The region from the White Sea to the Ural Mountains is inhabited by a race called Samoyeds, brachycephalic Mongols with a Finnish admixture. Of short stature, averaging a fraction over 5 feet, they have the short broad Mongolian face, long oblique eyes, high cheek-bones and flat noses. Like the Lapps they are dependent for locomotion, clothes, and food on their herds of reindeer, and they also have dogs for rounding up the deer. Their boots, loose tunics, and winter cloaks are of deer-skin, and the Samoyed hut (_choon_) is made of birch poles covered with deer-skin for winter, and with strips of birch-bark sewn with sinews in summer. Like the Lapps too, and for the same reason--to drive off mosquitos--they light their fires inside the _choon_. The Samoyed sledge, drawn by three to five reindeer abreast, consists of two thick runners curved upwards in front, about 9 feet long and 30 inches wide, with four uprights and cross bars. These people worship great numbers of wooden idols grouped round a seven-headed idol of Kesaks. They come to the settlement of Khabarova, near the narrow strait which separates the mainland from the island of Waigatz, during the summer; and they look upon the latter as the holy island on which they wish to be buried. Eastward of the Samoyed country is the Siberian coast, extending for 2000 miles of longitude along the Polar Ocean, a vast tundra traversed by three great rivers--the Obi and its tributary the Irtish, the Yenisei, and the Lena. To the east of the Lena there are three smaller rivers, the Yena, Indigirka, and Kolyma, but all have their sources far to the south of the Arctic Circle. Some other streams, merely rising in the tundra, flow into the Polar Ocean. These are the Piasina, Taimir, Khatanga, Anabara, and Olenek between the Yenisei and Lena, and the Alaseia between the Indigirka and Kolyma. The three great rivers have remarkable width and volume. The Yenisei is more than three miles wide for at least a thousand miles, and a mile wide for another thousand. The 200 miles of delta have a width of 20 miles. The sudden melting of the winter accumulations of snow gives rise to floods of great magnitude. Vast harvests of ice are thus annually poured out. The tundra is generally a slightly rolling plain sloping towards the rivers, intercepted by deep river valleys with precipitous sides. The ground is frozen for several hundreds of feet below the surface, and for eight months, from October to May, the tundra is a sheet of snow 6 feet thick. In the summer a wild-looking country appears, full of small lakes, swamps, and streams, swarming with mosquitos and frequented by myriads of birds. The sun brings to life a brilliant Alpine flora, and the tundra has a carpet of grass and mosses. The Siberian shores of the Polar Ocean forming the edge of the tundra are for the most part low and flat, and Cape Chelyuskin, the northern termination of the Taimir Peninsula in 77° 36′ N., is a low promontory.