palace of glass, and wherever we looked we saw transparent masses of ice, while the reflection of our fire glittered in brilliant colours on the crystals of ice near us. Not a breath of air stirred, and had it not been for the numbing cold and the glistening ice around to prove the reality of this fearful scene, we might easily have been tempted to regard it as a dream. Our cattle, too, felt the cold greatly and trembled all over. We covered them with all the blankets we could spare, and I took special care of Czar, whom I fastened up as near the fire as I could. We made a tremendous blaze in order to render the cold to some extent endurable. One of us was obliged in turn to watch at the fire during the night, while the others lay round it and stretched out their feet to it. Morning arrived, and with it we welcomed the sun which appeared over the mountains in the blue sky. Everything glittered and shone around, as if the world were covered with a sheet of glass and brilliants; the grass plot was hidden by a layer of transparent pieces of ice, which brilliantly reflected the sunbeams; every bush, every shrub glittered with the hues of the rainbow, and the ice almost blinded our eyes. The sunbeams gradually rendered the cold more endurable. We crept out from under our rock and tried to warm ourselves by jumping. We were compelled to leave our horses tied up, as the grass was covered with ice, even where there was no drift. We could not go up to the spring which bubbled up in a gorge below the destroyed cedar-wood, because the path leading down to it was too smooth and slippery; hence we filled our pots with hailstones and thus procured water for our breakfast. The ice disappeared again as quickly as it had fallen on the unusual ground; it was only where the hail had drifted in large layers that the masses of ice lay for a longer period.