434 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



and has cavities filled with chlorite. The lower strata are more 

 abundantly mixed with micaceous schistus, containing compact 

 actynolite, and flat prisms of a glassy shade of it, crystals of tour- 

 maline, and those various concretions of iron pyrites. The quartz 

 is, in some places, colored a real topaz tint. Such, in brief, is a faint 

 description of those geological attractions which the Arctic rocks of 

 Kotzebue Sound present to a student. 



The country everywhere, that borders the Ai-ctic Ocean and this 

 sound, is low. The land rises by faint and gradual slopes ; it is 

 covered with clay soils and the characteristic vegetation of a tun- 

 dra. The many low, projecting points of Kotzebue Sound are 

 thickly strewn with large and smaller masses of vesicular and of 

 compact lava, containing olivine. Some of these blocks extend into 

 the sea ; others are embedded in the sandy soil of the beach ; but 

 many are insulated and awash above the surf. They are honey- 

 combed with empty cavities. The sands of this Arctic Ocean beach 

 partake of the black and volcanic nature of those blocks. These 

 large and numerous erratic blocks of basalt, collected chiefly on 

 such jutting points, must have been conveyed there by ice-sheets 

 from a very considerable distance, for no volcanic formation is to be 

 seen in their vicinity. 



A suggestive wreck lies half buried in the sand and drift of the 

 north shore of Choris Peninsula — it is the scant and weathered 

 remnants of a large whaling-bark, which was run ashore here and 

 burned. Its own crew did so to prevent its capture by the Shenan- 

 doah — that cruiser which, during our civil war, swooped down upon 

 our Asio-Alaskan whaling-fleet, as a fish-hawk drops upon a flock 

 of startled gulls. Again, on the south side of Good Hope Bay, in 

 this same remarkable sound of Kotzebue, is a bluff of solid blue 

 clay, from the face of which the frost-king annually strikes large 

 masses. The weathered debris of these fallen sections reveal many 

 fine specimens of well-presei'ved i-emains of huge pachyderms — 

 mammoths — and their finding has given a fit name of "Elephant 

 Point " to the place. 



Across that peninsula, which Choris Point and its comical little 

 tender of Chamisso Islet project from, lies the long and narrow est- 

 uary of Hotham Inlet, where all Innuits, from Icy Cape to the far 

 north and Bering Straits in the south, annually repair for salmon- 

 fishing in August. Into the mouths of a half-dozen small streams 

 which empty there, and that large one, of Kooak Eiver, the hump- 



