Away from these sheltering rocks, away from the southern slopes of the Caucasian ridges, you are in Russia. The only mountains throughout all the rest of the Tsar's European territories are the Urals, which nowhere reach even the heights of the Apennines, which do not form everywhere a continuous chain, and which run in almost a straight line from north to south. From the icy pole the wind sweeping over the frozen ocean and the snowy wastes of the northern provinces finds nowhere a hindrance to its cruel blasts, and spreads its chill over the whole land with such steady keenness as to make the climate of the exposed parts of the Black Sea coast almost as wintry as that of the White Sea. At Odessa in the early days of October both our hotel and the private houses we had occasion to enter had already put up double doors and windows, and people lived in apartments as hermetically closed as if their homes had been in St. Petersburg. We slept at Baidar, a Tartar village, where a maiden of that Moslem race was the only attendant at the Russian inn, and on the morrow we drove in three hours to Sebastopol, a distance of forty-two versts. Sebastopol has still not a little of that Pompeian look which it bore on the day after its surrender to the Western Allies in 1856. We drove through miles of ruins, the roofless walls staring at us from the dismantled doors and windows, the dust from the rubbish-heaps of brick and mortar blinding us at every turning of the streets, though, we were told, the city is looking up and thriving, and both house-rent and building-ground are rising in price from day to day. We had to wait two days for the "Olga," detained by stress of weather, and it was with a hope of enlivening ourselves that, under the escort of the English Consul, a Crimean veteran who takes care of the heroic dead, and actually lives with as well as for them, we drove out to some of the eleven English cemeteries, to the house where Lord Raglan died, and the monument marking the spot where "the six hundred rode into the jaws of death"--those localities made forever memorable by a war than which none was ever undertaken with less distinct aims, none fought with greater valour, none brought to an end with less important results. We left Sebastopol at three in the afternoon in the "Olga," and landed at Odessa in the morning at ten. Throughout the first week after our arrival, we never caught a single glimpse of the sun. Odessa, like Sebastopol, like Kertch, like Astrakhan, and other places lying on the edge of the Russian Steppe, seems habitually, under the influence of the wind in peculiar quarters, to be haunted by fogs that set in at sunrise and only sometimes clear off after sunset. During this gloomy state of the atmosphere the night is usually warmer than the day. [Illustration: PLACE TUREMNAJA ODESSA.]