130 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



landscape gardener had been intelligently exercised, as if man had 

 fashioned the whole with an eye to scenic effect. 



In the south, the forests show their greatest beauty in spring, 

 in the north, in autumn. By the first days of September the leaves 

 of the foliage trees begin to turn yellow here, and by the middle 

 of the month the north Siberian forest is more brilliant than any 

 of ours. From the darkest green to the most flaming red, through 

 green and light green, light yellow and orange yellow, pale red and 

 carmine, all the shades of colour are represented. The dark Norway 

 spruce firs and pichta firs are followed by the cembra pines and 

 larches; and next in order come the few birches which are not yet 

 yellowed. The white alders display all gradations from dark to 

 light green and to greenish yellow; the aspen leaves are bright 

 cinnabar red, the mountain-ash and the bird-cherry are carmine. 

 So rich and yet so harmonious is the mingling of all these colours 

 that sense and sentiment are satisfied to the full. 



Such are the pictures which the woodlands of Western Siberia 

 display to the traveller. But all the sketches we have attempted 

 to give have been taken from within a narrow fringe. To penetrate 

 further into the primeval forests, in summer at least, seems to the 

 western traveller absolutely impossible. On the slopes of the 

 mountains he is hindered by thickets and masses of debris, on high- 

 land and plain alike by prostrate trees and a tangle of bushes, in 

 the hollows and valleys by standing and flowing water, by brooks 

 and swamps. Wide-spread talus from the rocks, blocks and boulders 

 rolled into heaps and layers form barriers on all the hills; lichens 

 and mosses form a web over the rocks, and treacherously conceal 

 the numerous gaps and clefts between them; a young undergrowth 

 is rooted between and upon the old possessors of the soil; and the 

 old trees as well as the young increase the risk of attempting 

 to traverse these regions. On the low ground the obstacles which 

 the forests present are hardly less formidable. Literally impene- 

 trable thickets such as exist in the virgin forests of equatorial 

 countries there are none, but there are obstacles enough. The 

 prostrated trunks are all the more troublesome because most of 

 them lie, not on the untrodden path, but at an inconvenient height 



