A SUMMER ON THE YENESEl 19 



Ocean ! The strength of all these billions of tons of 

 moving water is scarcely harnessed sufficiently even to 

 turn a sawmill. And if the waste were twenty times 

 as great, it would be almost useless to exploit it, for 

 during the half of each year the Yenesei is securely 

 locked away under ice. Marvellous must be the power 

 of the frost that can bind such a volume of running 

 water. But strong though the frost is, the strength of 

 the thaw is greater still. Seebohm,^ who watched the 

 break-up of the ice on the Lower Yenesei, gives a 

 graphic account of a display of force which " dwarfs 

 Niagara into insignificance. . . . Some idea of what 

 the pressure must have been may be realised by the 

 fact that a part of the river a thousand miles long, 

 beginning with a width of two miles, and ending with 

 a width of six miles, covered over with three feet of ice, 

 upon which was lying six feet of snow, was broken uj) 

 at a rate of a hundred miles a day. ... On several 

 occasions we stood on the banks of the river for hours, 

 transfixed with astonishment, staring aghast at icebergs, 

 twenty to thirty feet high, driven down the river at a 

 speed of ten to twenty miles an hour." 



When we left Yenesiesk the heat was intense, and 

 mosquito netting was stretched over all the portholes. 

 About midday we stopped for an hour at Nasimoro- 

 koya, a large settlement on the left bank of the river. 

 This was the terminus of the high road from Krasnoyarsk. 

 From here, the only communication with the north is 

 down the river or else by telegraph. We went ashore 

 and walked about the village with interest, for it was 



^ Birds of Siberia, p. 331. 



