Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/359

Rh deep and sincere regret, bade them good-by forever. Twelve hours later we were posting furiously towards Irkútsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. For five days and nights we traveled westward at the rate of eight miles an hour, stopping only to change horses, and suffering from cold, hunger, and sleeplessness until it seemed to me that I could endure no more. We found Lake Baikál still open, but the last steamer for the season had gone, and we were forced to take the high, picturesque cornice road around the lake at its southern end. Monday evening, December 14th, we were stopped only fifty or sixty miles from Irkútsk by the absence of post-horses. For almost three months we had been cut off from all communication with the civilized world, for ten weeks we had not received a letter nor read a newspaper, and furious with impatience at finding ourselves stopped so near the capital, we hired a peasant to carry us and our baggage on a low freight-sledge to the next station. We little knew what a night of misery we were preparing for ourselves. The cold was intense; the road ran across a series of high, massive, and densely wooded mountain-ridges; the peasant's horses proved to be half dead from starvation, and after the first three miles absolutely refused to draw us up hill; we walked almost the whole distance in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero, and finally reached the next station, more dead than alive, at two o'clock in the morning. If I fell down once I fell down twenty times from weakness and exhaustion on the slippery slopes of the last hills. Tuesday, December 15th, we reëntered the city of Irkútsk, drove to the post-office and then to the Moscow Hotel, and, without waiting to wash our hands, change our dress, or refresh ourselves with food, sat down to read forty or fifty letters from home. The most recent of them were two and a half months old, and the earliest in date nearly six.

It was late in the Siberian winter when we reached Irkútsk, and the thermometer had indicated temperatures