442 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



which shrouded all about it in its misty darkness, and thus lighted 

 up a lofty russet head of the East Cape of St. Lawrence Island, a 

 little vessel bearing the author would have been piled up and 

 thrown into foaming breakers which beat upon a low, rocky reef 

 that reaches out from its feet. This gleam of light reflected from 

 that headland warned a startled man on the lookout just in time to 

 have her wheel put hard up, and thus luff our light trim craft in 

 season to shave safely by. 



St. Lawrence is the largest island in Bering Sea. It is directly 

 south of Bering Straits, one hundred and eighty miles distant 

 from the Diomedes ; it is eighty to eighty-five miles in length, with 

 an average width of fifteen or twenty. The sea has built onto it 

 quite extensively, in very much the same manner as it has filled 

 out and extended the coast of St. Paul, of the Pribylov group. At 

 Kagallegak, on the east shore, the island is made up of coarse feld- 

 spathic, red. granitic flats and hills, with extensive lagoons and 

 lakelets. The skeleton of this island seems to have been originally 

 one of low hills and ranges of granite, with volcanic outbursts every- 

 where manifested at their summits, especially on the north shore. 

 Between them stretch long, low plains, or gently rolling uplands, 

 and perfectly smooth reaches of sand and gravelly beaches that 

 border the sea everywhere not so marked by bluffs. 



At Kagallegak your eye sweeps over extensive level plains to the 

 northward, upon which a green-stalked and white-plumed tundra 

 grass (Eriophorum) principally grows everywhere on the wet and 

 boggy surface, while, on those sand-beach margins, the " wild wheat " 

 (Elymus) springs up most abundantly, short and stunted, however. 

 These extended low areas of moorland so peculiar to this island 

 are made up of fine granitic drift and clays, lined at their sea-bor- 

 ders with a low, broad sand-belt. The hills and hill ranges of St. 

 Lawrence are rich in color, with dark blue-black patches inter- 

 spersed which indicate a location of trap-protrusions. No shrub- 

 bery whatever grows upon these wind-swept tundra and hills save 

 dwarfed and creeping willows ; yet, a series of characteristic rock- 

 lichens color such bare summits in their bright relief which we 

 have just noted. The rocks themselves are reddish, coarse-grained, 

 shining granites, with abundant trap-protrusions, that weather out 

 and fall down upon the flanks of the peaks and ridges in dusky 

 patches and streaks, so as to contrast, from a slight distance, very 

 sharply with the main ground of pinkish rock, which is moss- and 



