we could think of nothing better to do than sit around the
camp-fire on bearskins and talk. Ever since leaving Petropavlovsk,
talking had been our chief amusement; and although it had answered
very well for the first hundred nights or so, it was now becoming a
little monotonous and our mental resources were running decidedly low.
We could not think of a single subject about which we knew anything
that had not been talked over, criticised, and discussed to the very
bone. We had related to each other in detail the whole history of our
respective lives, together with the lives of all our ancestors as far
back as we knew anything about them. We had discussed in full every
known problem of Love, War, Science, Politics, and Religion, including
a great many that we knew nothing whatever about, and had finally been
reduced to such topics of conversation as the size of the army with
which Xerxes invaded Greece and the probable extent of the Noachian
deluge. As there was no possibility of arriving at any mutually
satisfactory conclusion with regard to either of these important
questions, the debate had been prolonged for twenty or thirty
consecutive nights and the questions finally left open for future
consideration. In cases of desperate emergency, when all other topics
of conversation failed, we knew that we could return to Xerxes and the
Flood; but these subjects had been dropped by the tacit consent of
both parties soon after leaving Gizhiga, and were held in reserve as a
"dernier ressort" for stormy nights in Korak _yurts_. One night as we
were encamped on a great steppe north of Shestakova, the happy idea
occurred to me that I might pass away these long evenings out of
doors, by delivering a course of lectures to my native drivers upon
the wonders of modern science. It would amuse me and at the same time
instruct them--or at least I hoped it would, and I proceeded at
once to put the plan into execution. I turned my attention first to
astronomy. Camping out on the open steppe, with no roof above except
the starry sky, I had every facility for the illustration of my
subject, and night after night as we travelled northward I might have
been seen in the centre of a group of eager natives, whose swarthy
faces were lighted up by the red blaze of the camp-fire, and who
listened with childish curiosity while I explained the phenomena of
the seasons, the revolution of the planets around the sun, and the
causes of a lunar eclipse. I w