nearly four miles and which stretched away to the
westward like a frozen lake surrounded by dark wooded hills. Up this
great river--the Lena--we were to travel on the ice for a distance of
nearly a thousand miles, following a sinuous, never-ending line of
small evergreen trees, which had been cut in the neighbouring forests
and set up at short intervals in the snow, to guide the drivers in
storms and to mark out a line of safety around air-holes and between
areas of thin ice or stretches of open water. I fell asleep, shortly
after leaving Yakutsk, but was awakened, two or three hours later,
at the first post-station, by the voice of our driver shouting: "Ai!
Boys! Out with the horses--lively!" Two of us then had to alight from
our sleighs, go into the post-station, show our _podorozhnayas_ to the
station-master, and superintend the harnessing of two fresh teams.
Getting back into my fur bag, I lay awake for the next three hours,
listening to the jangle of a big bell on the wooden arch over the
thill-horse's back, and watching, through frosty eyelashes, the dark
outlines of the high wooded shores as they seemed to drift swiftly
past us to the eastward.

The severest hardship of post travel in eastern Siberia in winter is
not the cold, but the breaking up of all one's habits of sleep. In the
first stages of our journey, when the nights were clear and the river
ice was smooth and safe, we made the distances between stations in
from two to three hours; and at the end of every such period we were
awakened, and had to get out of our warm fur bags into a temperature
that was almost always below zero and sometimes forty or fifty degrees
below. When we got back into our vehicles and resumed our journey,
we were usually cold, and just as we would get warm enough to go to
sleep, we would reach another station and again have to turn out.
Sleeping in short snatches, between shivers, to the accompaniment of
a jangling dinner-bell and a driver's shouts, and getting out into
an arctic temperature every two or three hours, night and day, for a
whole week, reduces one to a very fagged and jaded condition. At the
end of the first four days, it seemed to me that I should certainly
have to stop somewhere for an unbroken night's rest; but man is an
animal that gets accustomed to things, and in the course of a week I
became so used to the wild cries of the driver and the jangle of the
thill-horse's bell that they no longer disturbed me, and I