It did not seem possible that human beings could live, or would care to live, on this desolate plain of moss, 4000 feet above the sea, enveloped half the time in drifting clouds, and swept by frequent storms of rain and snow.  But even here the Wandering Koraks herd their hardy reindeer, set up their smoky tent-poles, and bid contemptuous defiance to the elements.  Three or four times during the day we passed heaps of reindeer’s antlers, and piles of ashes surrounded by large circles of evergreen twigs, which marked the sites of Korak tents; but the band of wild nomads which had left these traces had long before disappeared, and was now perhaps herding its deer on the wind-swept shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Owing to the dense mist in which we were constantly enveloped we could get no clear ideas as to the formation of the mountain range over which we were passing, or the extent and nature of this great plain of moss which lay so high up among extinct volcanic peaks.  I only know that just before noon we left the tundra, as this kind of moss steppe is called, and descended gradually into a region of the wildest, rockiest character, where all vegetation disappeared except a few stunted patches of trailing-pine.  For at least ten miles the ground was covered everywhere with loose slab-shaped masses of igneous rock, varying in size from five cubic feet to five hundred, and lying one upon another in the greatest disorder.  The heavens at some unknown geological period seemed to have showered down huge volcanic paving-stones, until the earth was covered fifty feet deep with their broken fragments.  Nearly all of these masses had two smooth flat sides, and resembled irregular slices of some black Plutonian pudding hardened into stone.  I was not familiar enough with volcanic phenomena to be able to decide in what manner or by what agency the earth had been thus overwhelmed with loose rocky slabs; but it looked precisely as if great sheets of solidified lava had fallen successively from the sky, and had been shattered, as they struck the earth, into millions of angular slabs.  I thought of Scott’s description of the place where Bruce and the Lord of the Isles landed after leaving the Castle of Lorn, as the only one I had ever read which gave me an idea of such a scene.

We drank tea at noon on the west side of this rocky wilderness, and before night reached a spot where bushes, grass, and berries again made their appearance.  We camped in a storm of wind and rain, and at daybreak on the 21st continued our descent of the western slope of the mountains.  Early in the forenoon we were inspirited by the sight of fresh men and horses which had been sent out to meet us from a native village called Sidanka (see-dahn’-kah), and exchanging our tired, lame, and disheartened animals for these fresh recruits, we pushed rapidly on.  The weather soon cleared up warm and bright, the trail wound around among the rolling foot-hills through groves of yellow birch and scarlet mountain ash, and as the sun gradually dried our water-soaked clothes, and brought a pleasant glow of returning circulation to our chilled limbs, we forgot the rain and dreary desolation of the mountain-top and recovered our usual buoyancy of spirit.