from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait. I only hope that the New
Zealander will write a book, and confer upon the two crazy Americans
the honour and the immortality which their labours deserved, but which
the elevated railroad failed to give.

We left Penzhina on the 31st day of December for Anadyrsk. After
travelling all day, as usual, over a barren steppe, we camped for
the night near the foot of a white isolated peak called Nalgim, in a
temperature of 53 deg. below zero. It was New Year's Eve; and as I sat by
the fire in my heaviest furs, covered from head to foot with frost,
I thought of the great change which a single year had made in my
surroundings. New Year's Eve, 1864, I had spent in Central America,
riding on a mule from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific coast, through a
magnificent tropical forest. New Year's Eve, 1865, found me squatting
on a great snowy plain near the Arctic Circle, trying, in a
temperature of 53 deg. below zero, to eat up my soup before it froze
solidly to the plate. Hardly could there have been a greater contrast.

Our camp near Mount Nalgim abounded in trailing-pine and we made a
fire which sent up a column of ruddy flame ten feet in height; but it
did not seem to have much influence upon the atmosphere. Our eyelids
froze together while we were drinking tea; our soup, taken hot from
the kettle, froze in our tin plates before we could possibly finish
eating it; and the breasts of our fur coats were covered with a white
rime, while we sat only a few feet from a huge blazing camp-fire. Tin
plates, knives, and spoons burned the bare hand when touched, almost
exactly as if they were red-hot; and water, spilled on a little piece
of board only fourteen inches from the fire, froze solid in less than
two minutes. The warm bodies of our dogs gave off clouds of steam; and
even the bare hand, wiped perfectly dry, exhaled a thin vapour
when exposed to the air. We had never before experienced so low a
temperature; but we suffered very little except from cold feet, and
Dodd declared that with a good fire and plenty of fat food he would
not be afraid to try fifteen degrees lower. The greatest cause of
suffering in Siberia is wind. Twenty degrees below zero, with a fresh
breeze, is very trying; and a gale of wind, with a temperature
of -40 deg., is almost unendurable. Intense cold of itself is not
particularly dangerous to life. A man who will eat a hearty supper of
dried fish and tallow, dress himself in