Not being able to conceive in what part of the world I was born, they asked me if my country were not on the other side of the great river. Before I answered them, I desired to know the meaning of their question; and I found they imagined that beyond Russia, with which country itself they had little acquaintance, there was a very large river that divided them from another country inhabited by different people. It was not easy to instruct them upon this subject. I talked a long while without their understanding a single word of my geographical dissertation. They had no accurate idea either of number or extension. It was not less difficult to give them a notion of the strength of a state, or the riches and power of its sovereign. They had never attempted an estimation even of that of Russia. That I might enable them to judge of it, I was obliged to illustrate the abundance of its commodities, its money, and its population, by comparisons drawn from the number of animals they hunted, and the quantity of fish they caught every year, without destroying the breed. This explanation, which I exerted all my ability to make level to their capacities, extremely pleased them. I adopted the same method to give them a notion of the way measure extension. I began with the ground that my tent covered, and the taking a sheet of paper, drew a sort of geographical chart, in which I marked pretty nearly the situation and distances of Russia and France, with respect to their country. It was not without some labour that I made myself understood. But for this I was indemnified by the eagerness and attention with which they listened to me. In general I was astonished at the solidity of their understanding, and the thirst they felt for the acquisition of knowledge. Superior in these respects to the Koriacs, they appear both to respect more upon what they say themselves, and what they hear and behold. These two people have nearly the same idiom; the only difference is, that I found in the Tchoukchis a habit of prolonging the final syllables of words, and a pronunciation slower and sweeter than that of the Koriacs. With the assistance of my guide, who served me for an interpreter, I kept up the conversation tolerably well.