As we gradually approached the white curtain of mist, we began to feel sharp intermittent puffs of wind and little whirlwinds of snow, which increased constantly in strength and frequency as we drew nearer and nearer to the mouth of the ravine.  Our guide once more remonstrated with us upon the folly of going deliberately into such a storm as this evidently would be; but Leet laughed him to scorn, declaring in broken Russian that he had seen storms in the Sierra Nevadas to which this was not a circumstance—­“Bolshoi storms, you bet!” But in five minutes more Mr. Leet himself was ready to admit that this storm on the Viliga would not compare unfavourably with anything of the kind that he had ever seen in California.  As we rounded the end of a protecting bluff on the edge of the ravine, the gale burst upon us in all its fury, blinding and suffocating us with dense clouds of driving snow, which blotted out instantly the sun and the clear blue sky, and fairly darkened the whole earth.  The wind roared as it sometimes does through the cordage of a ship at sea.  There was something almost supernatural in the suddenness of the change from bright sunshine and calm still air to this howling, blinding tempest, and I began to feel doubtful myself as to the practicability of crossing the valley.  Our guide turned with a despairing look to me, as if reproaching me with my obstinacy in coming into the storm against his advice, and then urged on with shouts and blows his cowering dogs.  The sockets of the poor brutes’ eyes were completely plastered up with snow, and out of many of them were oozing drops of blood; but blind as they were they still struggled on, uttering at intervals short mournful cries, which alarmed me more than the roaring of the storm.  In a moment we were at the bottom of the ravine; and before we could check the impetus of our descent we were out on the smooth glare ice of the “Propashchina,” or “River of the Lost,” and sweeping rapidly down toward the open water of the Okhotsk Sea, only a hundred yards below.  All our efforts to stop our sledges were at first unavailing against the force of the wind, and I began to understand the nature of the danger to which our guide had alluded.  Unless we could stop our sledges before we should reach the mouth of the river we must inevitably be blown off the ice into three or four fathoms of water.  Precisely such a disaster had given the river its ominous name, Leet and the Cossack Paderin, who were alone upon their respective sledges, and who did not get so far from the shore in the first place, finally succeeded with the aid of their spiked sticks in getting back; but the old guide and I were together upon one sledge, and our voluminous fur clothes caught so much wind that our spiked sticks would not stop or hold us, and our dogs could not keep their feet.  Believing that the sledge must inevitably be blown into the sea if we both clung to it, I finally relinquished my hold and tried to stop myself by sitting