THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 157 



three or four big wooden warehouses with a wharf running well 

 into the harbor, two or more trading-stores, one of them quite im- 

 posing in its size, and fifty or sixty barraboras these constitute the 

 abiding-places of the four hundred residents of Illoolook. They 

 are placed upon a narrow spit of alluvium that divides the sea from 

 the waters of a small creek which runs just back of the village 

 right under these hills that abruptly rise there, to rise again, farther 

 inland, to higher peaks in turn. A 'rich, dark, vivid green covers 

 and clothes the mountain slopes, the valleys, and the hills, even to 

 the loftiest summits, where only a light patch of glistening snow 

 is now and then seen relieved thereon by the grayish-brown rocky 

 shingle. These hills and mountains, rising on every hand above 

 us from the land-locked shores of Captain's Harbor, bear no tim- 

 ber whatsoever, but the mantle of circumpolar sphagnum, inter- 

 spersed with grasses and a large flora, makes ample amends for that 

 deficiency and hide their nakedness completely in their narrow 

 defiles and over the bottom-land patches grass grows with tropi- 

 cal luxuriance, waist-high, with small clumps of stunted willow- 

 bushes clinging to the banks of little water-courses and rivu- 

 lets. This is the only growing timber found anywhere on the 

 Aleutian chain. It never becomes stouter than the thickness of a 

 man's wrist, and the tallest bushes in scattered thickets are never 

 over six or seven feet high, rapidly dwindling in growth as they as- 

 cend the hillsides. 



Especially gratifying is the landscape, thus adorned, to the 

 senses of any ship-worn traveller, who literally feasts his eyes upon 

 it. But if he should go ashore and step upon what appeared to 

 him, from the vessel's deck, to be a firm greensward, he will find 

 instead a quaking, tremulous bog, or he will slide over a moss- 

 grown shingle, painted and concealed by cryptogamic life, where 

 he fondly anticipated a free and ready path. The thick, dense 

 carpet of crowberry* plants that is spread everywhere over the hill- 

 sides, into which the pedestrian sinks ankle-deep at every step, 

 makes a stroll very laborious when undertaken at any distance from 

 the sea-beach. 



If a wide survey is accomplished here of Oonalashka Island, the 

 studies made will give a perfect understanding of every other island 



* Empetrum nigrum. The natives call it "shecksa." It is their chief 

 supply of fuel. 



