Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/82

60 whips of icy rain until it is again buried in snow; and in winter, fierce gales, known to the Russians as púrgas, sweep across it from the arctic ocean and score its snowy surface into long, hard, polished grooves called zastrúgi. Throughout the entire winter, it presents a picture of inexpressible dreariness and desolation. Even at noon, when the sea-like expanse of storm-drifted snow is flushed faintly by the red, gloomy light of the low-hanging sun, it depresses the spirits and chills the imagination with its suggestions of infinite dreariness and solitude; but at night, when it ceases to be bounded even by the horizon because the horizon can no longer be distinguished, when the pale, green streamers of the aurora begin to sweep back and forth over a dark segment of a circle in the north, lighting up the whole white world with transitory flashes of ghostly radiance, and adding mystery to darkness and solitude, then the Siberian túndra not only becomes inexpressibly lonely and desolate, but takes on a strange, half terrible unearthliness, which awes and yet fascinates the imagination.

The climate of this great northern túndra is the severest in the Russian empire, if not the severest in the known world. As you go eastward from the Urál mountains through this barren zone, the mean annual temperature gradually decreases; until, shortly after crossing the river Léna, you reach, in latitude 67.34, on the border of the great túndra, a lonely Yakút settlement called Verkhoyánsk, or the upper settlement of the Yána, a village that is known throughout Siberia, and is beginning to be known throughout the world, as the Asiatic pole of cold. The fact is familiar to most readers that the magnetic pole, and probably the pole of greatest cold, do not coincide with the geographical pole. There are two points in the northern hemisphere, one in the American arctic archipelago and one in northeastern Siberia, where the cold is more severe than in any region lying farther north that has yet been explored. The