practicable, and try instead to make our way along the narrow
strip of beach which the ebbing tide would leave bare at the foot
of the cliffs. This plan, he contended, was no more dangerous than
attempting to cross the mountains, and was much more certain of
success, as there were only a few points where at low water a horse
could not pass with dry feet. It was not more than thirty miles to
a ravine on the south side of the mountain range, through which we
could, leave the beach and regain our old trail at a point within one
hard day's ride of Lesnoi. The only danger was in being caught by high
water before we could reach this ravine, and even then we might save
ourselves by climbing up on the rocks, and abandoning our horses to
their fate. It would be no worse for them than starving and freezing
to death in the mountains. Divested of its verbal plausibility, his
plan was nothing more nor less than a grand thirty-mile race with a
high tide along a narrow beach, from which all escape was cut off by
precipitous cliffs one and two hundred feet in height. If we reached
the ravine in time, all would be well; but if not, our beach would be
covered ten feet deep with water, and our horses, if not ourselves,
would be swept away like corks. There was a recklessness and dash
about this proposal which made it very attractive when compared with
wading laboriously through snow-drifts, in frozen clothes, without
anything to eat, and I gladly agreed to it, and credited our guide
with more sense and spirit than I had ever before seen exhibited by a
Kamchadal. The tide was now only beginning to ebb, and we had three or
four hours to spare before it would be low enough to start. This
time the Kamchadals improved by catching one of the dogs which had
accompanied us from Lesnoi, killing him in a cold-blooded way with
their long knives, and offering his lean body as a sacrifice to the
Evil Spirit, in whose jurisdiction these infernal mountains were
supposed to be. The poor animal was cut open, his entrails taken out
and thrown to the four corners of the earth, and his body suspended
by the neck from the top of a long pole set perpendicularly in the
ground. The Evil Spirit's wrath, however, seemed implacable, for it
stormed worse after the performance of these propitiatory rites than
it did before. This did not weaken at all the faith of the Kamchadals
in the efficacy of their atonement. If the storm did not abate, it
was only because an unbe