Condemned as a Nihilist: A Story of Escape from SiberiaHenty, G. A. (George Alfred)
History
Condemned as a Nihilist: A Story of Escape from Siberia
Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
Escapes -- Fiction; Russia -- History -- Alexander II, 1855-1881 -- Fiction; Siberia (Russia) -- Fiction
They had caught eight or ten fish as they came across, passing through a
great shoal of herrings. In half an hour the kettle was boiling over the
fire, the fish were hissing and crackling in the frying-pan over it, and
a strip of deer's flesh, with the ramrod run through it, was frizzling.
It was pronounced excellent. There was a slight aromatic bitterness that
gave a zest and flavour to it, and the flesh inside was by no means so
tough as Godfrey had expected to find it. When all three of the voyagers
had satisfied their hunger, the brands were as usual extinguished, the
embers thrown overboard; then returning to the canoe, they lay down,
and were in a very few minutes fast asleep. They slept for six hours,
and when they woke the land was no longer in sight.
"It is lucky there is no fog," Godfrey said, "and that we have the sun
to act as a compass. We can't be many miles out. We won't make straight
for shore, Luka; we will head about north-west, so as to edge in
gradually. There must be a good deal of current here, and it will be
helping us along."
In an hour the low line of coast was visible, and they then headed still
more to the north.
"There must be a good three-mile-an-hour current here," Godfrey observed
presently. "We are going along first-rate past the shore. It took us
over five days to come up. At this rate we shall go down in two."
They paddled steadily for twelve hours, stopping once only to cook a
meal. Then they went close inshore again, had supper, and slept. When
they woke they found they were still within a mile of the shore, and the
current was now taking them along no more than a mile an hour.
"The gulf must be wide here, Luka. I don't think we should gain anything
by going out four or five miles farther, so we will keep about as we
are. We ought to be at the point by the end of to-day's work. We were
two hundred miles up. I expect we drifted down five-and-twenty miles in
crossing, and we must have passed the land at a good five miles an hour
yesterday; so that we ought not to be more than thirty or forty miles
from the point, for this peninsula does not go as far north as the other
by twenty or thirty miles."
After eight hours' paddling they found themselves at the mouth of a deep
bay.
"That is all right," Godfrey said, examining his tracing. "That land on
the farther side of the bay is the northern point of the gulf. We will
paddle across there and anchor by the shore for to-night. To-morrow we
shall have a long paddle, for it is seventy or eighty miles nearly due
west to a sheltered bay that lies just this side of Cape Golovina. Once
round that, we have nearly four hundred miles to go nearly due south
into Kara Bay. This long tongue of land we are working round is called
the Yamal Peninsula. Once fairly down into Kara Bay, we shall leave
Siberia behind us, and the land will be Russia."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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