nce was ours. But Gilder was compelled to ride
several stages and thus graphically describes his sufferings: "The
Yakute horse can scarcely be called a horse, he is a domesticated wild
animal. A coat or two was placed under the wooden saddle, so that the
writer was perched high in the air like on a camel. The stirrups were of
wood, and it was an art to mount, for they depended immediately from the
pommel. When you mounted ten to one that you fell in front of the
pommel, and as you could not get back over a pommel ten inches high you
slid over the horse's head to the ground and tried again. Yakute horses
are docile, provokingly so, for they have not enough animation to be
wicked. The favourite gait is a walk so slow and deliberate that you
lose all patience, and, if possible, raise a trot which is like nothing
known to the outside world; your horse rises in the air and straightens
out his legs and then comes down upon the end which has the foot on it,
the recoil bouncing you high up from your seat just in time to meet the
saddle as it is coming up for the next step. It's like constant bucking,
and yet you don't go four miles an hour!"

I could sympathise with the writer of the above, for during the first
day's work with these brutes I was upset five times, and felt towards
evening like an invalid after a hard day with hounds.

Crossing lake after lake (this is a Siberian Finland) with intervals of
forest and barren plain, we reached the last _stancia_ of any size,
Ultin. This is about two hundred miles from Sredni-Kolymsk, and the
rest-house showed signs of approaching civilisation, or rather Russian
humanity. For the floor was actually clean, there was a table and two
chairs, and a cheap oleograph of his Majesty the Emperor pinned to the
plank wall. The place seemed palatial after the miserable shelters we
had shared, and I seized the opportunity of a wash in warm water before
confronting the authorities at Sredni-Kolymsk.

On March 17 Atetzia was reached. This is, indeed, a land of
contradictions, for, although only ten miles from Sredni-Kolymsk, the
_povarnia_ here was the filthiest we entered throughout the journey from
Verkhoyansk. It contained two occupants, an old and ragged Yakute woman
and a dead deer in an advanced state of decomposition. The former lay
upon the mud floor groaning and apparently in great pain, with one arm
around the neck of the putrid carcase beside her, and I inferred that
she had been pois