The battle of the Yen-e-say raged for about a fortnight. The sun was generally burning hot in the daytime; but every night there was more or less frost. The ice came down the Yen-e-say at various speeds. Sometimes we could see gigantic masses of pack-ice, estimated at twenty to thirty feet in height, driven down the river at an incredible pace, not less than twenty miles an hour. In the Koo-ray-i-ka the scene was constantly changing. The river rose and fell. Sometimes the pack-ice and floes were jammed so tight together that it looked as if one might scramble across the river without difficulty. At other times there was a good deal of open water, and the icebergs “calved” as they went along with much commotion and splashing, that could be heard half a mile off. Underlayers of the iceberg ground; and after the velocity of the enormous mass has caused it to pass on, the pieces left behind rise to the surface, like a whale coming up to breathe. Some of these “calves” must come up from a considerable depth. They rise up out of the water with a great splash, and rock about for some time before they settle down to their floating level. At last the final march past of the beaten winter-forces in this great fourteen days’ battle took place and for seven days more the rag, tag, and bob-tail of the great Arctic army come straggling down--warm and weather-beaten little icebergs, dirty ice-floes that looked like mud-banks floating down, and straggling pack-ice in the last stages of consumption. The total rise of the river was upwards of seventy feet.
The moment that the snow disappeared vegetation sprang up as if by magic, and the birds made preparations for breeding. As we passed through Yen-e-saisk I bought a schooner off a ship-builder of the name of Boiling, a Heligolander. I christened it the _Ibis_; and on the 29th of June we left the Koo-ray-i-ka with this little craft in tow. Our progress down the river, however, was one catalogue of disasters, ending in our leaving the _Thames_ on the 9th of July a hopeless wreck, lying high and dry on a sand-bank, in latitude 67°. As we sailed northwards in the _Ibis_, the forests became smaller and smaller, and disappeared altogether about latitude 70°. The highest point we reached was latitude 71½°, where I sold the _Ibis_ to the captain of a Russian schooner, which had been totally wrecked during the break-up of the ice.
On the 23rd of July I left Gol-chee-ka in the last Russian steamer up the river; and reached Yen-e-saisk on the 14th of August. After a few days’ delay I drove across country to Tomsk, stopping a day or two in Kras-no-yarsk. In Tomsk I found an excellent iron steamer, in which I sailed down the river Tom into the Obb, down which we steamed to its junction with the Eer-tish, up which we proceeded until we entered the Tob-ol, and afterwards steamed up the Too-ra to Tyu-main, a distance by water of 2,200 miles. From the Tyu-main I drove through Ekatereenburg across the Urals to Perm, where I took my passage on board the _Sam-o-lot_, or self-flyer, down the Kama, and up the Volga, to Nishni Novgorod.
THE YARROW
JOHN MACWHIRTER
Yarrow and its vale form one of the high places of the earth. In this age of cheap trips it is easy to get there, and perhaps you don’t think much of it as you rattle through on the coach. There is many a Highland scene incomparably grander. After all
“What’s Yarrow, but a river bare, That glides the dark hills under? There are a thousand such elsewhere, As worthy of your wonder.”
A word of dry description must commence. The Yarrow Water is in Yarrow and Selkirk parishes of the country of Selkirk. It rises in St. Mary’s Loch, it courses therefrom to its junction with Ettrick Water fourteen and a half miles, when the latter gives its name to the united currents. They are soon lost in the Tweed. Beyond St. Mary’s Loch, and separated from it by a narrow strip of land, is the Loch o’ the Lowes (or Lochs). It is about two miles in length, and is fed by the Yarrow, which rises some two miles higher up, though it is usually taken as beginning in the large lake. In the lower reach the banks are wooded; farther up the hills are bare, soft, rounded, the stream is clear and swift-flowing, with a musical note on its large and small stones; there is no growth of sedge or underwood, but the fresh green grass stretches up the slope till it is lost in the heather. Between the hills are glens down which wind greater or smaller tributaries to the Yarrow. Each has its legend and its ruin. Dim, romantic, enticing, these glens stretch away into the mysterious mountain solitude. You begin your excursion from Selkirk, which is on Ettrick Water, ten miles down stream from its junction with the Yarrow, and two places soon take your attention, Carterhaugh and Philiphaugh. There is a farm “toun,” as they name a steading in the north, that is called Carterhaugh; but what is meant here is a charming piece of greensward and wood, that lies almost encircled by the two streams at and near their meeting place. A very Faeryland! and here is laid the scene of the faery ballad of “The Young Tamlane.” The song is very old; it was well known in 1549, as we learn from a chance mention in a work of the period. It is a delicious poem, pure phantasy; a very Mid-summer Night’s Dream, scarcely of the earth at all, far less dealing with historical incident. The forgotten poet, lest he should be all in the air, makes the young Tamlane son to Randolph, Earl Murray, and Fair Janet, daughter to Dunbar, Earl March, but this is only because these were the noblest names in Scotland, and he chooses Carterhaugh for his stage; as like as not he lived somewhere on the Yarrow, and the stream sang in his ears as he built the song. Tamlane is nine when his uncle sends for him “to hunt and hawk and ride,” and on the way--
“There came a wind out o’ the north, A sharp wind and a snell, And a dead sleep came over me, And frae my horse I fell. The Queen of the Fairies she was there, And took me to herself.”
On the left bank of the Yarrow, just across from Carterhaugh, is Philiphaugh. It is a large space of level ground, and here the fortunes of the great Montrose and his Highland army came to hopeless smash in the early morning of 13th September, 1645. Montrose had won six victories in the Highlands, had been appointed Viceroy of Scotland, and full of ill-placed confidence was preparing an invasion of England. He spent the previous evening at ease in Selkirk (they still show you the house) and was writing despatches to the king, when he heard the sound of firing. He galloped to the field and found everything practically over! David Leslie had been seeking him far and near for some time, had found the camp and invaded it in a mist. The Royalists were scattered; Montrose--no one ever counted cowardice among his vices--made a desperate effort to retrieve the fortune of the day, but all in vain. Finally he dashed through the opposing forces, galloped away up the Yarrow, then by a wild mountain path, right over Minchmoor, and drew not bridle till he dashed up to Traquair House, sixteen miles from the battle-field. A number of prisoners were taken. The common lowland Scot has still a certain contempt for the Highlander, whose appreciation in the modern world is due to literature; then he looked upon him as an outcast and outlaw, “a broken man,” in the expressive phrase of an earlier day. The captives were shot in the court-yard of Newark Castle, and buried in a field still called Slain-mans-lee. Celtic troops are very brave, but unless mixed with the steadier Saxon, they don’t seem reliable.
[Illustration: THE YARROW]
Still keeping on the left bank, follow the road by the riverside and as before you come to two places, each with an interest very different from the others. One is a ruined house, a poor enough building at the best. An inscription tells you that Mungo Park (1771-1805) the African traveller, was born and lived here. He saw Scott a little before his last voyage, told how he dreaded leave-taking (he had been recently married!) and that he meant to leave for Edinburgh on some pretence or other and make his adieux from there. On Williamhope ridge the two parted.
“I stood and looked back, but he did not,” says Scott. He had put his hand to the plough. Poor Mungo Park! his discoveries seem little now-a-days, yet to me, he is always the most attractive of African travellers, his life the most interesting, his end the most melancholy. One thinks how under the hot sun in those fearful swamps he must have often remembered the cool delicious green braes of his native Yarrow. But we turn our eyes to the opposite bank and scarce need be told that the castle we see, majestic, though in ruins, is “Newark’s stately tower.” ’Tis a great weather-beaten square keep, where Anna, relict of the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, lived for some years of her widowed life. To her Scott’s “Last Minstrel” sings his lay. But the place was already centuries old. It was once a hunting-seat of the Scots kings, when the whole region was the densely wooded Ettrick Forest, and here there was great sport with the wolf, the mountain bear, the wild-cat, and all sorts of other small and large deer. Some place-names still save the old memories, Oxcleugh, Durhame, Hartleap, Hindshope, and so forth.