Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/87

Rh animated conversation with the two merchants about gristmills I said to Frost, with a groan, "It's no use. I have n't had a wink of sleep, I've been tormented by bedbugs, I've taken cold from the incessant opening of that confounded door and have a sharp pain through one lung, and I am going to get up and drink tea." It was then broad daylight. The white-bearded old man with the shot-gun invited us to take tea with him, and said he had seen us on the steamer. We talked about the newly discovered Mongolian gold placer known as the "Chinese California," which was then attracting the attention of the Siberian public, and under the stimulating influence of social intercourse and hot tea I began to feel a little less miserable and dejected.

About half-past ten o'clock Sunday morning we finally obtained horses, put our baggage into another rough, shallow teléga, and resumed our journey. The night had been cold, and a white frost lay on the grass just outside the village; but as the sun rose higher and higher the air lost its chill, and at noon we were riding without our overcoats. About ten versts from Ílinskaya the road turned more to the southward and ran up the left bank of the Selengá River, through the picturesque valley shown in the illustration on opposite page. The bold bluff on the right was a solid mass of canary-colored birches, with here and there a dull-red poplar; the higher and more remote mountains on the left, although not softened by foliage, were

while in the foreground, between the bluff and the mountains, lay the broad, tranquil river, like a Highland lake, reflecting in its clear depths the clumps of colored trees on its banks and the soft rounded outlines of its wooded islands. The valley of the Selengá between Ílinskaya and Vérkhni Údinsk seemed to me to be warmer and more