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the water is unable to carry with it the huge ice-floes,
which in narrow places are heaped up in colossal masses,
damming up the river until the barrier is broken, when,
carried along with resistless force, it destroys everything in
its way, sweeping away earth, rocks, and entire groves of
trees, which are mown down like grass. As we descended
the Lena in the middle of June gigantic blocks of ice
were still lying on the shores of the river, some twenty
feet or more above its water-line.
The summer in Yakutsk is short, only four months in
the south and two months in the north; but it is bright
and usually warm, indeed in some places the mercury
even touches 103° Fahr. on occasion. The ever-frozen soil,
which in the neighbourhood of the city of Yakutsk melts to
a depth of 3 to 4 feet, and in the northern regions to
barely a foot at times, becomes so heated that you can
hardly walk barefooted on the sand. The first half of the
summer is usually dry, and the plants then receive moisture
exclusively from the melting soil. If the soil in the autumn
has been sufficiently saturated by rain, there will be no lack
of this; if not, the crops will fail from drought. During
the latter part of the summer the quantity of rain is usually
so large that it is difficult to prevent the crops from rotting.
Great variations occur also in temperature in summer, thus a
northerly storm may in a few hours lower the thermometer
from 85° to freezing-point, and snow may fall in July at a
distance of fifteen hundred miles south of the Arctic Ocean.
The perennially frozen soil begins in the southern parts
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