"The groundwork of all this variegated scenery," says Seebohm, "is more beautiful and varied still—lichens and mosses of almost every conceivable colour, from the cream-coloured reindeer-moss to the scarlet-cupped trumpet-moss, interspersed with a brilliant alpine flora, gentians, anemones, saxifrages, and hundreds of plants, each a picture in itself, the tall aconites, both the blue and yellow species, the beautiful cloudberry, with its gay white blossom and amber fruit, the fragrant _Ledum palustre_ and the delicate pink _Andromeda polifolia_. In the sheltered valleys and deep water-courses a few stunted birches, and sometimes large patches of willow scrub, survive the long severe winter, and serve as cover for willow-grouse or ptarmigan. The Lapland bunting and red-throated pipit are everywhere to be seen, and certain favoured places are the breeding-grounds of plovers and sandpipers of many species. So far from meriting the name of Barren Ground, the tundra is for the most part a veritable paradise in summer. But it has one almost fatal drawback—it swarms with mosquitoes." [Illustration: OSTIAK MAN] [Illustration: SAMOYED MAN] The beauty of the tundra is, however, transient and skin deep; it is only such plants as can live in the soil that thaws that survive. Wherever the ground is dug into, ice is sure to be reached; in fact, it may be said that ice is one of the rocks of the subsoil, and in some places these strata of ice that never melts have been found to be three hundred feet thick—ice that has remained in block since the mammoths got into cold storage in it ages ago, for otherwise they would not have lasted intact in skin and flesh as many have done, like the very first discovered in a complete state, that chipped out by Adams in 1807.