60 THE FOREST LANDS OF NORTHERN RUSSIA. 
to very cold climates; it is called the Lower Alpine 
region, The fifth, the Higher Alpine region, lies beyond 
this. Much of it is covered with perpetual snow; it pro- 
duces no trees, and scarcely any vegetation whatever, 
except a few hardy plants where the snow has disappeared. 
Mr A. G. Guillemard, writing in the Journal of Forestry 
of September 1882, of Forest Rambles in Swedish Lapland, 
tells :— 
‘An almost unbroken solitude of vast forests and wide- 
spreading moorland, lonely lakes, and rushing rivers, with 
lofty.ranges of noble snow-mountains in the far interior, 
dividing the watershed between the Gulf of Bothnia and 
the: Atlantic Ocean; a “wild north land” in which the 
solitary traveller from countries of so-called civilisation is 
regarded with eyes of wonderment, and to which the 
modern tourist never comes ; the home of the elk and the 
bear, the ptarmigan and capercailzie—such is the land of 
the Lapp. A glance at the map of the country will suffice 
to convince the intending traveller that this far-distant 
land is eminently a land of waters, rivers innumerable 
flowing through long strings of lakes forming its main 
characteristic. But the four days’ voyage from Stockholm 
to Lulea at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia will speedily 
lead him to conclude that it must be a land of trees as 
well, for almost every ship he meets is a timber ship, every 
port at which his steamer touches is crowded with rafts of 
pine-trunks, and noisy with saw-mills, and the entire coast- 
line is densely covered with pine forest. His deduction 
will prove to be a correct one, though the sights and 
sounds from which he draws it are Swedish, the boundary 
of Lapland being far up country. The cream of the forest 
and mountain and lake scenery, and perhaps of the sport 
as well, is to be found in the vicinity of the Stora Lule 
river and its tributaries, a truly noble stream, which for 
many miles above its mouth averages more than a mile in 
width Small steamers navigate the Stora Lule for a 
distance of a hundred miles, and at a point just ninety 
