The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

342 RUSSIA IX EUROPE.continued eastwards into Russian territory by deeply furrowed plateaux, with hereand there a few eminences over 1,550 feet high. The small range terminatingnorth of the Gulf of Kandalaksha, at the western extremity of the White Sea, hassome peaks said to rise 3,000 feet, but in the east crests of 350 feet are rarely met.The surface is almost everywhere covered with a vast peat bed, filling up all theirregularities of the ground, except along the frontier, where the peat-clad granite-The Isthmus of Kaxdalaksha.Scale 1 : 2,525,000.is intersected by deep ravines filledwith perpetual snow.East of the river Mezen a range ofhills, rooted southwards in the parma,or wooded plateau, about the sources ofthe Dvina, Petchora, and Kama, runs ina north-westerly direction, broken hereand there by gaps, through whichwinding streams flow west to the Mezen,east to the Petchora. This ridge, sometimescalled the Timan range, has insome places an elevation of from 650to 820 feet, one crest in the northrising apparently 890 feet above thesea. But here the chain, already intersectedby numerous rivers, spreads outlike a fan, terminating on the ArcticOcean in a number of parallel peninsulas,one of which, the Svatoi Xos,projects some 18 miles beyond thenormal coast-line. The large island ofKolguyev, separated from the mainlandby a strait 60 miles wide, may beregarded as a continuation of theTiman range, for the interveningwaters are only 130 feet deep. Kolguyev,with an estimated area of 1,350square miles, is surrounded by shallowsand of difficult access, but is yearlyvisited by some sixty or eighty huntersiu search of the seal, white bear, wild swan, duck, blue fox, and reindeer. Allattempts at permanent colonisation have hitherto ended in disaster. In 1767seventy Raskolniks took refuge here from religious persecution, but all soonperished of scurvy.The Kanin peninsula itself may perhaps be nothing more than a western continuationof a secondary spur of the Timan range. Its northern section betweenCapes Mikulkin and Kanin, presenting the appearance of a hammer, is occupiedby a plateau of crystalline schists, corresponding exactly with a rocky belt