282 A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 



The captain even gave up his own cabin to our humble 

 but intrusive selves, and for the rest of the voyage 

 he slept in the charthouse on the bridge. Miss Curtis 

 and I felt that we could not be sufficiently grateful 

 for a kindness which thus spared us the danger, 

 difficulty, and tedium of the journey across Europe, 

 although, as it turned out, our voyage through the 

 Arctic Ocean was not lacking in incident either. 



Having arranged the matter with Mr. Lied, we 

 heard that the Oryol was spending a few hours longer 

 at Breokoffsky in order to pick up some fish cargoes. 

 We therefore all four went ashore together. There 

 were two or three balagans, whose occupants were 

 all preparing to leave in the steamers Lena and 

 Turuhhansk, which were expected to pass in a day 

 or two ; and there were also seven or eight Yurak 

 and Samoyede chooms beside the beach. Miss Czaplicka 

 and Miss Curtis went to call upon the natives in 

 their extremely dirty dwellings, while I walked along 

 the shore with my binoculars ; for it was the time of 

 the autumn migration, and the bird life of the Yenesei 

 delta was likely to repay observation. 



Nosonovsky Ostrov is a low-lying island, about 

 six versts in breadth. Most of the land is swampy 

 and overgrown with yellow willow bushes. These 

 willows, although none of them are more than five 

 feet high, seemed like a regular forest after the stunted 

 knee-deep scrub at Golchika. During floods, the island 

 is sometimes entirely swamped, and even now most 

 of the low-lying ground was so wet as to be almost 

 impassable. The covert was so thick tliat it was 



