BOOKS.
THE TUNDRAS AND THEIR INHABITANTS.*
Six days' journey by land from Archangel lies the grey and dreary little coast town of Mezen, a place of "modified exile," the frontier town of Siberia in Europe ; and beyond it is the wilderness of the Siberias, extending northward to the Icy Sea and eastward to the Pacific Ocean. From this point stretch the Tundras, vast deserts of swamp and moss, the haunts of the lonely Samoyedes ; the dismal, unvisited country east of the White Sea, whither Mr. Rae and his friend journeyed last year, in the process of their exploration of the kingdom of the North Wind. It was a pioneer expedition ; no travellers had ever before visited the bleak, isolated promontory of Kanin, which runs up out of Malaya Zemlia into the Frozen Ocean ; no one knew where the Samoyedes dwelt,, whether on the shore or inland, or how they lived ; the isolation of the place and the people was complete. A little steamer towed the boat in which the travellers were to make their coasting-voyage along the summer shores of Kanin, and at the Cape they were cast off. The voyage had much interest even before the vast loneliness was reached, and the strange people were seen, while yet they had not quite done with Russian-Christian races, or entered the most desolate of all the realms of heathendom. "1 hope you will come back" is an ominous, but not unnatural form of farewell under such circumstances, and Mr. Rae and the Doctor were reminded of it at an early stage, when they found themselves sailing upon the White Sea—having crossed the Polar Circle in the bright morning light—in a boat which was neither rivetted nor bolted, but merely stitched with osier twigs, which leaked liberally and required much baling. They weathered one heavy breeze, which succeeded to a calm, in which "a great stillness fell upon the sea, the clouds and sea and sky became one sheet of milk, the only distinction being a creamy haze upon the water," and then gave it up, put in at Korga, a Russian settlement consisting of one solitary wooden hut, inhabited by three men and a boy, and pitched their gay little tent under the lee of this hardly larger shelter. "Between the hut and the shore lay a reach of low, brown, turfy land, strewed with bleached skeletons of trees and driftwood. Away on either side stretched the shores of Kanin, patched in places with pure snow. Behind us the White Sea was thundering on a shingly beach, and away below the low brow of land in front of us lay the Tundras, a scene of boundless desola- tion. A few yards away from the hut, three tall, grey, weather- beaten wooden crosses stood side by side, an Arctic Calvary, looking seaward for the comfort and encouragement of mariners." Two days' waiting here, where pebbles of price may be picked up on the shore—whimsical lavishness of nature, where value has no significance—and they put to sea again, to be once more driven before the wind to the desolate shore of Kanfishin. A curious scene presented itself at this little settlement, which was absolutely
• The Land of the North Wind; or, Travels atnong the Laplanders and The Sarnovedes. By Edward Rae, F.R.S. London : John Murray.
deserted. No trace of life was to be found ; one of the wooden huts was full of sledges, in another were traces of reindeer hair and hoofs. They "walked up to a lonely little wooden church on the cliff, and were amazed to find the east wall covered with costly pictures and silver work. There were brazen lamps and candle- sticks, with yellow bees'-wax tapers and enormous decorated candles standing in them. On the floor was a little hand-censer. It is evident that these were votive offerings from thankful souls who had weathered Cape Kanushin. Gifts were there, rude wooden shrines and crosses, carved by the mariners' own hands, and coarsely painted. A little reading-desk held two old missals in the Sclavonic tongue, and from the altar-shelf hung screens which had once been embroidered cloth of gold." They lighted the candles, the Russian boatmen kindled incense in the censer, and censed the pictures and the few lonely graves outside ; then they extinguished the lights, and went their way. The next day they succeeded in weathering Cape KanUshin, and went sailing northwards under the coast, which is a mass of spongy moss, on a light earth-bed, and forms a dull brown wall with the grey sea battering at its foot, to the mouth of the Kiga river. On the left bank were Samoyede dwellings ; the travellers had reached the promised land ; but they sailed north- ward still, to the mouth of the Miesna, rowed up to its muddy waters, landed on its muddy bank, supped with the Midnight Sun at 8° above the horizon, despatched the boatmen to fetch some natives, and in two hours were rewarded by the approach of seven Samoyedi, and one Samoyeda, in procession, with ten sledges and forty reindeer.
Then began the bargaining for reindeer sledges, and the arranging for travel across the Tundras, inaugurated by the slaughter of one of the reindeer, which was killed by the woman, and its blood drunk while warm by the whole party. The Samoyedes are of the Mongol type, low, but not repulsive, with flat faces, high cheek-bones, squat noses, with round, open nostrils, oblique dark eyes, no hair upon the men's faces but a thin wisp of moustache, and tawny orange complexion. They are a superior race to the Lapps in every respect, especially in the cleanliness of their habits, and their tents, or tjoums, of birch-bark and reindeer-skin, are curiously beautiful. So is their costume, formed, of course, of reindeer-skin, but ornamented ingeniously with lines of deep rich colour, and strips of black, brown, and grey fur. Their sledges are charming vehicles,—" a light body on a wooden frame- work supported on slight runners, nine feet in length, two feet in width above, two and a half at the runner, everything taper- ing upwards a little, and the whole exceedingly light and strong. The guiding-pole is eighteen feet long, slightly tapering, and very heavy, with a round metal knob at one end, at the other a sort of lance-head, employed in seal or walrus-spearing in the season. To stimulate the reindeer, they are gently tapped on the back with the knob." The reindeer are harnessed to these sledges five abreast, or three abreast, or singly, according to the load, and away go the people, and the strange, ungainly creatures who share and support their lives over the wonderful, appalling wastes of the North. There is a strong appeal to the imagination in the absolute dependence of the human on the brute inhabitants of these regions, a dependence complete than that of the Arab on his camel or the Esquimaux on his dogs. It was humor- ously described by a Norwegian, a certain Mr. Olsen, thus :— " He is a fonny beast, de reinbow; he lives mit de Lapps and their famlies up in de mountings, and they lives upon him. They eats him for meats and drinks his milk, and he draws 'em in de sledge ; but he von't go ven he don't like, and kicks up de ground mit his foots ; den must de Lapp turn over de sledge on himself, and wait till the reinbow change his mind."
Mr. Olsen was familiar with the ways of walruses too, and told a pleasant story of one of those unwieldy beasts :—" Yen I wass in Nova Zemlia to search de valros, von day they catched a yong valros. By 'm bye up came de old valros, putted him tosks over de edge of de boat, and look about him. Den he taked hold of our friend in him arms and dive mit him, for, tinks the valros, he is my yong one. So afterwards he find out his mistakes, comes op again, and put him back in de boat." The spare reindeer canter in open order over the Tundras, the herd are kept together by the intelligent Samoyede dogs, as clever at their business as the sheep-dog of Scotland ; the Tfindras are simply swaying bogs,— swamp, hillocks, brushwood, streams, and pools are among their features. The reindeer trot with soft, ungainly step ; the sledge bounds from one great lump of peat to another, hisses through shal- low pools, leaps fissures in the turf, tumbles on floating mosses, which like yellow sponges sink bubbling and swaying under the light runners, tears through brakes of sage-bush, with water gurgling at the roots; and glides, producing delicious exhilaration, over soft, wet, level moss. A glorious sensation, says Mr. Rae, and superior to every other kind of locomotion, is this summer sledging on the Tundras of the Samoyedes. It is not to be had elsewhere ; the Lapps don't sledge in the summer, their sledges are not made for the purpose, and their reindeer could not travel in the heat of their sheltered, windless country. Up here, in the far, far North, where the wind blows fresh and free, under the sky in which "the sun has risen redly up, to shine for half a year," the intelligent, sagacious, enduring creatures speed over the quagmires in which a man would sink to his neck in ten seconds, with broad, elastic hoofs, expanding like camels' feet. Their gait is awkward, their bellow is like the grunt of a pig, their rounded bodies, slender legs, bulgy hoofs, heavy mossy horns, strangely analogous with the soil, are ugly perhaps ; but their bright, answering eyes, and their soft, dark mouths and nostrils are beautiful. Speeding on, on, towards the top of the world, with vast herds of these creatures and their owners all migrating, to escape the mosquitoes, to the coldest camping- ground attainable, with no other life stirring around, with the soft, dark outline of the Tundras—how beautiful any one who has studied the beauty of a turf bog may dimly guess—stretching illimitably far, through the intoxicatingly pure bright air ; this at least was new in the experience of travel ; and the people were absolutely new also, interesting, and harm- less. The travellers with their Samoyede guides made for the northern centre of the Kanin peninsula, Koroleva, and every village was moving when they reached it, so that the journey must have been a weird, flying-Dutchman sort of experience, with every- where the pure air, the springy morass, the squadrons of reindeer, the heathen escort, mild, though they devour raw flesh and drink hot blood, and with a great reverence for their dead, though ten years ago they certainly worshipped reindeer skulls set up in their damp desert on poles for fetish, and most likely worship them— that is, the majority----still. At Koroleva, the whole tribe was leaving for Kanin Nos, and in another week not a single Samoyede would have been found short of that Cape. The Koroleva Samoyedes look rather like gipsies, but are well fed and pros- perous; their tents are neat and commodious, their personal habits are cleanly ; and the start of the tribe was curious to see. There were less than forty persons, and they had thirty-five sledges and five hundred reindeer,—a very moderate number. One Samoyede at Sobatschya owns five thousand. "The sledges were collected in three flies, each sledge with its team of reindeer and male and female driver ; the great herd was concentrated and sent on in front, and slowly the Samoyedes began to defile on their journey northwards. First one sledge, with four other sledges at- tached to it, trailed off over the Tundra, then a second link of five, then another, until, like the children of Israel, the whole tribe— men, women, and children, homes and herds—were in motion, disappearing one by one over the brow of some tiring ground, until all had vanished." They had taken little notice of the strangers ;—they were too busy to treat them with the courtesy the Samoyedes all along their route had shown them,—and nowhere is it evident that the apparition of the men from the world outside the Tiindras, whose like they never saw before, of the existence of whose race they may perhaps—or some of them—have been entirely ignorant, excited much curiosity among the happy, busy, nomad people, who live, on the best of terms with each other, and know no greater trouble than the mosquitoes, which afflict their reindeer even more severely than themselves. Mr. Rae tells that when the tribe had vanished, the blank was so great that the travellers stood and stared vacantly at each other for some time before they could prepare for their bivouac on the vacant site of Koroleva, which was to remain desert until autumn, when the nomads would return. It must have had a strange effect upon the mind of the Englishmen who had made such a journey to see them, to come up with them, and behold them vanish, to adopt Dutnas's celebrated simile, "like buffaloes in the mist."
On they went, westward now, towards Schoina, on the coast, five miles an hour, over country which no human foot or animal's, save a reindeer's, could traverse, occasionally stopping to lasso fresh reindeer, or to chat with Samoyedes who met them, accom- panied by their herds, of course en route for Kanin Nos.
When they reached the bank of the Schoina, a boy put off to meet them in a canoe, and they were invited to enter the chief wigwam—the entire village community numbers forty-five — where they found nine Samoyedes, well-mannered and pleasant- looking, waiting for the fish supper which two women Were cook- ing. Their experience of the tribes of the- Tfindras- may be
summed up in the description of that visit ; there is little to tell about these, the least-known people in the world, and it is attrac- tive. They are quite ignorant, and have no written language ; they are dignified, hospitable, and kindly ; their family life is united and happy, and 'in spite of intercourse with their neigh- bours, they retain composure and self-respect." Probably their wigwams may be less airy and cleanly in the winter, when the dreadful cold and snowstorms hold them prisoners in the tents and prevent them from using water, but in the summer they are clean, comfortable, and tastefully adorned. They have a curious superstition about the bear, a creature they much respect. In killing one they never fail to cut the claws off his fore-paws, lest when next they attack one they themselves should lose their lives. Whether they believe in a future life no one knows ; they are sensible and unambitious in their enjoyment of the present. There is no comparison, in Mr. Rae's opinion, between the Russian boor and his so-called savage neighbour, the Samoyede. "To the sordid meanness and greediness of the former, the poor Yellow Man never did and probably never will condescend."
The river-side village looked picturesque in the clear, gentle light which shone on the birch-bark tents, with gaily-dressed Samoyedes grouped in front of them, the fishing-nets hanging up to dry, the bright river, and the one canoe drawn up on the turf,—and with this fair picture in their minds the travellers bade adieu to the Tundra and resumed their journey by water. When they were once again abreast of Kanershin, they saw great whales rolling and wallowing in the sea. "We wondered," says Mr. Rae, "why the Archangel fishers never came here, as this afternoon alone would have enriched them." The trackless, soft, brown, silent wastes, with the sweet wind singing over them, had been traversed and left behind ; their kindly, harmless, wandering people, with the herds of the gentle animals which render human life possible throughout their vast harvestless, treeless, expanse, were faring to the northernmost north, to thrive in the breath of the ice-wind; the solemn midnight sun was gliding along the horizon, when, while the boatmen slept, one of the travellers steered the boat back towards their point of departure, often looking behind to the North, over "the White Sea, which stretched away, perhaps to the shores of an undiscovered country."
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