Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/217

Rh beautiful scenery in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, of Nicaragua, of Kamchátka, of the Caucasus, and of the Russian Altái, and it is my deliberate opinion that for varied beauty, picturesqueness, and effectiveness that mountain landscape is absolutely unsurpassed. If there exist anywhere a more superbly situated village, I am ready to cross three oceans to see it.

The Altái Station, or, as the Kírghis call it, "Kotón Karaghái," is situated at a height of about thirty-five hundred feet in the upper part of the fertile alpine valley known as the valley of the Búkhtarmá. The village stands upon a small, flat terrace or plateau two or three miles square, which is bounded on the north by rolling, flowery foot-hills and on the south by a shallow wooded ravine through which flows an insignificant tributary of the Búkhtarmá River. The main street of the little hamlet runs parallel with the ravine, and on the opposite side of the latter rise abruptly three or four grandly sculptured peaks, whose steep slopes are clothed to a height of two or three thousand feet with larch forests, and above that are generally white, even in midsummer, with fresh-fallen snow. The village itself is a mere Cossack picket of seventy or eighty log houses, with wide, clean streets, and with a quaint log church at one end; but to a traveler just from the hot, arid plains of the Írtish even this insignificant Cossack station has its peculiar charm. In front of every house in the settlement is a little inclosure, or front yard, filled with young birches, silver-leafed aspens, and flowering shrubs, and through all of these yards, down each side of every street runs a tinkling, gurgling stream of clear, cold water from the melting snows on the mountains. The whole village, therefore, go where you will, is filled with the murmur of falling water; and how pleasant that sound is, you must travel for a month in the parched, dust-smothered, sun-scorched valley of the Írtish fully to understand. The little rushing streams seem to bring with them, as they tumble in rapids through the