I may as well mention here, that when I returned from Anadyrsk in March I went to look at the poles, 500 in number, which the Penzhina men had cut.  I found, to my great astonishment, that there was hardly one of them less than twelve inches in diameter at the top, and that the majority were so heavy and unwieldy that a dozen men could not move them.  I told the natives that they would not do, and asked why they had not cut smaller ones, as I had directed.  They replied that they supposed I wanted to build some kind of a road on the tops of these poles, and they knew that poles only five inches in diameter would not be strong enough to hold it up!  They had accordingly cut trees large enough to be used as pillars for a state-house.  They still lie there, buried in arctic snows; and I have no doubt that many years hence, when Macaulay’s New Zealander shall have finished sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s and shall have gone to Siberia to complete his education, he will be entertained by his native drivers with stories of how two crazy Americans once tried to build an elevated railroad from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait.  I only hope that the New Zealander will write a book, and confer upon the two crazy Americans the honour and the immortality which their labours deserved, but which the elevated railroad failed to give.

We left Penzhina on the 31st day of December for Anadyrsk.  After travelling all day, as usual, over a barren steppe, we camped for the night near the foot of a white isolated peak called Nalgim, in a temperature of 53 deg. below zero.  It was New Year’s Eve; and as I sat by the fire in my heaviest furs, covered from head to foot with frost, I thought of the great change which a single year had made in my surroundings.  New Year’s Eve, 1864, I had spent in Central America, riding on a mule from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific coast, through a magnificent tropical forest.  New Year’s Eve, 1865, found me squatting on a great snowy plain near the Arctic Circle, trying, in a temperature of 53 deg. below zero, to eat up my soup before it froze solidly to the plate.  Hardly could there have been a greater contrast.

Our camp near Mount Nalgim abounded in trailing-pine and we made a fire which sent up a column of ruddy flame ten feet in height; but it did not seem to have much influence upon the atmosphere.  Our eyelids froze together while we were drinking tea; our soup, taken hot from the kettle, froze in our tin plates before we could possibly finish eating it; and the breasts of our fur coats were covered with a white rime, while we sat only a few feet from a huge blazing camp-fire.  Tin plates, knives, and spoons burned the bare hand when touched, almost exactly as if they were red-hot; and water, spilled on a little piece of board only fourteen inches from the fire, froze solid in less than two minutes.  The warm bodies of our dogs gave off clouds of steam; and even the bare hand, wiped perfectly dry, exhaled a thin vapour