APPENDIX A • XLVII 



party of American botanists who studied the plants of Mt. Albert 

 and Tabletop a number of years ago. 



From the lake one ascends a steep mountain ridge, the lower part 

 covered with stunted trees, the middle part clothed largely with 

 exasperatingly stiff spruce bushes, and the upper part bare scree and 

 rock, from which one looks down a thousand feet upon the blue lake, 

 apparently vertically beneath. 



Crossing the rounded stony summit of the first mountain, 3,900 

 feet above the sea, bushes and then stunted trees appear once more 

 on the side sheltered from the west winds, and at 3,500 feet beside a 

 streamlet trees are tall enough to make camp. There are ancient 

 spruces and balsams, a foot in diameter a^d less than thirty feet high, 

 but hundreds of years old and rotten at heart. Here the French- 

 Canadian misses his beloved white birch, whose tough bark serves 

 such a multitude of purposes in camps at lower levels. 



The Tabletop forms an extraordinary little world to itself, more 

 like northern Labrador or the Rockies àt timberline than the province 

 of Quebec 3,000 feet below. On almost all sides impassable cliffs 

 prevent intrusion from the lowlands and man scales the walls very 

 seldom. Its bare mountain domes of decaying granite provide secure 

 pastures for the caribou, while the shallow valleys with groves of 

 stunted evergreens, meadows of swampy grasses and innumerable 

 ponds and lakes are the home of the moose, both unusually tame. 



Half a dozen of the mountains reach above 4,000 feet; and 

 aneroid readings make the elevation of one of them 4,350 feet. On 

 the rocky slopes of these mountains wherever a little soil has lodged 

 one finds red and white flowering heathers and Arctic berries, such 

 as the low cranberry, the dwarf blue berry, the black crowberry and 

 the insipid bear berry. Still higher up are the cushions of moss 

 campion covered with pink fîowers, just as in the Rockies at 7,000 or 

 8,000 feet, while scanty grasses, pale gray reindeer lichen and certain 

 mosses reach the wind-swept tops of the mountains. 



On the south side of some of the highest points a few great 

 snowbanks were slowly melting at the end of July, 1919. Probably 

 some of them last till the snows begin to fall again in September. 

 Tabletop has a climate of its own, like that of northern Labrador, 

 with nine months winter and a summer darkened with mist and fog 

 and driving rain whenever the wind blows from the sea. The fine 

 days are superfine, however, with brilliant sun and a cool springlike 

 air that is most inspiring. 



