That meant it was still day; the blizzard, would, of course, last the whole night, perhaps even longer. . . . Siberian blizzards are of long duration. You can imagine what it was to have all this before one. In the meantime my position became more and more terrible; we had certainly been well covered up with snow, and in our lair it was, not only warm, but stuffy; but, on the other hand, the horrible sickening exhalations became more dense—my breath was taken away by this suffocating stench, and it was a pity it had not finished me quite, because I would then not have experienced a hundredth part of those sufferings which I felt, when I remembered that with Father Kiriak not only my bottle with brandy and water, but all our provisions had been lost. I clearly saw that if I was not suffocated here as in the Black Hole, I was certainly threatened with the most terrible, the most painful of all deaths—the death from starvation and thirst, which had already begun its torments on me. Oh, how I regretted that I had not remained above to freeze, but had crawled into this snowy coffin, where we two were lying so close together and under such a weight, that all my efforts to raise myself and get up were quite useless.
With the greatest trouble I was able to get from under my shoulder some small pieces of
