like "_yahee_,"
is uttered to urge on a team, and it generally has the desired effect,
for the Siberian reindeer is the gamest animal in the world. I have seen
them working incessantly day after day, growing weaker hour by hour, and
yet bravely struggling on until the poor little beasts would fall to the
ground from sheer exhaustion, never to rise again. We lost many during
the long and trying journey to the Arctic, and I shall always recall
their deaths with a keen pang of remorse. For their gentle, docile
nature made it the more pitiable to see them perish, as we looked
helplessly on, unable to alleviate their agony, yet conscious that it
was for our sake they had suffered and died.

The distance from Yakutsk to Verkhoyansk is 934 versts, or about 625
English miles. Most of the way lies through a densely wooded region and
across deep swamps, almost impassable in summer. About half-way the
Verkhoyansk range is crossed, and here vegetation ceases and the country
becomes wild in the extreme. Forests of pine, larch, and cedar
disappear, to give place to rugged peaks and bleak, desolate valleys,
strewn with huge boulders, and slippery with frozen streams, which
retard progress, for a reindeer on ice is like a cat on walnut-shells.
The _stancias_, as the deer-stations are called, are here from forty to
sixty versts apart. There are no towns in this region, or even villages
in our sense of the word, for a couple of dilapidated huts generally
constitute the latter in the eyes of the Yakute. As for the _stancias_
they were beyond description. I had imagined that nothing could be worse
than a Lena post-house, but the latter were luxurious compared to the
native _yurta_, which is merely a log-hut plastered with mud. You enter
a low, narrow aperture, the door of which is thickly padded with felt,
and find yourself in a low dark room considerably below the surrounding
ground, with a floor of beaten mud, slippery with the filth of years,
and windows of ice. The walls are of mud-plastered logs, also the
ceiling, which would seriously inconvenience a six-foot man. As soon as
the eye grows accustomed to the gloom you find that a rough wooden bench
surrounds the apartment, and that one portion of it is strewn with wet
and filthy straw. This is for the guests. When it was occupied we slept
on the floor, and there was little difference, except that cattle also
shared the _stancia_, and were apt to walk over us during the night. A
fire o