mutilated faces and bodies half burned, with broken skulls, floated and
mingled with the blocks of ice, looking for their graves; or, turning
in the furious whirlpools among the jagged blocks, they were ground and
torn to pieces into shapeless masses, which the river, nauseated with
its task, vomited out upon the islands and projecting sand bars. I
passed the whole length of the middle Yenisei and constantly came across
these putrifying and terrifying reminders of the work of the Bolsheviki.
In one place at a turn of the river I saw a great heap of horses, which
had been cast up by the ice and current, in number not less than three
hundred. A verst below there I was sickened beyond endurance by the
discovery of a grove of willows along the bank which had raked from the
polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human
bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness
which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful
gruesome company I counted seventy.

At last the mountain of ice passed by, followed by the muddy freshets
that carried down the trunks of fallen trees, logs and bodies, bodies,
bodies. The fisherman and his son put me and my luggage into their
dugout made from an aspen tree and poled upstream along the bank.
Poling in a swift current is very hard work. At the sharp curves we were
compelled to row, struggling against the force of the stream and even in
places hugging the cliffs and making headway only by clutching the rocks
with our hands and dragging along slowly. Sometimes it took us a long
while to do five or six metres through these rapid holes. In two days we
reached the goal of our journey. I spent several days in this gold mine,
where the watchman and his family were living. As they were short of
food, they had nothing to spare for me and consequently my rifle again
served to nourish me, as well as contributing something to my hosts.
One day there appeared here a trained agriculturalist. I did not hide