388 
TCHUSSOVAYA SECTION CONCLUDED. 
A more picturesque river gorge was certainly never examined by geologists. 
Between the hamlet of Kinish and Ust-Koiva we passed through scenes even sur- 
passing in beauty those higher up the stream, and to which it would have required 
the pencil of a professed artist to do justice. The river runs in a limestone gorge, 
in which cliffs of every variety of form, occasionally exposing large caverns along 
theii veitical faces, with trees and flowers grouped about in the clefts: rocks, 
vrnying in colour from black to white, in structure from amorphous dolomite to 
plane-bedded limestone, and twisted about into basins and anticlinals — here rising 
into serrated and broken peaks, there bending into graceful slopes — appeared in a 
continual succession 1 . We offer to our readers a sketch, taken at a point where 
the rivet is very tortuous, and must leave it to his imagination to conceive how 
beauteous are these scenes in all their summer glory. In the opposite lithograph 
a large bowl of carboniferous limestone, presenting a lofty precipitous face and 
covered with foliage, is seen in the distance, on the opposite or left bank of the 
stream ; whilst highly-inclined and contorted rocks, which we believe to be De- 
vonian, occupy the foreground. 
The local name of the most remarkable of these basins, as represented in this 
woodcut, flanked by a striking mural mass of limestone (a) 300 or 400 feet in 
The four Brothers 
Thin bedded 
limestone. 
Dolomite. 
Dolomite 
with Encrinites. 
... - witn .kncrimtes 
height, has escaped us ; but certain peaks were known to our boatmen as the 
“four brothers,” and another fine face of rock was termed “ Ghselny Kamen,” or 
the musical stone. Some of the caverns, like those before mentioned on the Issetz 
are said to have been inhabited by Yermak, the Cossack conqueror of Siberia, and 
therefore the great hero of the Ural Mountains 2 . 
In approaching Ust-Koiva these grand calcareous flexures begin to cease, and a 
long ledge of the upper limestone, loaded with true mountain limestone fossils, 
1 The most prevalent fir-trees are the Pirns allies and P.picea, here and there a gigantic Pinus cem- 
bra and a larch, with birch, aspen, &c. &c. Among a profusion of wild flowers we were specially struck 
with the beauty of the Cypripedium calceola, and many species of Or chide ce, Vicia, Stachys, &c. 
2 It was from the adjoining Zavod belonging to the Strogonoflf family, then almost exclusively pos- 
sessing this region, that Yermak the Cossack first proceeded in his expedition into Siberia. In that 
establishment he found a sure retreat and centre of operations between his first exploits and his final 
conquest of Siberia — a conquest scarcely less wonderful than that of Mexico by Cortez. 
