Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/336

320 were generally rough, hard-frozen, and bare; the telégas and tárantáses furnished us were the worst and most uncomfortable vehicles of their kind in all Eastern Siberia; and we suffered from cold, hunger, jolting, and sleeplessness until we were reduced to a state of silent, moody, half-savage exasperation, in which life — or at least such a life — seemed no longer worth living, and we were ready to barter all our earthly rights and possessions for a hot bath, a good dinner, and twelve hours of unbroken sleep in a warm, clean bed.

At four o'clock Thursday morning, a little more than forty hours after leaving the Nérchinski Zavód, we reached the post-station of Biankínskaya, on the bank of the Shílka River, and, transferring our baggage for the first time from a wheeled vehicle to a sledge, we continued our journey to Nérchinsk over the ice in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero. We had had for several days very little to eat, and in the absence of nourishing food the intense cold forced me to put on, one over another, no less than three heavy sheepskin shúbas, which extended from my neck to my heels and transformed me into a huge perambulating cotton bale surmounted by a fur cap and a dirty, unshaven, frost-bitten face. Even under all my furs I was cold to the very marrow of my bones; and Mr. Frost, who had only two warm coats and wore only one, suffered much more than I did. When we reached Nérchinsk, late that forenoon, we found that there was no snow in the streets, and as our underfed and feeble horses could not drag us over bare ground, we alighted from our sledge and waddled ingloriously behind it into the city, like stiff-jointed arctic mummies marching after the hearse in a funeral procession.

At Nérchinsk, for the first time in a month, we stopped in a hotel; but in point of cleanliness and comfort it was far inferior to the zémski kvartírs in which we had slept at the mines. It was, in fact, the very worst hotel that we had seen in Siberia. The main hall, which divided the