116 
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY. 
As circumstances compelled me to visit Siberia during the winter 
months, it may, perhaps, be worth while to briefly describe how I 
made my sledge journey of more than 3,000 miles. This vehicle is a 
kind of oblong basket, fixed, a few inches above the ground, on 
stout runners, the driver being perched upon a small seat in front. 
The baggage is arranged underneath the traveller, and is covered 
with hay, in order to make the improvised seat a little more soft. 
Since the thermometer often marks 70, 80 and sometimes 90° of frost 
Fahrenheit and as the wind is extremely bitter, the clothing must be 
such as to keep the body sufficiently warm, although no amount of it 
will keep out the cold for an indefinite period unless there is move¬ 
ment of the limbs. The requisites are a fur lined jacket reaching to 
below the waist and buttoning close up to the throat, long and thick 
felt boots, reaching to the knees, a reindeer cloak down to the ankles 
and of which the collar turns up higher than the head, a fur cap with 
nose and ear flaps, a comforter and fingerless warm gloves. The 
reindeer cloak is lined with fur also. For a drive, many hundreds of 
miles long, the difficulty is to prevent the collar of this “ dakha,” as 
it is called, from becoming hard frozen, when you have ice on the 
face; one cannot stand the wind without protection. When I arrived 
at Irkutsk, I found my room almost insupportably hot; yet the temp¬ 
erature was only 60° Fahrenheit. This shows what it, when on 
the road, must have been, and sixteen hours elapsed before the 
collar of my “ dakha ” was thoroughly thawed and dry again. A 
rug is also necessary, when sleighing, to draw up over the knees, so 
as to prevent the cold getting underneath the clothes. It is very 
easy to get frost-bitten when asleep and then, of course, the worst may 
happen. 
It might be supposed that, when driving on a frozen river, the 
thicker the ice the greater the safety. But this is not always the case. 
Towards the latter part of the winter, water comes down to the river 
from the mountains in China. Now in places, the rivers freeze to the 
very bottom, so intense is the cold. When this water encounters a 
solid wall of ice one of two things must happen. Either the accum¬ 
ulated pressure of the water carries away the ice wall, leaving ice on 
the surface sufficiently thick for traffic, or else, if the barrier be too 
stout, the water forces its way to the top and there forms a layer, two 
feet or more in depth and varying in area according to the slope of 
the ice, its roughness, and the bends of the river. These “ Nalyedis ” 
as they are termed, the word signifying water on the ice, often form 
very rapidly ; in the daytime it is a beautiful sight to see the evaporated 
water forming white wreaths in the sunshine, but at night the case is 
much more serious, for the traveller is often into one without any 
warning. As he is only a few inches above the water, he runs the 
risk of getting his legs wet and losing them by frost-bite. 
On very broad rivers, such as the Selenga which flows into lake 
Baikal, great rifts sometimes occur in the ice, and if the driver be 
careless and misses the track, the whole turn-out, human beings, horses 
and conveyance are lost. I drove across lake Baikal, just after it 
