In summer and in winter communication is pretty regular, but there is a suspension of travel when the ice is forming, and another when it breaks up.  This causes serious inconvenience, and has led the government to build a road around the southern extremity of the lake.  The mountains are lofty and precipitous, and the work is done at vast expense.  The road winds over cliffs and crags sometimes near the lake and again two thousand feet above it.  Largo numbers of peasants, Bouriats, and prisoners have been employed there for several years, but the route was not open for wheeled vehicles at the time I crossed the lake.

One mode of cutting the road through the mountains was to build large bonfires in winter when the temperature was very low.  The heat caused the rock to crack so that large masses could be removed, but the operation was necessarily slow.  The insurrection of June, 1866, occurred on this road.

Formerly a winter station was kept on the ice half-way across the lake.  By a sudden thaw at the close of one winter the men and horses of a station were swallowed up, and nothing was known of them until weeks afterward, when their bodies were washed ashore.  Since this catastrophe the entire passage of the lake, about forty miles, is made without change of horses.

We left Posolsky and enjoyed a sunset on the lake.  The mountains rise abruptly on the western and southeastern shores, and many of their snow covered peaks were beautifully tinged by the fading sunlight.  The illusion regarding distances was difficult to overcome, and could only be realized by observing how very slowly we neared the mountains we were approaching.  The atmosphere was of remarkable purity, and its powers of refraction reminded me of past experience in the Rocky Mountains.  We had sunset and moon-rise at once.  ’Adam had no more in Eden save the head of Eve upon his shoulder.’

The boat went directly across and then followed the edge of the lake to Listvenichna, our point of debarkation.  There was no table on board.  We ordered the samovar, made our own tea, and supped from the last of our commissary stores.  Our fellow passengers in the cabin were two officers traveling to Irkutsk, and a St. Petersburg merchant who had just finished the Amoor Company’s affairs.  We talked, ate, drank, smoked, and slept during the twelve hours’ journey.

Congratulate us on our quick passage!  On her very next voyage the steamer was eight days on the lake, the wind blowing so that she could not come to either shore.  To be cooped on this dirty and ill-provided boat long enough to cross the Atlantic is a fate I hope never to experience.

There is a little harbor at Listvenichna and we came alongside a wharf.  Maack departed with our papers to procure horses, and left me to look at the vanishing crowd.  Take the passengers from the steerage of a lake or river steamer in America, dress them in sheepskin coats and caps, let them talk a language you cannot understand, and walk them into a cloud of steam as if going overboard in a fog, and you have a passable reproduction of the scene.  A bright fire should be burning on shore to throw its contrast of light and shadow over the surroundings and heighten the picturesque effect.