Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/222

200, I made a call of ceremony upon Captain Maiefski, the uyéizdni nachálnik or chief administrative officer of the southern Altái district. I found him to be a pleasant, cultivated officer about thirty-five years of age, who had just returned from a trip on horseback through the high Altái, and who could give me the fullest and most accurate information with regard to scenery and routes. He welcomed me very cordially, introduced me to his wife,—a most agreeable and intelligent young woman,—and invited me to come with Mr. Frost that day to dinner. I accepted the invitation, both for myself and for my comrade, and we thus began an acquaintance that proved to be a very delightful and advantageous one for us, and that brought some novelty and variety, I hope, into the rather lonely and eventless lives of Captain and Mrs. Maiéfski.

We remained at the Altái Station three or four clays, making excursions into the neighboring mountains with Captain Maiéfski and his wife, visiting and photographing the Kírghis who were encamped near the village, and collecting information with regard to the region lying farther to the northward and eastward which we hoped to explore. The mountains of the Altái occupy in southern Siberia an area more than three times as great as that of Switzerland. Only a small part of this vast wilderness of mountains has been actually settled by the Russians, and outside of the fertile valleys of such rivers as the Katún and the Búkhtarmá it is very imperfectly known, even to the hardy and daring Cossack pioneers. For this ignorance, however, there are several good reasons. In the first place, the southern part of the Russian Altái, including the valley of the Búkhtarmá and the high peaks of the Katúnski and Chúiski Alps, belonged, until very recently, to the empire of China. The Russians first appeared in the upper part of the Búkhtarmá valley in 1869, and the Altái Station was not founded until two years later. It was then nothing more than a Cossack observing-picket on the new Chinese