The Kamchadal language is to me one of the most curious of all the wild tongues of Asia; not on account of its construction, but simply from the strange, uncouth sounds with which it abounds, and its strangling, gurgling articulation.  When rapidly spoken, it always reminded me of water running out of a narrow-mouthed jug!  A Russian traveller in Kamchatka has said that “the Kamchadal language is spoken half in the mouth and half in the throat”; but it might be more accurately described as spoken half in the throat and half in the stomach.  It has more guttural sounds than any other Asiatic language that I have ever heard, and differs considerably in this respect from the dialects of the Chukchis and Koraks.  It is what comparative philologists call an agglutinative language, and seems to be made up of permanent unchangeable roots with variable prefixes.  It has, so far as I could ascertain, no terminal inflections, and its grammar seemed to be simple and easily learned.  Most of the Kamchadals throughout the northern part of the peninsula speak, in addition to their own language, Russian and Korak, so that, in their way, they are quite accomplished linguists.

It has always seemed to me that the songs of a people, and especially of a people who have composed them themselves, and not adopted them from others, are indicative to a very great degree of their character; whether, as some author supposed, the songs have a reflex influence on the character, or whether they exist simply as its exponents, the result is the same, viz., a greater or less correspondence between the two.  In none of the Siberian tribes is this more marked than in the Kamchadals.  They have evidently never been a warlike, combative people.  They have no songs celebrating the heroic deeds of their ancestors, or their exploits in the chase or in battle, as have many tribes of our North American Indians.  Their ballads are all of a melancholy, imaginative character, inspired apparently by grief, love, or domestic feeling, rather than by the ruder passions of pride, anger, and revenge.  Their music all has a wild, strange sound to a foreign ear, but it conveys to the mind in some way a sense of sorrow, and vague, unavailing regret for something that has for ever passed away, like the emotion excited by a funeral dirge over the grave of a dear friend.  As Ossian says of the music of Carryl, “it is like the memory of joys that are past—­sweet, yet mournful to the soul.”  I remember particularly a song called the Penzhinski, sung one night by the natives at Lesnoi, which was, without exception, the sweetest, and yet the most inexpressibly mournful combination of notes that I had ever heard.  It was a wail of a lost soul, despairing, yet pleading for mercy.  I tried in vain to get a translation of the words.  Whether it was the relation of some bloody and disastrous encounter with their fiercer northern neighbours, or the lament over the slain body of some dear son, brother, or husband, I could not