after day,
would probably kill the strongest man outright, but here they made no
appreciable difference in our bodily health.

It was no doubt rough travelling along the Lena, and yet the pleasures
of the journey far outweighed its ills. Before reaching the river our
way lay across vast deserts of snow, with no objects visible save, at
rare intervals, some tiny village almost buried in the drifts, its dark
roofs peeping out here and there, and appearing at a distance like
pieces of charcoal laid on a piece of white cotton-wool. Beyond these
nothing but the single telegraph wire which connects Yakutsk with
civilisation. Coated with rime it used to stand out like a jewelled
thread against the dazzling sky, which merged imperceptibly from darkest
sapphire overhead to tenderest turquoise on the horizon. Who can
describe the delights of a sleigh journey under such conditions, or
realise, in imagination, the charm and novelty of a wild gallop over
leagues of snow behind game little Siberian horses, tearing along to the
clash of yoke-bells at the rate of twenty miles an hour! In anything but
a Yakute sleigh we should have been in an earthly paradise.

And on fine evenings, pleasanter still was it to lie in the sleigh
snugly wrapped in furs, and watch the inky sky powdered with stars--Ursa
Major (now almost overhead) sprawling its glittering shape across the
heavens, and the little Pleiades twinkling like a diamond spray against
dark velvet. At times I could make out every lonely peak and valley in
the lunar world, and even distinguish far-away Polaris twinkling dimly
over the earth's great mystery. The stars are never really seen in misty
Europe.

But a week, ten days, elapses and so little progress is made in the
alarming total of mileage that the heart sinks at the mere thought of
the stupendous distance before us. Few villages are passed and these
are invariably alike. A row of ramshackle huts; at one extremity the
post-house with black and white _verst_ post, at the other a rough
palisade of logs about twenty feet high, enclosing a space from which a
grey column of smoke rises lazily into the frosty air. The building is
invisible, but it generally contains one or more unhappy exiles wending
slowly towards a place of exile. Every village between Irkutsk and
Yakutsk has its _Balogan_, or resting-place for political offenders, but
in the Far North beyond the Arctic Circle prison bars become
superfluous. Nature has taken t