CHAPTER V
THE CONVICT MINES OF KARÁ
THE mines of Kará are distant from Chíta, the capital of the Trans-Baikál, about 300 miles; but for more than 200 miles the traveler in approaching them follows a fairly good post-road, which runs at first through the valley of the Ingodá and then along the northern or left bank of the Shílka River, one of the principal tributaries of the Amúr. At a small town called Strétinsk, where the Shílka first becomes navigable, this post-road abruptly ends, and beyond that point communication with the Kará penal settlements is maintained by boats in summer and by sledges drawn over the ice in winter. For two or three weeks in autumn, while the ice is forming, and for a somewhat shorter period in the spring, after the river breaks up, the Kará mines are virtually isolated from all the rest of the world, and can be reached only by a difficult and dangerous bridle path, which runs for a distance of seventy or eighty miles, parallel with the river, across a series of steep and generally forest-clad mountain ridges. We hoped to reach Strétinsk in time to descend the Shílka to the Kará River in a boat; and when we left Chíta, on Saturday, October 24th, there seemed to be every probability that we should succeed in so doing. The weather, however, turned suddenly colder; snow fell to a depth of an inch and a half or two inches; and Wednesday morning, when we alighted from our teléga on the northern bank of the Shílka opposite Strétinsk, winter had set in with great
