Rolling mountains rose and fell in the distance, and endless forests stretched toward the sky. From the bow of the Great Snow Wolf, looking toward both banks of the great river, densely packed, thick-trunked trees almost filled the entire view.
Aside from trees, there were still trees—trees everywhere. Beneath them was damp, soft black soil, covered in thick layers of leaves and pine needles. And where the trees grew a little sparser, there were all kinds of traces of water. The floods of the rainy season seemed to have only just receded. Wet, sticky, mingled—the air was full of damp water vapor and the smell of rotting leaves. And the stretches of bog, one patch after another, looked as if grass grew over them, but step down and there was no bottom to be found; they could swallow a person whole.
The white mountains in the distance, the black waters beneath their feet, and the surging great river. This Tungusic land of "white mountains and black waters," when one reached the lower reaches of the great river, was precisely the grain barn of the Outer Northeast in later generations.
However, the Outer Northeast of this era had nothing at all to do with a warm, fertile black-soil granary. In the agricultural age, a cold black-earth belt had run headlong into the Great Cold Period, making it extremely difficult to develop! Before the swamps were drained, this place was desperately short of land fit for farming, and there were no Old Continent crops adapted to the bitter cold that could be cultivated here.
This was a true "bitterly cold and damp" swamp, a "destitute and desperate" woodland, a burial ground where countless Tungusic tribes slaughtered one another and left their bones!
Swamps and dense forests were the first trial of death