d
being or speak a word of my native language, and at the end of that
time I should have been glad to talk to an intelligent American dog.
"Aloneness," says Beecher, "is to social life what rests are to
music"; but a journey made up entirely of "aloneness" is no more
entertaining than a piece of music made up entirely of rests--only a
vivid imagination can make anything out of either.

[Illustration: A YURT OF THE SETTLED KORAKS IN MIDWINTER]

At Kuil, on the coast of Penzhinsk Gulf, I was compelled to leave
my good-humoured Cossacks and take for drivers half a dozen stupid,
sullen, shaven-headed Koraks, and from that time I was more lonesome
than ever. I had been able to talk a little with the Cossacks, and
had managed to pass away the long winter evenings by the camp-fire in
questioning them about their peculiar beliefs and superstitions, and
listening to their characteristic stories of Siberian life; but now,
as I could not speak the Korak language, I was absolutely without any
resource for amusement.

My new drivers were the ugliest, most villainous-looking Koraks that
it would have been possible to select in all the Penzhinsk Gulf
settlements, and their obstinacy and sullen stupidity kept me in
a chronic state of ill-humour from the time we left Kuil until we
reached Penzhina. Only by threatening them periodically with a
revolver could I make them go at all. The art of camping out
comfortably in bad weather they knew nothing whatever about, and in
vain did I try to teach them. In spite of all my instructions and
illustrations, they would persist night after night in digging a deep
narrow hole in the snow for a fire, and squatting around the top of it
like frogs around the edge of a well, while I made a camp for myself.
Of the art of cooking they were equally ignorant, and the mystery of
canned provisions they could never fathom. Why the contents of one can
should be boiled, while the contents of another precisely similar
can should be fried--why one turned into soup and another into a
cake--were questions which they gravely discussed night after
night, but about which they could never agree. Astounding were the
experiments which they occasionally tried upon the contents of these
incomprehensible tin boxes. Tomatoes they brought to me fried into
cakes with butter, peaches they mixed with canned beef and boiled for
soup, green corn they sweetened, and desiccated vegetables they broke
into lumps with stones. Never