By the isolated railway station and under the lonely mountains so far from their homes, they were drawn up, and the Prince made an informal inspection of the men who had been so long away, and who had travelled the long road from Siberia on their way Blightyward. The inspection lasted only a few minutes, and the episode, spontaneous as it was characteristic, scarcely broke the run into Revelstoke. But it was the happiest of meetings. Revelstoke is a small, bright mountain town known, as its inhabitants say, for snow and strawberries. It is their way of explaining that the land in this deep mountain valley is splendidly fertile, and that settlers have only to farm on a small scale in order to make a comfortable living, though in winter it is--well, of the mountains. The fishing there is also extremely good, and we were told almost fabulous tales of boys who on their journey home from school spent a few minutes at the creeks of the Columbia River, and went on their way bearing enough fish to make a dinner for a big family. The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that climbed by corkscrew bends. This was thrilling enough, for there were abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly corners. From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fishing centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore later), where there are rich orchard lands. With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers, those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district. A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we passed dumps of war material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver. After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace. CHAPTER XVII THE PACIFIC CITIES: VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA I