From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands

by Alfred Edmund Brehm

Nor day nor dark was over head,

But weird twilight.

THE TUNDRA AND ITS ANIMAL LIFE.

Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable land, a desert which owes its special character rather to the water than to the sun. Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields of ice, towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field of snow and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees attempt the struggle for existence only in the deepest valleys or on the sunniest slopes. This region is the Tundra.[6]

It is a monotonous picture which I attempt to sketch when I seek to describe the tundra, a picture gray on gray, yet not devoid of all beauty; it is a desert with which we have to do, but a desert in which life, though for many months slumbering and apparently banished, stirs periodically in wondrous fulness.

Our language possesses no synonym for the word tundra, because our Fatherland possesses no such tract of country. For the tundra is neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places it may resemble one or other of these. “Moss-steppes” someone has attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense. In my opinion the tundra most resembles one of those moors which we find—and avoid—on the broad saddles of our lofty mountains; but it differs in many and important respects even from these boggy plateaus; indeed its character is in every respect unique. The region is sometimes divided into low and high tundra, though the differences between the land under three hundred feet above sea-level and that above this line are in the tundra more apparent than real.

The low tundra is bounded by flat, wavy outlines; its valleys are shallow troughs, and even the heights, which, from a distance, look like hills or even mountains, turn out to be only flat hillocks when one approaches their base. Flatness, uniformity, expressionlessness prevail, yet that there is a certain variety in the landscape, a diversity in some of its individual features, cannot be disputed. As one wanders through the tundra for days at a time, one’s attention is often arrested by dainty, even charming little pictures, but such pictures rarely stamp themselves on the memory, since on closer examination they prove, in all important details, in setting and surroundings, in contour and colour, like too many other scenes to make a distinct impression. Notwithstanding this monotony, the general aspect of the tundra has little unity, still less grandeur, and on this account one does not become enthusiastic about the region, does not reach to the heights of emotion which other landscapes awaken, perhaps does not even attain to full enjoyment of the real beauties which, it must be admitted, even this desert possesses.

The tundra receives its greatest beauty from the sky, its greatest charm from the water. The sky is seldom quite clear and bright, though even here the sun, shining uninterruptedly for months together, can beat down hot and oppressive on the flat hills and damp valleys. The blue sky is usually seen only in isolated places through light, white, loose-layered clouds; these are often massed together into cloud-banks which form on all sides of the apparently immeasurable horizon, continually changing, shifting, assuming new forms, appearing and vanishing again, so ravishing the eye with their changeful brilliance that one almost forgets the landscape underneath. When a thunder-storm threatens after a hot day the sky darkens here and there to the deepest gray-blue, the vapour-laden clouds sink beneath the lighter ones, and the sun shines through, clear and brilliant; then the dreary, monotonous landscape is magically beautified. For light and shade now diversify the hill-tops and valleys, and the wearisome monotony of their colour gains variety and life. And when, in the middle of a midsummer night, the sun stands large and blood-red in the heavens, when all the clouds are flushed with purple from beneath, when those hill-tops which hide the luminary bear a far-reaching flaming crown of rays, when a delicate rosy haze lies over the brown-green landscape, when, in a word, the indescribable magic of the midnight sun casts its spell over the soul: then this wilderness is transformed into enchanted fields, and a blissful awe fills the heart.

Fig. 5.—The High Tundra in Northern Siberia.