The inhabitants of Sagalien, one of the northerly Asiatic islands, are a race called the Anios, the same people who form the aboriginal population of Jesso, and some tribes of whom also dwell on the opposite shores of Manchooria. They are uncultured and pagan savages, who dwell in huts built of rough logs, and live upon the proceeds of their fishery and the chase. Their women are ugly and little; the men are tall, lithe, straight, and strong, with flowing hair and unkempt beard and moustaches. Like the Samoiedes they worship the bear; feasting the living animals on the choicest dried fish, and planting young pines round the cages in which they are kept. Their graves they regard with similar feelings of veneration. * * * * * The other Hyperborean races do not widely differ in character and physical appearance from those already described. [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. THE MOUNTAINS. "Blue, and baseless, and beautiful, Did the boundless mountains bear Their folded shadows into the golden air. The comfortlessness of their chasms was full Of orient cloud and undulating mist, Which, when their silver cataracts hissed, Quivered with panting colour." RUSKIN. From the Polar deserts to the icy crests of the mountains the transition is natural. There are here, so to speak, two varieties of a single class of deserts, which we might call the Deserts of Cold, since the coldness of the climate is the dominant cause which in both renders the soil more and more unproductive and uninhabitable. In effect, it is not only in departing from the Tropic Zone that we see the mean temperature gradually sinking even to the point whereat all liquids congeal and all terrestrial life becomes impossible. The same phenomenon occurs in proportion as we ascend in the atmosphere. It is a consequence of the properties of the gaseous medium which envelops our globe, and takes place in obedience to certain laws which science has been able to ascertain and define. We know now that the decline of the temperature is always in proportion to the elevation of places or of the atmospheric strata; but the value of the relation which exists between the two terms may be modified by various circumstances--such as the direction of the prevailing wind, the hygrometrical state of the atmosphere, the hour of the day, and particularly the climate, or, to speak more exactly, the thermic latitude. The warmer the climate, the more sensible the difference between the temperature of the air at the level of the sea and that which we observe at a certain height; greater, nevertheless, is the height to which we must rise to find the region where the thermometer never descends below 0°, and where, consequently, the snows and ices of the mountains do not melt in any season.