Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/213

Rh leaf and every blade of grass, as far as the eye could reach, had been absolutely burned dead by the fierce sunshine; great whirling columns of sand, 100 to 150 feet in height, swept slowly and majestically across the sun-scorched plain; and we could trace the progress of a single mounted Kírghis five miles away by the cloud of dust that his horse's hoofs raised from the steppe. I suffered intensely from heat and thirst, and had to protect myself from the fierce sunshine by swathing my body in four thicknesses of blanket and putting a big down pillow over my legs. I could not hold my hand in that sunshine five minutes without pain, and wrapping my body in four thicknesses of heavy woolen blanketing gave me at once a sensation of coolness. Mine was the southern or sunny side of the tárantás. and I finally became so exhausted with the fierce heat, and had such a strange feeling of faintness, nausea, and suffocation, that I asked Mr. Frost to change sides with me, and give me a brief respite. He wrapped himself up in a blanket, put a pillow over his legs, and managed to endure it until evening. Familiar as I supposed myself to be with Siberia, I little thought, when I crossed the frontier, that I should find in it a North African desert, with whirling sand-columns, and sunshine from which I should be obliged to protect my limbs with blankets. I laughed at a Russian officer in Omsk who told me that the heat in the valley of the Írtish was often so intense as to cause nausea and fainting, and who advised me not to travel between eleven o'clock in the morning and three in the afternoon when the day was cloudless and hot. The idea of having a sunstroke in Siberia, and the suggestion not to travel there in the middle of the day, seemed to me so preposterous that I could not restrain a smile of amusement. He assured me, however, that he was talking seriously, and said that he had seen soldiers unconscious for hours after a fit of nausea and fainting, brought on by marching in the sunshine. He did not know sunstroke by name, and seemed to think that the