ded there by the
_Onward_.

In March I received by a special courier from Yakutsk another letter
and more orders from Major Abaza. The eight hundred labourers whom he
had engaged were being rapidly sent forward to Okhotsk, and more than
a hundred and fifty were already at work at that place and at Yamsk.
The equipment and transportation of the remainder still required his
personal supervision, and it would be impossible, he wrote, for him to
return that winter to Gizhiga. He could come however, as far as
the settlement of Yamsk, three hundred versts west of Gizhiga, and
requested me to meet him at that place within twelve days after the
receipt of his letter. I started at once with one American companion
named Leet, taking twelve days' dog-food and provisions.

The country between Gizhiga and Yamsk was entirely different in
character from anything which I had previously seen in Siberia. There
were no such great desolate plains as those between Gizhiga and
Anadyrsk and in the northern part of Kamchatka. On the contrary, the
whole coast of the Okhotsk Sea, for nearly six hundred miles west
of Gizhiga, was one wilderness of rugged, broken, almost impassable
mountains, intersected by deep valleys and ravines, and heavily
timbered with dense pine and larch forests. The Stanavoi range of
mountains, which sweeps up around the Okhotsk Sea from the Chinese
frontier, keeps everywhere near the coast line, and sends down between
its lateral spurs hundreds of small rivers and streams which run
through deep wooded valleys to the sea. The road, or rather the
travelled route from Gizhiga to Yamsk, crosses all these streams and
lateral spurs at right angles, keeping about midway between the great
mountain range and the sea. Most of the dividing ridges between these
streams are nothing but high, bare watersheds, which can be easily
crossed; but at one point, about a hundred and fifty versts west of
Gizhiga, the central range sends out to the seacoast, a great spur of
mountains 2500 or 3000 feet in height, which completely blocks up the
road. Along the bases of these mountains runs a deep, gloomy valley
known as the Viliga, whose upper end pierces the central Stanavoi
range and affords an outlet to the winds pent up between the steppes
and the sea. In winter when the open water of the Okhotsk Sea is
warmer than the frozen plains north of the mountains, the air over the
former rises, and a colder atmosphere rushes through the valley of t