ble from the level of the river,
which is here about two miles wide. The surroundings, however, are more
picturesque than those of Middle Kolymsk, for a picturesque chain of
mountains breaks the horizon to the eastward, although the remainder of
the landscape consists of level and marshy tundra. In the reign of the
Empress Catherine Nijni-Kolymsk contained over five hundred sturdy
Cossacks and their families; it was peopled at the time of our visit by
about fifty poor souls, whose gaunt and spectral appearance told of a
constant struggle against cold, hunger and darkness. Nijni-Kolymsk had
once apparently boasted of a main street, but the wooden huts had fallen
bodily, one by one, till many now formed mere heaps of mud and timber;
those still erect being prevented from utter collapse by wooden beams
propped against them.

We found the entire community, consisting of half-breeds, Yakutes and
Tunguses, gathered outside the hut of the only Russian in the place, one
Jacob Yartsegg, who was banished here for life for smuggling rifles for
revolutionary purposes into Russia. Yartsegg, a tall elderly man in
ragged deerskins, informed me that the village possessed no _ispravnik_
but himself, at which I could scarcely restrain a smile. There was
something so "Gilbertian" in the idea of a prisoner acting as his own
jailer! This man spoke a little English and apologised for the damp and
darkness of the only hut he had to offer us. And in truth it was a
piteous hovel half filled with snow, which was soon melted by the heat
of our fire, rendering the floor, as usual, a sea of mud. There was not
a mouthful of food to spare in the place, and we ate from our own
stores. Yartsegg's dwelling was shared by a miserable creature who had
lost a hand and leg in a blizzard the previous year. The wounds, with no
treatment, had not even yet healed, and it made me shudder to think of
the agony the poor fellow must have endured, with cold and hunger to add
to his misery. But although the sufferer was a young man, now maimed for
life, he never complained save when pain in the festering limbs became
excruciating. Under such conditions a European would probably have
succumbed in a few weeks, but Arctic Siberia must be visited to
thoroughly realise the meaning of the words "suffering" and "patience."

The cold is not generally so severe at Nijni-Kolymsk as at the
settlement up river (Yartsegg's record showed 42 deg. F. as the minimum
temperature of th