XIV.] 
VISIT TO PORT CLARENCE. 
227 
but its entrance is too shallow for vessels of any considerable 
draught. The river itself, on the contrary, is deep, and about 
eighteen kilometres from* its mouth flows through another lake, 
from the eastern shore of which rugged and shattered mountains 
rise to a height which I estimate at 800 to 1000 metres ; but it 
is quite possible that their height is twice as great, for in making 
such estimates one is liable to fall into error. South of the river 
and the harbour the land rises abruptly from the river bank, 
which is from ten to twenty metres high. On the north side, on 
the other hand, the bank is for the most part low, but farther 
into the interior the ground rises rapidly to rounded hills from 
800 to 400 metres high. Only in the valleys and at other places 
where very large masses of snow had collected during the winter, 
were snow-drifts still to be seen. On the other hand, we saw no 
glaciers, though we might have expected to find them on the 
sides of the high mountains which bound the inner lake on the 
east. It was also clear that during the recent ages no widely 
extended ice-sheet was to be found here, for in the many 
excursions we made in different directions, among others up the 
river to the lake just mentioned, we saw nowhere any moraines, 
erratic blocks, striated rock-surfaces, or other traces of a past 
ice-age. Many signs, on the other hand, indicate that during 
a not very remote geological period glaciers covered considerable 
areas of the opposite American shore, and contributed to 
excavate the fjords there—Kolyutschin Bay,* St. Lawrence Bay, 
Metschigme Bay, Konyam Bay, &c. 
When we appoached the American side we could see that the 
shore cliffs were formed of stratified rocks. I therefore hoped 
to be able, at last, to make a rich collection of fossils, something 
that I had no opportunity of doing during the preceding part of 
the voyage. But I found, on reaching them, that the stratified 
rocks only consisted of crystalline schists without any traces of 
animal or vegetable remains. Nor did we find on the shore 
any whale-bones or any of the remarkable mammoth-bearing 
Q 2 
