happen to them.  The Kamchatkan Caesar, however, on this occasion seemed to distrust his own fortunes, and the attempts at consolation came from the opposite quarter.  His boatman did not tell him, “Cheer up, Caesar, a Kamchadal and his fortunes are carrying you,” but he did assure him that he had navigated the river for several years, and had “never been drowned once.”  What more could Caesar ask!—­After some demur we all took seats upon bearskins in the bottoms of the canoes, and pushed off.

All other features of natural scenery in the vicinity of Kluchei sink into subordination to the grand central figure of the Kluchefskoi volcano, the monarch of Siberian mountains, whose sharp summit, with its motionless streamer of golden smoke, can be seen anywhere within a radius of a hundred miles.  All other neighbouring beauties of scenery are merely tributary to this, and are valued only according to their capability of relieving and setting forth this magnificent peak, whose colossal dimensions rise in one unbroken sweep of snow from the grassy valleys of the Kamchatka and Yolofka, which terminate at its base.  “Heir of the sunset and herald of morning,” its lofty crater is suffused with a roseate blush long before the morning mists and darkness are out of the valleys, and long after the sun has set behind the purple mountains of Tigil.  At all times, under all circumstances, and in all its ever-varying moods, it is the most beautiful mountain I have ever seen.  Now it lies bathed in the warm sunshine of an Indian summer’s day, with a few fleecy clouds resting at the snow-line and dappling its sides with purple shadows; then it envelops itself in dense volumes of black volcanic smoke, and thunders out a hoarse warning to the villages at its feet; and finally, toward evening, it gathers a mantle of grey mists around its summit, and rolls them in convulsed masses down its sides, until it stands in the clear atmosphere a colossal pillar of cloud, sixteen thousand feet in height, resting upon fifty square miles of shaggy pine forest.

You think nothing can be more beautiful than the delicate tender colour, like that of a wild-rose leaf, which tinges its snows as the sun sinks in a swirl of red vapours in the west; but “visit it by the pale moonlight,” when its hood of mist is edged with silver, when black shadows gather in its deep ravines and white misty lights gleam from its snowy pinnacles, when the host of starry constellations seems to circle around its lofty peak, and the tangled silver chain of the Pleiades to hang upon one of its rocky spires—­then say, if you can, that it is more beautiful by daylight.

We entered the Yolofka about noon.  This river empties into the Kamchatka from the north, twelve versts above Kluchei.  Its shores are generally low and marshy, and thickly overgrown with rushes and reedy grass, which furnish cover for thousands of ducks, geese, and wild swans.  We reached, before night, a native village called Harchina (har’-chin-ah) and sent at once for a celebrated Russian guide by the name of Nicolai Bragan (nick-o-lai’ brag’-on) whom we hoped to induce to accompany us across the mountains.