THE GREATEST HORSE-EXPRESS SERVICE IN THE WORLD—EQUIPMENT FOR THE ROAD—A SIBERIAN "SEND-OFF"—POST TRAVEL ON THE ICE—BROKEN SLEEP—DRIVING INTO AN AIR-HOLE—REPAIRING DAMAGES—FIRST SIGHT OF IRKUTSK

We remained in Yakutsk only four days—just long enough to make the necessary preparations for a continuous sleigh-ride of five thousand one hundred and fourteen miles to the nearest railway in European Russia. The Imperial Russian Post, by which we purposed to travel from Yakutsk to Nizhni Novgorod, was, at that time, the longest and best organised horse-express service in the world. It employed 3000 or 4000 drivers, with twice as many telegas, tarantases and sleighs, and kept in readiness for instant use more than 10,000 horses, distributed among 350 post-stations, along a route that covered a distance as great as that between New York City and the Sandwich Islands. If one had the requisite physical endurance, and could travel night and day without stop, it was possible, with a courier\'s "podorozhnaya" (po-do-rozh\'-na-yah), or road-ticket, to go from Yakutsk to Nizhni Novgorod, a distance of 5114 miles, in twenty-five days, or only eleven days more than the time occupied by a railway train in covering about the same distance. Before the establishment of telegraphic communication between China and Russia, imperial couriers, carrying important despatches from Peking, often made the distance between Irkutsk and St. Petersburg—3618 miles—in sixteen days, with two hundred and twelve changes of horses and drivers. In order to accomplish this feat they had to eat, drink, and sleep in their sleighs and make an average speed-rate of ten miles an hour for nearly four hundred consecutive hours. We did not expect, of course, to travel with such rapidity as this; but we intended to ride night and day, and hoped to reach St. Petersburg before the end of the year. With the aid and advice of Baron Maidel, a Russian scientist who had just come over the route that we purposed to follow, Price and I bought a large open pavoska or Siberian travelling sleigh, which looked like a huge, burlap-covered baby-carriage on runners; had it brought into the courtyard of our house, and proceeded to fit it up for six weeks\' occupancy as a bedchamber and sitting-room. First of all, we repacked our luggage in soft, flat, leather pouches, and stowed it away in the bottom of the deep and capacious vehicle as a foundation for our bed. We then covered these flat pouches with a two-foot layer of fragrant hay, to lessen the shock of jolting on a rough road; spread over the hay a big wolfskin sleeping-sack, about seven feet in length and wide enough to hold our two bodies; covered that with two pairs of blankets; and finally lined the whole back part of the sleigh with large, soft, swan\'s-down pillows. At the foot of the sleeping-sack, under the driver\'s seat, we stowed away a bag of dried rye-bread, another bag filled with cakes of frozen soup, two or three pounds of tea, a conical loaf of white sugar, half a dozen dried and smoked salmon, and a padded box containing teapot, tea-cannister, sugar-jar, spoons, knives and forks, and two glass tumblers. Schwartz; and Malchanski bought another pavoska and fitted it up in similar fashion, and on the 19th of November we obtained from the Bureau of Posts two podorozhnayas, or, as Price called them, "ukases," directing every post-station master between Yakutsk and Irkutsk to furnish us, "by order of his Imperial Majesty Alexander Nikolaivitch, Autocrat of All the Russias," etc., etc., six horses and two drivers to carry us on our way.

In every part of the world except Siberia it is customary to start on a long journey in the morning. In Siberia, however, the proper time is late in the evening, when all your friends can conveniently assemble to "provozhat," or, in colloquial English, give you a send-off. Judging from our experience in Yakutsk, the Siberian custom has the support of sound reason, inasmuch as the amount of drinking involved in the riotous ceremony of "provozhanie" unfits a man for any place except bed, and any occupation more strenuous than slumber. A man could never see his friend off in the morning and then go back to his business. He would see double, if not quadruple, and would hardly be able to speak his native language without a foreign accent. When the horses came from the post-station for us, at ten o\'clock on the evening of November 20th, we had had one dinner and two or three incidental lunches; had "sampled" every kind of beverage that our host had in the house, from vodka and cherry cordial to "John Collins" and champagne; had sung all the songs we knew, from "John Brown\'s Body" in English to "Nastóichka travnáya" in Russian; and Schwartz and Malchanski were ready, apparently, to make a night of it, send the horses back to the station, and have another provozhanie the next day. Price and I, however, insisted that the Czar\'s ukase to the station-masters was good only for that evening; that if we didn\'t take the horses immediately we should have to pay demurrage; that the curfew bell had rung; that the town gates would close at ten thirty sharp; and that if we didn\'t get under way at once, we should probably be arrested for riotous disturbance of the peace!

We put on our kukhlankas and fur hoods at last; shook hands once more all around; and finally got out into the street;—Malchanski dragging Schwartz off to his sleigh singing the chorus of a Russian drinking song that ended in "Ras-to-chee\'-tel-no! Vos-khe-tee\'-tel-no! Oo-dee-vee\'-tel-no!" We then drank a farewell stirrup cup, which our bareheaded host brought out to us after we had taken our seats, and were just about to start, when Baron Maidel shouted to me, with an air of serious concern, "Have you got a club—for the drivers and station-masters?"

"No," I replied, "I don\'t need a club; I can talk to them in the most persuasive Russian you ever heard."

"Akh! Neilza!" ("Impossible") he exclaimed. "It is impossible to go so! You must have a club! Wait a minute!" and he rushed back into the house to get me a bludgeon from his private armory. My driver, meanwhile, who evidently disapproved, on personal grounds, of this suggestion, laid his whip across his horses\' backs with a cry of "Noo, rebatta!" ("Now then, boys") and we dashed away from the house, just as the Baron reappeared on the steps brandishing a formidable cudgel and shouting: "Pastoy! Neilza!" ("Stop, it\'s impossible.") "You can\'t go without a club!" When we turned a neighbouring corner and lost sight of the house, our host was waving a bottle in one hand and a lighted candle in the other; Baron Maidel was still gesticulating on the steps, shouting: "Neilza! Hold on! Club! For your drivers! It\'s impossible to go so!" and the little group of "provozhatters" on the sidewalk were laughing, cheering, and shouting "Good-bye! Good luck! With God!"

We dashed away at a gallop through the snow-drifted streets, past earth-banked yurts whose windows of ice were irradiated with a warm glow by the open fires within; past columns of luminous smoke rising from the wide chimneys of Yakut houses; past a red stuccoed church upon whose green, balloon-shaped domes golden stars glittered in the frosty moonlight; past a lonely graveyard on the outskirts of the city; and finally down a gentle decline to the snow-covered river, which had a width of nearly four miles and which stretched away to the westward like a frozen lake surrounded by dark wooded hills. Up this great river—the Lena—we were to travel on the ice for a distance of nearly a thousand miles, following a sinuous, never-ending line of small evergreen trees, which had been cut in the neighbouring forests and set up at short intervals in the snow, to guide the drivers in storms and to mark out a line of safety around air-holes and between areas of thin ice or stretches of open water. I fell asleep, shortly after leaving Yakutsk, but was awakened, two or three hours later, at the first post-station, by the voice of our driver shouting: "Ai! Boys! Out with the horses—lively!" Two of us then had to alight from our sleighs, go into the post-station, show our podorozhnayas to the station-master, and superintend the harnessing of two fresh teams. Getting back into my fur bag, I lay awake for the next three hours, listening to the jangle of a big bell on the wooden arch over the thill-horse\'s back, and watching, through frosty eyelashes, the dark outlines of the high wooded shores as they seemed to drift swiftly past us to the eastward.

The severest hardship of post travel in eastern Siberia in winter is not the cold, but the breaking up of all one\'s habits of sleep. In the first stages of our journey, when the nights were clear and the river ice was smooth and safe, we made the distances between stations in from two to three hours; and at the end of every such period we were awakened, and had to get out of our warm fur bags into a temperature that was almost always below zero and sometimes forty or fifty degrees below. When we got back into our vehicles and resumed our journey, we were usually cold, and just as we would get warm enough to go to sleep, we would reach another station and again have to turn out. Sleeping in short snatches, between shivers, to the accompaniment of a jangling dinner-bell and a driver\'s shouts, and getting out into an arctic temperature every two or three hours, night and day, for a whole week, reduces one to a very fagged and jaded condition. At the end of the first four days, it seemed to me that I should certainly have to stop somewhere for an unbroken night\'s rest; but man is an animal that gets accustomed to things, and in the course of a week I became so used to the wild cries of th............