Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/81

Rh is everywhere a thick stratum of eternal frost, beginning in winter at the surface of the ground, and in summer at a point twenty or thirty inches below the surface, and extending in places to a depth of many hundred feet. What scanty vegetation, therefore, the túndra affords roots itself and finds its nourishment in a thin layer of unfrozen ground—a mere veneering of arable soil—resting upon a substratum of permanent ice. This foundation of ice is impervious, of course, to water, and as the snow melts in summer the water completely saturates the soil to as great a depth as it can penetrate, and, with the continuous daylight of June and July, stimulates a dense growth of gray, arctic moss. This moss, in course of time, covers the entire plain with a soft, yielding cushion, in which a pedestrian will sink to the knee without finding any solid footing. Moss has grown out of decaying moss, year after year, and decade after decade, until the whole túndra, for thousands of square miles, is one vast, spongy bog. Of other vegetation there is little or none. A clump of dwarf berry-bushes, an occasional tuft of coarse, swamp grass, or a patch of storm-and-cold-defying kedróvnik [Pinus cembra] diversifies perhaps, here and there, the vast, brownish-gray expanse; but, generally speaking, the eye may sweep the whole circle of the horizon and see nothing but the sky and moss.

An observer who could look out upon this region in winter from the car of a balloon would suppose himself to be looking out upon a great frozen ocean. Far or near, he would see nothing to suggest the idea of land except, perhaps, the white silhouette of a barren mountain range in the distance, or a dark, sinuous line of dwarf berry-bushes and trailing pine, stretching across the snowy waste from horizon to horizon, and marking the course of a frozen arctic river. At all seasons, and under all circumstances, this immense border land of moss túndras is a land of desolation. In summer, its covering of water-soaked moss struggles into life, only to be lashed at intervals by pitiless