their spiked sticks in getting back; but the old guide and I were
together upon one sledge, and our voluminous fur clothes caught so
much wind that our spiked sticks would not stop or hold us, and
our dogs could not keep their feet. Believing that the sledge must
inevitably be blown into the sea if we both clung to it, I finally
relinquished my hold and tried to stop myself by sitting down, and
then by lying down flat upon my face on the ice; but all was of no
avail; my slippery furs took no hold of the smooth, treacherous
surface, and I drifted away even faster than before. I had already
torn off my mittens, and as I slid at last over a rough place in
the ice I succeeded in getting my finger-nails into the little
corrugations of the surface and in stopping my perilous drift; but I
hardly dared breathe lest I should lose my hold. Seeing my situation,
Leet slid to me the sharp iron-spiked _oerstel_, which is used to
check the speed of a sledge in descending hills, and by digging this
into the ice at short intervals I crept back to shore, only a short
distance above the open water at the mouth of the river, into which my
mittens had already gone. Our guide was still sliding slowly and at
intervals down stream, but Paderin went to his assistance with another
_oerstel_, and together they brought his sledge once more to land. I
would have been quite satisfied now to turn back and get out of the
storm; but our guide's blood was up, and cross the valley he would if
we lost all our sledges in the sea. He had warned us of the danger and
we had insisted upon coming on; we must now take the consequences.
As it was evidently impossible to cross the river at this point, we
struggled up its left bank in the teeth of the storm almost half a
mile, until we reached a bend which put land between us and the open
water. Here we made a second attempt, and were successful. Crossing a
low ridge on the west side of the "Propashchina," we reached another
small stream known as the Viliga, at the foot of the Viliga Mountains.
Along this there extended a narrow strip of dense timber, and in this
timber, somewhere, stood the _yurt_ of which we were in search. Our
guide seemed to find the road by a sort of instinct, for the drifting
clouds of snow hid even our-leading dogs from sight, and all that we
could see of the country was the ground on which we stood. About an
hour before dark, tired and chilled to the bone, we drew up before
a little log hut