DOG-SLEDGE TRAVEL--ARCTIC MIRAGES--CAMP AT NIGHT--A HOWLING
CHORUS--NORTHERN LIGHTS
The morning of December 13th dawned clear, cold, and still, with a
temperature of thirty-one degrees below zero; but as the sun did not
rise until half-past ten, it was nearly noon before we could get our
drivers together, and our dogs harnessed for a start. Our little party
of ten men presented quite a novel and picturesque appearance in their
gaily embroidered fur coats, red sashes, and yellow foxskin hoods,
as they assembled in a body before our house to bid good-bye to the
ispravnik and the Major. Eight heavily loaded sledges were ranged in
a line in front of the door, and almost a hundred dogs were springing
frantically against their harnesses, and raising deafening howls
of impatience, as we came out of the house into the still, frosty
atmosphere. We bade everybody good-bye, received a hearty "God bless
you, boys!" from the Major, and were off in a cloud of flying snow,
which stung our faces like burning sparks of fire. Old Paderin, the
chief of the Gizhiga Cossacks, with white frosty hair and beard, stood
out in front of his little red log house as we passed, and waved us a
last good-bye with his fur hood as we swept out upon the great level
steppe behind the town.
It was just midday; but the sun, although at its greatest altitude,
glowed like a red ball of fire low down in the southern horizon, and a
peculiar gloomy twilight hung over the white wintry landscape. I could
not overcome the impression that the sun was just rising and that it
would soon be broad day. A white ptarmigan now and then flew up with
a loud whir before us, uttered a harsh "querk, querk, querk" of
affright, and sailing a few rods away, settled upon the snow and
suddenly became invisible. A few magpies sat motionless in the
thickets of trailing-pine as we passed, but their feathers were
ruffled up around their heads, and they seemed chilled and stupefied
by the intense cold. The distant blue belt of timber along the Gizhiga
River wavered and trembled in its outlines as if seen through currents
of heated air, and the white ghost-like mountains thirty miles away
to the southward were thrown up and distorted by refraction into a
thousand airy, fantastic shapes which melted imperceptibly one into
another, like a series of dissolving views. Every feature of the
scenery was strange, weird, arctic. The red sun rolled slowly along
the southern horizon, until it seemed to rest on a white snowy peak
far away in the south-west, and then, while we were yet expecting day,
it suddenly disappeared and the gloomy twilight deepened gradually
into night. Only three hours had elapsed since sunrise, and yet stars
of the first magnitude could already be plainly distinguished.
[Illustration: YURT AND DOG-TEAM OF THE SETTLED KORAKS.
From a painting by George A. Frost]
We stopped for the night at the house of a Russian peasant who lived
on the bank of the Gizhiga River, about fifteen versts east of the
settlement. While we were drinking tea a special messenger arrived
from the village, bringing two frozen blueberry pies as a parting
token of regard from the Major, and a last souvenir of civilisation.
Pretending to fear that something might happen to these delicacies
if we should attempt to carry them with us, Dodd, as a precautionary
measure, ate one of them up to the last blueberry; and rather than
have him sacrifice himself to a mistaken idea of duty by trying to eat
the other, I attended to its preservation myself and put it for ever
beyond the reach of accidental contingencies.
On the following day we reached the little log _yurt_ on the Malmofka,
where we had spent one night on our way to Gizhiga; and as the cold
was still intense we were glad to avail ourselves again of its
shelter, and huddle around the warm fire which Yagór kindled on a sort
of clay altar in the middle of the room. There was not space enough on
the rough plank floor to accommodate all our party, and our men built
a huge fire of tamarack logs outside, hung over their teakettles,
thawed out their frosty beards, ate dry fish, sang jolly Russian
songs, and made themselves so boisterously happy, that we were tempted
to give up the luxury of a roof for the sake of sharing in their
out-door amusements and merriment. Our thermometers, however, marked
35° below zero, and we did not venture out of doors except when an
unusually loud burst of laughter announced some stupendous Siberian
joke which we thought would be worth hearing. The atmosphere outside
seemed to be just cool enough to exert an inspiriting influence
upon our lively Cossacks, but it was altogether too bracing for
unaccustomed American constitutions. With a good fire, however, and
plenty of hot tea, we succeeded in making ourselves very comfortable
inside the _yurt_, and passed away the long evening in smoking
Circassian tobacco and pine bark, singing American songs, telling
stories, and quizzing our good-natured but unsophisticated Cossack
Meranef.
It was quite late when we finally crawled into our fur bags to sleep;
but long afterward we could hear the songs, jokes, and laughter of our
drivers as they sat around the camp-fire, and told funny stories of
Siberian travel.
We were up on the following morning long before daylight; and, after a
hasty breakfast of black-bread, dried fish, and tea, we harnessed our
dogs, wet down our sledge-runners with water from the teakettle to
cover them with a coating of ice, packed up our camp equipage, and,
leaving the shelter of the tamarack forest around the _yurt_, drove
out upon the great snowy Sahara which lies between the Malmofka River
and Penzhinsk Gulf. It was a land of desolation. A great level steppe,
as boundless to the weary eye as the ocean itself, stretched away in
every direction to the far horizon, without a single tree or bush
to relieve its white, snowy surface. Nowhere did we see any sign of
animal or vegetable life, any suggestion of summer or flowers or warm
sunshine, to brighten the dreary waste of storm-drifted snow.
White, cold, and silent, it lay before us like a vast frozen ocean,
lighted up faintly by the slender crescent of the waning moon in the
east, and the weird blue streamers of the aurora, which went racing
swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun
rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south,
it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry
landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous
streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars,
tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, and lighted
up a splendid mirage in the north-west which startled us with its
solemn mockery of familiar scenes. The wand of the Northern Enchanter
touched the barren snowy steppe, and it suddenly became a blue
tropical lake, upon whose distant shore rose the walls, domes, and
slender minarets of a vast oriental city. Masses of luxuriant foliage
seemed to overhang the clear blue water, and to be reflected in its
depths, while the white walls above just caught the first flush of the
rising sun. Never was the illusion of summer in winter, of life in
death, more palpable or more perfect. One almost instinctively glanced
around to assure himself, by the sight of familiar objects, that it
was not a dream; but as his eyes turned again to the north-west across
the dim blue lake, the vast tremulous outlines of the mirage still
confronted him in their unearthly beauty, and the "cloud-capped towers
and gorgeous palaces" seemed, by their mysterious solemnity, to rebuke
the doubt which would ascribe them to a dream. The bright apparition
faded, glowed, and faded again into indistinctness, and from its ruins
rose two colossal pillars sculptured from rose quartz, which gradually
united their capitals and formed a titanic arch like the grand portal
of heaven. This, in turn, melted into an extensive fortress, with,
massive bastions and buttresses, flanking towers and deep embrasures,
and salient and re-entering angles whose shadows and perspective were
as natural as reality itself. Nor was it only at a distance that these
deceptive mirages seemed to be formed. A crow, standing upon the
snow at a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, was exaggerated and
distorted beyond recognition; and once, having lingered a little
behind the rest of the party, I was startled at seeing a long line of
shadowy dog-sledges moving swiftly through the air a short distance
ahead, at a height of eight or ten feet from the ground. The mock
sledges were inverted in position, and the mock dogs trotted along
with their feet in the air; but their outlines were almost as clear
as those of the real sledges and real dogs underneath. This curious
phenomenon lasted only a moment, but it was succeeded by others
equally strange, until at last we lost faith in our eyesight entirely,
and would not believe in the existence of anything unless we could
touch it with our hands. Every bare hillock or dark object on the snow
was a nucleus around which were formed the most deceptive images, and
two or three times we started out with our rifles in pursuit of wolves
or black foxes, which proved, upon closer inspection, to be nothing
but crows. I had never before known the light and atmosphere to be so
favourable to refraction, and had never been so deceived in the size,
shape, and distance of objects on the snow.
[Illustration: A WOMAN FEEDING A DOG-TEAM IN GIZHIGA From a painting
by George A. Frost]
The thermometer at noon marked -35°, and at sunset it was -38°, and
sinking. We had seen no wood since leaving the _yurt_ on the Malmofka
River, and, not daring to camp without a fire, we travelled for five
hours after dark, guided only by the stars and a bluish aurora which
was playing away in the north. Under the influence of the intense
cold, frost formed in great quantities upon everything which was
touched by our breaths. Beards became stiff tangled masses of frozen
iron wire, eyelids grew heavy with long white rims of frost, and froze
together when we winked, and our dogs, enveloped in dense clouds of
steam, looked like snowy polar wolves. Only by running constantly
beside our sledges could we keep any sensation of life in our feet.
About eight o'clock a few scattered trees loomed up darkly against the
eastern sky, and a joyful shout from our leading drivers announced the
discovery of wood. We had reached a small stream called the Usinova
(Oo-seen'-ova), seventy-five versts east of Gizhiga, in the very
middle of the great steppe. It was like coming to an island after
having been long at sea. Our dogs stopped and curled themselves up
into little round balls on the snow, as if conscious that the long
day's journey was ended, while our drivers proceeded to make rapidly
and systematically a Siberian half-faced camp. Three sledges were
drawn up together, so as to make a little semi-enclosure about ten
feet square; the snow was all shovelled out of the interior, and
banked up around the three closed sides, like a snow fort, and a huge
fire of trailing-pine branches was built at the open end. The bottom
of this little snow-cellar was then strewn to a depth of three or four
inches with twigs of willow and alder, shaggy bearskins were spread
down to make a warm, soft carpet, and our fur sleeping-bags arranged
for the night. Upon a small table extemporised out of a candle-box,
which stood in the centre, Yagór soon placed two cups of steaming
hot tea and a couple of dried fish. Then stretching ourselves out in
luxurious style upon our bearskin carpet, with our feet to the fire
and our backs against pillows, we smoked, drank tea, and told stories
in perfect comfort. After supper the drivers piled dry branches of
trailing-pine upon the fire until it sent up a column of hot ruddy
flame ten feet in height, and then gathering in a picturesque group
around the blaze, they sang for hours the wild melancholy songs of the
Kamchadals, and told never-ending stories of hardship and adventure on
the great steppes and along the coast of the "Icy Sea." At last the
great constellation of Orion marked bedtime. Amid a tumult of snarling
and fighting the dogs were fed their daily allowance of one dried fish
each, fur stockings, moist with perspiration, were taken off and dried
by the fire, and putting on our heaviest fur _kukhlankas_ we crawled
feet first into our bearskin bags, pulled them up over our heads, and
slept.
A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a
strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold
feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my
frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died
away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough
to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad
forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and
the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the
snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe
in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into
one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and
darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black,
sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the
celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise
and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in
the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then
waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp,
as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions
around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but
the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the
sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose
upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a
human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled
and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its
volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing
moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and
unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that
it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very
finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog,
upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty,
forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled
one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with
sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute
heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends.
Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult
grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it
began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.
One or two of our men moved restlessly in their sleep, as if the
mournful howls had blended unpleasantly with their dreams; but no
one awoke, and a death-like silence again pervaded heaven and earth.
Suddenly the aurora shone out with increased brilliancy, and its
waving swords swept back and forth in great semicircles across the
dark starry sky, and lighted up the snowy steppe with transitory
flashes of coloured radiance, as if the gates of heaven were opening
and closing upon the dazzling brightness of the celestial city.
Presently it faded away again to a faint diffused glow in the north,
and one pale-green streamer, slender and bright as the spear of
Ithuriel, pushed slowly up toward the zenith until it touched with its
translucent point the jewelled belt of Orion; then it, too, faded and
vanished, and nothing but a bank of pale white mist on the northern
horizon showed the location of the celestial armory whence the arctic
spirits drew the gleaming swords and lances which they shook and
brandished nightly over the lonely Siberian steppes. Crawling back
into my bag as the aurora disappeared, I fell asleep, and did not wake
until near morning. With the first streak of dawn the camp began to
show signs of animation. The dogs crawled out of the deep holes which
their warm bodies had melted in the snow; the Cossacks poked their
heads out of their frosty fur coats, and whipped off with little
sticks the mass of frost which had accumulated around their
breathing-holes; a fire was built, tea boiled, and we crawled out of
our sleeping-bags to shiver around the fire and eat a hasty breakfast
of rye-bread, dried fish, and tea. In twenty minutes the dogs were
harnessed, sledges packed, and runners covered with ice, and one after
another we drove away at a brisk trot from the smoking fire, and began
another day's journey across the barren steppe.
In this monotonous routine of riding, camping, and sleeping on the
snow, day after day slowly passed until, on December 20th, we arrived
at the Settled Korak village of Shestakóva, near the head of Penzhinsk
Gulf. From this point our Gizhiga Cossacks were to return, and here we
were to wait until the expected sledges from Penzhina should arrive.
We lowered our bedding, pillows, camp-equipage, and provisions down
through the chimney hole of the largest _yurt_ in the small village,
arranged them as tastefully as possible on the wide wooden platform
which extended out from the wall on one side, and made ourselves as
comfortable as darkness, smoke, cold, and dirt would permit.
[Illustration: Korak Adzes]