this
beach and the _pripaika_, or ice-foot, to a ravine, twenty-five or
thirty miles farther west, which would lead us up on the tundra beyond
the mountains. We could at least try this shelf of ice under the
cliffs, and if we should find it impassable we could return, while if
we went into the mountains in such a blizzard we might never get back.
The plan suggested by the guide seemed to me a bold and attractive one
and I decided to adopt it. Making our way down the river, in clouds of
flying snow, we soon reached the coast, and started westward, along a
narrow strip of ice-encumbered beach, between the open water of the
sea and a long line of black perpendicular cliffs, one hundred and
fifty to three hundred feet in height. We were making very fair
progress when we found ourselves suddenly confronted by an entirely
unexpected and apparently insurmountable obstacle. The beach, as far
as we could see to the westward, was completely filled up from the
water's edge to a height of seventy-five or a hundred feet by enormous
drifts of snow, which had been gradually accumulating there throughout
the winter, and which now masked the whole face of the precipice, and
left no room for passage between it and the sea. These snow-drifts,
by frequent alternations of warm and cold weather, had been rendered
almost as hard and slippery as ice, and as they sloped upward toward
the tops of the cliffs at an angle of seventy-five or eighty degrees,
it was impossible to stand upon them without first cutting places for
the feet with an axe. Along the face of this smooth, snowy escarpment,
which rose directly out of two or three fathoms of water, lay our only
route to Yamsk. The prospect of getting over it without meeting with
some disaster seemed very faint, for the slightest caving away of
the snow would tumble us all into the open sea; but as there was no
alternative, we fastened our dogs to cakes of ice, distributed our
axes and hatchets, threw off our heavy fur coats, and began cutting
out a road.

We worked hard all day, and by six o'clock in the evening had cut a
deep trench three feet in width along the face of the escarpment to a
point about a mile and a quarter west of the mouth of the Viliga. Here
we were again stopped, however, by a difficulty infinitely worse than
any that we had surmounted. The beach, which had previously extended
in one unbroken line along the foot of the cliffs, here suddenly
disappeared, and the mass of snow