It
resembles as much as anything a dwarf pine tree, with a remarkably
gnarled, crooked, and contorted trunk, growing horizontally like a
neglected vine along the ground, and sending up perpendicular branches
through the snow. It has the needles and cones of the common white
pine, but it never stands erect like a tree, and grows in great
patches from a few yards to several acres in extent. A man might walk
over a dense growth of it in winter and yet see nothing but a few
bunches of sharp green needles, sticking up here and there through the
snow. It is found on the most desolate steppes and upon the rockiest
mountain-sides from the Okhotsk Sea to the Arctic Ocean, and seems to
grow most luxuriantly where the soil is most barren and the storms
most severe. On great ocean-like plains, destitute of all other
vegetation, this trailing-pine lurks beneath the snow, and covers
the ground in places with a perfect network of gnarled, twisted, and
interlocking trunks. For some reason it always seems to die when it
has attained a certain age, and wherever you find its green spiny
foliage you will also find dry white trunks as inflammable as tinder.
It furnishes almost the only firewood of the Wandering Koraks and
Chukchis, and without it many parts of north-eastern Siberia would
be absolutely uninhabitable by man. Scores of nights during our
explorations in Siberia, we should have been compelled to camp without
fire, water, or warm food, had not Nature provided everywhere an
abundance of trailing-pine, and stored it away under the snow for the
use of travellers.

[Illustration: DOG-TEAMS DESCENDING A STEEP MOUNTAIN SLOPE]

We left our camp in the valley early on the following morning, pushed
on across the large and heavily timbered river called the Aklan, and
entered upon the great steppe which stretches away from its northern
bank toward Anadyrsk. For two days we travelled over this barren
snowy plain, seeing no vegetation but stunted trees and patches of
trailing-pine along the banks of occasional streams, and no life
except one or two solitary ravens and a red fox. The bleak and dreary
landscape could have been described in two words--snow and sky. I had
come to Siberia with full confidence in the ultimate success of the
Russian-American Telegraph line, but as I penetrated deeper and deeper
into the country and saw its utter desolation I grew less and less
sanguine. Since leaving Gizhiga we had travelled nearly three hundred