Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/165

Rh by the wind, at a pace which sometimes reached a giddy speed.

My trembling steps made their debut between "Belgium" and "Holland," whose patience I admired, while little wooden seats—very heavy, too heavy to be upset—gave a precious help to the beginner.

Ski-ing was also much in favour, and one of my friends used to ski from Petrograd to Cronstadt in two hours. It must have been delightful to carve out a road for oneself through that immense, glittering whiteness; an excursion full of poetry and dreams, it seemed to me, in all the sadness of Nature at this season, which sleeps for many months under its thick white shroud—sleeps "as in a death."

The troika charmed me, especially for making long excursions, enveloped in warm furs, to the sound of pretty bells; one felt quite Russified. On one's veil the breath froze in the icy air and formed real stalactites.

The Russians recommend veils of white wool, made like light shawls, for this sort of expedition. I thought them dreadful, so unbecoming, a quite barbarous invention, but the only efficacious one against the cold.

As for the Montagnes-russes, or toboggan runs, and really "ice mountains" in Russian practice, nothing could be more heating, the descent being more than swift, so swift and so narrow that on each side there are planks forming walls to prevent a serious fall; but