D--EQUIPMENT FOR
THE ROAD--A SIBERIAN "SEND-OFF"--POST TRAVEL ON THE ICE--BROKEN
SLEEP--DRIVING INTO AN AIR-HOLE--REPAIRING DAMAGES--FIRST SIGHT OF
IRKUTSK

We remained in Yakutsk only four days--just long enough to make the
necessary preparations for a continuous sleigh-ride of five thousand
one hundred and fourteen miles to the nearest railway in European
Russia. The Imperial Russian Post, by which we purposed to travel from
Yakutsk to Nizhni Novgorod, was, at that time, the longest and best
organised horse-express service in the world. It employed 3000 or 4000
drivers, with twice as many _telegas, tarantases_ and sleighs, and
kept in readiness for instant use more than 10,000 horses, distributed
among 350 post-stations, along a route that covered a distance as
great as that between New York City and the Sandwich Islands. If one
had the requisite physical endurance, and could travel night and
day without stop, it was possible, with a courier's "podorozhnaya"
(po-do-rozh'-na-yah), or road-ticket, to go from Yakutsk to Nizhni
Novgorod, a distance of 5114 miles, in twenty-five days, or only
eleven days more than the time occupied by a railway train in covering
about the same distance. Before the establishment of telegraphic
communication between China and Russia, imperial couriers, carrying
important despatches from Peking, often made the distance between
Irkutsk and St. Petersburg--3618 miles--in sixteen days, with two
hundred and twelve changes of horses and drivers. In order to
accomplish this feat they had to eat, drink, and sleep in their
sleighs and make an average speed-rate of ten miles an hour for nearly
four hundred consecutive hours. We did not expect, of course, to
travel with such rapidity as this; but we intended to ride night and
day, and hoped to reach St. Petersburg before the end of the year.
With the aid and advice of Baron Maidel, a Russian scientist who had
just come over the route that we purposed to follow, Price and I
bought a large open _pavoska_ or Siberian travelling sleigh, which
looked like a huge, burlap-covered baby-carriage on runners; had it
brought into the courtyard of our house, and proceeded to fit it up
for six weeks' occupancy as a bedchamber and sitting-room. First of
all, we repacked our luggage in soft, flat, leather pouches, and
stowed it away in the bottom of the deep and capacious vehicle as a
foundation for our bed. We then covered these flat pouches with a
two-foot layer o