o provide themselves with masks of horse-hair, to which is
attached a coat of mail of very fine wire, which covers their shoulders.
Notwithstanding these precautions, there are few who come out of these
marshes without having their faces, necks, and hands covered with red
spots. The atmosphere there seems to bristle with fine needles, and one
would almost say that a knight's armor would not protect him against
the darts of these dipterals. It is a dreary region, which man dearly
disputes with tipulae, gnats, mosquitos, horse-flies, and millions
of microscopic insects which are not visible to the naked eye;
but, although they are not seen, they make themselves felt by their
intolerable stinging, to which the most callous Siberian hunters have
never been able to inure themselves.

Michael Strogoff's horse, stung by these venomous insects, sprang
forward as if the rowels of a thousand spurs had pierced his flanks.
Mad with rage, he tore along over verst after verst with the speed of an
express train, lashing his sides with his tail, seeking by the rapidity
of his pace an alleviation of his torture.

It required as good a horseman as Michael Strogoff not to be thrown by
the plungings of his horse, and the sudden stops and bounds which
he made to escape from the stings of his persecutors. Having become
insensible, so to speak, to physical suffering, possessed only with the
one desire to arrive at his destination at whatever cost, he saw during
this mad race only one thing--that the road flew rapidly behind him.

Who would have thought that this district of the Baraba, so unhealthy
during the summer, could have afforded an asylum for human beings? Yet
it did so. Several Siberian hamlets appeared from time to time among
the giant canes. Men, women, children, and old men, clad in the skins
of beasts, their faces covered with hardened blisters of skin, pastured
their poor herds of sheep. In order to preserve the animals from the
attack of the insects, they drove them to the leeward of fires of green
wood, which were kept burning night and day, and the pungent smoke of
which floated over the vast swamp.

When Michael Strogoff perceived that his horse, tired out, was on the
point of succumbing, he halted at one of these wretched hamlets, and
there, forgetting his own fatigue, he himself rubbed the wounds of the
poor animal with hot grease according to the Siberian custom; then he
gave him a good feed; and it was only after he h