On Monday morning, the 6th of June, they crossed the British line; but it was not till Wednesday, the 8th, at four in the afternoon, just ten months after leaving San Francisco, that the Oklahoma's passengers saw between the volcanic hills on the right bank of the Yukon a stretch of boggy tundra, whereon hundreds of tents gleamed, pink and saffron.

The banks are fringed with flowers, carpeted with the all-pervading moss or tundra.

All manner of men were there scattered over the tundra, and Ted became interested in two who were working together in silence.

The heavy rains had flooded the woods, and the deep worn game trails that we followed were half full of water, while the open meadows and tundra that we occasionally crossed were but little better than miniature lakes.

Where formerly an expedition of months was required, now in a few days' time he is carried to the most out-of-the-way places, to the barrens, the forests, the peaks, the mountain gladesalmost to the muskeg and the tundra.

Some object at a point where the timber ended and the tundra began cast back the sunlight with a golden glow.

" CHAPTER XII THE RUSSIAN TIGER When Rainey and Thompson, accompanied by the native, left the village to hunt the strange creature that was working havoc with the village reindeer herd, they walked directly away from the rows of deerskin houses toward the tundra at the foot of the hills where, some five miles away, the deer were herded.

Without it life is a frozen tundra where the sun never shines.

It was a slow and tiresome trip, along the dreary shores of Behring Sea, over timberless tundras, across inlets where the new ice bent beneath their weight and where the mail-carrier cautiously tested the footing with the head of his ax.

Below him lay the level tundra, merging indistinguishably with the white anchor-ice of Behring Sea; beyond that a long black streak of open water, underscoring the sky as if to emphasize the significance of that empty horizon, a horizon which for many months would remain unsmudged by smoke.

Being penniless he looked for work, and his first job came from a small Jewish merchant, named Guth, who offered him a hundred dollars to do the assessment work on a tundra claim.

He heard talk of a prehistoric sea-beach line, a streak of golden sands which paralleled the shore and lay hidden below the tundra mud.

" "I did the work on a tundra claim," said Folsom; "the Lulu" "The Lulu!"

He minds so quick I think he'd be a fine leader; an' it looks like he'd be fast from the way he chases rabbits and squirrels out on the tundra.

It 'ud be a terrible thing if she saw one out on the tundra, an' left the trail t' try and ketch him; or if she smelled some of 'em in the crowd an' made a break for 'em just when she ought t' be ready t' start.

The town of Nome, extending along the shore of Bering Sea for nearly two miles, is not built back to any extent on the tundra, which stretches away, a bog in summer, to the low-lying hills in the distance.

Far away across the sedgy tundra lay the sea, a line of molten gold in the last rays of the belated June sunset.

Then in the low foot-hills had come milder weather; and the route was fairly good, though it lay buried under freshly fallen snow through which Baldy led, picking his way with unerring precision across the trackless tundra.

Many of the herds which we saw in northern Kamchatka numbered from eight to twelve thousand; and we were told that a certain rich Korak, who lived in the middle of the great tundra, had three immense herds in different places, numbering in the aggregate thirty thousand head.

I have very sincere and hearty admiration for many Wandering Koraks whom I met on the great Siberian tundras but their settled relatives are the worst specimens of men that I ever saw in all northern Asia, from Bering Strait to the Ural Mountains.

How did you cross the tundras; with the Koraks?

The intervening country consisted of great moss tundras impassable in summer, and perfectly destitute of timber; and that portion of it which lay north-east of the last settlement was utterly uninhabitable on account of the absence of wood.

The disappearance of snow and the appearance of vegetation are almost simultaneous; and although the tundras or moss steppes, continue for some time to hold water like a saturated sponge, they are covered with flowers and blossoming blueberry bushes, and show no traces of the long, cold winter which has so recently ended.

They make the great moss tundras in some places utterly uninhabitable, and force even the reindeer to seek the shelter and the cooler atmosphere of the mountains.

We, moreover, had just come from the desolate moss tundras and wild, lonely forests of arctic Asia and were in a state of mind to be impressed by anything that had architectural beauty, or indicated culture, luxury, and wealth.