nkets and pillows from the sleigh of Schwartz and
Malchanski, and went to bed on the floor. As a result of this
misadventure, our homeward progress was stopped, and we had to stay at
the village of Krestofskaya two days, while we repaired damages. Our
sleigh, when it came in that morning, was a mass of ice; our fur bag,
blankets, pillows, and spare clothing were water-soaked and frozen
solid; and the contents of our leather pouches were almost ruined.
By distributing our things among half a dozen houses we succeeded in
getting them thawed out and dried in time to make another start at the
end of the second day; but after that time I did not allow myself to
fall asleep at night. We had escaped once, but we might not be so
fortunate again, and I decided to watch the line of evergreen bushes
myself. When we lost the road in the darkness afterward, as we
frequently did, I made the driver stop and searched the river myself
on foot until I found it. The danger that I feared was not so much
getting drowned as getting wet. In temperatures that were almost
continuously below zero, and often twenty or thirty degrees below, a
man in water-soaked clothing would freeze to death in a very short
time, and there were so many air-holes and areas of thin ice that
watchfulness was a matter of vital necessity.

Day after day and night after night we rode swiftly westward, up a
river that was always more than a mile in width and often two or
three; past straggling villages of unpainted log houses clinging
to the steep sides of the mountainous shores; through splendid
precipitous gorges, like those above the Iron Gate of the Danube;
along stretches of flat pasture land where shaggy, white Yakut
ponies were pawing up the snow to get at the withered grass; through
good-sized towns like Kirinsk and Vitimsk, where we began to see
signs of occidental civilisation; and finally, past a stern-wheel,
Ohio-River steamboat, of primitive type, tied up and frozen in near
the head of navigation at Verkholensk. "Just look at that steamer!"
cried Price, with an unwonted glow of enthusiasm in his boyish face.
"Doesn't that look like home?" At Verkholensk we abandoned the Lena,
which we had followed up almost to its source, and, leaving the ice
for the first time in two weeks, we started across country in a line
nearly parallel with the western coast of Lake Baikal. We had been
forty-one days on the road from Okhotsk; had covered a distance of
about 2300 mil