hey were even clothed in the same
way, excepting that the men wore a number of small bells in the
belt. The number of the reindeer which the three families owned was,
according to an enumeration which I made when the herd had with
evident pleasure settled down at noon in warm sunshine on a
snow-field in the neighbourhood of the tents, only about 400, thus
considerably fewer than is required to feed three Lapp families. The
Chukches have instead a better supply of fish, and, above all,
better hunting than the Lapps; they also do not drink any coffee,
and themselves collect a part of their food from the vegetable
kingdom. The natives received us in a very friendly way, and
offered to sell or rather barter three reindeer, a transaction which
on account of our hasty departure was not carried into effect.
The mountains in the neighbourhood of Konyam Bay were high and split up
into pointed summits with deep valleys still partly filled with snow. No
glaciers appear to exist there at present. Probably however the fjords
here and the sounds, like St. Lawrence Bay, Kolyutschin Bay, and
probably all the other deeper bays on the coast of the Chukch Peninsula,
have been excavated by former glaciers. It may perhaps be uncertain
whether a true inland-ice covered the whole country; it is certain that
the ice-cap did not extend over the plains of Siberia, where it can be
proved that no Ice Age in a Scandinavian sense ever existed, and where
the state of the land from the Jurassic period onwards was indeed
subjected to some changes, but to none of the thoroughgoing mundane
revolutions which in former times geologists loved to depict in so
bright colours. At least the direction of the rivers appears to have
been unchanged since then. Perhaps even the difference between the
Siberia where Chikanovski's _Ginko_ woods grew and the mammoth roamed
about, and that where now at a limited depth under the surface
constantly frozen ground is to be met with, depends merely on the
isothermal lines having sunk slightly towards the equator.
[Illustration: KONYAM BAY. (After a photograph by L. Palander.) ]
The neighbourhood of Konyam Bay consists of crystalline rocks,
granite poor in mica, and mica-schist lowermost, and then grey
non-fossiliferous carbonate of lime, and last of all magnesian
schists, porphyry, and quartzites. On the summits of the hills the
granite has a rough trachytic appearance, but does not pass into
true trachyte. Here however
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