A SLEDGE JOURNEY EASTWARD—REACHING TIDE-WATER—A NIGHT SEARCH FOR A STOVE-PIPE—FINDING COMRADES—A VOICE FROM A STOVE—STORY OF THE ANADYR PARTY

I will not detain the reader long with the first part of our journey from Anadyrsk to the Pacific Coast, as it did not differ much from our previous Siberian experience. Riding all day over the ice of the river, or across barren steppes, and camping out at night on the snow, in all kinds of weather, made up our life; and its dreary monotony was relieved only by anticipations of a joyful meeting with our exiled friends and the exciting consciousness that we were penetrating a country never before visited by civilised man. Day by day the fringe of alder bushes along the river bank grew lower and more scanty, and the great steppes that bordered the river became whiter and more barren as the river widened toward the sea. Finally we left behind us the last vestige of vegetation, and began the tenth day of our journey along a river which had increased to a mile in width, and amidst plains perfectly destitute of all life, which stretched away in one unbroken white expanse until they blended with the distant sky. It was not without uneasiness that I thought of the possibility of being overtaken by a ten days\' storm in such a region as this. We had made, as nearly as we could estimate, since leaving Anadyrsk, about two hundred versts; but whether we were anywhere near the seacoast or not we had no means of knowing. The weather for nearly a week had been generally clear, and not very cold; but on the night of February 1st the thermometer sank to -35°, and we could find only just enough small green bushes to boil our teakettle. We dug everywhere in the snow in search of wood, but found nothing except moss, and a few small cranberry bushes which would not burn. Tired with the long day\'s travel, and the fruitless diggings for wood, Dodd and I returned to camp, and threw ourselves down upon our bearskins to drink tea. Hardly had Dodd put his cup to his lips when I noticed that a curious, puzzled expression came over his face, as if he found something singular and unusual in the taste of the tea. I was just about to ask him what was the matter, when he cried in a joyful and surprised voice, "Tide-water! The tea is salt!" Thinking that perhaps a little salt might have been dropped accidentally into the tea, I sent the men down to the river for some fresh ice, which we carefully melted. It was unquestionably salt. We had reached the tide-water of the Pacific, and the ocean itself could not be far distant. One more day must certainly bring us to the house of the American party, or to the mouth of the river. From all appearances we should find no more wood; and anxious to make the most of the clear weather, we slept only about six hours, and started on at midnight by the light of a brilliant moon.
On the eleventh day after our departure from Anadyrsk, toward the close of the long twilight which succeeds an arctic day, our little train of eleven sledges drew near the place where, from Chukchi accounts, we expected to find the long-exiled party of Americans. The night was clear, still, and intensely cold, the thermometer at sunset marking forty-four degrees below zero, and sinking rapidly to -50° as the rosy flush in the west grew fainter and fainter, and darkness settled down upon the vast steppe. Many times before, in Siberia and Kamchatka, I had seen nature in her sterner moods and winter garb; but never before had the elements of cold, barrenness, and desolation seemed to combine into a picture so dreary as the one which was presented to us that night near Bering Strait. Far as eye could pierce the gathering gloom in every direction lay the barren steppe like a boundless ocean of snow, blown into long wave-like ridges by previous storms. There was not a tree, nor a bush, nor any sign of animal or vegetable life, to show that we were not travelling on a frozen ocean. All was silence and desolation. The country seemed abandoned by God and man to the Arctic Spirit, whose trembling banners of auroral light flared out fitfully in the north in token of his conquest and dominion. About eight o\'clock the full moon rose huge and red in the east, casting a lurid glare over the vast field of snow; but, as if it too were under the control of the Arctic Spirit, it was nothing more than the mockery of a moon, and was constantly assuming the most fantastic and varied shapes. Now it extended itself laterally into a long ellipse, then gathered itself up into the semblance of a huge red urn, lengthened out to a long perpendicular bar with rounded ends, and finally became triangular. It can hardly be imagined what added wildness and strangeness this blood-red distorted moon gave to a scene already wild and strange. We seemed to have entered upon some frozen abandoned world, where all the ordinary laws and phenomena of Nature were suspended, where animal and vegetable life were extinct, and from which even the favour of the Creator had been withdrawn. The intense cold, the solitude, the oppressive silence, and the red, gloomy moonlight, like the glare of a distant but mighty conflagration, all united to excite in the mind feelings of awe, which were perhaps intensified by the consciousness that never before had any human being, save a few Wandering Chukchis, ventured in winter upon these domains of the Frost King. There was none of the singing, joking, and hallooing, with which our drivers were wont to enliven a night journey. Stolid and unimpressible though they might be, there was something in the scene which even they felt and were silent. Hour after hour wore slowly away until midnight. We had passed by more than twenty miles the point on the river where the party of Americans was supposed to be; but no sign had been found of the subterranean house or its projecting stove-pipe, and the great steppe still stretched away before us, white, ghastly, and illimitable as ever. For nearly twenty-four hours we had travelled without a single stop, night or day, except one at sunrise to rest our tired dogs; and the intense cold, fatigue, anxiety, and lack of warm food, began at last to tell upon our silent but suffering men. We realised for the first time the hazardous nature of the adventure in which we were engaged, and the almost absolute hopelessness of the search which we were making for the lost American party. We had not one chance in a hundred of finding at midnight on that vast waste of snow a little buried hut, whose location we did not know within fifty miles, and of whose very existence we were by no means certain. Who could tell whether the Americans had not abandoned their subterranean house two months before, and removed with some friendly natives to a more comfortable and sheltered situation? We had heard nothing from them later than December 1st, and it was now February. They might in that time have gone a hundred miles down the coast looking for a settlement, or have wandered far back into the interior with a band of Reindeer Chukchis. It was not probable that they would have spent four months in that dreary, desolate region without making an effort to escape. Even if they were still in their old camp, however, how were we to find them? We might have passed their little underground hut unobserved hours before, and might be now going farther and farther away from it, from wood, and from shelter. It had seemed a very easy thing before we left Anadyrsk, to simply go down the river until we came to a house on the bank, or saw a stove-pipe sticking out of a snow-drift; but now, two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles from the settlement, in a temperature of 50° below zero, when our lives perhaps depended upon finding that little buried hut, we realised how wild had been our anticipations, and how faint were our prospects of success. The nearest wood was more than fifty miles behind us, and in our chilled and exhausted condition we dared not camp without a fire. We must go either forward or back—find the hut within four hours, or abandon the search and return as rapidly as possible to the nearest wood. Our dogs were beginning already to show unmistakable signs of exhaustion, and their feet, lacerated by ice which had formed between the toes, were now spotting the snow with blood at every step. Unwilling to give up the search while there remained any hope, we still went on to the eastward, along the edges of high bare bluffs skirting the river, separating our sledges as widely as possible, and extending our line so as to cover a greater extent of ground. A full moon now high in the heavens, lighted up the vast lonely plain on the north side of the river as brilliantly as day; but its whiteness was unbroken by any dark object, save here and there little hillocks of moss or swampy grass from which the snow had been swept by furious winds.

We were all suffering severely from cold, and our fur hoods and the breasts of our fur coats were masses of white frost which had been formed by our breaths. I had put on two heavy reindeerskin kukhlankas weighing in the aggregate about thirty pounds, belted them tightly about the waist with a sash, drawn their thick hoods up over my head and covered my face with a squirrelskin mask; but in spite of all I could only keep from freezing by running beside my sledge. Dodd said nothing, but was evidently disheartened and half-frozen, while the natives sat silently upon their sledges as if they expected nothing and hoped for nothing. Only Gregorie and an old Chukchi whom we had brought with us as a guide showed any energy or seemed to have any confidence in the ultimate discovery of the party. They went on in advance, digging everywhere in the snow for w............