Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/371



THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD IN WINTER

T is customary in Siberia, when traveling by post, to ride night and day, without other rest than that which can be obtained in one's sleigh; but when we reached the great Siberian road at the station of Cherómka I was still suffering from the results of the previous night's exposure to storm and cold in the mountains of the Angará, and at every respiration was warned by a sharp, cutting pain in one lung that it would be prudent to seek shelter and keep warm until I should be able to breathe freely. But it was very difficult to keep warm in that post-station. Almost every hour throughout the night travelers stopped there to change horses or to drink tea, and with every opening of the door a cold wind blew across the bare floor where we lay, condensing the moisture of the atmosphere into chilly clouds of vapor, and changing the temperature of the room from twenty to thirty degrees in as many seconds. I had taken the precaution, however, to bring our large sheepskin bag into the house, and by burying myself in the depths of that I not only escaped being chilled, but succeeded, with the aid of medicinal remedies, in getting into a profuse perspiration. This soon relieved the pleuritic pain in my side, and in the morning I felt able to go on. Neither of us had had any sleep, but to the experienced Siberian traveler deprivation of sleep for a night or two is a trifling hardship. I do not think that Mr. Frost had two consecutive hours of sleep in the whole week that we spent on the road between the