Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/80

64 that the wagon fairly rocked on its wheels, and we thought for a single breathless instant that he was coming through like a three-hundred-pound missile from a catapult. The grating of half-inch iron, however, was stronger and more firmly secured than it seemed to be; and although it was bent a little by the shock, it did not give way. The keeper seized a long, heavy iron bar and belabored the tiger with it through the grating until he finally lay down in one corner of the cage, snarling sullenly and fiercely like an enraged cat. I could not learn from the keeper the weight nor the dimensions of this tiger, but he seemed to me to be a splendid beast, quite as large as any specimen I had ever seen. He had been captured by some Russian peasants in the valley of the Amúr — one of the very few places on the globe where the tropical tiger meets the arctic reindeer.

The distance from Irkútsk to Lake Baikál is only forty miles; and as the road along the Angará was smooth and in good condition, we made rapid progress. The farther we went to the eastward, the higher and more picturesque became the banks of the river. On the last station they assumed an almost mountainous character, and along one side of the deep gorge formed by them the narrow, sinuous road was carried at a height of fifty or sixty feet above the water in an artificial cutting, bordered for miles at a time by a substantial guard-rail.

As it grew dark a cold, dense fog began to drift down the gorge from the lake; now hiding everything from sight except a short stretch of road hung apparently in misty mid-air, and then opening in great ragged rents, or gaps, through which loomed the dim but exaggerated outlines of the dark, craggy heights on the opposite shore. The surface of Lake Baikál is more than 400 feet higher than the city of Irkútsk, and the river Angará, through which the lake discharges into the arctic ocean, falls that 400 feet in a distance of 40 miles, making a current that is everywhere extremely swift, and that runs in some places at the