s faithfully,

"HARRY DE WINDT.

"ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY,
LONDON,
_November 26, 1901._"

With regard to the projected railway, let me now state as briefly and as
clearly as I can the conclusion to which I was led by plain facts and
personal experience. To begin with, there are two more or less available
routes across Siberia to Bering Straits, which the reader may easily
trace on a map of Asia. The city of Irkutsk is in both cases the
starting-point, and the tracks thence are as follows:

No. 1 Route. To Yakutsk, following the course of the Lena River, and
thence in an easterly direction to the town of Okhotsk on the sea of
that name. From Okhotsk, northward along the coast to Ola and Gijiga,
and from the latter place still northward to the Cossack outpost of
Marcova on the Anadyr River. From Marcova the line would proceed
northward chiefly over tundra and across or through one precipitous
range of mountains, to the Siberian terminus, East Cape, Bering Straits.

The second route is practically the one we travelled, viz., from Irkutsk
to the Straits _via_ Yukutsk, Verkhoyansk, and Sredni-Kolymsk.

From a commercial point of view, route No. 1 would undoubtedly be the
best, for of late years a considerable trade has been carried on between
Vladivostok and the Sea of Okhotsk. The latter only twenty years ago was
visited solely by a few whalers and sealing schooners, but a line of
cargo steamers now leaves Vladivostok once a month throughout the open
season (from June to September) and make a round trip, calling at
Petropaulovsk (Kamchatka), Okhotsk, Yamsk, and Ayan.[88] There is now a
brisk and increasing export trade in furs, fish, lumber, and whalebone
from these ports, the imports chiefly consisting of American and
Japanese goods.

[Footnote 88: These vessels also carry passengers.]

It has already been shown in a previous chapter that the natural
resources of the Yakutsk district would probably repay an extension of
the Trans-Siberian line to this now inaccessible portion of the Tsar's
dominions. Indeed it is more than probable that in a few years the
mineral wealth of this province, to say nothing of its agricultural
possibilities, will render the construction of a line imperative, at any
rate as far as the city of Yakutsk. The prolongation of this as far
north as Gijiga is no idle dream, for I have frequently heard it
seriously discus