Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/305

Rh has been erected in the dreary valley of Akatúi, and to it have been transported many political convicts from Kará. The intention of the Government is to pump the water out of the abandoned mine and set the politicals at work in its damp and gloomy galleries. The change, of course, will be for the worse. If there is in Siberia a more lonely, a more cheerless, a more God-forsaken place than Kará, it is the snowy, secluded valley of Akatúi.

At a late hour Tuesday night we returned to the Alexandrófski Zavód, and about noon on Wednesday, after a refreshing night's sleep and a good breakfast, we set out for the mine of Algachí, distant about twenty-two miles. There was little, if any, change in the appearance of the country, as we made our way slowly into the silver-mining district. One range of low, barren, round-topped mountains succeeded another, like great ocean swells, with hardly a sign of life or vegetation, except in the shallow haystack-dotted valleys. From the summit of the last divide that we crossed before reaching Algachí, the country, which we could see for thirty miles, looked like a boundless ocean suddenly frozen solid in the midst of a tremendous Cape Horn gale when the seas were running mountain-high. Far down in a snowy trough between two of these mighty surges we could just make out a little cluster of unpainted log-houses, which our driver said was the mining village of Algachí. I wondered, as we stopped for a moment on the summit to look at it, whether in all the world one could find a settlement situated in a more dreary and desolate spot. As far as the eye could see there was not a tree, nor a dark object of any kind, to break the ghastly whiteness of the rolling ocean of snowy mountains; and it was not hard to imagine that the village itself was nothing more than a little collection of floating driftwood, caught in the trough of the sea at the moment when the tremendous billows were suddenly turned to snow and ice. We descended the steep slope of the mountain to the village by a stony, zigzag road, entered a long, dirty, straw-littered street between two rows of