Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/154

The mines of Kará, which are the private property of his Imperial Majesty the Tsar, and are worked for his benefit, consist of a series of open gold placers, situated at irregular intervals along a small rapid stream called the Kará River, which rises on the water-shed of the Yáblonoi mountains, runs in a southeasterly direction for a distance of forty or fifty miles, and finally empties into the Shílka between Strétinsk and the mouth of the Argún. The name "Kará," derived from a Tatár adjective meaning "black," was originally used merely to designate this stream; but it is now applied more comprehensively to the whole chain of prisons, mines, and convict settlements that lie scattered through the Kará valley. These prisons, mines, and convict settlements, taking them in serial order from south to north, are known separately and distinctively as Ust Kará or Kará mouth, the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kará, Upper Kará, and the Upper or Amúrski Prison. The administration of the whole penal establishment centers in the Lower Diggings, where the governor of the common-criminal prisons resides, and where there is a convict settlement of two or three hundred inhabitants and a company or two of soldiers in barracks. It seemed to me best to make this place our headquarters; partly because it was the residence of the governor, without whose consent we could do nothing, and partly because it was distant only about a mile from the political prison in which we were especially interested. We therefore left our horses and our guide at Ust Kará with orders to wait for us, and after dining and resting for an hour or two, set out in a teléga for the Lower Diggings. The road ran up the left bank of the Kará River through a shallow valley averaging about half a mile in width, bounded by low hills that were covered with a scanty second growth of young larches and pines, and whitened by a light fall of snow. The floor of the valley was formed by huge shapeless mounds of gravel and sand, long ago turned over and washed in the