SNOW 189 
torn to pieces by the ravenous winds, and the 
traveller was instantaneously enveloped in a 
whirling mass far denser than any fog; it was 
a tornado with snow stirred into it. Standing 
in the middle of the road, with houses close on 
every side, one could see absolutely nothing in 
any direction ; one could hear no sound but the 
storm. Every landmark vanished; it was no 
more possible to guess the points of the com- 
pass than in mid-ocean; and it was easy to 
conceive of being bewildered and overwhelmed 
within a rod of one’s own door. The tempest 
lasted only an hour ; but if it had lasted a week, 
we should have had such a storm as occurred 
on the steppes of Kirgheez in Siberia, in 1827, 
destroying two hundred and eighty thousand 
five hundred horses, thirty thousand four hun- 
dred cattle, a million sheep, and ten thousand 
camels, —or as “the thirteen drifty days,” in 
1620, which killed nine tenths of all the sheep 
in the South of Scotland. On Eskdale Moor, 
out of twenty thousand only forty-five were left 
alive, and the shepherds everywhere built up 
huge semicircular walls of the dead creatures, 
to afford shelter to the living, till the gale should 
end. But the most remarkable narrative of a 
snowstorm which I have ever seen was that writ- 
ten by Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, in record 
of one which took place January 24, 1790. 
