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73
CHAPTER VII.
FROZEN FAST.
In the bright autumn atmosphere the sun at setting often
gave rise to magnificent displays. On the evening of the
19th November the steppe all around us was lit up with
an intense fiery yellow glare, as though the reeds which
encircled us on all sides were in flames. Dark and silent
wound the river through the dense thickets in which the
royal tiger had his lair. The sheet of ice, which covered
all the lagoons, gave out whisthngs and whinings un-
ceasing. Sometimes it was as though a flash of lightning
had struck the dark water in front of us ;
yet it was but
a disk of drift-ice, to us hitherto invisible, becoming tilted
on edge in an eddy and lifting above the inky black water
a corner as bright as glass, against which the rays of the
setting sun struck, broke, and were shivered into a thousand
fragments, as if scattered by a prism. Black and bare stood
the poplar trees and stretched their gnarled, dry branches
out over the life-giving stream.
The next afternoon we arrived at Ketchik, at which
point the river had deserted its old bed two years before,
and made a new path for itself through the desolate
wilderness of the sandy desert. As this part of the river’s
course was considered to be dangerous, we found some
of the native beks assembled with canoemen to give us
help. For the news of our journey by river had spread
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