North of the 62d parallel of latitude corn does not ripen on account of the biting blasts from the Icy Ocean, which sweep supreme over these unprotected wastes. In a higher latitude, even the interminable forests of gloomy fir are seen no more: all is a wide-spreading desolation of salt steppes, boundless swamps, and lakes of salt and fresh water. The cold is so intense there that the spongy soil is perpetually frozen to the depth of some hundred feet below the surface; and the surface itself, not thawed before the end of June, is again ice-bound by the middle of September, and deep snow covers the ground nine or ten months in the year. Happily, gales of wind are not frequent during winter, but when they do occur no living thing ventures to face them. The Russian Admiral Wrangel, who travelled during the most intense cold from the mouth of the river Kolyma to Behring’s Strait, gives an appalling account of these deserts. “Here endless snows and ice-covered 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, which contains only the bones of another world. The people, and even the snow smokes, 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 thick silk. The reindeer take to the forest, or crowd together for heat, and the raven alone, the dark bird of winter, still cleaves the icy air with slow and heavy wing, leaving behind him a long line of thin vapour, marking the track of his solitary flight. The trunks of the thickest trees are rent with a loud noise, masses of rock are torn from their sites, the ground in the valleys is rent into yawning fissures, from which the waters that are underneath rise, giving off a cloud of vapour, and immediately become ice. The atmosphere becomes dense, and 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.”[33] In many parts of Siberia, however, the sun, though long absent from these dismal regions, does not leave them to utter darkness. The extraordinary brilliancy of the stars, and the gleaming snowlight, produce a kind of twilight, which is augmented by the splendid coruscations of the aurora borealis. The scorching heat of the summer’s sun produces a change like magic on the southern provinces of the Siberian wilderness. The snow is scarcely gone before the ground is covered with verdure, and flowers of various hues blossom, bear their seeds, and die in a few months, when Winter resumes his empire. A still shorter-lived vegetation scantily covers the plains in the far north, and, on the shores of the Icy Ocean, even reindeer-moss grows scantily.