sed, and even advocated, by the merchant princes of
Irkutsk. A railway to Gijiga would open up Kamtchatka, with its valuable
minerals, furs, and lumber, and also Nelkan, near Ayan, where gold has
lately been discovered in such quantities that a well-known Siberian
millionaire has actually commenced a narrow-gauge railway about two
hundred miles in length, to connect the new gold-fields with the sea.
Even this miniature line is to cost an enormous sum, for it must pass
through a region as mountainous and densely wooded as the eight hundred
odd miles which separate Yakutsk from the coast. But although this
latter section of the Franco-American line, short as it is, would entail
a fabulous outlay, there is here, at any rate, some _raison-d'etre_ for
a railway, viz., the vast and varied resources of the region through
which it would pass, whereas to the north of Gijiga on the one hand, and
Verkhoyansk on the other, we enter a land of desolation, thousands of
miles in extent, chiefly composed of tundra, as yet unprospected, it is
true; but probably as unproductive, minerally and agriculturally, as an
Irish bog. The reader is already aware that tundra is impassable in
summer, for its consistency is then that of a wet bath sponge. The foot
sinks in over the knee at every step, and a good walker can scarcely
cover a mile within the hour. In winter the hard and frozen surface
affords good going for a dog-sled and could, no doubt, be made to
support a rolling mass of metal; but even then I doubt whether the thaws
and floods of springtime would not find the rails and sleepers at sixes
and sevens. This opinion is, of course, purely theoretical, for the
experiment of laying a line of such magnitude under such hopeless
conditions has yet to be tried.

Chat Moss in England is the nearest approach I can think of to these
Siberian swamps, but the railway across the former is only four miles
long, and cost, I am told, something like thirty thousand pounds. At
this rate the tundra section of the Bering Straits Railway would alone
involve an outlay of twenty million sterling; probably far more, for
every foot of timber for the roadway would have to be imported into this
treeless waste. And how is this expenditure going to be repaid by these
barren deserts, in winter of ice, and in summer of mud and mosquitoes.
Let another Klondike be discovered near, say, Sredni-Kolymsk, and I have
no doubt that surveys for a line to this place would be com