86 CAPE CHELYUSKIN 



miles they landed only twice. On the last day of the 

 month they caught up a steamer on which they became 

 passengers. 



" We were yet," says Nordenskiold, " far to the 

 north of the Arctic Circle, and as many perhaps 

 imagine that the little-known region we were now 

 travelling through, the Siberian tundra, is a desert 

 wilderness covered either by ice and snow, or by an 

 exceedingly scanty moss vegetation, it perhaps may not 

 be out of place to say that this is by no means the 

 case. On the contrary, we saw snow during our 

 journey up the Yenesei only at one place, in a deep 

 valley cleft some fathoms in breadth, and the vegeta- 

 tion, especially on the islands which are overflowed 

 during the spring floods, is distinguished by a luxuri- 

 ance to which I have seldom seen anything compar- 

 able. Already had the fertility of the soil and the 

 immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the pas- 

 tures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a 

 middle-aged man who is owner of a little patch of 

 ground among the fells of Northern Norway, a cry of 

 envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the 

 Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pas- 

 tured, no scythe mowed, the grass. Daily and hourly 

 we heard the same cry repeated, and even in louder 

 tones, when some weeks after we came to the grand 

 old forests between Yeneseisk and Turuchansk, or to 

 the nearly uninhabited plains on the other side of 

 Krasnoyarsk covered with deep black earth, equal with- 

 out doubt in fertility to the best parts of Scania, and in 

 extent surpassing the whole Scandinavian peninsula. 

 This judgment formed on the spot by a genuine though 



