134 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



Burrough's to Wood's and Vlamiugh's, and it may therefore not 

 be out of place here, before I proceed further with the sketch 

 of our journey, to give some account of its surroundings and 

 hydrography. 



If attention be not fixed on the little new-discovered island, 

 " Eusamheten," the Kara Sea is open to the north-east. It 

 is bounded on the west by Novaya Zemlya and Vaygats Island ; 

 on the east by the Taimur peninsula, the land between the 

 Pjaesina and the Yenisej and Yalmal ; and on the south by the 

 northernmost portion of European Russia, Beli Ostrov, and the 

 large estuaries of the Obi and the Yenisej. The coast between 

 Cape Chelyuskin and the Yenisej consists of low rocky heights, 

 formed of crystalline schists, gneiss, and eruptive rocks, from 

 the Yenisej to beyond the most southerly part of the Kara 

 Sea, of the Gyda and Yalmal tundras beds of sand of equal 

 fineness, and at Vaygats Island and the southern part of 

 Novaya Zemlya (to ^o'' N.L.) of limestone and beds of schist ^ 

 which slope towards the sea with a steep escarpment three 

 to fifteen metres high, but form, besides, the substratum of a 

 level plain, full of small collections of water which is quite 

 free of snow in summer. North of 73° again the west coast 

 of the Kara Sea is occupied by mountains, which near 

 Matotschkin are very high, and distributed in a confused 

 mass of isolated peaks, but farther north become lower and 

 take the form of a plateau. 



Where the mountains begin, some few or only very incon- 

 siderable collections of ice are to be seen, and the very moun- 

 tain tops are in summer free of snow. Farther north glaciers 

 commence, which increase towards the north in number and 

 size, till they finally form a continuous inland-ice which, like 

 those of Greenland and Spitzbergen, with its enormous ice-sheet, 

 levels mountains and valleys, and converts the interior of the 

 land into a wilderness of ice, and forms one of the fields for the 

 formation of icebergs or glacier-iceblocks, which play so great 

 a rdlc in sketches of voyages in the Polar seas. I have not 

 myself visited the inland-ice on the northern part of Novaya 

 Zemlya, but doubtless the experience I have previously gained 

 during an excursion with Dr. Bero^gren on the inland-ice of 

 Greenland in the month of July 1870, after all the snow on if 

 had melted, and with Captain Palander on the inland-ice of 

 North-East Land in the beginning of June 1873, he/ore any 

 melting of snoiv had commenced, is also applicable to the ice- 

 wilderness of north Novaya Zemlya. 



^ I come to this conclusion from the appearance of tlie strata as seen 

 from the sea, and from their nature on Vaygats Island and the west coast 

 of Novaya Zemlya. So far as I know, no geologist has landed on this part 

 of the east coast. 



