; and the desolate snow-covered landscape is faintly tinged
with a yellow glare by the low-hanging wintry sun. Every detail of the
scene is strange, wild, arctic,--even to the fur-clad, frost-whitened
men who come riding up to the tents astride the shoulders of panting
reindeer and salute you with a drawling "Zdar-o-o-va!" as they put one
end of their balancing poles to the ground and spring from their flat,
stirrupless saddles. You can hardly realise that you are in the same
active, bustling, money-getting world in which you remember once to
have lived. The cold, still atmosphere, the white, barren mountains,
and the great lonely wilderness around you are all full of cheerless,
depressing suggestions, and have a strange unearthliness which you
cannot reconcile or connect with any part of your pre-Siberian life.

At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours,
and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our
Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced
Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through
snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan. Our progress,
for the first two weeks, was slow and fatiguing and attended with
difficulties and hardships of almost every possible kind. The Tunguse
encampments were sometimes three or four days' journey apart; the
cold, as we ascended the Stanavoi range, steadily increased in
intensity until it became so severe as to endanger life, and day
after day we plodded wearily on snowshoes ahead of our heavily
loaded sledges, breaking a road in three feet of soft snow for our
struggling, frost-whitened deer. We made, on an average, about thirty
miles a day; but our deer often came in at night completely exhausted,
and the sharp ivory goads of our Tunguse drivers were red with frozen
blood. Sometimes we bivouacked at night in a wild mountain gorge
and lighted up the snow-laden forest with the red glare of a mighty
camp-fire; sometimes we shovelled the drifted snow out of one of the
empty _yurts_, or earth-covered cabins, built by the government along
the route to shelter its postilions, and took refuge therein from
a howling blizzard. Hardened as we were by two previous winters of
arctic travel, and accustomed as we were to all the vicissitudes of
northern life, the crossing of the Stanavoi range tried our powers of
endurance to the uttermost. For four successive days, near the summit
of the pass on