elling from 6 A.M. until we struck
drift-wood, the traveller's sole salvation on this coast. Sometimes we
found it and sometimes we didn't, in any case it was seldom more than
sufficient to boil a kettle, and bodily warmth from a good fire was an
unknown luxury. Even a little oil would have been a godsend for heating
purposes, but we had used up every drop we possessed before reaching
Sredni-Kolymsk, where no more was attainable, and I dared not waste the
alcohol brought for the purpose of bartering with the Tchuktchis. I can
safely say I have never suffered, physically or mentally, as I did
during those first two weeks along the shores of North-Eastern Siberia.
We were often compelled to go without food throughout the twenty-four
hours, and sometimes for thirty-six, our frozen provisions being
uneatable uncooked. At night, after a cheerless meal, we would crawl
into sleeping-bags and try to sleep in a temperature varying from 35
deg. to 45 deg. below zero. And sometimes lying sleepless, miserable,
and half frozen under that flimsy tent, I resolved to give it all up and
make an attempt to return to the Kolyma River, although even retreat
would now have been attended with considerable peril. And yet, somehow,
morning always found us on the march again eastward. On the beach we got
along fairly well, but steep, precipitous cliffs often drove us out to
sea, where the sleds had to be pushed and hauled over rough and often
mountainous ice, about the toughest work I know of. We then travelled
about a mile an hour, and sometimes not that. The end of the day
generally found us all cut about, bruised, and bleeding from falls over
the glassy ice; and the wounds, although generally trifling, were made
doubly painful by frost and the absence of hot water. I enter into these
apparently trivial details as at the time they appeared to us of
considerable importance, but the reader may think them unnecessary, just
as the man who has never had toothache laughs at a sufferer. Toothache,
by the way, was another minor evil that greatly increased our sufferings
during those dark days of hunger and incessant anxiety.

And yet, if all had gone well, all these troubles--added to intense cold
and semi-starvation--would have been bearable; but everything went
wrong. First it was the dogs, as famished as ourselves, who dragged
their tired limbs more and more heavily towards evening as the weary
days crawled on, and every morning I used to look at t