Poole has contrived to get on by composing a language of English, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Danish in which euphony is not the most predominant feature.
For some time he has got nothing to eat but some rye bread — much too hard, black, and sour, he thinks, for any human being to eat. He might have had plenty of some raw salt goose if he had liked.
Stockholm is not so regular as Copenhagen, but more magnificent.
He has been to the Arsenal and seen the skin of the horse that carried Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Lutzen, and the clothes in which Charles XII was shot.
He has sent his father two pieces of Swedish money, which is so heavy that when it was used as current coin, a public officer receiving a quarter’s allowance had to bring a cart to carry it away.
To Westeras
In Upsala he visited the Cathedral and found there a man who could speak Latin very fluently. The Rector Magnificus was not at home. He was detained some time in a forest of fir and birch by the axletree breaking. In general, he is annoyed by having to find separate lodgings for himself and his horses in each town.
His Swedish has made the most terrible havoc with the little German he knows.
In Abo
He understands there is a gloom over the Russian court.
St. Petersburg: Rubbers of Whist
The immense forests of fir strike the imagination at first but then become tedious from their excessive uniformity. He has eaten partridges and a cock of the woods. As he advances in Russian Finland he finds everything getting more and more Russian: the churches begin to be ornamented with gilt domes and the number of persons wearing beards continues to increase. A postmaster addresses him in Latin but in spite of that is not very civil. The roads are so bad that eight horses will not draw him along and he is helped up the mountain by some peasants. He sees two wolves. He crosses the Neva over a wooden bridge. He is amused at finding his old friends the Irish jaunting-cars.
The most striking objects here are certainly the common people.
He has a poor opinion of the honesty of the country when he finds in the Russian language a single word to express “the perversion of Justice by a Judge,” as in Arabic there is a word to express “a bribe offered to a Judge.”
In the Russian language they have only one word to express the ideas of red and beautiful, as the Romans used the word “purple” without any reference to color, as for instance “purple snow.”
He is bored by the society of the people of St. Petersburg, where he plays rubbers of whist without any amusing conversation. He considers card games even more dull and unentertaining than spitting over a bridge or tapping a tune with a walking stick on a pair of boots.
The general appearance of the city is magnificent, and he sees this as proof of what may be done with brick and plaster — though the surrounding country is very flat, dull, and marshy. The weather begins to be cold, and a stove within and a pelisse without doors are necessary.
He wishes to see the ice-hills and sledges, and the frozen markets.
He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake, thinking it is a French opera. Yet he expects in course of time to be able to converse with his friends the Sclavonians. He sees the Tauride, now lapsed to the crown, behind which is a winter garden laid out in parterres and gravel walks, filled with orange trees and other exotics, and evenly heated by a great number of stoves. The Neva is now blocked by large pieces of ice floating down from the Ladoga. Though the temperature has been down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, that is not considered to be much at all here.
The Empress gives birth to an Archduchess. When the Court assembles to pay their respects, the person who most attracts attention is Prince Hypsilantes, the Hospodar of Wallachia, and the Greeks of his train.
There is not much variety in his mode of life. He studies Russian in the morning.
He begins to be very tired of this place and its inhabitants: their hospitality; the voracious gluttony on every side of him; their barefaced cheating; their conversation, with its miserable lack of information and ideas; their constant fear of Siberia; their coldness, dullness, and lack of energy. The Poles are infinitely the most gentlemanlike, and seem a superior order of men to their Russian masters.
He won’t remain here as long as he had intended, but will purchase two sledge kibitkas, and other supplies, and depart, not for Moscow, but for Archangel.
He imagines there must be something curious in driving reindeer on the ice of the White Sea.
To Archangeclass="underline" The Mayor Makes a Speech
He buys two sledges covered with a tilt, furnishes them with a mattress, and lays in frozen beefsteaks, Madeira, brandy, and a large saucepan. For the trip he dresses in flannel, over that his ordinary clothes, over his boots fur shoes, over the fur shoes a pair of fur boots, covers his head with a cap of blue Astrachan wool, wraps himself in a sable pelisse, and over it all throws a bear skin.
On the road there are no accommodations, so he sees inside the houses of the peasantry. The whole family lives in one room in suffocating heat and smell and with a number of cockroaches, which swarm in the wooden huts. The dirt is excessive. But the people are civil, hospitable, cheerful, and intelligent, though addicted to spirits, quarrelsome among themselves, and inclined to cheat. They are more like the common Irish than anyone else he has seen. Peter the Great has by no means succeeded in forcing them to abandon their beards.
In the cottage, people come to see him dine. Twenty or thirty women crowd around him, examining him and asking him questions.
He passes through Ladoga and Vitigra. Approaching Kargossol, he counts from a distance nineteen churches, most of which have five balloon-like domes, gilt, copper, or painted in the most gaudy colors, and thinks it must be a magnificent town, but the number of churches here almost equals the number of houses.
In Archangel the Archbishop speaks Latin very fluently, but does not know whether the Samoyeds of his diocese are Pagans or Christians.
His hostess is anxious to show that they, too, have fruit, and brings in some specimens preserved. Here they have in the woods a berry with a strong taste of turpentine.
The mayor comes in during the evening and makes a speech to him in Russian three quarters of an hour long.
The temperature in Archangel is fifty-one degrees below freezing, both his hands are frozen, and Pauwells has a foot frozen. He goes northeast of Archangel, procures three sledges and twelve reindeer, and sets out over the unbeaten snow in search of a horde of Samoyeds. He finds them exactly on the Arctic circle in an immense plain of snow surrounded by several hundred reindeer. They are Pagans.
Back in Archangel, the cold has increased, and he is forced to bake his Madeira in an oven to get at it, and to carve his meat with an axe. It is nearly seventy degrees below freezing, barely three points above the point of congelation of mercury.
Moscow Is Immense and Extraordinary
Moscow is immense and extraordinary, after a journey over the worst road he has ever traveled in his life through a forest which scarcely ever suffered any interruption but continued with dreary uniformity from one capital to another.
He begins to be able to read Russian fairly easily, and speak it sufficiently. Poole has also picked up enough.
He sends his younger brother a Samoyed sledge and three reindeer cut out of the teeth of a sea horse by a peasant at Archangel.
The extent of Moscow is prodigious despite its small population because in no quarter of the city do the houses stand contiguous. The Kremlin is certainly the most striking quarter, and nearly thirty gilt domes give it a most peculiar appearance.