and held in canyon-like
by great towering ranges. The huge stream had brought down whole miles
of ice fields, breaking them up on the rapids and on isolated rocks,
twisting them with angry swirls, throwing up sections of the black
winter roads, carrying down the tepees built for the use of passing
caravans which in the Winter always go from Minnusinsk to Krasnoyarsk on
the frozen river. From time to time the stream stopped in its flow, the
roar began and the great fields of ice were squeezed and piled upward,
sometimes as high as thirty feet, damming up the water behind, so that
it rapidly rose and ran out over the low places, casting on the shore
great masses of ice. Then the power of the reinforced waters conquered
the towering dam of ice and carried it downward with a sound like
breaking glass. At the bends in the river and round the great rocks
developed terrifying chaos. Huge blocks of ice jammed and jostled until
some were thrown clear into the air, crashing against others already
there, or were hurled against the curving cliffs and banks, tearing
out boulders, earth and trees high up the sides. All along the low
embankments this giant of nature flung upward with a suddenness that
leaves man but a pigmy in force a great wall of ice fifteen to twenty
feet high, which the peasants call "Zaberega" and through which they
cannot get to the river without cutting out a road. One incredible feat
I saw the giant perform, when a block many feet thick and many yards
square was hurled through the air and dropped to crush saplings and
little trees more than a half hundred feet from the bank.

Watching this glorious withdrawal of the ice, I was filled with terror
and revolt at seeing the awful spoils which the Yenisei bore away
in this annual retreat. These were the bodies of the executed
counter-revolutionaries--officers, soldiers and Cossacks of the former
army of the Superior Governor of all anti-Bolshevik Russia, Admiral
Kolchak. They were the results of the bloody work of the "Cheka" at
Minnusinsk. Hundreds of these bodies with heads and hands cut off, with
mutilated faces and bodies half burned, with broken skulls, floated and
mingled with the blocks of ice, looking for their graves; or, turning
in the furious whirlpools among the jagged blocks, they were ground and
torn to pieces into shapeless masses, which the river, nauseated with
its task, vomited out upon the islands and projecting sand bars. I
passed the whole leng