tsk is a city
of the past, one may almost add of the dead, where ghosts walk in the
shape of surly Russian traders clad in the fashion of a century ago, and
sinister-looking fur-clad Yakutes. And yet the dead here may be said to
live, for corruption is delayed for an indefinite period, so intense is
the cold. Shortly before our arrival a young Russian girl was exhumed
for legal purposes, and her body was found in exactly the same condition
as when it was interred five years before. This however is scarcely
surprising in a soil which is perpetually frozen to a depth of six
hundred feet.

The uncanny sensation of gloom and despondency which here assails the
traveller is not mitigated by the knowledge that, to reach Yakutsk you
must slowly wade, as we had done, through a little hell of monotony,
hunger, and filth. To leave it you must retrace your steps through the
same purgatory of mental and physical misery. There is no other way
home, and so, to the stranger fresh from Europe, the place is a sink of
despair. And yet Yakutsk only needs capital, energy, and enterprise to
convert her into a centre of modern commerce and civilisation. Gold
abounds in all the affluents of the Lena; last year the output in the
Vitimsk district alone was over a quarter of a million sterling, and the
soil is practically untouched. Iron also exists in very large
quantities, to say nothing of very fair steam coal near the delta; and
there is practically a mountain of silver known to exist near the city.
Lead and platinum have also been found in considerable quantities
further afield. Were the Yakutsk province an American State the now
desolate shores of the Lena would swarm with prosperous towns, and the
city would long ere this have become a Siberian El Dorado of the
merchant and miner.[13] As it is the trade of this place is nothing to
what it could be made, in capable and energetic hands, within a very
short space of time. Here, as everywhere else on the river, the summer
is the busiest season. In August a fair is held on the Lena in barges,
which drift down the river from the Ust-kutsk with European merchandise
of every description. In the fall the barges are towed back by steamers,
exporting furs, fish, and ivory to the value of twenty million roubles,
the goods brought in only amounting to about a twentieth part of that
sum. Steamers run frequently in the open season both up and down the
river as far as Bulun in the Arctic Ocean, which tiny