280 



THE POLAR WORLD. 



of the scene. This they knew marked the course of the great river towards 

 which they were tending. Pushing eagerly on, at sunset they broke out of the 

 woods, shot down a steep bank, and stood on an immense plain of snow-covered 

 ice. It was the Yukon, frozen solidly over as far as the eye could reach, except 

 that here and there was a faint streak of open water. From bank to bank the 

 distance was more than a mile, and this they afterwards found was the normal 

 breadth of the river for seven hundred, miles below, and a thousand miles above. 

 Not unfrequently it spread out into broad lagoons four or five miles wide. The 

 Yukon is one of the great rivers of the globe. In length and volume of water 

 it is exceeded only by the Amazon, the Mississippi, and perhaps the Plata. It 

 exceeds the Nile, the Ganges, the Volga, the Amoor, and has affluents to which 

 the Rhine and Rhone are but brooks. It rises far within the British Posses- 

 sions, and its head-waters almost interlock with those of the Mackenzie, which 

 empties into the Arctic Ocean. A portage of only eighty miles intervenes be- 

 tween these rivers at points where each is navigable for boats forty feet long, 

 and drawing two feet of water. Over this portage the Hudson's Bay Company 

 transport upon men's backs the goods for trading with the Indians on the Up- 

 per Yukon. Mr. Whymper thinks that a flat-bottomed stern-wheel steamer, 

 like those used on the Upper Mississippi, could ascend the Yukon for eighteen 

 hundred miles, and tap the whole fur-bearing region. But as the river is frozen 

 solid for eight months out of the twelve, the steamer could hardly make more 

 than one trip a year. 



The travellers stopped two days at the Indian winter village of Coltog. The 

 houses were built mainly under-ground. First, a Httle shanty is put up, under 

 which a hole like a well is dug ; thence a branch like a sewer runs some yards, 

 along which one must crawl on hands and knees to reach the proper dwelling, 



UNDER-GROUND HOUSE. 



which is a square hole in the earth, over which is raised a low dome-shaped 

 roof, with a hole in the top to let out the smoke of the fire, which is built di- 

 rectly underneath. When the fire gets low the smoke-hole is covered with a 

 skin, which keeps in not only the heat but the manifold scents engendered by 

 the crowded occupancy. The slight heat from below makes the roof a favorite 

 trysting-place for the dogs, and every now and then one comes tumbling down 

 through the smoke-hole upon the fire below, adding the odor of singed hair to 

 those arising from stale fish, old skin garments, and other unnamable abomina- 

 tions. Coltog is a rather favorable sample of an Indian winter village in Alaska. 



From Coltog the travellers proceeded up the river two days' journey to Nu- 

 lato, the most northern and most inland of the Russian Company's fur-posts. 



