Читать книгу Eastbound through Siberia - Georg Wilhelm Steller - Страница 13
ОглавлениеABOUT IRKUTSK AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
IN DESCRIBING THE TOWN OF IRKUTSK AND ITS surroundings, I can be brief, since I am well aware that Professor Müller’s incredible diligence and skill have omitted nothing concerning the region, the public buildings, the number of private dwellings, the founding and growth of the place, the inhabitants’ trade and character, and the income of the province and town. I also know that the town’s location together with the advantages a kind Nature has bestowed on it have been described in such a way that to write more about it is quite unnecessary. Strictly for order’s sake, I shall limit my observations to the shortest review of some information received, in order to proceed to a more thorough description of Lake Baikal.
The town of Irkutsk was built at 52°12′ northern latitude on the western bank of the Angara River, in the middle of three rivers: the Angara; the Irkut, which flows into the Angara’s eastern bank above the town; and the Ushakovka, a small stream that joins the Angara’s western bank directly below the town. I shall write more about it below.
This town got its start as well as its name about sixty years ago with the construction of a zimov’e1 on the Irkut River. Because of its location, which is pleasant and convenient for trade, in a short time it became so popular with the Russians that due to its many advantages it can now rival the fame of Tobolsk, the capital [of Siberia since 1709]. Although the town has now left its original location, having moved from the bank of the Irkut to the west bank of the Angara, it has nevertheless retained its original name of Irkutsk.
Its location is undeniably one of the healthiest and most pleasant places in all of Siberia. From the south to the north, the Angara River flows past it, which is so clear and fast it likely has no equal in all of Russia and Siberia—few, if any, in the rest of the world. It flows from Lake Baikal, emptying sixty-one kilometers from Yeniseysk into the Yenisey.
Fig. 1.1. Steller’s handwritten manuscript of part of the facing page, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Reprinted with permission.
The Angara’s bottom is rocky, its current so fast that though the water is very cold, it does not begin to freeze up until a few days before Christmas, some years as late as the first or even the sixth or seventh of January. By then, all the other rivers in the country can already be used as ice roads. The lake always freezes first and afterward the Angara . . . [omission in MS.]. About forty kilometers [in text, verst, R, equals 1.067 kilometers; consistently translated as kilometers] from town, where the steep mountains and cliffs begin and hug the bank, the Angara tends to break up again almost every year around January 12 to 15 when the water flowing past Irkutsk begins to recede, forcing travelers to stay put, which happened to me, too, in 1740, much to my vexation. In the area forty kilometers from Irkutsk and fourteen from Nikolski, where the Angara often opens up, I came upon an extremely rare circumstance, emphatically worth mentioning. On the highest mountain summits, you find whole layers of round or oval gravel, waterworn in many ways; you can undeniably conclude that they had previously lain in water. I’ll let others guess how they got there. I cannot think of a reason, especially since there are no indications whatsoever of a previous great flood in these parts, which is evident from the complete lack of petrifications.2 Unlike the species of salmon and trout, those river fish whose fins are not suitable for swimming upriver against the current cannot sustain themselves in the Angara River. Consequently, the absence of the Eurasian ruffe [Gymnocephalus cernua] that occurs in all Siberian rivers is due not to antipathy but to the rigidity of its dorsal fins [not a valid scientific explanation. Arkadii Vladimirovich Balushkin, in WH, Anm. 16]. For these fish are found in the Angara far below the Balaganskoi Ostrog where the current is considerably slower. This river’s water is extraordinarily clean, light, and clear so that for thirty-five or forty-two, even up to eighty-six feet, you can clearly see the stones on the bottom and even distinguish their colors. The local residents have also noted that, no matter how much you drink, this water does not weigh down your body, nor cause any harm, though it is unsuitable for washing wounds since it would prevent their healing.
Usually the Angara breaks up in the beginning of April; in 1739, for example, it went out the night of April 5. Both when it freezes and when it breaks up, two phenomena occur that constitute the biggest part of spring or fall weather. Before the river opens, Irkutsk is such a filthy place that you cannot proceed on foot without getting horribly dirty and at every step running the risk of losing shoes or boots. As soon as the river breaks up, all the streets dry up and then remain clean.
The severest cold happens between Christmas and about the twentieth of January. After that, it is uncommonly warm and pleasant as long as ice is drifting in the river, but as soon as the Irkut freezes up, Irkutsk is invariably shrouded in fog, especially above the Angara, so that it keeps you from clearly seeing the other side of the river, sometimes for weeks. Yet you do not hear that this thick, foggy, damp air makes people especially susceptible to disease. As soon as the river [not clear whether Steller means the Angara or the Irkut] freezes up, it is uncommonly pleasant and without a hint of fog. The cold immediately lets up, from which you should guess that the seasonal cold of a place is caused not only by its latitude, mountains, or north winds but also by fast river currents and evaporation. You notice that the wind coming across the Angara feels colder than when it blows directly from the north.
This river’s name, Angara, is a proper name in the language of the Buryat and Tungus, and until now I have not been able to ascertain what it actually means or why it is applied to large rivers. One Angara River flows into one end of Lake Baikal in a delta with three arms; the other flows from the lake’s other end and past Irkutsk. This latter Angara does not, like other rivers, flood in spring but instead floods in the fall even though the weather is the most constant then. As wet as the spring is, the fall is dry—entirely free of rain; so heavy rains cannot, as in other places, cause the strong increase in water flow. Rather, it is due to the Angara’s gradually freezing and ceasing to flow. For two hundred kilometers below Irkutsk, near Balaganskoi Ostrog, it freezes a month earlier than at Irkutsk, and as the ice gradually sets up, freezing closer to the town, the water backs up more and more because the ice downstream impedes the current. As soon as the river freezes solid in Irkutsk, the water gradually disappears. This year it rose so high that it was level with the streets and flooded the basements. Eventually the water recedes and returns to the river. Also, this river does not freeze for good at once but within twenty-four hours sometimes breaks up again six to ten times. This year, the Angara resembled a boggy meadow more than a river, the great flood having inundated all the pastures and fields. When the water reached its highest level close to freeze-up, it swept up whole fields and deposited them in front of the town so that the river indeed looked more like a boggy meadow.
Fig. 1.2. Traveling on the Lena with rafts and doshcheniks. (Ann Arnold adapted this and the other drawings from her book Sea Cows, Shamans, and Scurvy: Alaska’s First Naturalist—Georg Wilhelm Steller [New York: Frances Foster Books, 2008] and granted us permission to use them.)
As soon as the Angara is frozen solid, Lake Baikal is, too, but like the Angara it often freezes only to be torn open again by the winds. On the lake and on the Angara, the doshcheniks go to the Selenga River and the Posolsky Monastery and from there regularly to Irkutsk with goods for sale until the middle of December, which deserves to be noted as something special in this region. Yet the trips in late fall are not without danger, because sometimes the vessels drift with the ice around and around for six to seven weeks, not being able to sail either into the Selenga or to the other shore, suffering distress and deprivation in the process. The distance between where the Angara flows out of the lake and Irkutsk is over one hundred kilometers by water but only ninety-six by land. The river flows so rapidly that, with little rowing, you can drift from Nikolski to Irkutsk in four to five hours. Pulling a boat upriver, however, requires close to four full days and the great effort of many workers. The river has rapids, here called shiveri, that you have to pay close attention to going up- or downriver. The Angara also divides into protoki or channels, forming big and small islands here and there.
Both Lake Baikal and the Angara are surrounded by tall, rugged cliffs, decreasing in height and ruggedness as they approach Irkutsk; just before Irkutsk they become lower on both sides, constituting the most pleasant landscape you can imagine. In this respect, the Siberian Cossacks’ natural intelligence shown by their sensible choice of this place—as well as of Yeniseysk and Tomsk—has to be admired. You almost come to believe that they had all the necessary architectural, mathematical, and physical reasons for establishing a town on a list before their eyes and followed them. To be sure, from Nikolskaya Zastava to Irkutsk—that is, a hundred kilometers downriver, on either side of the Angara—there is no place as suitable a location for a town as the one where it was built. For immediately above Irkutsk, at the place called Krest3 not far from the church built in honor of the Trinity, the mountains on both sides of the Angara hug the banks, leaving—much to the regret of the town’s residents—no suitable room for grain fields or a pretty village or estate. If the Angara’s dammed-up waters had not turned the few level places into bogs as well as calm lakes, the residents feel that the trip to Nikolski would be ever so much more pleasant and the area would have been better cultivated. As it is, there are only huts built of necessity and named after the merchants who built them. Still, the ample scenery and images inspire the viewers to utmost delight.
The region around the outlet4 of the Angara is above all worth noting. Around Listvenishnoe Zimov’e, seven kilometers from where the Angara flows out of the lake, tall, forested mountains form a semicircle like an amphitheater. In the middle before the outfall, an imposing rock rises out of the water, thirteen feet tall and twenty-one feet wide, called Shamanski kamen, Shaman’s Rock, which the Buryats and Tungus venerate, even considering it divine, and they habitually swear on it and are afraid of it as if it were God himself. They will rather admit any guilt than go there to kiss it. It is less respected by the gulls, who have completely painted it white with their excrement. At that point, the river is very fast and the noise so overpowering [In text, prächtig, dazzling; we assume Steller meant mächtig, mighty.] that nobody is able to understand another’s word. It is also dangerous to get there and then only possible in small boats. Among the rocks are field stones, pieces of wood, and rags that the natives [In text, heathens; replaced with natives where appropriate] have thrown there as offerings. The rock itself is a coarse, blackish-gray sandstone mixed with spar. I am sending a piece of this nature-made idol to the Kunstkammer as a testament to heathen foolishness, though I do not know which of the god’s members it resembles.
To the right side of the Angara’s source above the lake, approximately forty kilometers from Nikolski, the eternally snow-covered Tunkinski Range is visible, with the tallest mountains on the whole lake and among those I’ve ever seen anywhere. They are visible though only in clear weather not far from Tulun, the first place in the Irkutsk district, three hundred kilometers from town. From the middle of the area opposite Medvedev’s Church, you can see between the mountains toward the source of the Angara and the Tunkinski Range for over a hundred kilometers, which reveals that Irkutsk was built in a direct line from the source of the Angara though the river has many bends. Below Ilimsk where the Ilim River flows into the Angara from the left, the Angara loses its name and becomes the Tunguska; from then on till it flows into the Yenisey, sixty-seven kilometers from the town of Yeniseysk at Tunginskoi Ostrog, it is known as the Tunguska. Downriver, the Tunguska has many porogi or rapids that cause considerable dangers and costs for the merchants. These rapids are clearly formed by the cliffs that extend underwater into the river. Nine of these are especially big and dangerous. The first is called Strelovskoi Porog, seventy-one kilometers from the town of Yeniseysk, ten before the Tunguska joins the Yenisey; the second is Murskoi Porog; the third Kasina Shivera [waterfall]; the fourth Aplinskoi Porog; the fifth, Shamanskoi Porog, is called that because a shaman fell in there and broke his neck. The sixth is called Dolgoi Porog, the seventh Padunskoi Porog because it is very steep and precipitous. The eighth, Pianoi Porog [the Drunken One; WH, Anm. 58], has its name from a plant that makes people drunk, of which Dr. Gmelin will give extensive information; the ninth is called Pochmel’noi Porog [R, Hangover Rapids], and I could say more about it if I didn’t know that Professor Müller has described all you need to know in the greatest of detail. While the water around Irkutsk is very clean, it gradually becomes less so, mixed with diverse kinds of pollution the closer it gets to the Yenisey.
The fish in the Angara are as follows: common sturgeon [R, oseter; Acipenser sturio], sterlet [Acipenser ruthenus]5 and starry sturgeon [In text, Schebriga; best guess Acipenser stellatus; WH, Anm. 65]. But these fish are never caught below Bratskoi Ostrog where the Ilim flows into the Irkut even though they are numerous in Lake Baikal because they are used to swimming upstream and not downstream. Siberian taimen [Hucho taimen] and sig [common whitefish] sometimes swim up the Irkut into Lake Baikal, but as soon as the Irkut freezes up, not a single one of these fish is to be seen because the sig in Lake Baikal [Baikal Lake sig, Coregonus lavaretus baicalensis, best guess] do not swim downstream in the Irkut. Sharp-snouted lenok [Brachymystax lenok], grayling [Thymallus thymallus, “Siberian Fish,” or T. arcticus; Bond, pers. comm., May 1991], Eurasian dace [R, elets, Leuciscus leuciscus, best guess, “Siberian Fish”], species of roach [in text, sorogi], plotva [R, common roach, Rutilus rutilus, “Siberian Fish”], pizda [R, Pizda ryba; bullhead, best guess; WH, Anm. 75], northern pike [Esox lucius L.; WH, Anm. 76; see ch. 5], and omul [Lake Baikal omul, Caregonus migratorius, of which there are four to five subpopulations in Lake Baikal; since 2004 listed as endangered; “Fishes: Baikal Omul,” Baikal.ru] are sometimes caught around the solstice. The omul is native only to Lake Baikal, being occasionally swept out of the lake with the current. Below Balaganskoi Ostrog in the upper regions of the Angara and in Lake Baikal, there are no burbot [Lota lota], perch [species of Perca], or Eurasian ruffe, the reason for which I have given above.
Most of the fishing in the Angara takes place in spring and fall; in winter people make do with frozen or salted fish. It is almost a hallmark of Irkutsk that in the morning or evening you almost always see people in the street carrying a string of Arctic grayling in their hand. In spring, the fish are full of worms and lice, which I have extensively described in my Catalogus insectorum. In some places, like below the Voznesenski Monastery, this river is bottomless and never freezes. Elsewhere I will describe the kind of villages, landed estates, and farms—in this country called zaimki [small settlements in Siberia with just a few houses; translated as village when not used as part of a proper name; WH, Glossar]—as well as the zimovia or single huts found on the road on both sides of the Angara. The Irkut, the other river that flows into the Angara across from the city, is almost as wide as the Angara; in addition, it is very deep and rather muddy in some places. I shall describe its course, as well as its banks and the rivers flowing into it and the settlements built on it, in a special treatise [No proof such a document exists; WH, Anm. 85].
The Ushakovka, or Ida River, which originates close to Lake Baikal between mountains not far from the source of the Golousnaya, is no more than 70 to 105 feet wide and flows into the Angara, approximately fifty kilometers from its source, close to and below the town—that is, between the town and Monastery Village, which is located on a hill and contains a nuns’ convent. The Ushakovka is named after the man Ivashka Ushakov, who first built a mill on its bank. These days this mill belongs to the widow of Ivan Pivovarov and generates an annual income of five hundred rubles. The Ushakovka’s bottom is rocky, the gravel in it red and ferrous. Iron used to be smelted from bogs along this river. Nowadays this iron is left lying by the wayside since it is friable due to all the sand. Ten kilometers from the mill on a hill surrounded by boggy areas, Pivovarov’s widow has built an estate or zaimka, and about forty or fifty kilometers from town live promyshlenniks who hunt Siberian stags or iziubri [Cervus elaphus; WH, Anm. 94; common name is red deer], moose [Alces alces], and deer either by means of pits or with guns. About eighty years ago, this area was famous for hunting sable, but for many years now not a single one has been seen here. Many springs and small streams that flow into the Ushakovka are too insignificant to have names. The fish in this river are the Arctic grayling, the sharp-snouted lenok, lake minnows [mundi, Rhynchocypris percnurus], Eurasian dace, a species of roach [in text, sorogi], and burbot.
Fig. 1.3. Carrying home a string of grayling in Irkutsk (Arnold).
The nicest hayfields, belonging to the Demientievs, are found along this river. The woods are mostly young trees because, being so close to town, the trees are constantly being felled and transported to town for firewood. Many of the springs flowing into the Ushakovka never freeze, and that is where the water ouzels, or dippers, called vodianie vorob’i [most likely the Eurasian dipper, Cinclus cinclus; Springer, pers. comm., August 24, 2016], are found.
It is no mere flattery to say that this place, Irkutsk, has all the qualities of a well-positioned trade center and on top of that is endowed with many amenities that no European could imagine exist in Siberia. The air is healthy, the fall more pleasant than in all other areas of Russia or Siberia; the weather is constant, the river teeming with fish and navigable, except for a few shallow places that take a lot of effort to get around. The area is wonderfully scenic. Mountains rise above the Angara, if not on both sides, at least on one. Where the town is located, these mountains are about seven kilometers apart, gradually becoming a plain. One end of this valley is called Krest; the other is the Monastery Village, where the mountains gradually begin again, extending along the Angara. They are studded with the most beautiful forest of Dahurian larch [Larix dahurica Turcz. subsp. cajanderi (Mayr) Dylis; Jäger], Siberian spruce [Picea obovata Ledeb.; Jäger], Scots pine [Pinus sylvestris L.; Jäger], Japanese white birch [Betula platyphylla Sukaczev; Jäger], and a few Siberian pine [Pinus sibirica Du Tour; Jäger].
On this plain between both mountain ranges, the Ushakovka flows through forests and meadows, providing the most pleasurable strolls. Across from town, the left bank of the Angara is flat, with the most delightful meadows full of the most beautiful, colorful, and unusual flowers, which convince even the exiles that their lives are not utterly wretched.
You can see across this plain for about twenty kilometers. As the Voznesenski Monastery adds to the charm of Monastery Village, so this village and Zhilkina Village, in which the archbishop has built an uncommonly beautiful building, enhance the appearance of Irkutsk. Although the villages are about two kilometers apart, the people in town do not seem to perceive the space between them, judging them to be one and the same. Upriver from town, across the Angara, on the side of the Irkut, are pleasant forested hills that look like a rampart. Various estates and farms have been built there. A boat trip across the river to the monastery takes a little less than half an hour. The slobodas,6 located for eighteen to twenty kilometers across the mountains of the Angara in the nicest bottom lands, are endowed with the best soil, perfectly suitable for growing grain. You can buy the pud, thirty-six pounds [consistently converted] of rye flour firsthand from the farmer for six or eight kopeks, at the bazaar for ten or twelve, wheat flour for fifteen. As the rivers teem with fish—as I have related extensively in my separate “Description of Fish”7—the forests and meadows are full of the most enjoyable songbirds, as are the rivers with waterbirds. Whole sleds full of various species of ducks, geese, capercaillies [Tetrao urogallus], and black grouse, hazel grouse, and Daurian partridge [Tetrao tetrix, Tetrestes bonasia, and Perdix dauurica; Springer, pers. comm., August 24, 2016] are daily brought to town for sale by both Russians and Buryats, so that even a spoiled palate cannot complain of a lack of delicacies.
In town the Angara’s banks are full of boats, called doshcheniks, that transport goods from Russia here and to the Chinese border as well as returning from there across Lake Baikal to continue on down the Angara. At the bazaar as well as in the gostinii dvor,8 you can buy a lot of Russian and Chinese goods for reasonable prices. Every year more goods become available; some things can be bought at the same price or for little more than in Moscow—for example, German, Dutch, and English cloth, hats, linen, and sugar.
Notes
1. Zimov’e, R, literally winter hut, used by hunters and travelers primarily in winter; by the time of the expedition, used as way station; consistently translated except when part of a name.
2. Steller is right about the water-worn gravel having once been in the water; flooding or glaciation are possibilities. Robin Beebee, hydrologist, USGS, personal communication.
3. Krest, R, meaning cross. Traditionally, a cross was erected at the beginning of important routes for travelers to offer prayers; this is the route to Lake Baikal. WH, Anm. 34.
4. In text, Mündung or mouth; consistently replaced with source or outlet, where that is obviously meant.
5. A relatively small species of sturgeon from Eurasia, also native to rivers in Siberia as far east as the Yenisey, has excellent flesh and makes very good caviar; listed as threatened. “Siberian Fish,” www.sibrybalka.ru/ryby.
6. Sloboda, derived from the Slavic word for freedom. “Large communal villages settled by voluntary colonists with government assistance.” Gibson, 156; term retained.
7. In a letter to Baron von Korff, dated December 23, 1739, Steller promises to send his Historia piscium Angarae et Lacus Baikali cum iconibus [History of fish in the Angara River and Lake Baikal, with pictures] by April 1740. No such work has been found, but Steller’s descriptions of fish from 1739 are found in other places. WH, Anm. 121.
8. Gostinii dvor, prerevolutionary arcade, in towns and forts usually built out of stone. WH, Glossar; term retained.
