these
pillars in 1820, and measuring one found it forty-three feet in height.
He describes it as "something like the body of a man, with a sort of cap
or turban on his head, and without arms or legs," but to us they
appeared much more lifelike.

We made good headway during the greater part of the first day in clear
and cloudless weather, but towards evening the sky became overcast and a
rapidly rising wind brought down another shrieking _poorga_, which
compelled us to encamp in haste under the lee of a rocky cliff, luckily
at hand when the storm burst upon us. At this time a breastplate of
solid ice was formed by driving snow on our deerskins, and an idea of
the intense and incessant cold which followed may be gleaned by the fact
that this uncomfortable cuirass remained intact until we entered the
first Tchuktchi hut nearly three weeks later. But this first _poorga_,
although a severe one, was nothing compared to the tempests we
afterwards encountered. Nevertheless, our flimsy tent was twice blown
down before morning, its re-erection entailing badly frozen hands and
faces, for having encamped without finding drift-wood there was no fire
and therefore no food. Cold and hunger precluded sleep, and I passed the
cold and miserable hours vainly endeavouring to smoke a pipe blocked by
frozen nicotine. This may be taken as a fair sample of a night in dirty
weather on that cruel coast. At daybreak we commenced another hunt for
drift-wood, which was not discovered for several hours, when every one
was utterly worn out from the cold and lengthened fast.

Sometimes a _poorga_ would rage all day, and in this case progress was
out of the question. The solitary meal would then consist of frozen fish
or iron-like chunks of _Carnyl_ which were held in the mouth until
sufficiently soft to be swallowed. There was of course no means of
assuaging thirst, from which we at first suffered severely, for the
sucking of ice only increases this evil. And want of water affected even
the sleds, the runners of which should be sluiced at least once a day,
so as to form a thin crust of ice which slides easily over a frozen
surface.

On April 7 we reached a landmark for which Mikouline had been searching
in some anxiety, the Bolshaya-Reka or Big River. All that day we had
been at sea, picking our way through mountainous bergs and hummocks,
some quite sixty feet in height, while the sleds continually broke
through into crevasses concealed by layers