It was forty below zero that morning. The shaggy camels that passed us, appeared to wear great white coats, for every hair on their bodies stood out straight, covered with frost. So we had breakfast in the station restaurant, and waited through the day for the railroad men to get us back on the rails. I found the American officer on Intelligence duty at that station, living in a Russian home, and we went and lunched with the Railroad Engineers of the Stevens contingent. One of them was an excellent cook, and we had a splendid meal, the prize of the household being a large jar of gooseberry jam. The house was fairly good, but despite its massive proportions, cold as Greenland. And in the time I spent in Siberia, I never found a house or a hotel that was comfortably warm, even when I was clad in the heaviest clothing, except the house occupied by Colonel Morrow in Khabarovsk. We arrived in Chita, Trans-Baikal, thirteen days after leaving Vladivostok. As I looked out that morning, over a drear landscape partly concealed by frozen fog, I had in mind the thousands of exiles who had marched overland to Chita, for the city in the old days had been a distributing point for convict labor destined for the mines to the north. It was fifty degrees below that morning. I saw a low, white plain, shut in on three sides by hills, studded with huts. The huts were marked by white pillars of steam rising straight into the sky--warm air escaping from the chimneys. The station door was shrouded with ice, and whenever it opened there was a burst of white steam outward, but upon entering there was no steam inside--only a warm, odoriferous air. Great icicles over the door, some of them a foot through, are characteristic of public buildings in that country during the cold weather. We learned that we had passed through the city station of Chita, and had come three versts beyond to “Pervia Chita,” or First Chita, that being the name of the first station built as the building of the road progressed toward Vladivostok. Werkstein got a man with a pony and a cart, and we loaded our baggage. Then, trailing along after it, walking in order not to freeze our feet, we skirted the railroad, and came to a railroad bridge over a gully, which was to lead us to Chita proper. But just as our wagon approached the bridge, a Russian ran out of a hut, and let down bars, blowing a horn loudly meanwhile. Our pony had to stop, and we had to wait.