Identifier: ourlostexplorers01newc (find matches)
Title: Our lost explorers : the narrative of the Jeannette Arctic Expedition as related by the survivors, and in the records and last journals of Lieutenant De Long
Year: 1888 (1880s)
Authors: Newcomb, Raymond Lee
Subjects: De Long, George W. (George Washington), 1844-1881 Jeannette (Ship) Jeannette Expedition (1879-1881)
Publisher: Hartford, Conn., American Pub. Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
ion. Insummer its covering of water-soaked moss struggles intolife only to be lashed at intervals with pitiless whips of icyrain until it is again buried in snow; and in winter fiercegales, known to the Russians as ^ poorgas,^ sweep across itfrom the Arctic Ocean and score its snowy surface intolong, hard, polished grooves called sastrugi. Through-out the entire winter it presents a picture of inexpress-ible dreariness and desolation. Even at noon, when thesea-like expanse of storm-drifted snow is flushed faintly bythe red gloomy light of tlie low-hanging sun, it depresses thespirits and chills the imagination with its suggestions of infi-nite dreariness and solitude ; but at night, wlien it ceases tobe bounded even by the horizon, because the horizon can nolonger be distinguished when the pale green streamers ofthe aurora begin to sweep back and forth over a dark seg-ment of a circle in the north, lighting up the whole whiteworld with transitory flashes of ghostly radiance and adding
Text Appearing After Image:
96 THE JEANNETTE ARCTIC EXPEDITION, mystery to darkness and solitude,—then the Siberian tundranot only becomes inexpressibly lonely and desolate, buttakes on a strange, half terrible unearthliness which awesand yet fascinates the imagination. In the region of the Lower Lena, and to the westward,have been found specimens of a huge rhinoceros, and of anelephant larger than that now existing—popularly called themammoth. It is so named from the Russian mamont, or Tar-tar mamma (the earth), because the heathen Yakutes be-

Note About Images