“One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer-towed prison barge, following down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk,” the engineer continues. “For the first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest region. The interior is almost as unknown as when the Samoieds were its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called _urmans_, of larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches.” “It is not alluring,” we observe. “The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made _cheval de frise_, impossible to traverse save along the hunters’ trails. Another thousand versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins; eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation, extends this exiles’ oblast. Prison-stations are located in the forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed perpetually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most formidable.” “How long do men last in the Yakutski cold?” we ask the engineer. “Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate keep us from that road!” The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go forward into the observation-car. After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the railroad turns abruptly southwest, through the hilly country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central Russia in the same latitude. The train pulls next into the station of Nishneudinsk. A booted peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps, and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a miniature of multicolored minerals, glittering from a hundred crystal facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron pyrites,--“fools’ gold,” as they called it in old Nevada times,--green porphyry, iridescent peacock ore of copper, and some black crystals like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz, and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile. “Cabinetski?” asks the engineer. “Da, da,” assents the peddler. “Cabinetski.”