Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/254

232 We reached Alexandrófskaya in the gray light of early dawn, and after drinking tea and sleeping two hours on the floor of the post station, we resumed our journey with eight horses and three drivers. The road from Alexandrófskaya to Séivernaya runs for five or six miles up the steep, wild ravine that is shown in the illustration on page 231. It then crosses a series of high, bare ridges running generally at right angles to the course of the Írtish, and finally descends, through another deep, precipitous ravine, into the valley of Ulbínsk, which it follows to Ust Kámenogórsk. The mountains which compose this spur, or outlying branch, of the Altái system are not high, but, as will be seen from the illustration on page 235, they are picturesque and effective in outlining and grouping, and are separated one from another by extremely beautiful valleys and ravines.

Owing to the bad condition of the roads and the mountainous nature of the country, we were more than ten hours in making the nineteen miles between Séivernaya and Ulbínsk, although we had eight horses on the first stretch and five on the second. The slowness of our progress gave us an opportunity to walk now and then, and to make collections of flowers, and we kept the tárantás decorated all day with goldenrod, wild hollyhocks, long blue spikes of monk's-hood, and leafy branches of zhímolost or Tatár honeysuckle, filled with showy scarlet or yellow berries.

Late Saturday afternoon, as the sun was sinking behind the western hills, we rode at a brisk trot down the long, beautiful ravine that leads into the valley of the Ulbá, and before dark we were sitting comfortably in the neat waiting-room of the Ulbínsk post station, refreshing ourselves with bread and milk and raspberries.

Among the political exiles living in Ulbínsk at that time were Alexander L. Blok, a young law student from the city of Sarátof on the Vólga; Apollo Karélin, the son of a well-known photographer in Nízhni Nóvgorod; Séiverin Gross,