ean, the valleys of the Yolofka and the Kamchatka, and the
grand peaks of Suveilich and Kluchefskoi on the other. We caught
occasional glimpses, through openings in the mist, of the Yolofka
River, thousands of feet below, and the smoke-plumed head of the
distant volcano, floating in a great sea of bluish clouds; but a new
detachment of straggling vapours from the Okhotsk Sea came drifting
across the mountain-top, and breaking furiously in our faces, blotted
out everything except the mossy ground, over which plodded our tired,
dispirited horses.

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 rock