4o6 GOLCHIKA 



night on the tundra ; but we had no sooner returned to 

 the Ibis to dine than the wind, which had been freshen- 

 ing all the afternoon, blew such a gale that it became 

 impos-^ible to land with safety. The gale continued all 

 night, accompanied by heavy showers of rain, nor did it 

 decrease sufficiently during the next day to allow us to 

 venture on shore in a boat. Fortunately I had on 

 board a box of eggs, collected for me by a Samoyede, 

 the blowing of which kept me employed. Several had 

 been taken from the nest two or three weeks before our 

 arrival, and were becoming rotten. The larger number 

 were those of gulls and divers ; there were some small 

 eggs which were unquestionably those of the snow- 

 bunting, and there were twenty or thirty of the sand- 

 pipers, but none that were strange to me. There was a 

 sitting of red-necked phalarope, and some eggs which I 

 identified as those of the Little stint. There were also 

 two sittings of golden plover, and one of the Asiatic 

 golden plover. 



The wind having somewhat subsided during the 

 night, Glinski, Bill, and I started at four o'clock in the 

 morning for the tundra. We first had to cross the 

 swamps, which we did without difficulty, in no place 

 sinking more than a foot below the surface, at that 

 depth the ground probably remaining frozen. One 

 corner of the marsh was still bounded by a small range of 

 ice mountains, miniature Alps, perhaps thirty feet high 

 at their greatest elevation. This ice probably survives 

 the summer; it had, of course, been piled up when the 

 floes passed down the river. All over the swamp drift- 

 wood lay scattered — old, weather-beaten, moss-grown, 

 and rotten. The marshy ground was only a few inches 

 above the level of the sea, but immediately after the thaw 

 it had been, we were informed, some feet under water. 



