he Frost King. There was none of the singing, joking,
and hallooing, with which our drivers were wont to enliven a night
journey. Stolid and unimpressible though they might be, there was
something in the scene which even _they_ felt and were silent. Hour
after hour wore slowly away until midnight. We had passed by more than
twenty miles the point on the river where the party of Americans was
supposed to be; but no sign had been found of the subterranean house
or its projecting stove-pipe, and the great steppe still stretched
away before us, white, ghastly, and illimitable as ever. For nearly
twenty-four hours we had travelled without a single stop, night or
day, except one at sunrise to rest our tired dogs; and the intense
cold, fatigue, anxiety, and lack of warm food, began at last to tell
upon our silent but suffering men. We realised for the first time the
hazardous nature of the adventure in which we were engaged, and the
almost absolute hopelessness of the search which we were making for
the lost American party. We had not one chance in a hundred of finding
at midnight on that vast waste of snow a little buried hut, whose
location we did not know within fifty miles, and of whose very
existence we were by no means certain. Who could tell whether the
Americans had not abandoned their subterranean house two months
before, and removed with some friendly natives to a more comfortable
and sheltered situation? We had heard nothing from them later than
December 1st, and it was now February. They might in that time have
gone a hundred miles down the coast looking for a settlement, or have
wandered far back into the interior with a band of Reindeer Chukchis.
It was not probable that they would have spent four months in that
dreary, desolate region without making an effort to escape. Even if
they were still in their old camp, however, how were we to find them?
We might have passed their little underground hut unobserved hours
before, and might be now going farther and farther away from it, from
wood, and from shelter. It had seemed a very easy thing before we left
Anadyrsk, to simply go down the river until we came to a house on the
bank, or saw a stove-pipe sticking out of a snow-drift; but now, two
hundred and fifty or three hundred miles from the settlement, in a
temperature of 50 deg. below zero, when our lives perhaps depended upon
finding that little buried hut, we realised how wild had been our
anticipations, and how fa