In Greenland the vegetation is more truly of an Arctic character than even in Iceland. The valleys are covered with marsh-plants and dingy mosses; the gloomy rocks are encrusted with lichens; while the grasses on the meadow-lands that border the fiords and inlets are nearly four times less varied than those of Iceland.
The flora of Iceland is approximative to that of Great Britain; yet only one in every four of British plants is included in it. The total number of species may be computed at eight hundred and seventy, of which more than half blossom; this proportion is greater than prevails in Scotland, but then only thirty-two are of woody texture. They are scattered about in groups according as they prefer a marshy, volcanic, dry, or marine soil. Many bloom in the immediate vicinity of the hot springs; some not far from the brink of the basin of the Great Geyser, where every other plant is petrified; and several species of confervæ flourish in a spring the waters of which are hot enough, it is said, to boil an egg.
From the nature of the Arctic forests, the reader will be prepared to learn that they are not inhabited, like those of the Tropics, by swarms of animals; or made musical by the songs of birds, like our European woods. Even the echoes are silent, except when the hoarse wind bears to them the peculiar cry of the reindeer, the howl of the wolf, or the sharp scream of some bird of prey. Insect life, however, is active and abundant; and our Arctic travellers have suffered greatly from the legions of gnats which haunt their swampy recesses.
Passing from the forest region into the treeless wastes, we may glance once again at their strikingly impressive features. North of the 62nd parallel no corn can ripen, on account of the fatal power of the winds which pour down from the Arctic Ocean. As we advance to the northward, a wide-spread area of desolation stretches before us: salt steppes, stony plains, boundless swamps, and lakes of salt and fresh water. So terrible is the cold that the spongy soil is perpetually frozen to the depth of some hundred feet below the surface; and the surface itself, though not thawed until the end of June, is again ice-bound by the middle of September. One of the most graphic sketches with which we are acquainted of the extreme Siberian desert is furnished by Admiral von Wrangel, who travelled during the winter from the mouth of the Kolyma to Behring Strait.
Here, he says, endless snows and ice-crusted rocks bound the horizon; Nature lies shrouded in all but perpetual winter; life is a constant conflict with privation and with the terrors of cold and hunger; the grave of Nature, containing only the bones of another world. The people, and even the snow, throw off a continual vapour; and this evaporation is instantly changed into millions of needles of ice, which make a noise in the air like the sound of torn satin or the rustle of thick silk. The reindeer take to the forest, or crowd together for heat; and the raven alone, the dark bird of winter, still smites the frosty air with heavy laborious wing, leaving behind him a long trail of thin vapour to mark the course of his solitary flight. The trunks of the thickest trees are rent with a loud clang, masses of rock are torn from their sites, the ground in the valleys is split into a myriad fissures, from which the waters that are underneath bubble up, throwing off a cloud of smoke, and immediately congealing into ice. The atmosphere grows dense; the glistening stars are dimmed. The dogs outside the huts of the Siberians burrow in the snow, and their howling, at intervals of six or eight hours, interrupts the general silence of winter.
The abundance of fur-bearing animals in the less rigorous parts of the tundras has induced the hardy Russians to colonize and build towns on these confines of the Frozen World. Yakutsk, on the river Lena, in 62° 1′ 30″ N., may be regarded, perhaps, as the coldest town on the Earth. The ground is perpetually frozen to the depth of more than 400 feet, of which three feet only are thawed in summer, when Fahrenheit’s thermometer frequently marks 77° in the shade. Yet in winter the rigour of the climate is so extreme that mercury is constantly frozen for two and occasionally even for three months.
From the data set forth in the preceding pages, the reader will conclude that, as indeed results from physical laws, the line of perpetual snow will be found to descend lower and lower on advancing to the Pole. By the line of perpetual snow we mean, of course, the limit above which a continual frost endures. Now, this limit varies according to climate. The lower the temperature, the lower the snow-line; the higher the temperature, the higher the snow-line. In the Tropics it does not sink below the summits of the loftiest mountains. Thus, at 1° from the Equator, where the mean temperature at the sea-level is 84°.2, the snow-line must be sought at the elevation of 15,203 feet; in 51° 30’ lat., the latitude of London, it is usually found at about 5900 feet; in lat. 80°, where the mean temperature is 33°.6, it sinks to 457 feet. These figures, however, represent its normal elevations; but temperature, as we all know, is greatly affected by local circumstances, and therefore the perpetual snow-line varies greatly in height. Owing to causes already explained, the snow-line in the Circumpolar Regions sinks to a very low level; and, therefore, many mountainous regions or elevated table-lands, such as Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Novaia Zemlaia, which, in a more temperate climate, would bloom with emerald slopes and waving woods, are covered with huge glaciers and fields of ice, with apparently interminable reaches of untrodden snow.
It should be noted, however, that nowhere does the perpetual snow-line descend to the water’s edge; nowhere has the spell of winter absolutely crushed the life out of all vegetation. Lichens and grasses, on which the reindeer gains its hardy subsistence, are found near lat. 80°; even on the awful plains of Melville Island the snow melts at midsummer; and the deserts of New Siberia afford food for considerable numbers of lemmings. As far as man has reached to the north, says a popular and accurate writer, vegetation, when fostered by a sheltered situation and the refraction of solar heat from the rocks, has everywhere been found to rise to a considerable altitude above the level of the sea; and should there be land at the North Pole, we may reasonably suppose that it is destitute neither of animal nor vegetable life. It would be quite wrong to conclude that the cold of winter invariably increases as we approach the Pole, the temperature of a land being controlled by many other causes besides its latitude. Even in the most northern regions visited by man, the influence of the sea, particularly where favoured by warm currents, considerably mitigates the severity of the winter, while at the same time it diminishes the heat of summer. On the other hand, the large continental tracts of Asia or America that slope towards the Pole, possess a more rigorous winter and a fiercer summer than many coast lands or islands situated far nearer to the Pole. For example: the western shores of Novaia Zemlaia, fronting a wide expanse of sea, have an average winter temperature of only -4°, and a mean summer temperature which rises very little above the freezing-point of water (+ 36° 30’); while Yakutsk, situated in the centre of Siberia, and 20° nearer to the Equator, has a winter temperature of -36° 6’, and a summer of + 66° 6’.