Page:The cruise of the Corwin.djvu/194

 fern and one heathwort along a streamside. I saw no true tundra here, its absence, no doubt, being due to the free drainage of the surface. The winds from the north are violent here, as evidenced by the immense snow-drifts still unmelted along the shore where we landed, and also back in the hollows where they feed the stream at which we got water for the ship. They probably will last all summer. This circumstance, of course, leaves the hill slopes all the barer and dryer. The trends of two main ridges, of which I obtained approximate measurements, probably coincide with the direction of the movement of the ice. There is a small wasted moraine in the lower part of the stream valley, extending to the shore. Partial after-glaciation has been light, and on rocks of this sort has left only very faint traces.

July 20. Last night we again anchored on the south side of Point Hope, the norther still blowing hard. About noon to-day it began to abate, and we again pushed off northward. Now, at eight o'clock in the evening, we are approaching Cape Lisburne, a bold bluff of gray stratified rocks about fifteen hundred feet high. All along the coast, from the neighborhood of Cape Prince of Wales, the peculiar