One evening, thirteen weeks after leaving Yakutsk, the three men were crossing a plain of snow under the light of the full moon. At the last settlement, ten days previously, they had exchanged their reindeer transport for dogs, and since then had been traversing this same white and empty plain. There seemed, indeed, no obvious reason why the plain and the journey might not go on for ever. The temperature was fifty below zero. A.J. had noticed that for some hours the guards had been muttering to each other, which was unusual, for in such cold air it was painful to speak. Suddenly, out of the silver gloom, appeared the hazy shapes of a few snow-covered roofs; the guards gave a cry; the dogs barked; a few answering cries came from the dimness ahead. They had reached Russkoe Yansk.
It was smaller and more desolate than he had imagined. There were only four Russians in exile there, none of them educated men; the rest of the population consisted of a score or more natives of very low intelligence. The native men, under the direction of the guards, began to dig an entry through the snow into an unoccupied timber hut that was to belong to the new exile; there were several of these deserted huts, for the settlement had formerly been larger. The natives looked on in amazement when A.J. began to unpack the bundle that he had not been allowed to touch since leaving Petersburg; they had never before seen such things as books, writing-paper, or a kerosene-lamp. The Russians looked on also with a curiosity scarcely less childlike; they had seen no strange face for years, and their eagerness bordered on almost maniacal excitement. A.J. addressed them with a few cordial words and they were all around him in a moment, shaking his hands and picking up one after another of his belongings; they had evidently been half afraid of him at first. One of them said: “This shows that the Government has not forgotten us—they know we are still here, or they would not have sent you.”
A fire was made, and the two Cossack guards stayed the night in the hut. The next morning they hitched up their dog teams, shook hands cordially enough, and began the long return journey. A.J. watched them till the distance swallowed up their sleigh and the hoarse barking of the animals. Then he set to work to make his habitation more comfortable.
Russkoe Yansk was close to but not actually on the Arctic Ocean; the nearest settlements, not much larger, were four hundred and four hundred and fifty miles to west and east respectively. There was no communication of any regular kind with the civilised world; sometimes a fur-trapper would take a message and pass it on to someone else who might be going to Yakutsk, but even in most favourable circumstances an answer could scarcely arrive in less than twenty months. The nearest railway and telegraph stations were over three thousand miles away.
The year was composed of day and night; the day lasted from June to September only. In winter the temperature sometimes fell to seventy below zero, and there were week-long blizzards in which no living human being could stir a yard out of his hut. During the short summer the climate became mild and moist; the river thawed and overflowed, causing vast swamps and floodings that cut off the settlement from the world outside even more effectively than did the winter cold and darkness.
A.J. had brought a fair supply of tea and tobacco, and with small gifts of these he could secure the manual services of as many natives as he wanted, apart from the four Russians, who would have lived their whole lives as personal slaves in his hut if he had wished it. He did not feel particularly sad, but he did begin to feel a strange Robinson-Crusoe kind of majesty that was rather like an ache gnawing at him all the time. He was the only person in Russkoe Yansk who could read, write, work a simple sum, or understand a rough map. The most intelligent of the Russians had no more than the mind of a peasant, with all its abysmal ignorance and with only a touch of its shrewdness. The others were less than half-witted, perhaps as a result of their long exile. They remembered the names of the villages from which they had been banished, but they had no proper idea where those villages were, how long their banishment had lasted, or what it had been for. Yet compared with the native Yakuts, even such men were intelligent higher beings. The Yakuts, with their women and families, reached to depths of ugliness, filth, and stupidity that A.J. had hardly believed possible for beings classifiable as mankind. Their total vocabulary did not comprise more than a hundred or so sounds, hardly to be called words. In addition to physical unpleasantness (many were afflicted with a loathsome combination of syphilis and leprosy), they were abominable thieves and liars; indeed, their only approach to virtue was a species of dog- like attachment to anyone who had established himself as their master. With a little of the most elementary organisation they could have murdered all the exiles and plundered the huts, but they lacked both the initiative and the virility. Life to them was but an unending struggle of short summers and long winters, of snow and ice, blizzard and thaw, of fishing in the icy pools and trapping small animals for flesh and fur, of lust, disease, and occasional gluttony. They had never seen a tree, and knew timber only as material providentially floated down to them on the spring-time floods. Even when he had picked up their rudimentary language, A.J. could not interest them by any talk of the outer they were incapable of imagination, and the only thing that stirred them to limited excitement was the kerosene-lamp, which, after some experimenting, he made to burn with certain kinds of fish-oil.
Now especially he had cause to be grateful to Savanrog, the enterprising and sympathetic prison-guard at the Gontcharnaya. For the luggage, packed according to the latter’s instructions, included all kinds of things that A.J. would never have thought of for himself, but which now were found to be especially useful. With them, and with the miscellaneous articles he had purchased in Irkutsk, he was not badly equipped. He had his twelve books, chosen apparently at random from his shelves in Petersburg; the only one he would have thought of selecting himself was a translation of Don Quixote, but the others soon grew to be odd but no less faithful companions. One was a school text-book in algebra, another an out-of-date year- book; another was Dickens’s Great Expectations—of course in Russian. Mr. Pumblechook and Joe Gargery became the friends of all his waking and sleeping dreams, and before them alone he could relax and smile.