4.01 
HOW WE ARRIVE AT AYAN. 
f 
and the “old John” would scarcely have stemmed that 
had we not had steam to help our sails. 
It struck two bells (5 p.m.) in the first dog-watch as we 
called “all hands bring ship to anchor;” and half an hour 
later all our sails were furled snugly to the yards and the 
“old John” herself (the tide having slackened as we got 
in-shore) was steaming slowly, through quite a fleet of 
American wdialers, to a more inner anchorage. Five 
minutes more, and she rounded to with her usual 
grace (?), let go her anchor in a quiet part of the harbour, 
entirely removed from the strong tide and surrounded 
in part by the “snow-clad mountains of •Siberia,” and, as 
usual, commenced rolling heavily to the swell which set 
into the mouth of the harbour. 
We found these “snow-clad mountains” without a ves- 
tige of snow or ice near them, covered by a luxuriant 
undergrowth and supporting as healthy-looking forests 
of spruce and bircli as I ever saw. From a distance the 
entire scene had much more of a tropical than of an 
arctic aspect; and the unlooked-for attentions of several 
wandering mosquitos served to help us to the conclusion 
that the “snow-clad mountains” of Siberia were not 
alwaj’s the bleak and frozen heights of which we had 
read in our school-boy days, and that, after all, “Siberia 
the frozen” might be a very pleasant place. To test the 
truth of this conclusion, several of us took a boat when 
the work was over, and started for a point of the harbour 
around which one of the whalers told us we should find 
Ayan; and as we rounded the point and shot into the 
pond-like cove from the rippling beach of which a scat- 
tering and streetless town ran back a half-mile or more, 
