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298 waves that form the valley. The clay was clear and pleasant, but very cold; the ground was everywhere covered with snow, and a most dreary arctic landscape was presented to us as we rode from the prison down into the valley. A few hundred yards from the village our attention was attracted to half a dozen dark objects — apparently animals of some kind — on the white slope of the adjacent hill.

"I verily believe," said Mr. Frost, after a prolonged stare at them, "that they're camels!"

"Camels!" I exclaimed incredulously. "Who ever heard of camels at the mines of Nérchinsk? and how could they live in such a climate as this?"

As we drew nearer to them, however, it became evident that camels they were. To whom they belonged, whence they had come, and whither they were going I do not know; but it seemed strange enough to see a herd of great double-humped Bactrian camels nibbling the tufts of frost-bitten grass that appeared here and there above the snow in the foreground of that bleak, desolate arctic landscape.

If we had expected to find at the mine of Algachí the buildings, the steam-engines, the hoisting machinery, and the stamp-mills that would have marked the location of an American mine, we should have been greatly disappointed. The mining-plant consisted of a powder-magazine, a roofed-over cellar used for the storage of dynamite, a shanty or two, and a small log tool-house which served also as a smithy, a repair shop, a crushing and sorting room, and a guard-house. In the building last mentioned half a dozen convicts, including two or three women, were breaking up ore with short hammers and sorting it into piles, an overseer was sharpening a drill on an old worn grindstone, and three or four soldiers were lounging on a low bench, over which, in a rack against the wall, hung their Berdan rifles. It was, without exception, the most feeble exhibition of mining activity that I had ever witnessed.

Mr. Nésterof did not seem inclined to go down into the mine with us, but turned us over to one of the convicts,