whale-boat and prepared for our first bivouac in the open air.
Beating down the high wet grass, Viushin pitched our little cotton
tent, carpeted it with warm, dry bearskins, improvised a table and
a cloth out of an empty candle-box and a clean towel, built a fire,
boiled tea, and in twenty minutes set before us a hot supper which
would not have done discredit to the culinary skill of Soyer himself.
After supper we sat by the fire smoking and talking until the long
twilight died away in the west, and then, rolling ourselves up in
heavy blankets, we lay down on our bearskins and listened to the low
quacking of a half-awakened duck in the sedges, and the lonely cries
of night birds on the river until at last we fell asleep.

Day was just breaking in the east when I awoke. The mist, which for a
week had hung in grey clouds around the mountains, had now vanished,
and the first object which met my eyes through the open door of the
tent was the great white cone of Villuchinski gleaming spectrally
through the greyness of the dawn. As the red flush in the east
deepened, all nature seemed to awake. Ducks and geese quacked from
every bunch of reeds along the shore; the strange wailing cries of
sea-gulls could be heard from the neighbouring coast; and from the
clear, blue sky came down the melodious trumpeting of wild swans, as
they flew inland to their feeding-places. I washed my face in the
clear, cold water of the river, and waked Dodd to see the mountains.
Directly behind our tent, in one unbroken sheet of snow, rose the
colossal peak of Koratskoi (ko-rat'-skoi), ten thousand five hundred
feet in height, its sharp white summit already crimsoning with the
rays of the rising sun, while the morning star yet throbbed faintly
over the cool purple of its eastern slope. A little to the right was
the huge volcano of Avacha, with a long banner of golden smoke hung
out from its broken summit, and the Raselskoi (rah'-sel-skoi) volcano
puffing out dark vapour from three craters. Far down the coast, thirty
miles away, stood the sharp peak of Villuchinski, with the watch-fires
of morning already burning upon its summit, and beyond it the hazy
blue outlines of the coast range. Shreds of fleecy mist here and there
floated up the mountain sides, and vanished like the spirits of
the night dews rising from earth to heaven in bright resurrection.
Steadily the warm, rosy flush of sunrise crept down the snowy slopes
of the mountains, until at last,