CHAP. VI!I.] 
NOAH’S WOOD. 
381 
in rich abundance, and along with them masses of old drift¬ 
wood, originating from the Mammoth period, known by the 
Russian natives of Siberia under the distinctive name of 
“ Noah’s wood.” Besides there are to be seen in the most 
recent layer of the Yenesej tundra^ considerably north of the 
present limit of actual trees, large tree-stems with their roots 
fast in the soil, which show that the limit of trees in the 
Yenesej region, even during our geological period, went further 
north than now, perhaps as far as, in consequence of favourable 
local circumstances, it now goes on the Lena. 
On the slopes of the steep hondra bank and in several of the 
tundra valleys there is an exceedingly rich vegetation, which 
already, only 100 kilometres south of Yefremov Kamen, forms 
actual thickets of flowering plants, while the tundra itself is 
overgrown with an exceedingly scanty carpet, consisting more of 
mosses than of grasses. Sal ices of little height go as far 
north as Port Dickson (73° 30' N.L,), the dwarf birch {Betida 
nana, L.) is met with, though only as a bush creeping along the 
ground, at Cape Schaitanskoj (72° 8' N.L.) ; and here in 1875, on 
the ice-mixed soil of the tundra, we gathered ripe cloudberries. 
Very luxuriant alders (Alnaster fruticosus, Ledeb.) occur already 
at Mesenkin (71° 28' N.L.), and the Briochov Islands (70° to 
71° N.L.), are in several places covered with rich and luxuriant 
thickets of bushes. But the limit of trees proper is considered 
to begin first at the great bend v/hich the river makes in 
69° 40' N.L., a little north of Dudino. Here the hills are 
covered with a sort of wood consisting of half-withered, grey, 
moss-grown larches [Larix sihirica), which seldom reach a 
height of more than seven to ten metres, and which much less 
deserve the name of trees than the luxuriant alder bushes 
which grow nearly 2° farther north. But some few miles south 
of this place, and still far north of the Arctic Circle, the pine 
forest becomes tall. Here begins a veritable forest, the greatest 
the earth has to show, extending with little interruption from 
