snow-drifts over which ice windows peer mournfully, a
wooden church pushed by time and climate out of the perpendicular, with
broken spire and golden crosses mouldering with rust--on the one hand, a
dismal plain of snow fringed on the horizon by a dark pine forest; on
the other, the frozen river Yana, across which an icy breeze moans
mournfully--such is Verkhoyansk as we saw it on the morning of February
28, 1902. I thought that a more gloomy, God-forsaken spot than this
could not exist on the face of the earth. But I had not seen
Sredni-Kolymsk. And yet, if we were here forty-eight hours and it seemed
a lifetime, what must an enforced sojourn of five or six years mean to
the unhappy exiles, some of whom had been here for a quarter of a
century. Let the reader imagine, if possible, the blank despair of
existence under such conditions; day after day, year after year, nothing
to do or look at of interest, tortured by heat and mosquitoes in summer,
perished by cold and hunger in the dark, cruel winter, and cut off as
completely as a corpse from all that makes life worth living. An exile
here told me that the church was his only link with humanity, for it
recalled other sacred buildings in which loved ones were worshipping,
far away in the busy world of freedom. One could imagine a man entirely
losing his identity after a few years here and forgetting that he was
ever a human being. In truth Yakutsk was bad enough; but Yakutsk,
compared to Verkhoyansk, is a little Paris. And yet, I repeat, this is
by no means the worst place of banishment in North-Eastern Siberia.

The _ispravnik_ received us in the official grey and scarlet, reminding
me that even in this remote corner of the Empire a traveller is well
within reach of Petersburg and the secret police. But we found in
Monsieur Katcherofsky a gentleman and not a jailer, like too many of his
class, whose kindness and hospitality to the miserable survivors of the
Arctic exploring ship _Jeannette_, some years ago, was suitably rewarded
by the President of the United States.[27] Katcherofsky's invaluable
services for twenty years past might also have met, by now, with some
substantial recognition at the hands of the Russian Government, for a
more honest, conscientious and universally popular official is not to be
found throughout the dominions of the Tsar.

[Footnote 27: The U.S. Arctic exploring steamer _Jeannette_ was crushed
in the ice and sank on June 12, 1881, in the Arctic