THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 187 



by tremblings of the earth upon which they stood. Then a dense 

 dark cloud, full of gas and ashes, came down upon them from 

 Bering Sea, swept by a northerly wind, and it hung over their 

 astonished heads for a week or ten days, accompanied by earth- 

 quakes and subterranean thunder ; then when an interval of clear- 

 ing occurred by a change of winds, they saw distinctly to the 

 northward a bright light burning over the sea. The boldest 

 launched their bidarkas, and, after a close inspection, saw that a 

 small island had been elevated about one hundred feet above the 

 level of the surrounding waters ; that it had been forced up from 

 some fissure of the bottom to the sea, and was still rising, while 

 liquid streams of lava and scoriae made it impossible for them to 

 land. This plutonic action did not cease here until 1825, when it 

 left above the green waters of Bering Sea an isolated oval peak with 

 a serrated crest, almost inaccessible, some two hundred and eighty 

 feet high, and two or three miles in circumference. The Russians 

 landed here then for the first time, and the rocks were so hot that 

 they passed but a few moments ashore. It has, however, cooled 

 off enough now to be occupied by large herds of sea-lions, and is re- 

 sorted to by flocks of sea-fowl. In this fashion of the making of 

 Bogaslov was our vast chain of the Aleutian archipelago cast up 

 from that line of least resistance in the earth's crust which is now 

 marked by the position of these islands, as they alternately face the 

 billows of the immense wastes of the Pacific, and those storm-tossed 

 waves of the shoal sea of Bering. 



