end our policy: that he was a democrat, and anxious that his
country should be in labour matters amongst the first flight of nations.

The question now to be solved was: What attitude would the anarchist
adopt to this new evangelism?

I was ready to start on my journey when there began such a blizzard as
is occasionally described in the literature of Polar exploration. For
forty-eight hours from the south came a furious gale. It was not too
cold, only about twenty degrees of actual frost, but with the wind came
blinding snow--not snow such as we see in England, but fine snow, like
white dust. It beat on your face, found its way between the flaps of
your head-covers, where it thawed and ran down your neck and chest and
saturated your underwear. It smashed straight on to your eyeballs, and
froze in cakes to your eyelashes and cheeks, so that in five or ten
minutes you were blind and unable to find your way or move in any
direction. All sentries had to be withdrawn and sent to the nearest
shelter, for it was impossible to locate oneself or see a building till
you blundered up against it. A note in my diary records that "a guard of
eighteen Russians and one officer walked away from their post and have
not been seen since, and six days have passed." Roofs were torn off the
houses, and the strongest buildings rocked in a most alarming manner.
The snow piled itself up against the houses till it covered the windows
on the ground floors and half-way up those of the second. This southern
gale took twenty-four hours in which to blow itself out, and a four
days' calm followed, during which the snow was cleared from the railway
and traffic resumed. The next startler was a message from Irkutsk
stating that a terrific gale was breaking down from the north--a recoil
from the one just described--accompanied with sixty degrees of actual
frost, making it impossible to live out of doors. This storm struck Omsk
on February 20, and no words can describe the complete obliteration of
man and all his works accomplished by such a gale. Nothing can live in
the intense cold created by such a wind. Hence movement and life cease,
and King Frost has the whole field to himself. In a few hours the earth
is levelled; all the indications remaining of the ordinary log dwellings
are a few snow-banks with a row of dark posts from which smoke is
emitted, showing that there are human habitations underneath. By
February 22 this storm had worked itself out and