Kipling, and could, I
verily believe, have passed an examination in most of his works.

[Illustration: POOR YAKUTES.]

We took leave of our kind host, Captain Bereskine, at midnight. It was
bitterly cold (30 deg. below zero), and I was, therefore, surprised when
we alighted at the first post-house, after a long stage of thirty-five
miles, to find our host smilingly awaiting us with sandwiches,
cigarettes, and a bottle of cognac! He had passed us on the road,
determined, even at considerable discomfort to himself, that we should
travel, at any rate through his district, in comfort. Such a thing
could never have occurred in any country but Siberia, where hospitality
is looked upon (amongst Russians) as the first duty of man. Just imagine
leaving your host on a cold winter's night in England to travel from
London to Edinburgh and finding him waiting at, say, Hitchin to bid you
a final farewell. But the _simile_ is weak, for there is a vast
difference between an open sleigh and a sleeping-car.

An interesting personality we afterwards met on the road to Yakutsk was
Dr. Herz, the famous naturalist, whom we fortunately came across in a
post-house, for it gave me an opportunity of a chat with the Doctor
anent his now well-known discovery, the "latest Siberian Mammoth," which
he was conveying in sections, packed in twenty sleighs, to Irkutsk. Dr.
Herz gave us, like Talbot Clifton, very disheartening accounts of
affairs north of Yakutsk. The Doctor had travelled here from the Kolyma
river (our goal on the Arctic Ocean) only with the greatest difficulty
on account of the scarcity of reindeer and the dangerous condition of
the mountain passes. The task of conveying the mammoth, even as far as
this point, had been an almost super-human one, but no trouble or
expense had been spared in the preservation of this antediluvian
monster, which is undoubtedly the most perfect specimen of its kind ever
brought to light. The animal was found frozen into a huge block of ice,
as it had evidently fallen from a cliff overhead, for the forelegs were
broken and there were other signs of injury. The flesh of the mammoth
(which measures about twenty feet high) was of a pinkish colour and as
fresh, in appearance, as during the monster's lifetime, countless ages
ago. Some grasses found in the mouth had been carefully preserved, and
have since been analysed with the view of ascertaining the age of the
prehistoric monster. Time was now of the greates