h tremendous
clouds of snow from the great steppe north of the village, that the
whole earth was darkened as if by an eclipse, and the atmosphere, to a
height of a hundred feet from the ground, was literally packed with a
driving mist of white snowflakes. I ventured to the top of the chimney
hole once, but I was nearly blown over the edge of the _yurt_, and,
blinded and choked by snow, I hastily retreated down the chimney,
congratulating myself that I was not obliged to lie out all day on
some desolate plain, exposed to the fury of such a storm. To keep
out the snow, we were obliged to extinguish the fire and shut up the
chimney hole with a sort of wooden trap-door, so that we were left to
total darkness and a freezing atmosphere. We lighted candles and stuck
them against the black smoky logs above our heads with melted grease,
so that we could see to read; but the cold was so intense that we
were finally compelled to give up the idea of literary amusement, and
putting on fur coats and hoods, we crawled into our bags to try to
sleep away the day. Shut up in a dark half-underground dungeon, with
a temperature ten degrees below the freezing-point, we had no other
resource.

It is a mystery to me how human beings with any feeling at all can be
satisfied to live in such abominable, detestable houses as those of
the Settled Koraks. They have not one solitary redeeming feature.
They are entered through the chimney, lighted by the chimney, and
ventilated by the chimney; the sunshine falls into them only once a
year--in June; they are cold in winter, close and uncomfortable in
summer, and smoky all the time. They are pervaded by a smell of rancid
oil and decaying fish; their logs are black as jet and greasy with
smoke, and their earthen floors are an indescribable mixture of
reindeer hairs and filth dried and trodden hard. They have no
furniture except wooden bowls of seal oil, in which burn fragments of
moss, and black wooden troughs which are alternately used as dishes
and as seats. Sad is the lot of children born in such a place. Until
they are old enough to climb up the chimney pole they never see the
outside world.

The weather on the day after our arrival at Shestakova was much
better, and our Cossack Meranef, who was on his way back to Tigil,
bade us good-bye, and started with two or three natives for Kamenoi.
Dodd and I managed to pass away the day by drinking tea eight or ten
times simply as an amusement, reading an