On English Old-Year’s night, which is a fortnight before the same date in Russia, the men on the ships decided to celebrate the coming of the New Year with festivity. The Russians ashore peacefully slept and the great gloomy cliffs that close the harbour in were silent as the grave. Suddenly from all the ships burst forth cries and fireworks and rockets, songs, shoutings. The Russians ashore all wakened up and thought the Germans had come. This Ekaterina is a great sight, a most beautiful place, though forbidding and austere, a symmetrical, flask-shaped exit from the Arctic. In the storm of driving mist and snow it was difficult enough finding the neck of the flask, the way in; but once in, all was peace, though the storm raged in the heavens and in the air. There were no ships to speak of in the harbour then, but a good deal of life on the shore, especially at Semionova. A tatterdemalion Russian population, some in sheepskins, some in Caucasian _bourkas_, some in bowler hats, some in old khaki overcoats, and smoking pipes--evidence of English influence. There were engineers in leather jackets and with flannel bashleeks over their heads, workmen in felt boots, many Circassian troops with their rifles and in ragged uniforms, men with pale, severe faces--they make probably the most terrible type of Russian troops, silent, faithful, relentlessly severe and very powerful, speaking little or no Russian, Mohammedan by religion--the guards of the Austrian prisoners. When the railway is finished its terminus will be at Semionova, and that will probably be the name of the new port. Semionova is all new, unpainted wood. Here are hundreds of shanties and barracks, and an indescribable chaos of workmen, materials, and mud. Engines puff along the shore on the bit of railway which is in working order, and on these engines the various agents and engineers clamber to go to the place of action where the gangs are at work. I fell in with various queer people; a speculator buying up land, a one-eyed man with smoky glasses seeking a site on which to build a cinema. Eight thousand roubles, would buy a cinema with all fixtures, including an electric piano. It was bound to be a success, he argued, for there would be no other place to go to in the long black winter. Land has been bought up all round the harbour, and by people who have never seen it--just for speculation, the curse of modern life in Russia. And all the time whilst Russian peasants and workmen are slaving and dying, comfortable commercial folk in the south are buying and selling the prospective fruits of their labour and sufferings.