however, that the day in question happened to be a Russian holiday, and that work had, in consequence, been suspended. Everybody was in the little brandnew church, which I entered and found crowded to suffocation with people — mostly soldiers — who were all standing up and all crossing themselves at frequent intervals, while black-bearded Russian priests, perspiring in gorgeous vestments, celebrated the Mass. The only busy place in the town was the railway station, from which a company of soldiers marched singing.
Dalny's only place of amusement seemed to be a public garden situated at a distance of some versts from the town, and planted with trees that were all very young and did not look as if they would ever get much older. The greatest attraction in this garden was a small zoological section which contained deer, monkeys, and two bears. On the occasion of my visit two tall Russians were apparently deriving great amusement from the work of giving these bears lumps of sugar, and two very small Japanese in faded European dress were looking on with simulated interest from a respectful distance and cackling obsequiously.
With regard to scenery, I found Dalny to be about the bleakest place I had ever set eyes on. High, bare, quartzite hills, yellowish in colour and with hardly a blade of grass to hide their repulsive nakedness, lay at the back of the town and stretched away towards Port Arthur.
The appearance of these hills was not improved by the fact that the Russians had evidently begun quarrying for stones on almost every one of them, and had abandoned nine out of every ten of the quarries,
after having made ugly yellow gashes on the flanks of the mountains and strewn the hill-sides with clay and with unsightly blocks of quartzite. At Port Arthur the case was exactly the same.
We left Dalny for Port Arthur at about three o'clock in the morning, and I got up at daybreak and remained on deck until we had reached our destination, for 1 had a presentiment that this coast would become famous. The rocky shore was to the last degree bleak and inhospitable, the only signs of life I saw being the poles of a military telegraph wire which here and there stood out against the sky; and, in one place, a Chinese fishing village at the foot of the cliffs.
Long before we had reached Port Arthur we saw in the heavens a striking object which indicated that we were in the vicinity of Russia's " inaccessible stronghold " and of the fleet which Admiral Alexeieff had been gradually concentrating there for years past. That object as a colossal pillar of black smoke, ending at the top in a mushroom-shaped cloud, which could be seen towering over the mountain tops in the remote distance. It rose from the Russian battleships assembled at Port Arthur. There the King of the North had his chariots and his horsemen and his many ships.
Skirting the huge bulk of Liao-Tau-Shan, which rose, black, bleak and menacing, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, we cast anchor at about eleven o'clock in the morning opposite the entrance to the inner harbour.
Above us towered Golden Hill, with its summit all cut away in order to make room for the huge guns, of which six or seven were clearly visible to the naked eye. On the left-hand side of the summit was a flagstaff for signalling purposes. Behind the flagstaff was a low stone house, and in front of it was a platform of cement, on which, on February 9 of the following year, I was to see Admiral Alexeieff and his staff watching the naval battle raging below.
From their unmistakable, pared-away tops it could be seen, even by the most unpractised eye, that most of the other hills in sight were also fortified. Towering over Tiger's Tail Peninsula, I could see the masts and the sinister fighting tops of the Russian warships in the inner harbour; and, inside the entrance on the left-hand side, was the torpedo-boat shed, the sea-front around which looked as if it had been covered thick with the stumps of trees. These were the short masts of a swarm of new torpedo-boats.
" These boats come by rail, in sections, from St. Petersburg," said a Russian passenger to me