Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/82

 CHAPTER IX

HERE is another "free profession" of the same kind pursued to this very day in the Far East of Russia. In former times—some twenty or twenty-five years ago—many men were actively engaged in it, who now, or whose sons, belong to the richest classes of the cities of the Far East.

In the early spring numerous bands of Koreans and Chinese travel from Korea and China to the countries of Ussuri and Amur. These are the poorest of the poor inhabitants of the "country of the sad dusks" (Korea) and the Sun State (China). Some of these newcomers obtain work in the local coal or gold mines, others as dockers in the ports of Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk on the Amur, some are engaged as labourers by the peasants and Cossacks of Ussuri and Amur. But a certain number of the most enterprising and the most energetic men who thus find themselves thrown upon their own resources in the virgin forests where the Amur tiger reigns supreme, search for gold and precious stones in the unknown beds of the mountain rivers and streams, or wander over the hills of the Sihota-Alm mountains searching for the priceless,