Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/16

4 the region and became known as the Ussuri Bay and Amur Bay. They are but the fingers of the sea, a part of the hand geographers call the Bay of Peter the Great, on that arm of the ocean they have christened the Japan Sea.

At the very tip of the peninsula, where the small Golden Horn has driven its way into the land, Vladivostok has spread itself over the western shore of this little bay and occupied also a part of the eastern littoral, known as Egersheld. There, overhung by mountain summits covered with oak forests, that were denizened by pheasants, hares and raccoons instead of the princely tigers which had gone out of residence some fifteen years before, Vladivostok was climbing the terraced hillsides in the year 1903, when I arrived for the first time in this centre of Oriental power.

The population of the town counted a heterogeneous conglomerate of Russians, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans with a small admixture of Europeans.

In a building belonging to the railway administration I organized my laboratory and at once set to work. In an earlier volume, Man and Mystery in Asia, I have described some of the outstanding features of the life of Vladivostok, some of my wanderings and a few of the more important of my undertakings in the surrounding country. In December of 1903, while I was engaged in a study of the coal samples I had collected during my several expeditions, events were developing in the Far East that were fraught with a deep significance and furnished much food for thought.

It is a matter of common historical knowledge that the seriousness and significance of these events had their inception in the securing by the Russians of a timber concession on the upper reaches of the Yalu River, which