Works of A.P. Chekhov, Vol. 10: Sakhalin Island

Near the wharf on the shore, apparently idling, about fifty convicts were wandering around: some in bathrobes, others in jackets or coats of gray cloth. At my appearance, the entire fifty took off their caps—such an honor, probably, had not yet been bestowed upon any other man of letters. On the shore stood someone's horse, harnessed to a springless carriage. The convicts piled my luggage onto the carriage, and a man with a black beard, in a jacket and a shirt worn outside his trousers, sat on the driver's seat. We drove off.

— "Where shall I take you, Your Excellency?" he asked, turning around and taking off his cap.

I asked if there was a room for rent anywhere nearby, even just one.

— "Exactly so, Your Excellency, there is."

I traveled the two versts from the wharf to the Alexandrovsky Post along an excellent highway. In comparison with Siberian roads, this clean, smooth highway, with ditches and lanterns, seems simply like a luxury. A railway track is laid alongside it. But the nature along the way is striking in its poverty. Up on the mountains and hills surrounding the Alexandrovskaya valley, through which the Duika flows, charred stumps or the trunks of larches, dried out by the wind and fires, stick out like the needles of a porcupine, and down along the valley are hummocks and sour grasses—remnants of the impassable swamp that was here recently. A fresh cut of the earth in the ditches reveals in all its wretchedness the swampy, burnt-out soil with a half-vershok approx. 0.88 inches layer of poor black soil. No pine, no oak, no maple—only larch, scrawny, miserable, as if gnawed away, which serves here not as a decoration for forests and parks, as in Russia, but as a sign of poor, swampy soil and a harsh climate.

The Alexandrovsky Post, or more briefly, Alexandrovsk, is a small, decent-looking town in the Siberian [style].