Then it was an unknown, mysterious land of glaciers and snowy mountains, filled with possibilities of adventure, but lonely and forbidding in its uninhabited wildness.  Now it was no longer lonely or desolate.  Every mountain peak was associated with some hospitable village nestled at its feet; every little stream was connected with the great world of human interests by some pleasant recollection of camp life.  The possibilities of adventure were still there, but the imaginary loneliness and desolation had vanished with one week’s experience.  I thought of the vague conceptions which I had formed in America of this beautiful country, and tried to compare them with the more recent impressions by which they had been crowded out, but the effort was vain.  I could not surround myself again with the lost intellectual atmosphere of civilisation, nor reconcile those earlier anticipations with this strangely different experience.  The absurd fancies, which had seemed so vivid and so true only three months before, had now faded away into the half-remembered imagery of a dream, and nothing was real but the tranquil river which flowed at my feet, the birch tree which dropped its yellow leaves upon my head, and the far-away purple mountains.

I was roused from my reverie by the furious beating of a tin mess-kettle, which was the summons to breakfast.  In half an hour breakfast was despatched, the tent struck, camp equipage packed up, and we were again under way.  We floated all day down the river toward Kluchei, getting ever-changing views of the mountains as they were thrown into new and picturesque combinations by our motion to the northward.  We reached Kazerefski at dark, and, changing our crew, continued our voyage throughout the night.  At daybreak on Friday we passed Kristi (kris-tee’), and at two o’clock in the afternoon arrived at Kluchei, having been just eleven days out from Petropavlovsk.

The village of Kluchei is situated in an open plain on the right bank of the Kamchatka River, at the very foot of the magnificent Kluchefskoi volcano, and has nothing to distinguish it from other Kamchadal towns, except the boldness and picturesque beauty of its situation.  It lies exactly in the midst of the group of superb isolated peaks which guard the entrance to the river, and is shadowed over frequently by the dense, black smoke of two volcanoes.  It was founded early in the eighteenth century by a few Russian peasants who were taken from their homes in central Russia, and sent with seeds and farming utensils to start a colony in far-away Kamchatka.  After a long adventurous journey of six thousand miles across Asia by way of Tobolsk (to-bolsk’), Irkutsk (eer-kootsk’), Yakutsk (yah-kootsk’), and Kolyma (kol-e-mah’), the little band of involuntary emigrants finally reached the peninsula, and settled boldly on the Kamchatka River, under the shadow of the great volcano.  Here they and their descendants have lived for more than a hundred years, until they have almost forgotten