276 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
face of the snow was hard, so the going was wonder¬ 
fully good. For some time we travelled over the 
sea-ice and had to make a wide detour to avoid a 
long lane of open water. We stopped once at an 
aranga on the way for tea and at four o’clock 
reached a place called Elewn. Here we stayed 
until six o’clock in the afternoon, when we again 
got away for an all-night journey. 
We were now on the last lap and the dogs knew 
it, so they travelled at even greater speed than be¬ 
fore. At one point as we were going along, we 
met a Chukch woman driving a team of dogs. Our 
drivers stopped and talked with her. The baron 
asked me what I thought about her; his question 
rather puzzled me but I replied that I supposed 
the woman was driving the dogs and doing other 
things that men do, just as I had been accustomed 
to see women doing among the other Eskimo whom 
I had known. Then he said that, on the contrary, 
this was really not a woman at all but a man who 
had, so to speak, turned himself into a woman. It 
was, it seemed, a custom among these Siberians to 
do this and a man who thus transformed himself 
acted like a woman, dressed like a woman, talked 
like a woman and was looked upon by the other 
Chukches as a woman. The baron knew the whys 
and wherefores of this extraordinary custom but 
