nomad encampment.  There are no trees or shrubs around them to shut out a part of the sky, limit the horizon, or afford the least semblance of shelter to the lonely settlement, and there is no wall or palisade to fence in and domesticate for finite purposes a little corner of the infinite.  The grey tents seem to stand alone in the great universe of God, with never-ending space and unbounded desolation stretching away from their very doors.  Take your stand near such an encampment and look at it more closely.  The surface of the snowy plain around you, as far as you can see, has been trampled and torn up by reindeer in search of moss.  Here and there between the tents stand the large sledges upon which the Tunguses load their camp-equipage when they move, and in front is a long, low wall, made of symmetrically piled reindeer packs and saddles.  A few driving deer wander around, with their noses to the ground, looking for something that they never seem to find; evil-looking ravens—­the scavengers of Tunguse encampments—­flap heavily past with hoarse croaks to a patch of blood-stained snow where a reindeer has recently been slaughtered; and in the foreground, two or three grey, wolfish dogs with cruel, light-coloured eyes, are gnawing at a half-stripped reindeer’s head.  The thermometer stands at forty-five degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and the breasts of deer, ravens, and dogs are white with frost.  The thin smoke from the conical fur tents rises perpendicularly to a great height in the clear, still air; the ghostly mountain peaks in the distance look like white silhouettes on a background of dark steel-blue; and the desolate snow-covered landscape is faintly tinged with a yellow glare by the low-hanging wintry sun.  Every detail of the scene is strange, wild, arctic,—­even to the fur-clad, frost-whitened men who come riding up to the tents astride the shoulders of panting reindeer and salute you with a drawling “Zdar-o-o-va!” as they put one end of their balancing poles to the ground and spring from their flat, stirrupless saddles.  You can hardly realise that you are in the same active, bustling, money-getting world in which you remember once to have lived.  The cold, still atmosphere, the white, barren mountains, and the great lonely wilderness around you are all full of cheerless, depressing suggestions, and have a strange unearthliness which you cannot reconcile or connect with any part of your pre-Siberian life.

At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours, and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan.  Our progress, for the first two weeks, was slow and fatiguing and attended with difficulties and hardships of almost every possible kind.  The Tunguse encampments were sometimes three or four days’ journey apart; the cold, as we ascended the Stanavoi