We could have managed very comfortably with a solid meal after this drive, but little enough was forthcoming. All the post-houses have a list put up on the wall, beside the oleographs of the Czar and the Czarina, on which there is set forth in Russian, Qfinsk, and Svensk, the lists of viands which are officially procurable, with the official price of each. But few of these were ever actually on sale, and at Murtola a little curdled milk, some adamantine rye-cake, and some scraps of fish so stinking as to be uneatable were all we could collect. So we fared poorly enough.
We started off from Murtola next morning in an even worse _karre_ than the one we had driven up in. It did possess springs, it is true, but as they were venerable, and tender with age, and had been reinforced by a pine log, the motion of the _karre_ on the road was, to use the Chinese phrase, "bumpy, bumpy, all-e-same ridy gee-gee."
For the whole of that stage we drove between forests of slim, straight pines, absolutely without undergrowth higher than six-inch grass. All the big trees had been cut from near the roads, and only the second growth was left. Heavy timber for exportation has to be sought now on the more distant hills, sent down log by log by a specially dammed stream to the main rivers, and there chained and lashed and spiked together in long, sinuous rafts to float down to the winches of the shipping on the coast. Acres of these rafts did we see new-cut in the rivers, huge bristles of logs did we come across stranded in angles of dried-up tributary streams; and yet so small a part did they make of the whole growth of the country that one could look from across a valley at the hillside from which they had come, and never find the spots which the axes had weeded. A fire of a day can do more in the way of forest destruction than the work of a dozen logging camps in a year.
Water is the one and only means of transport on which the woodcutter has to depend upon for bringing his wares to the rim of those seas which carry them to the markets of the outer world. And at one time he only cut trees which would fall directly into deep rivers, which would carry them without further ado; but as the harvest of the river-banks and the accessible parts got reaped, he had to go with his axe farther back amongst the fastnesses of the mountains, and amplify his methods of transport. The logs have to be floated somehow, and as he has no river ready-made to his hand, he manufactures one. He picks upon some gully in the wilderness of the hills with a streamlet trickling through its mosses, and throws a dam of logs and turf and stones across its lower end, with a broad gate of logs in its middle. Axe in hand he goes down the hill-flank beyond, notes the direction which a sudden gush of water would take on its journey to the nearest stream, and clears the way of all the larger obstructions. And in the meanwhile the trickling streamlet above is with infinite slowness beginning to fill his dam.