with the storm, and not against it, I literally gasped for breath for more than two hours; and when we arrived at the station of Cheremshánka, it would have been hard to tell, from an inspection of our faces, whether we were Kírghis or Americans—black men or white. I drank nearly a quart of cold milk, and even that did not fully assuage my fierce thirst. Mr. Frost, after washing the dust out of his eyes and drinking seven tumblers of milk, revived sufficiently to say, "If anybody thinks that it doesn't get hot in Siberia, just refer him to me!"
At the station of Málo Krasnoyárskaya we left the Írtish to the right and saw it no more. Late that afternoon we reached the first foot-hills of the great mountain range of the Altái, and began the long, gradual climb to the Altái Station. Before dark on the following day we were riding through cool, elevated alpine meadows, where the fresh green grass was intermingled with bluebells, fragrant spirea, gentians, and delicate fringed pinks, and where the mountain tops over our heads were white, a thousand feet down, with freshly fallen snow. The change from the torrid African desert of the Irtish to this superb Siberian Switzerland was so sudden and so extraordinary as to be almost bewildering. I could not help asking myself every fifteen minutes, "Did I only dream of that dreary, sun-scorched steppe yesterday, with its sandspouts, its mountains of furnace slag, its fierce heat, and its whitening bones, or is it really possible that I can have come from that to this in twenty-four hours?" To my steppe-wearied eyes, the scenery, as we approached the Altái Station, was indescribably beautiful. On our left was a range of low mountains, the smooth slopes of which were checkered with purple cloud shadows and tinted here and there by vast areas of flowers; on our right, rising almost from the road, was a splendid chain of bold, grandly sculptured peaks from seven thousand to nine thousand feet in height, crowned with one thousand feet of fresh, brilliantly white
