LAPLAND, AND LAND OF THE SAMOIDES. 69 



may happen to be indented by the sea. In the southern 

 Alpine region there are mountains and glaciers 4000, 

 5000, and 6000 feet above the level of the sea. Of the 

 maritime Alps, which occupy the west and northern part 

 of Lapland, and which has glaciers immediately over the 

 sea, the highest are the Alps of Lyngen, which rise to an 

 elevation of 4264 feet. The rest of the coast of Lapland 

 is very rocky ; but, excepting the promontory of Kunnen, 

 it scarcely contains any high mountains. The promontoiies 

 of eastern Finmark do not exceed an elevation of 2132 

 feet above the level of the sea ; and those on its north 

 coast are only 1279 feet in height; and a long stretch 

 of comparatively level land is presented by the coast of the 

 Arctic Ocean in Russian Lapland. But it is begirt by a 

 mountain range, on the south of the coast of the White Sea. 

 Here it is that the forests commence. Much of the land 

 to the north of the Arctic Circle, like the land in the same 

 latitude to the east of the White Sea, resemble the 

 barrens of North America, and the Tundras of Siberia, 

 sterile marshy wastes. 



Of those lands washed by the White Sea the following 

 account is given by Hepworth Dixon, who wielded a 

 graphic pen perhaps somewhat freely, but if so all the more 

 effectively, in bringing before his readers the scenes he 

 describes. He is describing his approach to Russia, to 

 which he went by Archangel, in preference to taking any 

 of the more generally adopted routes in the south. 



' Rounding the North Cape, a weird and hoary mass of 

 rock projecting far into the Arctic foam, we drive in a 

 south-east course, lashed by the wind, and beaten by hail 

 and rain, for two long days, during which the sun never 

 sets and never rises, and in which if there is dawn at the 

 hour of midnight, there is also dusk at the time of noon. 



1 Leaving the picturesque lines of fiord and alp behind, 

 we run along a dim, unbroken coast, not often to be seen 

 through the pall of mist, until, at the end of some fifty 

 hours, we feel, as it were, the land in our front ; a stretch 



