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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



the Don, in 1825, as was 

 supposed, but caused the 

 body of a soldier who had 

 died in the hospital at Ta- 

 ganrog to be represented 

 and buried as his, while he 

 himself secretly stole away 

 in the garb of a pilgrim and 

 made his way among a troop 

 of emigrants to Tomsk, 

 where he thereafter lived a 

 religious life as a hermit till 

 extreme old age. 



I was told of men alive 

 in Tomsk who, in their 

 youth, had seen him, but no 

 one could say whether the 

 hermit encouraged the be- 

 lief that he had been Tsar. 

 If he did, he gained nothing 

 from it, except freedom 

 from molestation and ad- 

 ditional veneration from the 

 people. Slight as the evi- 

 dence for the story seems 

 to be, there was nothing in 

 Alexander's character, piet- 

 istic and emotional, to make 

 it impossible. 



A MOUNTAIN LAND OF 

 MYSTERY 



Now, before I come to 

 the journey, a few words 

 on the Altai. It is the name 

 given to the southwestern 

 part of a great mountain 

 mass which divides the low- 

 lands of Siberia from the 

 plateau of central Asia, 

 sending forth on one side 

 the great rivers that flow 

 north to the Arctic Ocean, 

 and on the other, the south- 

 ern and drier side of the 

 range, smaller streams that 

 lose themselves in the lakes 

 or marshes of Mongolia. 



Most of this vast moun- 

 tain land is unexplored, and 

 only a small part has been 

 surveyed for the purpose 

 of locating the mineral 

 wealth it is believed to con- 

 tain. As a boy, I had sought 

 to learn something about it 



