If the reader can imagine himself camping out on the steep sloping roof of a great cathedral, with a precipice a hundred feet high over his head and three or four fathoms of open water at his feet, he will be able, perhaps, to form some idea of the way in which we spent that dismal night.

With the first streak of dawn we were up.  While we were gloomily making preparations to return to the Viliga, one of the Koraks who had gone to take a last look at the gap of open water came hurriedly climbing back, shouting joyfully, “Mozhno perryekat, mozhno perryekat!”—­“It is possible to cross.”  The tide, which had risen during the night, had brought in two or three large cakes of broken ice, and had jammed them into the gap in such a manner as to make a rude bridge.  Fearing, however, that it would not support a very heavy weight, we unloaded all our sledges, carried the loads, sledges, and dogs across separately, loaded up again on the other side, and went on.  The worst of our difficulties was past.  We still had some road-cutting to do through occasional snow-drifts; but as we went farther and farther to the westward the beach became wider and higher, the ice disappeared, and by night we were thirty versts nearer to our destination.  The sea on one side, and the cliffs on the other, still hemmed us in; but on the following day we succeeded in making our escape through the valley of the Kananaga River.

The twelfth day of our journey found us on a great steppe called the Malkachan, only thirty miles from Yamsk; and although our dog-food and provisions were both exhausted, we hoped to reach the settlement late in the night.  Darkness came on, however, with another blinding snow-storm, in which we again lost our way; and, fearing that we might drive over the edges of the precipices into the sea by which the steppe was bounded on the east, we were finally compelled to stop.  We could find no wood for a fire; but even had we succeeded in making a fire, it would have been instantly smothered by the clouds of snow which the furious wind drove across the plain.  Spreading down our canvas tent upon the ground, and capsizing a heavy dog-sledge upon one edge of it to hold it fast, we crawled under it to get away from the suffocating snow.  Lying there upon our faces, with the canvas flapping furiously against our backs, we scraped our bread-bag for the last few frozen crumbs which remained, and ate a few scraps of raw meat which Mr. Leet found on one of the sledges.  In the course of fifteen or twenty minutes we noticed that the flappings of the canvas were getting shorter and shorter, and that it seemed to be tightening across our bodies, and upon making an effort to get out we found that we were fastened down.  The snow had drifted in such masses upon the edges of the tent and had packed there with such solidity that it could not be moved, and after trying once or twice to break out we concluded to lie still and make the best of our situation.