Viushin waked me early in the morning with the announcement that it was snowing.  I rose hastily and putting aside the canvas of the tent looked out.  That which I most dreaded had happened.  A driving snowstorm was sweeping down the valley, and Nature had assumed suddenly the stern aspect and white pitiless garb of winter.  Snow had already fallen to a depth of three inches in the valley, and on the mountains, of course, it would be deep, soft, and drifted.  I hesitated for a moment about attempting to cross the rugged range in such weather; but my orders were imperative to go on at least to the Samanka River, and a failure to do so might defeat the object of the whole expedition.  Previous experience convinced me that the Major would not let a storm interfere with the execution of his plans; and if he should succeed in reaching the Samanka River and I should not, I never could recover from the mortification of the failure, nor be able to convince him that Anglo-Saxon blood was as good as Slavonic.  I reluctantly gave the order therefore to break camp, and as soon as the horses could be collected and saddled we started for the base of the mountain range.  Hardly had we ascended two hundred feet out of the shelter of the valley before we were met by a hurricane of wind from the northeast, which swept blinding, suffocating clouds of snow down the slope into our faces until earth and sky seemed mingled and lost in a great white whirling mist.  The ascent soon became so steep and rocky that we could no longer ride our horses up it.  We therefore dismounted, and wading laboriously through deep soft drifts, and climbing painfully over sharp jagged rocks, which cut open our sealskin boots, we dragged our horses slowly upward.  We had ascended wearily in this way perhaps a thousand feet, when I became so exhausted that I was compelled to lie down.  The snow in many places was drifted as high as my waist, and my horse refused to take a step until he was absolutely dragged to it.  After a rest of a few moments we pushed on, and after another hour of hard work we succeeded in gaining what seemed to be the crest of the mountain, perhaps 2000 feet above the sea.  Here the fury of the wind was almost irresistible.  Dense clouds of driving snow hid everything from sight at a distance of a few steps, and we seemed to be standing on a fragment of a wrecked world enveloped in a whirling tempest of stinging snowflakes.  Now and then a black volcanic crag, inaccessible as the peak of the Matterhorn, would loom out in the white mist far above our heads, as if suspended in mid-air, giving a startling momentary wildness to the scene; then it would disappear again in flying snow, and leave us staring blindly into vacancy.  A long fringe of icicles hung round the visor of my cap, and my clothes, drenched with the heavy rain of the previous day, froze into a stiff crackling armour of ice upon my body.  Blinded by the snow, with benumbed limbs and chattering teeth, I mounted my