afterwards, that is on the 3rd of November, while Nindemann lay on the bed and Noros was sitting on the table, a man came in dressed in fur. "My God, Mr. Melville!" said Noros, recognising him as soon as he spoke. "Are you alive? We thought that the whale-boats were all dead!" The exile had handed the note to Melville, whom he knew as the captain, and his difficulty in understanding the sailors had been in their speaking of one boat while he had only seen the other. The whale-boat crew had reached a village opposite to where he lived, and he had agreed to take them to Bulun, and he was on his way there to arrange for their transport when he heard of the sailors. Like a sensible man he ordered the men to be sent to Bulun, and had hurried there, made his arrangements with the commandant and returned to Melville, who, seeing the urgency of the case as soon as he read the letter, had started at once, leaving his party to follow. Melville, as soon as possible, went off along the track of the two sailors, who were too weak to go with him, and eventually found the chronometer and the log-books and other records; but the winter was too far advanced for him to do more, and he had to return, after a journey of over six hundred miles, to try again in the spring. Then, accompanied by Nindemann, he went north, and came upon the bodies of the commander and those who had perished with him, and three or four feet behind De Long, as if he had tossed it over his shoulder, lay the journal in which the last page was but a chronicle of death after death. This chapter must conclude with another tragedy. In 1885 Dr. Bunge and Baron Toll made some important investigations in the neighbourhood of the mouth of the Yana; and next year Bunge among the fossils of Liakhoff Island found not only mammoth and rhinoceros, but horse, musk-ox and deer, and two new species of ox. To these Toll, after discovering that there were flourishing trees on Kotelnoi in the time of the mammoth—nearly two hundred miles north of their present limit—added frozen carcases of musk-ox and rhinoceros, and bones of antelope and tiger. In 1902 Toll, pushing his geological researches further north, reached Bennett Island, where he collected bones of the mammoth and other recent mammals, while the main mass of the plateau he identified as of Cambrian age. These discoveries he included in the record announcing his intention of leaving for Kotelnoi, which was found in 1904 by the expedition sent to his relief, for he was never seen alive again. CHAPTER VII BERING STRAIT