d sent a man to accompany them half way back to Whalen, for the thaw
had come so suddenly that he could proceed no further, and our
companions only just managed to reach home. This was the last journey
made by land between the two settlements, for which I was not sorry, as
the undesirable community at East Cape were now as completely cut off
from us as the pirates of Oumwaidjik. Harding informed me that at East
Cape a totally different dialect was spoken to that at Whalen, but this
did not surprise me, as I compiled while at Oumwaidjik a small glossary
which completely differed from words in use at Whalen. The natives of
the Diomede Island have also a distinctive language, of which, however,
I was unable to obtain any words. A reference to the Appendix will show
the difference existing between the dialects spoken on the mainland of
Siberia. East of Tchaun Bay the same language existed in every village
as far as Whalen. The languages spoken by the Reindeer Tchuktchis of the
interior and the Eskimo of the Alaskan Coast do not in any way resemble
the dialects spoken on the Siberian Coast.

By the end of June the snow on land was fast disappearing, and blue
lakes began to appear amongst the white plains and hummocks of the sea.
But those were weary days of waiting even when warmer weather enabled us
to live altogether in our hut without taking shelter in the chief's
malodorous _yarat_. For the former was crowded all day with natives,
who used it as a kind of club, and left us souvenirs every night in the
shape of a stifling stench and swarms of vermin. As time wore on the
heat in our heavy furs became insupportable, but frequent and sudden
changes of temperature rendered it impossible to discard them
altogether. For often the sun would be blazing at midday with a
temperature of 60 deg. in the shade, and a few minutes later we would be
cowering over the stove listening to the howling of the wind and the
rattle of sleet against the wooden walls. This would last perhaps an
hour or two, and then the sky would again become blue and cloudless, the
sunshine as powerful as before. One day in early June is thus described
in my journal: "Clear, cloudy, warm, cold, windy, calm, sunshine, fog
and a little rain!" The wind troubled us most, for here there is no
happy medium between a dead calm and a tearing gale, and the latter
occurred on an average every second day. Northerly and north-westerly
winds prevailed, and we whistled in vain f