The first time I visited one of their fish-curing places I thought of the western city that had, after a freshet, 'forty-five distinct and different odors beside several wards to hear from.' Above Mariensk the Amoor valley is often ten or twenty miles wide, enclosing whole labyrinths of islands, some of great extent.

These islands are generally well out of water and not liable to overflow.
Very few have the temporary appearance of the islands of the lower Mississippi.

Here and there were small islands of slight elevation and covered with cottonwoods, precisely like those growing between Memphis and Cairo.
[Illustration: GILYAK WOMAN.] The banks of this part of the Amoor do not wash like the alluvial lands along the Mississippi and Missouri, but are more like the shores of the Ohio.

They are generally covered with grass or bushes down to the edge of the water.

There are no shifting sand-bars to perplex the pilot, but the channel remains with little change from year to year.