CHAPTEK VIII. 



THE SIBERIAN TUNDRA. 



shores of the Arctic Ocean lying between Nova Zein- 

 -1- bla and Bering's Strait are perhaps the most desolate 

 on the whole Arctic circle. The great Siberian rivers the 

 Obi, the Yenisei, the Lena, the Indigirka, and the Kolyma 

 rise in the Altai Mountains, and flow, in their upper courses, 

 through forests of tall trees. But before they reach the Arctic 

 Ocean they traverse, for hundreds of miles, a dreary and 

 barely habitable region of frozen deserts and swamps 

 great desolate steppes, known to the Russians as tundras. 



In summer these tundras are almost impassable wastes of 

 brown Arctic moss saturated with water ; and in winter 

 trackless deserts of snow drifted and packed by northern 

 gales into long, hard, fluted waves. The ground is frozen to 

 a great depth, but in summer thaws out for a distance of 

 from two to three feet. 



Nothing can be more melancholy than the aspect of the 

 tundra, where, says Wrangel, endless snows and ice-covered 

 rocks bound the horizon, nature lies shrouded in all but per- 

 petual winter, and life is an unending struggle with privation 

 and with the terrors of cold and hunger ; where the people, 

 and even the snow, emit a constant smoke, and this evapora- 

 tion is immediately changed into millions of icy needles, 

 which make a noise in the air like the crackling of thick 

 silk ; where the reindeer crowd together for the sake of the 

 warmth derivable from such contiguity ; and only the raven, 

 the dark bird of winter, cleaves the sombre sky with slow- 

 laboring wing, and marks the track of his solitary flight by 

 a long line of thin vapor. 



" The tundra," says another writer, " is the very grave of 

 nature, the sepulchre of the primeval world, which occasion- 



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