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Updated: July 26, 2025


No snow or ice was to be seen in any direction, except along the borders of the sea where there was a little band, such as is commonly seen in all arctic regions. The clayey soil was covered with abundant vegetation, consisting of mossy grasses and lichens. The coast was enlivened by great numbers of wild geese and walruses. A white bear displayed himself on top of a rock.

When these figures are strongly developed the meteoric origin of the iron cannot be questioned, but their absence does not necessarily disprove such an origin. A continent twice the size of the United States lies sleeping beneath a mantle of snow and ice at the south pole. No vegetation save a few mosses and lichens exists anywhere on this vast expanse.

One flowering plant ascends to the summit; the alsinaceous one mentioned at chapter xxi. The other lichens were Lecidea atro-alba, oreina, elegans, and chlorophana, all alpine European and Arctic species.

Narrow paths full of dead leaves ran here and there through the woods, but he took none of these, keeping straight on toward the northwest until a high, moss-grown wall checked his progress. It ran west through the silent forest; damp green mould and lichens stained it; patches of grey stucco had peeled from it, revealing underneath the roughly dressed stones. He followed the wall.

Already "the minute grey lichens, plate o'er plate," were "softening down the crisp-cut name and date"; and the winds of winter and of summer blew over a little mound that had made itself at home in the still city of the dead. Green was the turf above Fifi, sweet the peacefulness of her little churchyard.

The brig went very near the coast; on some sheltered rocks rare heaths were to be seen, the pink flowers lifting their heads timidly out of the snows, and some meagre lichens of a reddish colour and the shoots of a dwarf willow.

Some of them, built years ago, and long deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior, which is open to the sky, and grass and wild-flowers rooting themselves into the chinks of the stones, look already like relics of antiquity, and may yet be overspread with the lichens of centuries to come.

The same bend away from the south-east is seen on all exposed situations, as in the trees covering the brow of a hill. At Kizinga, which is higher than the Lake, the trees are covered with lichens, chiefly on the south-east sides, and on the upper surfaces of branches, running away horizontally to or from the north-west.

From the abrupt edge of the overhanging Bastei we looked down some six hundred feet upon the wandering Elbe, threading its way by broad slopes, rich with the growth of the vine; or by bleached walls of stone, upon which even the lichens seemed to have been unable to make good their footing.

On the western side the great boulder was dressed in crimson lake and yellow-umber-hued lichens from base to summit, and in August, when the aloes flowered in magnificent fiery clusters upon its crown and at its base; and in May, when the sweet-scented clematis wreathed it in exquisite trails, and white and rose and purple pelargoniums made a carpet for its feet; and in July, when the yellow everlastings bloomed in every cranny of the rocks, King Solomon in all his glory held less magnificence of state.

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