THE TUNDRA AND ITS ANIMAL LIFE. 63 



THE TUNDRA AND ITS ANIMAL LIFE. 



Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable land, a 

 desert which owes its special character rather to the water than to 

 the sun. Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields 

 of ice, towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field 

 of snow and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees 

 attempt the struggle for existence only in the deepest valleys or 

 on the sunniest slopes. This region is the Tundra. 6 



It is a monotonous picture which I attempt to sketch when I 

 seek to describe the tundra, a picture gray on gray, yet not devoid 

 of all beauty; it is a desert with which we have to do, but a desert 

 in which life, though for many months slumbering and apparently 

 banished, stirs periodically in wondrous fulness. 



Our language possesses no synonym for the word tundra, 

 because our Fatherland possesses no such tract of country. For the 

 tundra is neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither 

 highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many 

 places it may resemble one or other of these. "Moss-steppes" some- 

 one has attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory 

 to those who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense. 

 In my opinion the tundra most resembles one of those moors which 

 we find and avoid on the broad saddles of our lofty mountains ; 

 but it differs in many and important respects even from these 

 boggy plateaus ; indeed its character is in every respect unique. 

 The region is sometimes divided into low and high tundra, though 

 the differences between the land under three hundred feet above 

 sea-level and that above this line are in the tundra more apparent 

 than real. 



The low tundra is bounded by flat, wavy outlines ; its valleys are 

 shallow troughs, and even the heights, which, from a distance, look 

 like hills or even mountains, turn out to be only flat hillocks when 

 one approaches their base. Flatness, uniformity, expressioulessness 

 prevail, yet that there is a certain variety in the landscape, a diver- 

 sity in some of its individual features, cannot be disputed. As one 



