ng deafening howls
of impatience, as we came out of the house into the still, frosty
atmosphere. We bade everybody good-bye, received a hearty "God bless
you, boys!" from the Major, and were off in a cloud of flying snow,
which stung our faces like burning sparks of fire. Old Paderin, the
chief of the Gizhiga Cossacks, with white frosty hair and beard, stood
out in front of his little red log house as we passed, and waved us a
last good-bye with his fur hood as we swept out upon the great level
steppe behind the town.

It was just midday; but the sun, although at its greatest altitude,
glowed like a red ball of fire low down in the southern horizon, and a
peculiar gloomy twilight hung over the white wintry landscape. I could
not overcome the impression that the sun was just rising and that it
would soon be broad day. A white ptarmigan now and then flew up with
a loud whir before us, uttered a harsh "querk, querk, querk" of
affright, and sailing a few rods away, settled upon the snow and
suddenly became invisible. A few magpies sat motionless in the
thickets of trailing-pine as we passed, but their feathers were
ruffled up around their heads, and they seemed chilled and stupefied
by the intense cold. The distant blue belt of timber along the Gizhiga
River wavered and trembled in its outlines as if seen through currents
of heated air, and the white ghost-like mountains thirty miles away
to the southward were thrown up and distorted by refraction into a
thousand airy, fantastic shapes which melted imperceptibly one into
another, like a series of dissolving views. Every feature of the
scenery was strange, weird, arctic. The red sun rolled slowly along
the southern horizon, until it seemed to rest on a white snowy peak
far away in the south-west, and then, while we were yet expecting day,
it suddenly disappeared and the gloomy twilight deepened gradually
into night. Only three hours had elapsed since sunrise, and yet stars
of the first magnitude could already be plainly distinguished.

[Illustration: YURT AND DOG-TEAM OF THE SETTLED KORAKS.
From a painting by George A. Frost]

We stopped for the night at the house of a Russian peasant who lived
on the bank of the Gizhiga River, about fifteen versts east of the
settlement. While we were drinking tea a special messenger arrived
from the village, bringing two frozen blueberry pies as a parting
token of regard from the Major, and a last souvenir of civilisation.
Pretending t