With a rear sweep, the rafts headed
about and escorted the newcomers to the fortress, where they were
locked for the night. After all, a welcome to exile was a sardonic
sort of mirth.
Kamchatka occupies very much the same position on the Pacific as Italy
to the Mediterranean, or Norway to the North Sea. Its people were
nomads, wild as American Indians, but Russia had established garrisons
of Cossacks--collectors of tribute in furs--all over the peninsula, of
whom four hundred were usually moving from place to place, three
hundred stationed at Bolcheresk, the seat of government, on the inner
coast of the peninsula.
The capital itself was a curious conglomeration of log huts stuck away
at the back of beyond, with all the gold lace and court satins and
regimental formalities of St. Petersburg in miniature. On one side of
a deep ravine, was the fort or _ostrog_--a palisaded courtyard of some
two or three hundred houses, joined together like the face of a street,
with assembly rooms, living apartments, and mess rooms on one side of a
passageway, kitchens, servants' quarters, and barracks for the Cossacks
on the other side of the aisle.
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