TWO DIANAS IN ALASKA 79 



pointed are they that not even the snow clings to 

 their spires. Thence past emerald tinted expanses, 

 grey pyramidal cliffs, valleys, and strangely shaped 

 rocks alive with sea-birds. Murres, the commonest 

 of all the Alaskan diving birds, in myriads, and 

 hundreds of tufted puffins with the wondrously tinted 

 extra-sized bill adopted for the breeding season, to 

 aid and abet the charms of the wooer, which is cast 

 away, just as it is with us human things, and our 

 adopted attractions, when he is married and a'. 



Following steadily in our wake sailed a slender 

 fulmar, a very distant relative of the albatross, whom 

 in many ways it imitates. The fulmar is a very rigid 

 flier, but it cannot glide indefinitely with never flap- 

 ping pinions, neither has it that air of absolute 

 mastery of all the laws of graceful flight which the 

 albatross exhibits. 



At the tip of the Peninsula, on Unimak Island, the 

 volcanic peaks of Shishaldin and Isanotski reared 

 their nine thousand feet of altitude. One of them 

 looked impressively sombre, with a great white ruffle 

 of pure coloured snow around the base. The snow 

 line extended from the sea level to half way up the 

 mighty cone, where it ceased suddenly, straight edged, 

 to give place to blackness. Its mountain twin ap- 

 peared to be leaking vapour at every pore, and from 

 each rent and fissure jets of steam issued. 



Now between Akun Island and Unimak we turn at 

 last into the Bering Sea. It looks like any other sea. 

 What had I expected, I wonder? Seals and sealers, 

 whales and icebergs, Eskimos and walruses. Of 



