Then the face of the country underwent another change. They were fairly in the region of the steppes—those wide and level plains which, during the brief summer, bloom with luxuriant vegetation, and are alive with the flocks and herds of the nomads, but in the long drear winter, from north to south and east to west, are buried deep beneath frozen snow. Wherever you direct your gaze it rests upon snow, snow, still snow; shining with a painful glare in the mid-day sun; fading into a dull, grey, melancholy ocean as noon lapses into twilight. “A picture of desolation which wearies by its utter loneliness, and at the same time appals by its immensity; a circle of which the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.” Travel, in this world-beyond-the-world, in this solitude which Frost and Winter make all their own, tests the courage and endurance of a man, for it makes no appeal to the imagination or the fancy, it charms the eye with no pleasant pictures, suggests no associations to the mind. But it has its dangers, as Major Burnaby experienced. He had left the station of Karabootak (three hundred and seventeen miles from Orsk), and as the road was comparatively smooth, and the wind had subsided, he leaned back in his sleigh and fell asleep. Unluckily he had forgotten to put on his thick gloves, and his hands, slipping from the fur-lined sleeves of his pelisse, lay exposed to the full potency of the cold air. In a few minutes he awoke with a feeling of intense pain; and looking at his hands, he saw that the finger-nails were blue, blue too the fingers and back of the hands, while the wrists and lower part of the arms had assumed the hue of wax. They were frost-bitten! He called his servant, and made him rub the skin with some snow in the hope of restoring the vitality. This he did for some minutes; but, meanwhile, the pain gradually ascended up the arms, while the lower portion of the arms was dead to all feeling, all sensation. “It is no good,” said Nazar, looking sorrowfully at his master; “we must drive on as fast as possible to the station.”
The station was some miles off. Miles? Each mile seemed to the tortured traveller a league; each league a day’s journey; the physical pain consumed him, wore him down as mental anguish might have done. But at last the station was reached; Burnaby sprang from the sleigh, rushed into the waiting-room, and to three Cossacks whom he met there showed his hands. Straightway they conducted him into an outer apartment, took off his coat, bared his arms, and plunged him into a tub of ice and water up to the shoulders. He felt nothing.
“Brother,” said the eldest of the soldiers, shaking his head, “it is a bad job; you will lose your hands.”
“They will drop off,” remarked another, “if we cannot get back the circulation.”
“Have you any spirit with you?” asked a third.
Nazar, on hearing this inquiry, immediately ran out, and returned with a tin bottle containing naphtha for cooking purposes; upon which the Cossacks, taking the Major’s arms out of the icy water, proceeded to rub them with the strong spirit.
Rub, rub, rub; the skin peeled under their horny hands, and the spirit irritated the membrane below. At last a faint sensation like tickling—we are using the Major’s own words—pervaded the elbow-joints, and he slightly flinched.
“Does it hurt?” asked the eldest Cossack.
“A little.”
“Capital, brothers,” he continued; “rub as hard as you can;” and after continuing the friction until the flesh was almost flayed, they suddenly plunged his arms again into the ice and water. This time, the pain was sharp.