MORSE AND MAHLEMOOT. 



439 



and snug, up and down a desolate coast. This lagoon of the Arc- 

 tic Ocean has several openings to the sea itself. Small schoon- 

 ers can run in and escape from ice-pack "jams," if they draw less 

 than eight or ten feet of water. The coast-line of the mainland at 

 Icy Cape is a series of low mud-cliffs, varying from ten to fifty feet 

 in height above a shingly beach, which is everywhere composed 

 of fine, minutely comminuted, pebbly bases of granite, of chert, of 

 sienite, and of indurated clay, the last being a predominant form. 



From this point clear around to the boundary of our Alaskan 

 Arctic coast at Point Demarcation that country presents the same 

 appearance which we note here. It is low and slightly rolling, and 

 falls in small cliffs of mud or sandstone at the sea-shore. During 



Innuit Whaling-camp at Icy Cape. 



the midsummer season it wears a liue of gray and brown, with lit- 

 tle patches of bright green where the snow has melted early in 

 sunny, sheltered spots. The lines of many streams, as they course 

 in carrying off melting snows, are plainly marked over a dreary 

 tundra by the dark fringes of dwarfed willows, birches, and alders 

 which only grow upon their banks. 



All along this cheerless northern sea-shore are small and widely 

 scattered settlements of our Innuits, who burrow in their turfy un- 

 derground winter huts, and who tent outside in summer-time upon 

 these shingly gravels and clink-stones of the Arctic coast. They 

 then live upon the walrus and kill an occasional calf-whale. For 

 the better apprehension of these animals they erect lookouts on the 

 beach by setting up drift-wood scaffolds, and climbing as lookouts 



