On an urgent call, with special preparations, you may travel for a hundred hours, night and day, without halt save for change of relays. Physically, it is possible to fight cold for a time. You can run along in all your furs beside the horses, you can beat your arms together, and rub nose and cheeks to keep the blood in motion. You can drink copious glasses of scalding tea in the post-houses, and live by stimulants on the road. Through ceaseless vigilance and resolution you can keep from freezing, even while intense fatigue creeps on and vitality is going. But the persistent awful shudder is Nature’s red lantern. Run past it if you must,--it is at your peril. Dark against the snows, now a low-lying village comes into sight,--Nijniouboukounskaia,--and among its first log houses is one bearing the post-horn signboard. A cry rouses the jaded horses to a gallop, and covered with snow, the sledge sweeps into the yard. Steaming and frosted white, the animals stand with lowered heads. Stablemen run to unharness them. Stiff with cold and muffled like a mummy, you clamber out, and on unsteady legs mount the steps to the felted door of the posting-inn. In the big bare room, beside the warm oven, robes and overcoats can be thrown off. A red-capped girl loads the samovar with glowing brands from the fire, and sets it humming for tea. Brown bread is produced and eggs, and a great bowl of warm milk. With these, and the contents of your bag of provisions, can be eked out a welcome _obeid_. For the night’s rest one need not seek a bed. There is never a spring to ease the bones from Verhneudinsk to Kiahta. There was discovered just once on the journey--at Arbouzarskie--an iron skeleton, bearing to a spring bed about the relation that the three-toed Pleistocene prairie trotter holds to a modern horse. The post-keeper had carefully hewn with his axe five pine planks to cover the gaunt limbs of it. The voyageur slept on the soft side of these timbers. Bed and board are synonyms in Siberia. For a couch there is to-night the narrow wooden law-provided bench, or--a less precarious perch, and equally resilient--the sanded floor. For bedding, one has one’s own blankets and coats. What if the shoulder slept on numbs with one’s weight, or the corner of the soap-box in the traveling-bag, serving as a pillow, dents the tired head! One draws off felt boots and some of the outer layers of clothes, rolls the sheepskin about one, covers the head with a blanket, and sleeps like the forest bears in their winter dens. Just before daybreak is the best time to start, so that one can cover the most road possible while the sun is up. At ten or eleven, an hour’s stop for lunch is advisable, and then on again until sundown. It is better not to travel after nightfall, as the cold is so much more intense. We dedicate the evening to hot tea, and then turn to the blankets and the bench.