VI.] 
ROSSMUISLOV’S WINTERING, 1768-9, 
275 
he removed a house which some hunters had built on the sound 
farther to the west, and erected another house, the materials 
of which he had brought from home, on a headland jutting out 
into the sound a little more to the east. The latter I visited 
in 1876. The walls were then still standing, but the flat roof, 
loaded with earth and stones, had fallen in, as is often the case 
with deserted wooden houses in the Polar regions. The house 
VIEW FROM MATOTSCHKIN SCHAR. 
(After a drawing bj' Hj. Theel. 1875.) 
was small, and had consisted of a lobby and a room with an 
immense fireplace, and sleeping places fixed to the walls. 
On the Matotschkin Sound was frozen over, and some 
days after the Kara Sea was covered with ice as far as the eye 
could reach. Storms from the north-east, west, and north-west, 
with drifting snow of such violence prevailed during the course 
of the winter that one could scarcely go ten fathoms from the 
