origin--grease
and smoke. Whenever any one enters the _yurt_, you are apprised of the
fact by a total eclipse of the chimney hole and a sudden darkness, and
as you look up through a mist of reindeer hairs, scraped off from the
coming man's fur coat, you see a thin pair of legs descending the pole
in a cloud of smoke. The legs of your acquaintances you soon learn to
recognise by some peculiarity of shape or covering; and their faces,
considered as means of personal identification, assume a secondary
importance. If you see Ivan's legs coming down the chimney, you feel a
moral certainty that Ivan's head is somewhere above in the smoke; and
Nicolai's boots, appearing in bold relief against the sky through the
entrance hole, afford as satisfactory proof of Nicolai's identity as
his head would, provided that part of his body came in first. Legs,
therefore, are the most expressive features of a Korak's countenance,
when considered from an interior standpoint. When snow drifts up
against the _yurt_, so as to give the dogs access to the chimney, they
take a perfect delight in lying around the hole, peering down into the
_yurt_, and snuffing the odours of boiling fish which rise from
the huge kettle underneath. Not unfrequently they get into a grand
comprehensive free fight for the best place of observation; and just
as you are about to take your dinner of boiled salmon off the fire,
down comes a struggling, yelping dog into the kettle, while his
triumphant antagonist looks down through the chimney hole with all
the complacency of gratified vengeance upon his unfortunate victim. A
Korak takes the half-scalded dog by the back of the neck, carries
him up the chimney, pitches him over the edge of the _yurt_ into a
snow-drift, and returns with unruffled serenity to eat the fish-soup
which has thus been irregularly flavoured with dog and thickened
with hairs. Hairs, and especially reindeer's hairs, are among the
indispensable ingredients of everything cooked in a Korak _yurt_, and
we soon came to regard them with perfect indifference. No matter what
precautions we might take, they were sure to find their way into our
tea and soup, and stick persistently to our fried meat. Some one was
constantly going out or coming in over the fire, and the reindeerskin
coats scraping back and forth through the chimney hole shed a perfect
cloud of short grey hairs, which sifted down over and into everything
of an eatable nature underneath. Our first me