v.] THE TUNDRAS. 97 



price, but this animal does not exist in any numbers in the penin- 

 sula. The most valuable skin of all is that of the sea-otter 

 {Enhydra lutris), which is becoming rarer year by year. A good 

 pelt of this animal will bring even the native hunter as much as a 

 hundred roubles, wliile in the European market a perfect one has 

 been known to realise £120 ! 



On the morniniT of August 22d we came for the first time to a 

 tundra of considerable size. After the gloom of the birch-forest 

 these vast stretches of level ground have a most exhilarating effect. 

 The feeling of oppressive stillness which but an hour or two before 

 seemed to weigh upon us like a nightmare, disappeared as if by 

 magic, and pushing our horses into an easy canter, we pursued our 

 way with a sense of freedom that is rarely or never felt except by 

 those who ride where fancy leads them over the level surface of an 

 uncultivated plam. The melancholy, the niedergescJilagcnhcit of 

 Kamschatka, of which Kittlitz gives such a long description in his 

 account of the country, I confess I never felt : the converse — a 

 purely physical feeling of delight in mere existence — we often 

 experienced, and a good rollicking drinking song and a loose 

 rein seemed a necessity in order to let off our stock of super- 

 abundant spirits. Long wastes of almost orange-coloured grass 

 stretched away nearly to the horizon, only broken here and there 

 by a still pool, or flecked by little tufts of snowy cotton-grass. Our 

 course — for we were on what a native would doubtless call the 

 "high road" to Narchiki — was marked out by long poles, some fifteen 

 or twenty feet in height, which in winter serve to guide the traveller 

 over the dreary wastes of snow. In the forest another method is 

 adopted. The trees are " blazed " by a vertical slit cut in the 

 bark by the hunter's axe. This gapes with the growth of the tree 

 and forms a conspicuous oval mark, ten or twelve feet above the 

 ground — a height which forcibly impresses upon the mind the 

 depth of the winter snow. Other evidences which told us that the 

 warm sun beneath which we were travelling was an affair of days, 

 not weeks, were close at hand, for the snow lay in thick patches 

 VOL. 1. H 



