XIV.] KONYAM BAY. 5R5 



We also visited the dwellings of the reindeer-Chukch 

 families. They resembled the Chiikch tents we had seen 

 before, and the mode of life of the inhabitants differed little 

 from that of the coast-Chiikches, with whom we passed the 

 winter. They were even clothed in the same way, excepting 

 that the men wore a number of small bells in the belt. The 

 number of the reindeer which the three families owned was, 

 according to an enumeration which I made when the herd had 

 with evident pleasure settled down at noon in warm sunshine 

 on a snow-field in the neighbourhood of the tents, only about 

 400, thus considerably fewer than is required to feed three Lapp 

 families. The Chukches have instead a better supply of fish, 

 and, above all, better hunting than the Lapps ; they also do 

 not drink any coffee, and themselves collect a part of their 

 food from the vegetable kinodom. The natives received us in 

 a very friendly way, and offered to sell or rather barter three 

 reindeer, a transaction which on account of our hasty departure 

 was not carried into effect. 



The mountains in the neighbourhood of Konyam Bay were 

 high and split up into pointed summits with deep valleys still 

 partly filled with snow. No glaciers appear to exist there at 

 present. Probably however tlie fjords here and the sounds, 

 like St. Lawrence Bay, Kolyutschin Bay, and probably all the 

 other deeper bays on the coast of the Chukch Peninsula, have 

 been excavated by former glaciers. It may perhaps be un- 

 certain whether a true inland-ice covered the whole country ; 

 it is certain that the ice-cap did not extend over the plains of 

 Siberia, where it can be j^r'jved that no Ice Age in a Scandi- 

 navian sense ever existed, and where the state of the land from 

 the Jurassic period onwards was indeed subjected to some 

 changes, but to none of the thorouohoroing mundane revolutions 

 which in former times geologists loved to depict in so bright 

 colours. At least the direction of the rivers appears to have 

 been unchanged since then. Perhaps even the difference 

 between the Siberia where Chikanovski's Ginko woods grew 

 and the mammoth roamed about, and that where now at a 

 limited depth under the surface constantly frozen ground is to 

 be met with, depends merely on the isothermal lines having 

 sunk slightly towards the equator. 



The neighbourhood of Konyam Bay consists of crystalline 

 rocks, granite poor in mica, and mica-schist lowermost, and then 

 grey non-f(jssiliferous carbonate of lime, and last of all magnesian 

 schists, porphyry, and quartzites. On the summits of the hills 

 the granite has a rough trachytic appearance, but does not 

 pass into true trachyte. Here however we are already in the 



was made by Von Middendorff, who found a species of Pliysa on tlie 

 Taimur Peninsula. 



