Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/524

 486 Collectanea.

bears. The Gilyaks were rich. Now there are many Russians here and we are hungry, ahnost we die. Sables are few, bears are few, reindeer are few. Perhaps we shall die soon. We asked the Russians for help, and they gave us straw to eat. When you go to your lord tell him all our wrongs."

The spirit which inspires poetical improvisations lives on the tip of the tongue and can easily fly away, doing great harm to the singer. Therefore the audience feel it their duty to excite the spirit with their shouts.

I shall never forget the impression of one night in my journey from the south to the north of Sakhalin. We were in two boats, (three Oroks, two Gilyaks, and myself) going up the river Poronay. We had been travelling twelve days, and had stopped two days and nights on account of the rain. We had reached the nearest Russian colony, and from there it was possible for us to continue our journey on foot. We spent the last night in the fir forest, as it was beautiful July weather. Fearing the convicts, thieves, and vagabonds in the near neighbourhood, we determined not to sleep till daybreak. After supper our conversation became less and less animated, and some of us began to doze after the day's hard work, when someone proposed that we should persuade a young man, who knew many poems by heart, to sing them to us. We arranged a little tent for the singer. Some of our'companions sat near him, and others at the opening of the tent. I and one of the Oroks (who did not understand the Gilyak language) lay down under a fir-tree near the tent. I soon fell asleep, lulled by the monotonous guttural voice of the Gilyak. I often woke up, and each time the interminable recitative would reach my ears. Now and again, when the singer paused to take breath, I heard loud cries of admiration. When dawn came the Orok and I got up and made tea, but the concert continued without any change. The listeners did not notice us in the least, so absorbed were they in the fate of the hero of whom the young Gilyak was singing as he lay on his back in the tent with botli hands under his head. When at last he sang the last words of the epilogue he arose pale with fatigue, and drank his tea in silence. It was some time before he began to speak to me and my companions. He seemed to be still living through the adventures of the hero.