Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

whilst the man of science was busy measuring a base-line to ascertain the heights of some mountains, his Samoyede companions suddenly disappeared with their tent and their reindeer, leaving him with three illequipped sledges and a few Ostyak attendants, and with no choice but to make the best of his way back to Obdorsk, whence he soon afterwards returned to Tobolsk. There he passed his Christmas, and then resumed his journey; but this time in a southerly direction. After having penetrated to sixty-seven degrees north, the region of eternal frost, he struck southwards to the latitude of the Land's End, making a dip into China, which furnishes some of the best chapters in his book.

Irkutsk, the last town of importance north of the Chinese frontier, consists of nineteen hundred houses, fifty being of brick, and the remainder of wood, and is probably the cheapest place in the civilized world as regards articles of food. We say "civilized," because, although situate in a barbarous region, and possessing a population of a very motley character, the town has much that is European in its aspect and usages. It possesses an exchange, government factories, where newlyarrived convicts are employed, a school of medicine, a gymnasium, and a handsome parade-ground. In the market, formed of wooden booths, the stores of food were enormous. Beef cost about a halfpenny a pound; of flour one penny would purchase nearly eight and a half pounds; partridges and heathfowl were sold at five farthings a-piece. But we are in haste to get among the Celestials. First comes a gallop across More Baikal, a large lake just beyond Irkutsk, on which the Russian government maintains an armed flotilla. This gallop is a fine bit of helterskelter over ice brilliant as glass. "There was no snow upon the ice, so that its surface shone like a polished mirror in the moonlight. The horses that were put under our sledges in Kadilnaya had to be held on each side till the very moment of starting, when they broke at once into full gallop, which they kept up till we landed on the further shore. We completed seven German miles in two

hours and a quarter, undoubtedly the most extraordinary as well as the most speedy stage upon any route in Russia." Thence, onwards to the frontier line. We followed the crowd that pressed forward towards a narrow door in the front of a long wooden building. This admitted us into the inner quadrangle of a Russian warehouse. A corresponding door, at the opposite side of this court, opens just upon a wooden barricade, which constitutes the barrier of China. In this there is a wide portal, ornamented with pillars, and displaying the Russian eagle above it, along with the cipher of the reigning Emperor, Nicholas the First, by whom it was erected. On passing this gate, the change is immediate and striking,from Russian sobriety of aspect and hue to the gaudy finery of China. Maimachen, the name of the Chinese town visited by Mr. Erman, has a very masquerading air to a European eye. The walls on either side of the streets do not look like house walls, the roofs being flat and invisible from the street. " Indeed, they are nearly altogether concealed by the gay-coloured paper lanterns and flags with inscriptions on them, hung out on both sides of the way. Cords, with similar scrolls and lanterns, are likewise stretched from roof to roof across the street. These dazzling decorations stand out in glaring contrast with the dull yellow of the ground and walls. In the open crossings of the streets, which intersect each other at right angles, stood enormous chafingdishes of cast-iron, like basins, upon a slender pedestal four feet in height. The benches by which they were surrounded were occupied by teadrinkers, who sat smoking from the little pipes they carry at their girdles, whilst their kettles boiled at the common fire." Mr. Erman had the good fortune to be on the frontier at the period of the Chinese festival of the White Moon, which is in fact the celebration of the new-year, and he had the still greater luck to be invited to share in it at Maimachen. He found the town in its gayest costume. The expenditure of flags and lanterns was prodigious. The scrolls usually contained the names of the families before whose houses they were hung

coupled with words of auspicious import, as gladness, riches, wisdom, &c. There was a great firing of crackers and rockets, partly to celebrate the day, but chiefly in honour of the guests. Before dinner the latter were diverted by a theatrical representation. Maimachen boasts a regular company of actors, and upon this great occasion they did their best. Their orchestra was of a rather violent description, consisting of "wooden drums, shaped like casks, brass cymbals, and plates of the same metal, or gongs, held by a string and beaten with knockers, and wooden truncheons, of different sizes, which they used as castanets." There were no actresses; but the deficiency was not to be detected, the younger and more delicate men personating women to the life by the aid of wigs and long tresses of black hair, but especially by curls pressed flat upon the forehead. Masks were not used, but paint was in abundance; in some cases with a view to represent spectacles, mustachios, &c.; in others to conceal the human features, or give them a monstrous aspect. "One face was covered with coloured rays, issuing from the mouth. The same actor had also a feather on his head in Chinese comedy the conventional mark of a ghost or apparition. Another wore a golden helmet, which constituted him a warrior. Several kept beating themselves incessantly on the hip with a cane, and by so doing intimated that they were on horseback." The play itself was more like a game of romps than any regular dramatic representation. Little was said; but on the other hand, there was a deal of dancing, drumming, and running about. Mr. Erman could make neither head nor tail of the proceedings. By way of experiment, how ever, he made some tender gestures to one of the pseudo-ladies, who acknowledged them in the most amiable manner, and after that the horsemen without horses paid him much attention, pointing with their sticks to his spectacles, and trying to touch them as they passed. All this greatly diverted the Mongol audience, evidently delighted to see a real counterpart to the painted spectacles of some of the

actors.

The play over, Mr. Erman and the

other guests, preceded by the uproarious orchestra, marched off to dinner at the house of the sarguchei or chief officer of Maimachen. This gentleman, a tall, thin person, of stern countenance, dressed in gray velvet, had a white button on the crown of his black felt hat, indicating his rank, and a chalcedony ring, an inch wide, upon his right-hand thumb, this being a mark of official dignity. "His nails," says our traveller, "did not extend above half an inch beyond the tips of his fingers, his personal vanity being in this respect subdued, as might be expected in a man of sober mind, and mature years." The man of short nails and sober mind was exceeding hospitable, welcomed his guests in a soft and sonorous voice, and sat down with them to dinner at tables covered with scarlet cloth. The regale that followed might have caused a European chef to pale his ineffectual fires from sheer envy. It began, oddly enough, with fruits, sweetmeats, and tea. These discussed, a piece of fine paper, for a napkin, and a pair of ivory chopsticks were laid before each guest, and the tables, which were six feet wide, were covered over thickly with small porcelain plates full of all manner of complicated edibles. Fat abounded in the dressing, to neutralize which weak vinegar was used. The first series of saucers duly honoured, a second was brought in and put on the top of its predecessor. followed, and as the previous stratum was never removed, there soon arose upon the table a lofty pile of gastronomical curiosities. Pipes and chowsen, a Chinese spirit distilled from rice, concluded the feast, as the strangers thought;-but they were vastly mistaken. The soup course had still to come, and that was followed by an infusion of cabbage-leaves, drawn out of an urn by a cock, and drunk steaming hot. How a dinner commencing with preserved apricots, and concluding with cabbage water agreed with German stomachs, Mr. Erman does not inform us. After managing to taste upwards of a hundred dishes, he went to visit the temple of Fo, whose court was guarded by two clay lions painted green, whilst at his shrine were deposited, on account of the festive season, a prodigious heap of

Others

delicacies. Whole sheep without the skin, plucked chickens, pheasants, and guinea-fowls, in their natural positions, and glistening with fat, lay in hillocks at the feet of half-a-dozen grotesque and indecent idols. On a long table a wall of offerings was built up, consisting of dressed meat and cakes of every kind, the whole surrounded with an elaborate latticework of white dough, five or six feet high, the openings of which were filled with dried fruits and coniectionery of the finest kind. Perfumed candles burned before the disgusting idols, and brass discs hung from the ceiling, and were struck with clappers when any bearing offerings approached. The contents of the shops at Maimachen gave Mr. Erman a very high opinion of Chinese skill and ingenuity. He saw scientific instruments of great merit, very clever clockwork, paintings drawn and finished with the greatest care, (although highly objectionable by the indelicacy of their subjects), porcelain, sculpture, bowls, vases, and figures of various kinds of stone. "There were large spherical bowls, and oval vases, of chalcedony and agate, and reliefs cut in cornelians, nephrit, and other coloured stones. Of the latter kind, the most common are flowers, the several parts of which are formed of various and tastefally selected stones, and then cemented with mastic on a foundation of stone. For many of these articles, highly elaborate, and at the same time quite useless, the merchants of Maimachen asked four thousand teabricks, (a standard of currency), or about two thousand five hundred Russian dollars. In this we saw a proof of luxury and profuse expenditure amongst the Chinese. Many other branches of industry indicated enervation and effeminacy of manners" musk, for instance, and other perfumes, enclosed in little bags, and considered indispensable appendages to a young man's dress. A curious plaything considered equally essential, is composed of two polished balls, about an inch in diameter, which the men always carry with them. "These are taken in the right hand, at idle times, and rolled and rubbed one over the other with the fingers; the noise they make amuses, and perhaps there

is something agreeable also in the feel of them. Here, in Maimachen, I saw some of these balls made of glass, striped green and white, and hollow, containing within them a little lump of clay, which rattled with every motion." The musk and perfumes, however abundantly used, are all insufficient to counteract a very peculiar and unpleasant smell attributed by Mr. Erman to the Chinese. He first perceived it at the theatre, and took it to arise from an inordinate addiction to leeks on the part of actors and audience, whose breath and clothes were infected with the disagreeable odour of that bulb. But he was subsequently induced to regard it as a national taint, a Chinese exbalation, not to be overcome by any amount of artificial perfume, and whose cause is matter of inquiry for the chemist. Doubtless the Chinese would get rid of it, were it possible so to do, for the care they bestow on personal beauty and elegance is very great. Another striking defect in the inhabitants of Maimachen is to be found in their black and decayed teeth. The cause of this Mr. Erman suspects to be the solution of copper, produced by the empyreumatic oil of tobacco in the bronze mouth-pieces of their pipes.

At a post-house upon his road back to Irkutsk, Mr. Erman and his party were met by a deputation from no less a personage than the Khamba Lama, the high-priest of the Buraets, a Mongolian tribe closely allied in language and customs to the natives of the northern provinces of China. The embassy consisted of four lamas or priests attired in scarlet robes and bright yellow hats. They brought an invitation to a grand festival, which was readily accepted, and a very remarkable business it proved to be. The discordant theatrical music at Maimachen was a mere trifle compared to the monstrous noise made by the Buraet kettle-drums, so large that they were dragged upon four wheels, and by copper trumpets ten feet long, borne by one man and blown by another. "The grave prelude of the wind instruments was like a roaring hurricane, and the chorus of brass gongs, drums, &c., resembled the crash of a falling mountain." In

this place we find some curious and interesting details respecting the Buddhist religion and priesthood, after which Mr. Erman returns to Irkutsk, and resumes his journey eastward, through the valley of the Lena, to the land of the Tunguzes and Yakuts. The chief town of the latter people, Yakutsk, is two degrees to the south of Beresov, which Mr. Erman had visited on his way to Obdorsk; but, nevertheless, the cold is far more severe at the former place, where frozen earth is found near the surface all the year round, and the same condition of the ground continues to the depth of six hundred feet. "The inhabitants of the Swiss Alps would not unjustly think themselves lost if they were compelled to live at the height of ten thousand feet, or two thousand three hundred feet above the hospital of the great St. Bernard, and there to support and clothe themselves by keeping cattle, and with the productions of the surrounding mountains; yet they would then, and not until they arrived at that height, be settled on ground having the same temperature which 1 found here amongst the Yakuts, who are rich in cattle. It would seem, therefore, as if that succeeded in Siberia which was impossible in Europe, if we did not take into account that the same constant temperature of the ground may be made up at different places of very different elements." Notwithstanding the severity of their climate

and resistance of their frozen soil, the Yakuts are a prosperous people, having attained a considerable degree of civilization, aud amongst whom crime is rare, although the influence of Russian example and contact daily renders it less so. There is much interest in Mr. Erman's account of them, and of the wandering Tunguzes, the last tribe with which he consorted before his arrival at Okhotsk. Here his reception was not very flattering. "We were looked at with much curiosity from all the house-doors on the way, for the devout elders of the place had been filled with anxious forebodings by the accounts of the arrival of a foreigner. They signed themselves with the cross whenever he was mentioned. And I learned today that they had fears of war, conscription, and other calamities." Nor was their alarm abated by learning that "the heathen foreigner wore snowshades (spectacles) even in thick wea ther, and that he carried a dog in the sledge with him. Thus the return to civilized man was marked in the first instance by the encounter of intolerant superstition, and it was necessary to forget the nobler traits of the wilderness before we could become reconciled to the Russians of Okhotsk." At which place Mr. Erman's narrative ceases. We await with interest its promised continuation-an account of his adventures in Kamschatka, California, and the Pacific.

THE SCOTTISH DEER FORESTS.

WE would that, like stout Lord Percy of yore, it were in our power at this present moment to chronicle a vow that we should forthwith take our pastime for three summer days on the pleasant hills of Scotland. Alas for us, that we are doomed, from divers causes, to absent ourselves from felicity awhile, and, amidst the heat and noise of London, listen with intense disgust to the brutal bayings of the Chartists! This very night, we hear, the ignoble hunt is to be up in Bishop Bonner's fields. Crowds of dirty, unshaven, squalid ruffians, who have not the strength to use the pike, but the will to employ the knife of the assassin-fellows whom even Cobden would be chary to recognise as his quondam supporters, defenders, and dupes-not unmingled with foreign propagandists, whom even France, in the fury of her revolutionary tornado, repudiates-are thronging to the place of rendezvous, where, doubtless, their souls will be worthily regaled by the ravings of some rascally vendors of sedition, blasphemy, and treason. Then will ensue the usual scene which for nights has disgraced the metropolis. Some unfortunate tradesman, whose curiosity has been stronger than his prudence, will be fixed upon as a special" or a spy-the cowards, presuming upon their numbers, and the apparent absence of all executive power, will attempt a deliberate murder-the police will sally from their hiding place to the rescue-there will be a storm of brickbats, a determined charge with the baton, a shop or two will be gutted, some score of craniums cracked, and to-morrow morning the greasy patriots, at the bar of Bow Street, will read their recantation, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, protest their loyalty to the Queen. Such are the pastimes of merry England in the month of June, and such the results of that enlightened policy which yields every thing to popular clamor, adopts the

66

most fatal delusions as distinct principles of right, and then shrinks, trembling and aghast, from the inevitable result of their development.

We do not want-in this article at least-to be political, and we vow that we took up our pen three minutes ago in a spirit of perfect good will and harmony towards all manner of men. But the hoarse bawling of these cannibals has somewhat ruffled our temper, dispelled for the moment our dreams of the mountains, and forced us back to the sterner realities of popular tumult and the truncheon. If this sort of thing lasts, we shall indubitably emigrate. Assassination, as recommended by the modern Hamilcar, is by no manner of means to our taste: Our opinion coincides with that of the gracious Captain of Knockdunder, and, were we promoted to a judicial function, "the chiel they ca' the Fustler" should ere long fustle in a tow. Neither are we at all disposed to fraternize with the milder Cuffeya fellow, by the way, who is not without some redeeming scintillations of humor. We have no wish to be introduced to him even at a mesmeric soiree; and, acting upon the principle of Jacquey, we shall pray heaven to decrease our acquaintance, and put the Tweed as speedily as possible between ourselves and the partisans of O'Connor. We hope the Lord Provost, though discomfited in his Police Bill, has been looking after the tranquillity of the Calton. If not, we must move farther north, and finally locate ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of Dalnacardoch. deuce is in it, if the revolutionary mania has penetrated to that sequestered region! No son of the mountains has ever yet given in his adhesion to the Charter-treason hath not stained the tartan, and no republican pins have ever been exposed beneath the checkered margin of the kilt. There is loyalty at least in the land which was traversed by Montrose and Dun

The

Lays of the Deer Forest, with Sketches of Olden and Modern Deer Hunting, &c. &c. By JOHN SOBIESKI and CHARLES EDWARD STUART. 2 vols. 8vo. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.

« AnteriorContinuar »