Towards 1 a.m.the noise ceased, and we were just dropping to sleep, when, at about half-past two in the morning, our drunken friends, headed by the lady, burst into our apartment, with the information, in bad Russian, that a gang of fifty men sent that morning to clear a path through the deep snow had just returned, and the road to Mazreh was now practicable.

The caravans would be starting in an hour, they added.

"And you'd better travel with them," joined in the lady, contemptuously, "or you will be sure to get into trouble by yourselves." A reply more forcible than polite from Gerome then cleared the apartment; and, rekindling the now expiring embers, we prepared for the road.
We set out at dawn for the gate of the village, where the caravans were to assemble.

It was still freezing hard, and the narrow streets like sheets of solid ice, so that our horses kept their legs with difficulty.

We must have numbered fifty or sixty camels, and as many mules and horses, all heavily laden.
Daybreak disclosed a weird, beautiful scene: a sea of snow, over which the rising sun threw countless effects of light and colour, from the cold slate grey immediately around us, gradually lightening to the faintest tints of rose and gold on the eastern horizon, where stars were paling in a cloudless sky.