As soon as his health was a little improved, he set out with M. Sokoloff, in order to visit the Altaïc mountains. The whole of the neighbouring districts are diversified with hill and dale, and watered by numerous streams, which come down from the mountains, foaming and thundering over their rocky beds. On some of these eminences were found extensive copses of raspberry-bushes, around which Pallas observed the fresh tracks of bears, which are very fond of this fruit, and not unfrequently carry off women and children who resort thither to gather it. Apparently this is done merely as a frolic, or by way of terrifying interlopers from meddling with their property; for our traveller gravely observes that they do them no manner of injury. At length they discovered the summits of the Altaï, covered with snow, and towering far above everything around them. Pallas had no eye for the picturesque. What in the eyes of another man would have been sublime was to him merely fearful and horrible; but he was struck with these cones, and pyramids, and precipices, and prodigious pinnacles of rock, which, when he beheld them, appeared to support a black roof of clouds, which stretched over the whole hemisphere, and menaced the country with a second deluge. No marine petrifactions, or any sign of their ever having been submerged in the ocean, were here discoverable; but it is probable that more careful researches would have been productive of a different result. From the Altaïc mountains Pallas directed his course towards the north, crossed the Obi, traversed the governments of Kolyran, visited Tomsk, and on the 10th of October arrived at Krasnoiarsk, a city situated on the Yeniseï, in the 66th degree of north latitude. Here he set up his quarters for the winter. The autumn, he observes, is generally mild in the southern parts of Siberia; but with the winter storms and hurricanes come on, and sometimes blow during a whole month without intermission. The cold is intense. Nevertheless, about the middle of February the sun begins to exert considerable power, and sensibly diminishes the snow on the mountains.