CHAPTER XLVIII.
The many vehicles in motion made a good road twelve hours after the storm ceased. The thermometer fell quite low, and the sharp frost hardened the track and enabled the horses to run rapidly. I found the temperature varying from 25° to 40° below zero at different exposures. This was cold enough, in fact, too cold for comfort, and we were obliged to put on all our furs. When fully wrapped I could have filled the eye of any match-making parent in Christendom, so far as quantity is concerned. The doctor walked as if the icy and inhospitable North had been his dwelling-place for a dozen generations, and promised to continue so a few hundred years longer. We were about as agile as a pair of prize hogs, or the fat boy in the side show of a circus.
My beard was the greatest annoyance that showed itself to my face, and I regretted keeping it uncut. It was in the way in a great many ways. When it was outside my coat I wanted it in, and when it was inside it would not stay there. It froze to my collar and seemed studying the doctrine of affinity. A sudden motion in such case would pull my chin painfully and tear away a few hairs. It was neither long nor heavy, but could hold a surprising quantity of snow and ice. It would freeze into a solid mass, and when thawing required much attention. The Russian officers shave the chin habitually, and wear their hair pretty short when traveling. I made a resolution to carry my beard inviolate to St. Petersburg, but frequently wished I had been less rash. A mustache makes a very good portable thermometer for low temperatures. After a little practice one can estimate within a few degrees any stage of cold below zero, Fahrenheit. A mustache will frost itself from the breath and stiffen slowly at zero, but It does not become solid. It needs no waxing to enable it to hold its own when the scale descends to -10° or thereabouts, and when one experiences -15° and so on downward, he will feel as if wearing an icicle on his upper lip. The estimate of the cold is to be based on the time required for a thorough hardening of this labial ornament, and of course the rule is not available if the face is kept covered.
There is a traveler’s story that a freezing nose in a Russian city is seized upon and rubbed by the bystanders without explanation. In a winter’s residence and travel in Russia I never witnessed that interesting incident, and am inclined to scepticism regarding it. The thermometer showed -53° while I was in St. Petersburg, and hovered near that figure for several days. Though I constantly hoped to see somebody’s nose rubbed I was doomed to disappointment. I did observe several noses that might have been subjected to friction, but it is quite probable the operation would have enraged the rubbee.
EXCUSE MY FAMILIARITY.
During our coldest nights on the steppe we had the unclouded heavens in all their beauty. The stars shone in scintillating magnificence, and seemed nearer the earth than I ever saw them before. In the north was a brilliant aurora flashing in long beams of electric light, and forming a fiery arch above the fields of ice and snow. Oh, the splendor of those winter nights In the north! It cannot be forgotten, and it cannot be described.
Twilight is long in a Siberian winter, both at the commencement and the close of day. Morning is the best time to view it. A faint glimmer appears in the quarter where the sun is to rise, but increases so slowly that one often doubts that he has really seen it. The gleam of light grows broader; the heavens above it become purple, then scarlet, then golden, and gradually change to the whiteness of silver. When the sun peers above the horizon the whole scene becomes dazzlingly brilliant from the reflection of his rays on the snow. In the coldest mornings there is sometimes a cloud or fog-bank resting near the earth, from the congelation and falling of all watery particles in the atmosphere. When the sun strikes this cloud and one looks through it the air seems filled with millions of microscopic gems, throwing off many combinations of prismatic colors, and agitated and mingled by some unseen force. Gradually the cloud melts away as it receives the direct rays of light and heat.
