The panorama of land and water here in summer is an exceedingly attractive one—in its effect fully as charming as is the lovely spread of Sitka Sound; but its character is widely opposed. If we chance to view Oonalashka in clear sunshine during a day in the summer months, we will recall this picture to our mind’s eye often with positive pleasure. Here, strung along for half a mile just back of a curved and pebbly beach, is an irregular row of frame, single-story cottages, a large Greek church, and a fine parsonage, three or four big wooden warehouses with a wharf running well into the harbor, two or more trading-stores, one of them quite imposing in its size, and fifty or sixty barraboras—these constitute the abiding-places of the four hundred residents of Illoolook. They are placed upon a narrow spit of alluvium that divides the sea from the waters of a small creek which runs just back of the village right under these hills that abruptly rise there, to rise again, farther inland, to higher peaks in turn. A rich, dark, vivid green covers and clothes the mountain slopes, the valleys, and the hills, even to the loftiest summits, where only a light patch of glistening snow is now and then seen relieved thereon by the grayish-brown rocky shingle. These hills and mountains, rising on every hand above us from the land-locked shores of Captain’s Harbor, bear no timber whatsoever, but the mantle of circumpolar sphagnum, interspersed with grasses and a large flora, makes ample amends for that deficiency and hide their nakedness completely—in their narrow defiles and over the bottom-land patches grass grows with tropical luxuriance, waist-high, with small clumps of stunted willow-bushes clinging to the banks of little water-courses and rivulets. This is the only growing timber found anywhere on the Aleutian chain. It never becomes stouter than the thickness of a man’s wrist, and the tallest bushes in scattered thickets are never over six or seven feet high, rapidly dwindling in growth as they ascend the hillsides. Especially gratifying is the landscape, thus adorned, to the senses of any ship-worn traveller, who literally feasts his eyes upon it. But if he should go ashore and step upon what appeared to him, from the vessel’s deck, to be a firm greensward, he will find instead a quaking, tremulous bog, or he will slide over a moss-grown shingle, painted and concealed by cryptogamic life, where he fondly anticipated a free and ready path. The thick, dense carpet of crowberry[77] plants that is spread everywhere over the hillsides, into which the pedestrian sinks ankle-deep at every step, makes a stroll very laborious when undertaken at any distance from the sea-beach.