them with a superstitious reverence for tin cans which no subsequent familiarity could ever overcome.  We were accustomed, when we came into camp at night, to set our cans into a bed of hot ashes and embers to thaw out, and I had cautioned my drivers repeatedly not to do this until after the cans had been opened.  I could not of course explain to them that the accumulation of steam would cause the cans to burst; but I did tell them that it would be “atkin”—­bad—­if they did not make a hole in the cover before putting the can on the fire.  One evening, however, they forgot or neglected to take this precaution, and while they were all squatting in a circle around the fire, absorbed in meditation, one of the cans suddenly blew up with a tremendous explosion, set free an immense cloud of steam, and scattered fragments of boiling hot mutton in every direction.  Had a volcano opened suddenly under the camp-fire, the Koraks could not have been more dismayed.  They had not time to get up and run away, so they rolled over backward with their heels in the air, shouted “Kammuk!”—­“The Devil!”—­and gave themselves up for lost.  My hearty laughter finally reassured them, and made them a little ashamed of their momentary panic; but from that time forward they handled tin cans as if they were loaded percussion shells, and could never again be induced to taste a morsel of their contents.

Our progress toward Anadyrsk after we left the coast of the Okhotsk Sea was very slow, on account both of the shortness of the days, and the depth and softness of the freshly fallen snow.  Frequently, for ten or fifteen miles at a stretch, we were compelled to break a road on snow-shoes for our heavily loaded sledges, and even then our tired dogs could hardly struggle through the soft powdery drifts.  The weather, too, was so intensely cold that my mercurial thermometer, which indicated only -23 deg., was almost useless.  For several days the mercury never rose out of the bulb, and I could only estimate the temperature by the rapidity with which my supper froze after being taken from the fire.  More than once soup turned from a liquid to a solid in my hands, and green corn froze to my tin plate before I could finish eating it.

On the fourteenth day after leaving Gizhiga we reached the native settlement of Penzhina, two hundred versts from Anadyrsk.  Ours was the first arrival at that place since the previous May, and the whole population of the village—­men, women, children, and dogs—­turned out en masse to meet us, with the most joyful demonstrations.  Six months had elapsed since they last saw a strange face or heard from the outside world, and they proceeded to fire a salute from half a dozen rusty old muskets, as a faint expression of their delight.

I had confidently expected when I left Gizhiga that I should meet somewhere on the road a courier with news and despatches from Bush; and I was very much disappointed and a little alarmed when I reached Penzhina to find that no one had arrived at that place from Anadyrsk, and that nothing had been heard from our party since the previous spring.  I felt a presentiment that something was wrong, because Bush had been expressly directed to send a courier to Gizhiga by the first winter road, and it was now late in November.