words of the Pitlekaj _lingua franca_ not yet forgotten, to bring us
a salutation from our friends among the ice of the north, thanks for
the past and good wishes for the coming year, mixed with Chukch
complaints of the great heat hereaway in the neighbourhood of the
equator, which for fur-clad men was said to be altogether
unendurable.

We remained at Aden only a couple of days, received in a friendly
manner by the then acting Swedish-Norwegian consul, who took us
round to the most remarkable points of the desolate environs of this
important haven, among others to the immense, but then and generally
empty water reservoirs which the English have made in the
neighbourhood of the town. No place in the high north, not the
granite cliffs of the Seven Islands, or the pebble rocks of Low
Island on Spitzbergen, not the mountain sides on the east coast of
Novaya Zemlya, or the figure-marked ground at Cape Chelyuskin is so
bare of vegetation as the environs of Aden and the parts of the east
coast of the Red Sea which we saw. Nor can there be any comparison
in respect of the abundance of animal life between the equatorial
countries and the Polar regions we have named. On the whole animal
life in the coast lands of the highest north, where the mountains
are high and surrounded by deep water, appears to be richer in
individuals than in the south, and this depends not only on the
populousness of the fowl-colonies and the number of large animals of
the chase that we find there, but also on the abundance of
evertebrates in the sea. At least the dredgings made from the _Vega_
during the voyage between Japan and Ceylon gave an exceedingly
scanty yield in comparison with our dredgings north of Cape
Chelyuskin.

Aden is now an important port of call for the vessels which pass
through the Suez Canal from European waters to the Indian Ocean, and
also one of the chief places for the export of the productions of
Yemen or Arabia Felix. In the latter respect the harbour was of
importance as far back as about four hundred years ago, when the
Italian, LUDOVICO DE VARTHEMA, was for a considerable time kept a
prisoner by the Arab tribes at the place.

In the harbour of Aden the _Vega_ was saluted by the firing of
twenty-one guns and the hoisting of the Swedish flag at the maintop
of an Italian war vessel, the despatch steamer _Esploratore_ under
the command of Captain AMEZAGA. The _Esploratore_ took part in an
expedition consisting of three wa