The travelers, however, received no further annoyance from them, and camped the next night on the borders of the Toukyulane, at the foot of the mountains of Verkho-Yansk.  After the usual repose, they began the severest part of the journey.  Rugged rocks, deep ravines, avalanches, snow, and ice, all were in their way.  Now they rode along the edge of frightful precipices, on a path so narrow, that one false step was death; now they forced their way through gulleys full of snow, where their horses were buried to their girths, and they had to drag them out by main force.  Fortunately the Siberian horse, though small, is sturdy and indefatigable, living during a three months’ journey on faded grass and half-rotten herbage.  That evening they camped on the loftiest part of the road, where it winds through still elevated rocks.

The middle of the next day brought them to another plain not much superior to that they had passed through, but yet less miserable looking, and with the additional advantage of having yourtes here and there to shelter the traveler.  The cold was now intense; and glad indeed was Ivan of the comforts of his Siberian dress, which had at first appeared so heavy.  The odd figures which Kolina and Sakalar presented under it made him smile at the notion which Maria Vorotinska would have formed of her lover under a garb that doubled his natural volume.  Several halts took place, and caused great delay, from the slippery state of the ice on the rivers.  The unshod horses could not stand.  A fire had to be lit; and when sufficient ashes were procured, it had to be spread across in a narrow pathway, and the nags led carefully along on this track—­one of the many artifices required to combat the rigorous character of the climate.  And thus, suffering cold and short commons, and making their way for days through frosty plains over ice and snow, amid deep ravines and over lofty hills, they at length reached Nijnei-Kolimsk, though not without being almost wholly knocked up, especially Kolina, who was totally unused to such fatigues.

They had now almost reached the borders of the great Frozen Sea.  The village is situated about eighteen degrees farther north than London, and is nearly as far north as Boothia Felix, the scene of Captain Ross’s four years’ sojourn in the ice.  It was founded two hundred years ago by a wandering Cossack; though what could have induced people to settle in a place which the sun lights, but never warms, is a mystery; where there is a day that lasts fifty-two English days, and a night that lasts thirty-eight; where there is no spring and no autumn, but a faint semblance of summer for three months, and then winter; where a few dwarf willows and stunted grass form all the vegetation; and where, at a certain distance below the surface, there is frost as old as the “current epoch” of the geologist.  But by way of compensation, reindeer and elks, brown and black bears, foxes and squirrels, abound; there are also wolves, and the isatis