But variety and life are also given by the jewels of the tundra—its innumerable lakes. Distributed singly or in groups, lying beside or rising above each other, stretching out into water-basins miles in breadth, or shrinking into little pools, they occupy the centre of every hollow, beautify every valley, almost every glen, sparkle in the all-enlivening sunshine, and gray and colourless though they may be, assume, if seen from the top of a hill, the deep blue of mountain lakes. And when the sunlight flashes and twinkles on their mirroring waves, or when they, too, are touched by the rosy glow of midnight, they stand out from the surrounding gloom like living lights, on which the eye delights to linger.
Much grander, though still gloomy and monotonous, is the spectacle presented by the high tundra. Here the mountains—for such they are—have all the charms of height. They almost always rise precipitously, and the chains they form have much-broken lines, and in all suitable places the snowy sheets which cover them become glaciers. Tundra in the strict sense is only to be found where the water does not find rapid outlet; the whole remaining country seems so different from the low grounds that only the essentially similar vegetation proclaims it tundra. The boulders, which in the low grounds are turfed over with thick layers of dead plant remains, are here almost everywhere exposed; endless heaps of gigantic blocks cover the slopes and fill the valleys; boulders form the substratum of wide, almost flat surfaces on which the traveller treads hesitatingly, as he ponders over the difficult riddle regarding the forces which have distributed the blocks over these vast surfaces with almost unvarying regularity. But everywhere between them the water trickles and glides, ripples and swells, rushes and roars, rages and thunders down to the low ground. From the slopes it flows in trickling threads, converging runlets, and murmuring brooklets; from the crevices of the glaciers it breaks forth in milky torrents; it enters the water-basins in turbid rivulets; it escapes from the purifying lakes in crystalline streams, and whirling and foaming, hissing and raging, it hurries onwards down the valleys, forming alternate waterfalls and whirlpools, till it reaches the low tundra, a river, or the sea. But the sun, as often as it breaks through the clouds, floods this unique mountain region also with its magic colours, defines every hill and valley, illumines every snowfield, makes every glacier and ravine conspicuous and telling, gives effect to every peak, ridge and cliff, shows every lake as a clear and smiling mountain eye, spreads, morning and evening, the blue haze of distance like a delicate veil over the background of the picture, and, at midnight, floods the whole with its deepest rays, so that it is bathed in rosy light. Surely even the tundra is not without its charms.
In some places, though very rarely, the vegetation gives a certain form and beauty to the scenery. Pines and firs, if not altogether confined to the south, are only to be found in the most sheltered valleys. The few firs which are to be seen look as if they had been seized by a giant hand and twisted like a screw, and they do not thrive in the higher districts. The birches penetrate farther, but even they are stunted and bent like grizzled dwarfs. The larches alone here and there hold the field, and grow to be really trees, but they cannot be described as characteristic of the tundra. The most characteristic plant is certainly the dwarf-birch. Only under exceptionally favourable circumstances attaining to a yard in height, it predominates over by far the greater part of the tundra so absolutely that all other bushes and shrubs seem only to have sprung up between the birches. It spreads over all tracts where it can take root, from the shore of the sea or river to the tops of the mountains, a more or less thick covering so equal in height that great stretches look as if they had been shorn along the top; it recedes only where the ground is so soaked with water that it forms swamp or morass; it is stunted only where the heights are covered with infertile quartz or with stiff clay, which hardens readily in the sun; but it strives for mastery with the bog-moss on all the low grounds and with the reindeer-moss on every height. Areas of many square miles are so thickly clothed—one might almost say felted—that only the indestructible bog-moss ventures to assert its claim to the soil beside, or rather under the birches. In other less moist places we find dwarf-birches, sweet-willow, and marsh-andromeda mixed together. In the same way various berry-bearing bushes are often mixed, especially cowberries, crowberries, cranberries, and whortleberries.
If the ground lies below the level of the surrounding plains, and is therefore very moist, the bog-moss gains the day, and, gradually crowding out the dwarf-birch, forms great swelling cushions. As the root-parts rapidly die away into peat, these cushions become higher and more extensive until the water impedes any further advance, or else they break up into dome-like hillocks. If the basin be very flat, the accumulated water rarely forms a lake or pond, scarcely even a pool, but soaks through the soil to an indefinite depth, and so forms a morass whose thin but tough covering of interlacing sedge-roots can only be trodden in safety by the broad-hoofed reindeer; and even his steps, and the deeply-sinking runners of the sledge, make it yield and tremble like jelly.
When the depression becomes a short confined trough, without outlet, into which a streamlet flows, however slowly, the morass becomes a bog, or lower down, a swamp. In the first of these, reeds, in the second downy willows (sallows), a second characteristic plant of the tundra, attain to luxuriant growth. Though only in very favourable circumstances becoming as tall as a man, these plants form thickets which may be literally impenetrable. Their branches and roots interlace to an even greater extent than do those of the dwarf-firs on the mountains, forming an inextricable maze which can best be compared to a felt compacted out of all the different parts of the willow. It withstands the strongest arm, when one tries to clear a path through it, and it offers so much obstruction to the foot that the most persistent explorer soon gives up the attempt to pierce it, and turns aside, or retraces his steps. This he does the more readily as the substratum is in most cases morass or an almost continuous series of marshy, slimy pools whose fathomableness one is unwilling even to try.
As the traveller journeys through the tundra, he recognizes that the whole region presents to the eye the individual features already described, in regular alternation and monotonous repetition. Only where a large river of considerable volume flows through the low tundra is there any real change. Such a river deposits on its banks the masses of sand it has carried down; and the wind, which blows constantly and usually violently, piles these gradually up into dunes along the banks; thus a soil foreign to the tundra is formed. On these sand-hills the larch grows, even in the tundra of Siberia, to a stately tree, and becomes, in association with willows and dwarf alder bushes, an ornament to the landscape. In the neighbourhood of small lakes the trees may even be grouped together, and, with the shrubs already named, form a natural park which would not escape observation even in a much richer and more fertile district, and is here so very remarkable that it leaves a lasting impression.
Fig. 6.—Peregrine Falcons and Lemmings.
When the larch has taken root in the sand-hills, there grow up under its sheltering branches other tall-stemmed plants such as sharp-leaved willows, mountain ash, black alder, and woodbine bushes, and there spring from the sand many flowers which one thought to have left far behind in the south. The surprised southerner is cheered by the red glory of the willow-herb; the charming wild rose clings close to the motherly earth, decorating it with its slender stems and its flowers; the bright forget-me-not looks up with home-like greeting; here hellebore and chives, valerian and thyme, carnations and blue-bells, bird-vetch and alpine vetch, ranunculus and immortelles, lady’s-smock, Jacob’s-ladder, cinquefoil, love-lies-bleeding, and others find a home in the desert. In such places more plants grow than one had expected, but the traveller is certainly modest in his expectations when he has seen the same poverty all around for days and weeks together, always dwarf-birches and sallows, marsh-andromeda and sedge, reindeer-moss and bog-moss; has refreshed himself with the stunted crowberries and cranberries half-hidden in the moss, half-creeping on the ground, and has been obliged to take the cloudberries which decorate the moss-cushion as flowers; when he has tramped over them and among them for days together always hoping for a change, and always being disappointed. Every familiar plant from the south reminds him of happier regions; he greets it as a dear friend whose value is only realized when he has begun to fear losing him.[7]
It seems strange that the plants above-named and many others should spring only from the dry sand of the dunes, but the apparent riddle is solved when we know that it is only the sand thus piled up, that becomes sufficiently warmed in the months of uninterrupted sunshine for these plants to flourish. Nowhere else throughout the tundra is this the case. Moor and bog, morass and swamp, even the lakes with water several yards in depth only form a thin summer covering over the eternal winter which reigns in the tundra, with destructive as well as with preserving power. Wherever one tries to penetrate to any depth in the soil one comes—in most cases scarcely a yard from the surface—upon ice, or at least on frozen soil, and it is said that one must dig about a hundred yards before breaking through the ice-crust of the earth. It is this crust which prevents the higher plants from vigorous growth, and allows only such to live as are content with the dry layer of soil which thaws in summer. It is only by digging that one can know the tundra for what it is: an immeasurable and unchangeable ice-vault which has endured, and will continue to endure, for hundreds of thousands of years. That it has thus endured is proved indisputably by the remains of prehistoric animals embedded in it, and thus preserved for us. In 1807 Adams dug from the ice of the tundras the giant mammoth, with whose flesh the dogs of the Yakuts sated their hunger, although it must have died many thousands of years before, for the race became extinct in the incalculably distant past. The icy tundra had faithfully preserved the carcase of this primitive elephant all through these hundreds of thousands of years.[8]