We are close to the border now, climbing the last crest which separates the Chickoya from the Cellinga Valley, our toiling tired ponies white with frost. All day the long sweep of the hills has been taken through heavy snow. The landscape is barren, desolate, and lifeless save for the occasional sight of a distant Buriat horseman. The sun is slowly sinking. The crest at last! The driver points with his whip to the dark masses of houses below, wreathed in the curling smoke of the evening fires. Here and there is a brilliantly painted building or tower, and sleighs and horsemen are passing in the streets. “Troitzkosavsk!” he says. He points further ahead to another more distant town, whose most dominant features are the great square tea-caravansaries and a mighty church, green-domed, with a gilded far-glimmering cross. The huddled houses end sharply toward the south, as if a ruler had marked off their limit in a straight stretch of white. Along this pale are little square sentry-boxes, striped black and white. In the evening sun a distant glint of steel flashes from the bayonet of a pacing sentry. “Kiahta!” the driver says. Then, across the white strip where a wooden stockade girds a settlement of gray-walled compounds, fluttering with tiny flags, gay with lofty towers and temples flaunting their red eaves, he points a third time: “Kitai!” (China). He picks up the reins, and lifts the whip; “Scurry!” he cries to the horses. The ponies leap forward, throwing their weight against duga and collar, and we sweep down the hill toward the nearest Russian town, Troitzkosavsk, four versts from the border. As we come down to the main road hard-by the town, officers of the garrison drive past with their spick-and-span fast trotters, city-wise, as one sees them in Irkutsk. Behind rolls a Mongol cart driven by a burly Chinaman. A Buriat, come to town to replenish his supply of powder and ball, follows on his shaggy pony. Down a long street, flanked first by log cabins with courtyards and fences like those in the peasant villages, then by stucco-plastered houses, cement-walled government buildings, and great whitewashed churches, we pass and reach the centre of the town. Then we turn up a side street to the house of a mine-owner, to whom we are accredited. Nicolai Vladimirovitch Tobagov meets us at the door of his log house, clad in gray flannel shirt and knee-boots. A not unnoteworthy product of Siberia is this man,--squarely built and yet wiry, with nervous strength expressed on his bearded face. He is self-made, risen from the masses. A peasant-boy, he started life as assistant to a surveyor, learning to read and write by his own efforts. During this apprenticeship he studied his chief’s books on geology, by the light of the brands for the samovar in the peasants’ houses where they were billeted nightly.