nter road. The
_Onward_ sailed for San Francisco at once, carrying back to home and
civilisation all of our employees except four, viz., Price, Schwartz,
Malchanski, and myself. Price intended to accompany me to St.
Petersburg, while Schwartz and Malchanski, who were Russians, decided
to go with us as far as Irkutsk, the east-Siberian capital.

Snow fell in sufficient quantities to make good sledging about the 8th
of October; but the rivers did not freeze over so that they could be
crossed until two weeks later. On the 21st of the month, Schwartz and
Malchanski started with three or four light dog-sledges to break a
road through the deep, freshly fallen snow, in the direction of the
Stanavoi Mountains, and on the 24th Price and I followed with the
heavier baggage and provisions. The whole population of the village
turned out to see us off. The long-haired priest, with his cassock
flapping about his legs in the keen wind of a wintry morning, stood
bareheaded in the street and gave us his farewell blessing; the
women, whose hearts we had made glad with American baking-powder and
telegraph teacups, waved bright-coloured handkerchiefs to us from
their open doors; cries of "Good-bye!" "God grant you a fortunate
journey!" came to us from the group of fur-clad men who surrounded our
sledges; and the air trembled with the incessant howls of a hundred
wolfish dogs, as they strained impatiently against their broad
sealskin collars.

"Ai! Maxim!" shouted the ispravnik to our leading driver, "are you all
ready?"

"All ready," was the reply.

"Well, then, go, with God!" and, amid a chorus of good wishes and
good-byes from the crowd, the spiked sticks which held our sledges
were removed; the howls instantly ceased as the dogs sprang eagerly
into their collars, and the group of fur-clad men, the green, bulbous
church domes, and the grey, unpainted log houses of the dreariest
village in all Siberia vanished behind us forever in a cloud of
powdery snow.

The so-called "post-road" from Kamchatka to St. Petersburg, which
skirts the Okhotsk Sea for more than a thousand miles, passes through
the village of Okhotsk, and then, turning away from the coast, ascends
one of the small rivers that rise in the Stanavoi Mountains; crosses
that range at a height of four or five thousand feet; and finally
descends into the great valley of the Lena. It must not be supposed,
however, that this "post-road" resembles anything that we know by that
n