LAPLAND, AND LAND OF THE SAMOIDES. 69 
may happen to be indented by the sea. In the southern 
Alpine region there are mountains and glaciers 4000, 
5000, and 6000 feet above the level of the sea. Of the 
maritime Alps, which occupy the west and northern part 
of Lapland, and which has glaciers immediately over the 
sea, the highest are the Alps of Lyngen, which rise to an 
elevation of 4264 feet. The rest of the coast of Lapland 
is very rocky; but, excepticg the promontory of Kunnen, 
it scarcely contains any high mountains. The promontories 
of eastern Finmark do uot exceed an elevation of 2132: 
feet above the level of the sea; and those on its north 
coast are only 1279 feet in height; and a long stretch 
of comparatively level land is presented by the coast of the 
Arctic Ocean in Russian Lapland. But it is begirt by a 
mountain range, on the south of the coast of the White Sea.. 
Here it is that the forests commence. Much of the land 
to the north of the Arctic Circle, like the land in the same 
latitude to the east of the White Sea, resemble the 
barrens of North America, and the Tundras of Siberia, 
sterile marshy wastes. 
Of those lands washed by the White Sea the following 
account is given by Hepworth Dixon, who wielded a 
graphic pen perhaps somewhat freely, but if so all the more 
effectively, in bringing before his readers the scenes he 
describes. He is describing his approach to Russia, to 
which he went by Archangel, in preference to taking any 
of the more generally adopted routes in the south. 
‘Rounding the North Cape, a weird and hoary mass of 
rock projecting far into the Arctic foam, we drive in a. 
south-east course, lashed by the wind, and beaten by hail’ 
and rain, for two long days, during which the sun never 
sets and never rises, and in which if there is dawn at the 
hour of midnight, there is also dusk at the time of noon. 
‘Leaving the picturesque lines of fiord and alp behind, 
we run along a dim, unbroken coast, not often to be seen 
through the pall of mist, until, at the end of some fifty 
hours, we feel, as it were, the land in our front; a stretch 
