"September 17th. Ninety versts from Yakutsk. Passed yesterday a very odd arrangement of rocks, which line the margin of the river for sixty versts. They are of talc, and appear formerly to have been covered with earth, but are now entirely bare. They are all of a pyramidal form, and about one hundred and fifty feet in height; detached at their bases, and disposed with extraordinary regularity. These rocky pyramids appear to terminate the long mountainous south and east banks of the Lena, which have uniformly continued from Katchuga, where I first embarked on the river." On the 18th of September he arrived at Yakutsk, after a fatiguing voyage of twentytwo days, in a small bateau on the Lena. During this period, he had passed from a summer climate to one of rigorous cold. When he left Irkutsk, it was just in the midst of harvest time, and the reapers were in the fields; but when he entered Yakutsk, the snow was six inches deep, and the boys were whipping their tops on the ice. He debarked from his bateau two miles above the town, and there mounted a sledge, drawn by an ox, with a Yakuti Indian on his back, and guided by a cord assing through the cartilage of his nose. CHAPTER X. Interview with the Commandant of Yakutsk. Detained under false Pretences. The Yakuti Tartars. Influence of Religion upon them.Peculiarities of Features in the Tartar Countenance. Difficulty of taking Vocabularies of unknown Languages. Classification of the - Tartars and North American Indians. - Causes of the Difference of Color in the Human Race. Tartars and American Indians the same People. LEDYARD immediately waited on the Commandant, delivered his letter from the Governor-General, and made known his situation and designs. It was his wish to press forward with as much expedition as possible to Okotsk, lest the winter should shut in before he could reach that town, where he hoped to seize upon the first opportunity in the spring, to secure a passage to the American continent. The distance from Yakutsk was between six and seven hundred miles. Lodgings were provided for him by order of the Commandant, with whom he had already dined, and who soon after came to see him. Imagine his dismay, when the Commandant assured him that the season was already so far advanced as to render a journey to Okotsk impossible. "What, alas! shall I do?" exclaims he in his journal; "for I am miserably prepared for this unlooked-for delay. By remaining here through the winter, I cannot expect to resume my march until May, which will be eight months. My funds! I have but two long frozen stages more, and I shall be beyond the want or aid of money, until, emerging from the deep deserts, I gain the American Atlantic States; and then, thy glowing climates, Africa, explored, I will lay me down, and claim my little portion of the globe I have viewed; may it not be before. How many of the noble minded have been subsidiary to me, or to my enterprises! yet that meagre demon Poverty has travelled with me hand in hand over half the globe, and witnessed what the tale I will not unfold. "Ye children of wealth and idleness, what a profitable commerce might be made between us! A little of my toil might better brace your bodies, give spring to mind and zest to enjoyment; and a very little of that wealth, which you scatter around you, would put it beyond the power of anything but death to oppose my kindred greetings with all on earth at bear the stamp of man. This is the third time, that I have been overtaken and arrested by winter; and both the others, by giving time for my evil genius to rally his hosts about me, have defeated the enterprise. Fortune, thou hast humbled me at last, for I am this moment the slave of cowardly solicitude, lest in the heart of this dread winter, there lurk the seeds of disappointment to my ardent desire of gaining the opposite continent. But I sub mit." These melancholy forebodings were but too literally verified, as the issue will prove. In a letter to Colonel Smith, from Yakutsk, he speaks again of this disappointment in the following manner. "The Commandant assured me that he had orders from the Governor-General to`render me all possible kindness and service; 'But, Sir,' continued he, the first service I am bound to render you is, to beseech you not to attempt to reach Okotsk this winter.' He spoke to me in French. I almost rudely insisted on being permitted to depart immediately, and expressed surprise that a Yakuti Indian, and a Tartar horse, should be thought incapable of following a man, born and educated in the latitude of forty. He declared upon his honor, that the journey was impracticable. The contest lasted two or three days, in which inter val, being still fixed in my opinion, I was preparing for the journey. The Commandant at length waited on me, and brought with him a trader, a very good, respectable looking man of about fifty, as a witness to the truth and propriety of his advice to me. This trader, for ten or twelve years, had passed and repassed often from Yakutsk to Okotsk. obliged, however severely I might lament the misfortune, to yield to two such advocates for my happiness. The trader held out to me all the horrors of the winter, and the severity of the journey at the best season; and the Commandant, the goodness of his house and the society here, all of which would be at my service. The difficulty of the journey I was aware of; but when I assented to its impracticability, it was a compliment; for I do not believe it is so, nor hardly anything else. "It is certainly bad in theory to suppose the seasons can triumph over the efforts of an honest man. The proffered hospitality of the Commandant I have no doubt was sincere, because in Russia generally, and particularly in Siberia, it is the fashion to be hospitable. It is probable, also, that it is a natural principle. I should, however, have said less to them about the matter, had I not been without clothes, and with only a guinea and one fourth |