seen,
the extraction of gold from the sand of Norton Sound, two hundred yards
or more out from the beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of
water with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why, by the exact
converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining; by freezing down instead of
thawing down. The ice is cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost
but not quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water below it, and
presently the hole is chopped down a little farther, leaving always a
thin cake above the water. A canvas chute is arranged over the shaft,
with a head like a ship's ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as it is frozen more
and more ice is removed until the bottom is reached, surrounded and
protected by a cylindrical shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed
and the gold it contains washed out. They told us they were making good
money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.

[Sidenote: ICE TRAVEL]

We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik, the people of
which are looked after by a mission of the Swedish Evangelical Church on
Golofnin Bay, which we should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off
the trail, and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
of this body until we reached Unalaklik. Next day, climbing and
descending considerable grades in warm, misty weather, we reached
Golofnin Bay, pursued it some distance, and left it by a very steep,
long hill that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of which
we were once more on the beach of the sound--and at the road-house for
the night. From that place the trail no longer hugged the coast but
struck out boldly across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point,
where we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for Isaac's
Point, most of the travelling during a long day in which we made
forty-eight miles being four or five miles from land. The day was clear,
and the shore-line of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as
we proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage. The
road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a great bluff, and
right across the ice lay Texas Point, for which we should make a
bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes the traveller must go all round Norton
Bay, but at this time the ice was in good condition and our route cut
across