the western slope, mercury froze at noon. [Footnote:
We had only a mercurial thermometer, so that we did not know how much
below -39 deg. the temperature was.] The faintest breath of air seared the
face like a hot iron; beards became tangled masses of frosty wire;
eyelids grew heavy with long snowy fringes which half obscured the
sight; and only the most vigorous exercise would force the blood back
into the benumbed extremities from which it was constantly being
driven by the iron grasp of the cold. Schwartz, the oldest member of
our party, was brought into a Tunguse encampment one night in a state
of unconsciousness that would soon have ended in death, and even our
hardy native drivers came in with badly frozen hands and faces. The
temperature alone would have been sufficient evidence, if evidence
were needed, that we were entering the coldest region on the
globe--the Siberian province of Yakutsk. [Footnote: In some parts of
this province the freezing point of mercury, or about forty degrees
below zero Fahrenheit, is the average temperature of the three winter
months, and eighty-five degrees below zero have sometimes been
observed.]

In a monotonous routine of walking on snowshoes, riding on
reindeer-sledges, camping in the open, or sleeping in smoky Tunguse
tents, day after day and week after week passed, until at last we
approached the valley of the Aldan--one of the eastern tributaries of
that great arctic river the Lena. Climbing the last outlying ridge of
the Stanavoi range, one dark, moonless evening in November, we found
ourselves at the head of a wild ravine leading downward into an
extensive open plain. Away below and in front, outlined against the
intense blackness of the hills beyond the valley, rose four or five
columns of luminous mist, like pillars of fire in the wilderness of
the Exodus.

"What are those?" I inquired of my Tunguse driver.

"Yakut," was the brief reply.

They were columns of smoke, sixty or seventy feet in height, over the
chimneys of Yakut farmhouses; and they stood so vertically in the
cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to
their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath. As I stood looking
at them, there came faintly to my ears the far-away lowing of cattle.
"Thank God!" I said to Malchanski, who at that moment rode up, "we are
getting, at last, where they live in houses and keep cows!" No one can
fully understand the pleasure that these columns