28 A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 



At Markova, as at all these riverside villages, a 

 broad lane was hewn through the forest parallel with 

 the river to make a way for the single line of telegraph 

 wire which connects Turukhansk and Vorogovo with 

 Yenesiesk. The trees and saplings were just lopped off, 

 and lay where they fell in an avenue some thirty yards 

 wide and five hundred miles long. When you walked 

 beneath it in the dusk of a Siberian midnight, and 

 listened to the wind buzzing round its insulators, that 

 telegraph had a peculiar romance of its own. Here 

 were two intense patches of human life, set down 

 hundreds of versts apart in the wilderness, and this 

 wire seemed such a slender, inconsequent sort of thing 

 to bind them together. How many messages must in 

 the course of the year travel thus through the heart of 

 the forest all unknown and unsuspected by the birds 

 who fly across the clearing, and the beasts who hunt 

 through the thickets hard by 1 



The voyage between Vorogovo and Turukhansk 

 was made difficult for us by the illness of the only 

 member of our quartet who could speak Russian. The 

 conversation of the other three was limited to authorita- 

 tive requests for tea and bread and butter, and as our 

 only other linguistic asset was an inquiry as to how 

 long the steamer would wait at the next stopping-place, 

 the situation would have been very inconvenient if it 

 had not been for the kindness of everybody on board 

 the Oryol. All, from Captain Ello, who was the only 

 person with whom we could converse, to Nicolai, the 

 good-natured steward, did their liest to help us. Even 

 the Influential Person dashed out of his cabin to rebuke 



