When Mama, T. and I went to church many years ago (we stopped going to church when we temporarily moved to Germany in April 1996), we learned the following song for this season:
Prepare the royal highway;
The King of kings is near!
Let ev'ry hill and valley
A level road appear!
Then greet the King of glory
Foretold in ancient story:
Hosanna to the Lord
For he fulfills God's word.
Anyway, when I reached the kitchen this morning, Papa, Mama, and T., had assembled, all reasonably awake. We had soft-boiled eggs; buns and baguette slices with Schinkenspeck (which resembles, I think, prosciutto), cheese, Nutella, and marmalade; and Mama and I each had raspberry-flavoured Götterspeise, the terribly fake but refreshing equivalent of Jell-o of the species that is sold ready-made in the grocery store refrigerators. With that we had tea and Carokaffee (coffee substitute). Anyway, I was still sleepy, and took a long while to respond to remarks or queries. Soon J. joined us, and summarized for us two tales from Strange Tales from the Strand before going to work on a kiwi that was so intransigent that a knife was needed to demolish it.
Yesterday I spent much of the day on the Internet. I kept on reading Tent Life in Siberia. The author travelled per horse and boats up into the central Kamchatkan mountain range during the brilliant autumn, then, as winter began, with sledges further and further into the snowy wasteland that is associated with Siberia until he reaches the Russian village of Gizhinga, then Anadyrsk. At most villages he changed his mode of transportation, and at the biggest ones he exchanged the guides and other native members of the expedition. Along the way he stayed in the dwellings of the native inhabitants, the Kamchadal (also known as Itelmen) and the Koryk (wandering and settled). There were yurts where one had to climb up at the side, then slide in on a pole through the smoke-hole, until one entered the dirty interior where the walls were black with smoke. Then there were large yurts that had no smoke-hole and were therefore awfully stuffy, with compartments of animal furs lining the outer wall; one had to enter them by crawling through a subterranean passage. There were houses that had fish bladders for windows, others that had blocks of ice for windows, and some that had no windows at all. And so on and so forth. Where there were no windows the usual lamp was a bowl of seal oil with moss floating in it for a wick.
Here is a typically humorous description of a miserable stay in an abandoned yurt whose wooden frame had been partially removed for firewood:
After a scanty supper of _selánka_, dried fish, hardtack, and tea, we stretched our tired bodies out in the shallowest puddles we could find, covered ourselves with blankets, overcoats, oilcloths, and bearskins, and succeeded, in spite of our wet clothes and wetter beds, in getting to sleep.
The wandering Koraks were essentially herders of reindeer. They used every part of the animal, just as the Plains Indians used every part of the buffalo. The bones were saturated with seal oil and used as fuel, the skin for clothing, the intestines stuffed with tallow and eaten, etc. Other groups also subsisted on fish and berries (blueberries and cranberries, for instance). It was altogether remarkable how ingeniously they survived despite temperatures of even around 68 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-55.6 degrees Celsius).
But another people that had made its mark on the Siberian population was the Cossacks, who had been sent in the eighteenth century to conquer and colonize the easternmost regions of Russia, and who, after the warfare was ended, remained and often intermarried with the native inhabitants. Altogether the land had already been explored to a surprising degree. Petropavlovsk had been founded by Vitus Bering, and it was named (as I discovered on Wikipedia) after his ships St. Peter and St. Paul. De Lesseps, whose name sounds familiar but whom I can't really place, also seems to have been there, because he had compounded a vocabulary of at least one of the indigenous languages. And the tallest peak on Kamchatka, the volcano Klyuchevskaya-Sopka (Mr. Kennan calls it "Kluchefskoi"), was already climbed in 1788 by Daniel Gauss and two other "westerners."*
Anyway, I also watched certain films aimed at the younger female demographic on YouTube. There was one British period drama, a "Kostümschinken" that was humorously aware of the fact, of which I watched the last eight minutes or so. Where I started watching Hazard of the Heart, the heroine, clad in a white dress with an Empire waist, was running through a mansion pursued by Diana Rigg (clearly enjoying herself), who wore a bright red dress and ran with a rapier stretched out in front of her with evidently homicidal intentions. The heroine rushed into the library, where an elderly man lay deceased in the style of an aristocratic or monied victim in Poirot, bent forward with his head on his desk. I found this part a little off-putting. At any rate, the maiden then runs out through a secret door consisting of a bookshelf, to find herself in dimly-lit underground caverns. But the pursuer had heard her fastening the latch, and enters the caverns by another route. The villainess catches up with her, as does an unwanted suitor of the heroine, who seemed to have been hanging out in the caverns for no discernible reason. The latter despatches his confederate with a dagger in order to avoid being blackmailed ("It would have been ten thousand pounds this year, then ten thousand the year after that . . ." says the murderer** -- "No, twenty thousand," Diana Rigg unrepentantly replies with her dying breath). The heroine is in imminent danger of being dragged off, when a very neatly-clad and very British-looking gentleman, who is also evidently the beloved of the heroine, rushes up and engages the villain in a long rapier duel. At this point it is quite nice, really, that the heroine is genuinely distressed by the violence, no matter what the outcome. Either way, the villain eventually succumbs. And the hero and heroine live happily ever after.
N.B.: There are apparently three, not two, volcanoes visible from Petropavlovsk.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klyuchevskaya_Sopka
** I'm paraphrasing here.
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