94 THE JEANNETTE ARCTIC EXPEDITION. 



a pedestrian will sink to the knee without finding any solid 

 footing. Moss has grown out of decaying moss year after 

 year and century after century, until the whole tundra for 

 thousands of square miles is a vast, spongy bog. Of other 

 vegetation there is little or none. A clump of dwarf berry 

 bushes, an occasional tuft of coarse swamp-grass, or a patch 

 of storm-and-cold-defying kedrovnik, diversifies, perhaps, 

 here and there the vast brownish-gray expanse ; but, gener- 

 ally speaking, the eye may sweep the whole circle of the 

 horizon and see nothing but the sky and moss. 



" An observer who could look out upon this region in win- 

 ter from the car of a balloon would suppose himself to be 

 looking out upon a great frozen ocean. Far or near he would 

 see nothing to suggest the idea of land, except, perhaps, the 

 white silhouette of a barren mountain-range in the distance, 

 or a dark sinuous line of dwarfed bushes and trailing pine 

 stretching across the snowy waste from horizon to horizon, 

 and marking the course of a frozen Arctic river. 



" At all seasons and under all circumstances this immense 

 border-land of moss tundras is a land of desolation. In 

 summer its covering of water-soaked moss struggles into 

 life only to be lashed at intervals with pitiless whips of icy 

 rain until it is again buried in snow ; and in winter fierce 

 gales, known to the Russians as ' poorgasj sweep across it 

 from the Arctic Ocean and score its snowy surface into 

 long, hard, polished grooves called ' sastrugi.'' Through- 

 out the entire winter it presents a picture of inexpress- 

 ible dreariness and desolation. Even at noon, when the 

 sea-like expanse of storm-drifted snow is flushed faintly by 

 the red gloomy light of the low-hanging sun, it depresses the 

 spirits and chills the imagination with its suggestions of infi- 

 nite dreariness and solitude ; but at night, when it ceases to 

 be bounded even by the horizon, because the horizon can no 

 longer be distinguished when the pale green streamers of 

 the aurora begin to sweep back and forth over a dark seg- 

 ment of a circle in the north, lighting up the whole white 

 world with transitory flashes of ghostly radiance and adding 



