A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 43 



dozen arctic terns were flying round the landing-stage 

 — perhaps in anticipation of the pickings that would 

 be theirs by and by. In the forest behind the houses, 

 the snow lay more thickly than at any place that we 

 had yet seen, and a flock of redpolls were feeding 

 in the drifts in front of the huts as confidently as 

 sparrows. This was the destination of the white 

 cemetery cross from Yenesiesk, for although there were 

 not half a dozen houses in the place, yet there was a 

 well-filled graveyard beside them. Two or three pallid 

 children peeped at us from the doorways, and although 

 the settlement did not seem as poor as many that we 

 had seen, yet it had a look of unutterable dreariness 

 that even the cheerful twittering of the redpolls among 

 the tombstones could not dispel. 



What a strange big-little horizon must compass the 

 folk who live in these pioneer settlements ! Their outer 

 world is almost boundless — taiga and taiga and taiga 

 again for three thousand miles. But their inner view 

 is limited by the price of fish and foxskins, and the 

 change of the weather. Often as I watched these 

 lonely spots slip behind us, I wished that I could 

 spend a year in pilgrimage on these waters, to work 

 with the people for a little while and live as they lived. 

 Later on we learned something of their precarious lives, 

 but even there we saw them only as a man sees players 

 moving on the stage, and criticised and applauded with 

 a certain detachment. What sort of people are they ? 

 Very simple, very powerful, very crude, but not brutal 

 any more than children or animals are brutal, and not 

 so much immoral as unmoral. It is only in the lees of 



