184 ICE-BOUND ON KOLGUEV 
we should be making soundings, and finding how the 
channels lay against the coming in of the Saxoz or the 
gunboat. 
After I had finished the work with the prismatic 
compass, and all the entries in my route-book, which 
always took up much of my time, I told Uano we would 
move to Scharok. 
We left at about four o'clock in the afternoon. For 
good-bye the women said ‘prostee,’ which is the common 
Samoyed formula. It may be Samoyed, but it sounds 
like a corruption of the Russian ‘pra-schei’ or ‘pra- 
scheite.’ 
We crossed in the order named, the Tinyan, the 
Barakova and the Peinmur rivers, all running through 
the same flat, and then came upon a really fine lake. 
This Uano told us they called ‘Solnoi Toh,’ which is to 
say, Solnoi Lake. The Russians, he added, called it 
Solnoida or Soldonoida Lake (‘ozero’). 
Soon after seven o’clock we made the passage of 
the Baroshika, the largest river, said Uano, after the 
Pesanka, on this coast. 
An hour and a half later we rose a slight hill, and 
there, some four miles off, were a row of little huts, 
plainly visible against a background of ice. They were 
not much to look at, but even after these few days of our 
wanderings seemed about as strange as though in the 
middle of Gobi you should come upon a modern hotel. 
Here the men pulled up the reindeer, flung down the 
