The Springdale news., 1889-11-15
THE SIBERIAN TUNDRAS.
Dreary Moss Plains That Are Inexpressi
 bIY Lonely and DesoIate.

No traveller, perhaps, has given a more complete and accurate account of the dreary moss plains of Northern Siberia than George Kennan, whose description of the region we quote at length. He says: "The northern coast of Siberia, between Cape Chelyuskin and Behring Strait, is probably the most barren and inhospitable part of the whole Russian Empire. For hundreds of miles back from the Arctic Ocean the country consists almost entirely of great desoate steppes, known to the Russians as tundras (pronounced toondras), which in
 summer are almost impossible wastes of brownish arctic moss, saturated with water, and in winter trackless deserts of snow, drifted and packed by polar gales into long,
 hard, f1uted waves. The Siberian tundra differs in many essential particulars from all other tireless plains. In the first place, it has a foundation of permanently frozen ground. Underlying the great moss tundras which border the Lena river north of Yakootsk there is everywhere q thick stratum of eternal frost, beginning in the winter at the surface of the earth and in summer at point twenty or thirty inches below the surface and czuending to a depth of many hundred feet. What scanty vegetation, therefore, the tundra affords roots itself and finds it's nourish- ment in a thin layer of unfrozen ground-a mere veneering of arable soil-Eesting upon q substratum, five hundred or six hundred feet in depth, of permanent and impen- etrable ice. This foundation of ice is i'm previous, of course, to water, and as the snow melts in summer the water complete ly saturates to as great a depth as it can penetrate, and, with the aid of the con tinuous daylight of June and July, stimu- lates dense, luxurious growth of gray arctic moss. The moss, in course of time, covers the entire plain with a soft, yielding cushion, in which pedestrian will sink to the knee without finding any solid footing Moss has grown out of decaying moss year after year, and century after century, until the whole tundra for thousands of square
 miles is a vast spongy bog. Of other vege. tation there is little or none. A clUmp Of
 dwarf berry bushes, an occasional tuft i Of coarse swamp grass, or patch of storm and cold-defying kedrovnik, diyers. l fes, perhaps, here and there, the vast. | brownlsh-gray expanse, but, generally speaking, the eye may sweep the whole circle of tho horizon and see nothing buf the sky and mess. At all seasons and un. der all circumstances this immense border. land of moss tunaras is land of desolation
 Throughout the entire winter it presents a picture of nexpressible dreariness and
 desolation. Even at noon, when the sea like expanse of storm-driven snow is flushed
 faintly by the red, gloomy light of the low
 hanging sun, it depresses the spirits and
 chils the imagination with it's suggestions
 of infinite dreariness and solitude; but al night, when IL ceases to be bounded even by the horlz0n, because the horizon can nc
 longer be distinguished, when the pale,
 green streamers of the aurora begin tc
 sweep back and forth over dark segment
 of a circle in the north, lighting up the
 whole white world with trahsitory flashes
 of ghostly radiance and adding mystery to
 darkness and solitude-then the Siberia
 tundra not only becomes inexpressibly
 lonely and desolate, but takes on a strange,
 half-terrible unearthliness, which awes and
 yet fascnates the imagination. "-Chicapq
 Inter Ocean.