My recollections of Tigil are somewhat vague and indefinite.  I remember that I was impressed with the inordinate quantities of champagne, cherry cordial, white rum, and “vodka” which its Russian inhabitants were capable of drinking, and thought that Tigil was a somewhat less ugly village than the generality of Kamchatkan towns, but nothing more.  Next to Petropavlovsk, however, it is the most important settlement in the peninsula, and is the trading centre of the whole western coast.  A Russian supply steamer and an American trading vessel touch at the mouth of the Tigil River every summer, and leave large quantities of rye flour, tea, sugar, cloth, copper kettles, tobacco, and strong Russian vodka, for distribution through the peninsula.  The Bragans, Vorrebeoffs (vor-re-be-offs’), and two or three other trading firms make it headquarters, and it is the winter rendezvous of many of the northern tribes of Chukchis and Koraks.  As we should pass no other trading post until we reached the settlement of Gizhiga (gee’-zhee-gah’), at the head of the Okhotsk Sea, we determined to remain a few days at Tigil to rest and refit.

We were now about to enter upon what we feared would prove the most difficult part of our journey—­both on account of the nature of the country and the lateness of the season.  Only seven more Kamchadal towns lay between us and the steppes of the Wandering Koraks, and we had not yet been able to think of any plan of crossing these inhospitable wastes before the winter’s snows should make them passable on reindeer-sledges.  It is difficult for one who has had no experience of northern life to get from a mere verbal description a clear idea of a Siberian moss steppe, or to appreciate fully the nature and extent of the obstacles which it presents to summer travel.  It is by no means easy to cross, even in winter, when it is frozen and covered with snow; but in summer it becomes practically impassable.  For three or four hundred square miles the eternally frozen ground is covered to a depth of two feet with a dense luxuriant growth of soft, spongy arctic moss, saturated with water, and sprinkled here and there with little hillocks of stunted blueberry bushes and clusters of labrador tea.  It never dries up, never becomes hard enough to afford stable footing.  Prom June to September it is a great, soft, quaking cushion of wet moss.  The foot may sink in it to the knee, but as soon as the pressure is removed it rises again with spongy elasticity, and no trace is left of the step.  Walking over it is precisely like walking over an enormous wet sponge.  The causes which produce this extraordinary, and apparently abnormal, growth of moss are those which exercise the most powerful influence over the development of vegetation everywhere,—­viz., heat, light, and moisture,—­and these agencies, in a northern climate, are so combined and intensified during the summer months as to stimulate some kinds of vegetation into almost tropical luxuriance.