134 ALEXIEVKA 



poles, while others are hired for the season to assist in 

 loading the ships at Alexievka. Many of the men bring 

 their wives with them to cook for the party ; sleeping 

 huts are erected on the raft, and it becomes to all intents 

 and purposes a little floating village, which is frequently 

 three months in making the voyage down the river. 

 Marriages have been known to take place on these rafts. 

 Occasionally a funeral has to be performed, and sometimes 

 all hands are engaged in helping to keep the raft under the 

 lee of an island or a promontory to avoid the danger of 

 having it broken up by the violence of the waves. With 

 the greatest care in the world this will sometimes happen. 

 The Russian has a good deal of the fatal facility to blunder 

 which characterises the Englishman, and shiploads of 

 stranded logs of larch are strewn on the islands of the 

 delta and on the shores of the lag^oon of this orreat river. 

 When we landed on the island of Alexievka it was 

 a rapidly drying-up willow-swamp of perhaps half a 

 dozen square miles, some six feet above the level of the 

 Petchora, which swept past it with a rapid current. In 

 some places the willow-swamp was impenetrable, in 

 others bare grassy oases varied the flat landscape, and 

 there were one or two largish lakes on the island. During 

 the floods which accompanied the break-up of the ice, 

 the whole of the island was under water, and men were 

 busily clearing away the mud which had deposited itself 

 on the floors of the houses. An extensive series of 

 wooden fortifications protected the various buildings from 

 being carried away by the ice. For four months of the 

 year the village was a busy scene, full of life and activity, 

 but for the remaining eight months a solitary man and a 

 dog kept watch over the property of the Company, and 

 even they had to desert their charge and escape to the 

 shore during the breaking-up of the ice. 



