The morning of December 13th dawned clear, cold, and still, with a temperature of thirty-one degrees below zero; but as the sun did not rise until half-past ten, it was nearly noon before we could get our drivers together, and our dogs harnessed for a start.  Our little party of ten men presented quite a novel and picturesque appearance in their gaily embroidered fur coats, red sashes, and yellow foxskin hoods, as they assembled in a body before our house to bid good-bye to the ispravnik and the Major.  Eight heavily loaded sledges were ranged in a line in front of the door, and almost a hundred dogs were springing frantically against their harnesses, and raising deafening howls of impatience, as we came out of the house into the still, frosty atmosphere.  We bade everybody good-bye, received a hearty “God bless you, boys!” from the Major, and were off in a cloud of flying snow, which stung our faces like burning sparks of fire.  Old Paderin, the chief of the Gizhiga Cossacks, with white frosty hair and beard, stood out in front of his little red log house as we passed, and waved us a last good-bye with his fur hood as we swept out upon the great level steppe behind the town.

It was just midday; but the sun, although at its greatest altitude, glowed like a red ball of fire low down in the southern horizon, and a peculiar gloomy twilight hung over the white wintry landscape.  I could not overcome the impression that the sun was just rising and that it would soon be broad day.  A white ptarmigan now and then flew up with a loud whir before us, uttered a harsh “querk, querk, querk” of affright, and sailing a few rods away, settled upon the snow and suddenly became invisible.  A few magpies sat motionless in the thickets of trailing-pine as we passed, but their feathers were ruffled up around their heads, and they seemed chilled and stupefied by the intense cold.  The distant blue belt of timber along the Gizhiga River wavered and trembled in its outlines as if seen through currents of heated air, and the white ghost-like mountains thirty miles away to the southward were thrown up and distorted by refraction into a thousand airy, fantastic shapes which melted imperceptibly one into another, like a series of dissolving views.  Every feature of the scenery was strange, weird, arctic.  The red sun rolled slowly along the southern horizon, until it seemed to rest on a white snowy peak far away in the south-west, and then, while we were yet expecting day, it suddenly disappeared and the gloomy twilight deepened gradually into night.  Only three hours had elapsed since sunrise, and yet stars of the first magnitude could already be plainly distinguished.

[Illustration:  YURT AND DOG-TEAM OF THE SETTLED KORAKS.  From a painting by George A. Frost]