telling the tale of the
bantering feast that had preceded the destruction of this life.

The further we went to the south, the more pronouncedly hospitable the
people became toward us and the more hostile to the Bolsheviki. At last
we emerged from the forests and entered the spacious vastness of the
Minnusinsk steppes, crossed by the high red mountain range called
the "Kizill-Kaiya" and dotted here and there with salt lakes. It is a
country of tombs, thousands of large and small dolmens, the tombs of the
earliest proprietors of this land: pyramids of stone ten metres high,
the marks set by Jenghiz Khan along his road of conquest and afterwards
by the cripple Tamerlane-Temur. Thousands of these dolmens and stone
pyramids stretch in endless rows to the north. In these plains the
Tartars now live. They were robbed by the Bolsheviki and therefore hated
them ardently. We openly told them that we were escaping. They gave us
food for nothing and supplied us with guides, telling us with whom we
might stop and where to hide in case of danger.

After several days we looked down from the high bank of the Yenisei upon
the first steamer, the "Oriol," from Krasnoyarsk to Minnusinsk, laden
with Red soldiers. Soon we came to the mouth of the river Tuba, which
we were to follow straight east to the Sayan mountains, where Urianhai
begins. We thought the stage along the Tuba and its branch, the Amyl,
the most dangerous part of our course, because the valleys of these two
rivers had a dense population which had contributed large numbers
of soldiers to the celebrated Communist Partisans, Schetinkin and
Krafcheno.

A Tartar ferried us and our horses over to the right bank of the Yenisei
and afterwards sent us some Cossacks at daybreak who guided us to the
mouth of the Tuba, where we spent the whole day in rest, gratifying
ourselves with a feast of wild black currants and cherries.

CHAPTER VIII

THREE DAYS ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE

Armed with our false passports, we moved along up the valley of the
Tuba. Every ten or fifteen versts we came across large villages of from
one to six hundred houses, where all administration was in the hands of
Soviets and where spies scrutinized all passers-by. We could not avoid
these villages for two reasons. First, our attempts to avoid them
when we were constantly meeting the peasants in the country would have
aroused suspicion and would have caused any Soviet to arrest us and
send us to the "Ch