f pine-logs was kept blazing on the clay hearth night and day, and
the heat was sometimes so overpowering that we suffered almost as much
from it as from the deadly cold outside. But the stench was even worse
to endure, especially when cooking operations were in progress, for the
Yakute will not look at fresh pure meat. He prefers it in a condition
that would repel a civilised dog, and the odour that used to emanate
from a mass of putrid deer-meat, or, worse still, tainted fish,
simmering on the embers, is better left to the imagination. At first we
suffered severely from nausea in these unsavoury shelters, and there
were other reasons for this which cannot here be explained. Suffice it
to say that it was a constant source of wonder to me that even this
degraded race of beings could live amidst such bestial surroundings and
yet survive. Vermin had up till now been a trifling inconvenience, but
thousands on the Lena were here succeeded by myriads of the foe, and,
for a time, our health suffered from the incessant irritation, which
caused us many days of misery and nights of unrest. Stepan told me that
in summer the _stancias_ were unapproachable, and this I could well
believe seeing that we were often driven out of them during dry and
intense cold. But in the open season only Cossacks attempt to travel
through with the mail to Verkhoyansk, once each way. The journey, which
is made on horseback, is a perilous one, owing to unfordable rivers and
dangerous swamps, and the mail carriers are occasionally drowned, or
lost in the marshy deserts, where they perish of starvation. Stepan
had once made the summer trip, and sincerely hoped he might never have
to repeat the experiment.

Travellers on this road are luckily rare, so that the post-houses seldom
contained any guests besides ourselves. The _stancias_ were crowded
enough as it was with the Yakute postmaster and his generally numerous
and disgusting family, several deer-drivers, and perhaps two or three
cows crowded into a space of about thirty feet square. We travelled
throughout the twenty-four hours, and only stopped at these places
sufficiently long to thaw out some food and swallow a meal. The
_stancias_ were too far apart to work on a schedule, and we generally
left one rest-house with very vague notions as to when we should see the
next. On one occasion we were compelled to lay-to in a storm for
eighteen hours (although the _stancia_ was only a couple of miles away),