Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/51

Rh an industry is impossible. Fishing and the hunting of sea-mammals (the whale and others), can be carried on in the summer only, so that during the long winter the maritime population has to depend exclusively upon its summer supplies. Reindeer-breeding, though affording a more reliable source of sustenance to the wandering reindeer people than that offered by hunting and fishing to the maritime people, is still in a most primitive state, owing chiefly to the deficient vegetation. The people live for nine months of the year in underground or half-underground houses.

The Southern zone, or rather south-western portion of it, is a lowland country, but considerable highland tracts are included in the southern and eastern sections. These highlands, often comprehensively spoken of as the Altai system, begin properly north of Lake Taisan and the Upper Irtish valley, by which their westernmost extremity is clearly separated from the Tarbagatai range. On this account the Tarbagatai, although usually included in the Siberian mountain systems, has to be regarded rather as the northernmost extension of the Tian-shan. Its true position is that of a water-parting between the Arctic and the Central Asiatic closed basins. For it sends down streams northwards to the Irtish, flowing to the Frozen Ocean through the Obi, southwards to Lakes Ala and Sassik, which formerly communicated westwards with Lake Balkhash, and eastwards with the Ebi-nor and the Mongolian Mediterranean.

From the Irtish valley the Altai or "Gold Mountains" stretch mainly north-eastwards through the Sayan range to the Daurian Alps, and thence beyond the Baikal basin under diverse names, such as the Yablonovoy and Stanovoy. to the volcanic masses filling the greater part of Kamchatka,