Bad--we were told--very bad it was out there, but in what way bad it was impossible to judge, even from the knowledge we had of life in less remote regions. Who would venture to draw conclusions from the little we knew as to the thousand small details which made up that grey, monotonous existence? Who could clearly bring them before the imagination? Only experience could reveal them in their appalling nakedness. Of one thing we were certain, that was that in a measure as the populousness decreases, and you move away in a centrifugal direction from where we were, life becomes harder and more and more distressing for human beings. In the south, on the wild high plateaus of the Aldon; in the east, on the mountain slopes of the Stanovoi-Chebret, where a single Tungus family constitutes the sole population along a river of 300 versts; in the west on the desolate heights of the Viluj, near the great Zeresej Lake; in the north at the mysterious outlets of the Quabrera, the desert places of the Olensk, Indigirika, and Kolyma, life becomes like a Danteesque hell, consisting in nothing but ice, snow and gales, and lighted up by the lurid blood-red rays of the northern light. But no! those deserts, equal in extent to the half of Europe, are only the purgatory, not yet the real Siberian hell. You still find woods there, poor, thin, dwarfed woods, it is true, but where there is wood there is fire and vitality. The true hell of human torture begins beyond the line of the woods; then there is nothing but ice and snow; ice that does not even melt in the plains in summer--and in the midst of that icy desert, miserable human beings thrown upon this shore by an alien fate. I shall never forget the impression which any chance bit of information on the characteristic features, the horrible details of that life, used to make upon me. Even clearly defined facts and exact technical terms bear quite a different aspect in the light of such unusual local conditions. I have a vivid remembrance of a story told me by a former official; he described to me how when he was stationed in V. as Ispravnik, 'a certain gentleman' was sent out to him with orders to take him to the settlement in Zaszyversk.[1] [Footnote 1: Pronounce: Zashiversk.]