hing for their food. Here not a single loom was seen,
and even the number of the gulls was small, which indeed in some
degree was to be accounted for by the late season of the year, but
also by the circumstance that no colony of birds had settled on the
rocky shores of the island.

The sea bottom consisted at certain places of hard packed sand, or
rather, as I shall endeavour to show farther on, of _frozen_ sand,
from which the trawl net brought up no animals. At other places
there was found a clay, exceedingly rich in _Idothea entomon_ and
_Sabinei_ and an extraordinary mass of bryozoa, resembling
collections of the eggs of mollusca.

It was not until the 30th of August that we were off the west side
of Ljachoff's Island, on which I intended to land. The north coast,
and, as it appeared the day after, the east coast was clear, of ice,
but the winds recently prevailing had heaped a mass of rotten ice on
the west coast. The sea besides was so shallow here, that already at
a distance 15' from land we had a depth of only eight metres. The
ice heaped against the west coast of the island did not indeed form
any very serious obstacle to the advance of the _Vega_, but in case
we had attempted to land there it might have been inconvenient
enough, when the considerable distance between the vessel and the
land was to be traversed in a boat or the steam launch, and it might
even, if a sudden frost had occurred, have become a fetter, which
would have confined us to that spot for the winter. Even a storm
arising hastily might in this shallow water have been actually
dangerous to the vessel anchored in an open road. The prospect of
wandering about for some days on the island did not appear to me to
outweigh the danger of the possible failure of the main object of
the expedition. I therefore gave up for the time my intention of
landing. The course was shaped southwards towards the sound, of so
bad repute in the history of the Siberian Polar Sea, which separates
Ljachoff's Island from the mainland.

[Illustration: IDOTHEA ESTOMON, LIN. From the sea north of the
mouth of the Lena. (Natural size.) ]

[Illustration: IDOTHEA SABINEI, KROeYER. From the sea off the
mouth of the Lena. (Natural size.) ]

So far as we could judge at a distance from the appearance of the rocks,
Stolbovoj consisted of stratified rocks, Ljachoff's Island, on the
contrary, like the mainland opposite, of high hills, much shattered,
probably formed of Plutonic