150 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



just as attractive, just as grand ; but how different ! All is laid 

 perfectly bare to inspection here— no dense forests and tangled 

 thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and moun- 

 tain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines 

 and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, 

 yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, 

 the most helpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recog- 

 nize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom 

 ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy 

 rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply out- 

 lined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll 

 up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few 

 miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island 

 will be entirely plain to your sight ; while everything above is con- 

 cealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing- 

 misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with 

 the force of wind-currents that bear it — now veiling, now revealing 

 the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of 

 the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great 

 Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower 

 ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impres- 

 sive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This 

 cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when 

 once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and sujDerb, on the 

 retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it. 



As the little schooner bears up to the westward for our port of 

 Oonalashka, after we have well passed the Straits of Oonimak, we 

 sail into the shorter, choppy waters of Bering Sea — into its chai-ac- 

 teristic light gray-green hue of soundings. The precipitous walls 

 of Akoon Island, rising like so much Titanic sandstone masonry 

 everywhere abruptly from the surf, carry a broad green plateau, 

 that rolls and extends high above the surrounding tide-level. 

 Here, under their lee, on the north shore, we encounter one of 

 those large schools of humpback whales* which are so common 

 and so frequently met with in the Aleutian straits and passages. 

 These animals rise and sink alongside of the vessel, in utter disre- 

 gard of its presence ; and even volleys and bullets of our breech- 

 loading rifles rapidly fired into their broad, glistening, gray-black 



Megaptera versabUis. 



