Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/274

252 became such that any sudden shock was likely completely to overthrow her reason—and the shock soon came. There are two villages in Eastern Siberia whose names are almost alike—Verkholénsk and Verkhoyánsk. The former is situated on the river Léna, only 180 miles from Irkútsk, while the latter is on the head-waters of the Yána, and is distant from Irkútsk nearly 2700 miles. As the party with which she was traveling approached the capital of Eastern Siberia, her hope, strength, and courage seemed to revive. Her husband she thought was only a few hundred miles away, and in a few more weeks she would be in his arms. She talked of him constantly, counted the verst-posts which measured her slow progress towards him, and literally lived upon the expectation of speedy reunion with him. A few stations west of Irkútsk she accidentally became aware, for the first time, that her husband was not in Verkholénsk, but in Verkhoyánsk; that she was still separated from him by nearly 3000 miles of mountain, steppe, and forest; and that in order to reach his place of banishment that year she would have to travel many weeks on dog or reindeer sledges, in terrible cold, through the arctic solitudes of northeastern Asia. The sudden shock of this discovery was almost immediately fatal. She became violently insane, and died insane a few months later in the Irkútsk prison hospital, without ever seeing again the husband for whose sake she had endured such mental and physical agonies.

I have been compelled to restrict myself to the barest outline of this terrible tragedy; but if the reader could hear the story, as I heard it, from the lips of exiles who traveled with Mrs. Biéli, and who saw the flickering spark of her reason go out, in an East Siberian étape, he would not wonder that exile by administrative process makes terrorists, but rather that it does not make a nation of terrorists.