INLAND NAVIGATION.

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1.774 he was wantonly murdered by the impostor Pugatschef. Ac-cording to the plan of Lovitz, the direct distance between the tworivulets is only five miles : but the great difficulty would consist indeepening their beds, and procuring a supply of water sufficient tomake them navigable. As the Don, however, is only forty milesfrom the Wolga, and land carriage in this country extremely cheap andeasy, it is imagined that the advantages resulting from the projectedcanal would be scarcely equivalent to the expence of making it.

I shall here add a short account of the frontier places of commercebetween the Ruffians and Chinese, the commodities in which theytraffic, and the route of the Ruffian Inland Navigation.

At a great distance up the river Yenisoy, which empties itself intothe Frozen ocean, or sea of Kara, beyond Nova Zembla, near a towncalled Yeniseik, a large branch takes an immense sweep to the north-east. This branch is called Zungufka river ; and after running fullten degrees in that direction, turns nearly due south. Out of it forkseveral rivers, called the Him, Irja, Oka, and Angara, which last is theprincipal, and forms a very large body of water, not less than eightdegrees in length and two in breadth, called the lake of Braikel, inwhich are a great number of islands, some of them very large. Fromnearly the middle of the lake lengthwise, another large river goes offstill farther south, on the first branch of which stands the town Udinfk;and on the second branch the town Selinginfk, which is the chief townof the frontier government of Ruffia. The next branch is called theKiatkar, and on the fork of this river is the Ruffian town Kiatka;and on the opposite side of the river, the Chinese frontier town Mait-matschin, which is their commercial town at the extremity of theChinese frontiers next to Ruffia. At this place the rivers Tchikoi,Bura, Tola, Orchon, and Selenga go off, and some of them branchagain, and end in lakes. The Ruffian frontier commercial town, Ki-atka, lies (according to Pallas’s Travels through Siberia to China) in

Ion.