y 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.

I have once before, I believe, given the history of a bear hunt in
which our party participated while crossing the Kamchatka _tundra_;
but as that was a mere skirmish, which did not reflect any great
credit upon the individuals concerned, I am tempted to relate one
more bear adventure which befell us among the foot-hills of the Tigil
mountains. It shall be positively the last.

Ye who listen with credulity to the stories of hunters, and pursue
with eagerness the traces of bears; who expect that courage will
rise with the emergency and that the deficiencies of bravery will
be supplied by the tightness of the fix, attend to the history of
Rasselas, an inexperienced bear-slayer. About noon, as we were making
our way along the edge of a narrow grassy valley, bordered by a dense
forest of birch, larch, and pine, one of our drivers suddenly raised
the cry of _medveid_, and pointed eagerly down the valley to a large
black bear rambling carelessly through the long grass in search of
blueberries, and approaching gradually nearer and nearer to our side
of the ravine. He evidently had not yet seen us, and a party t