CHAPTER III.THE DUNES, OR SAND-HILLS.

“Hard by a poplar shook alway,All silver-green with gnarlèd bark;For leagues no other tree doth markThe level waste, the rounding gray.”[8]

The dwellings which stud this dreary, yet not wholly unpoetic landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated oftentimes by many miles. Round them spreads a miserable field or two, planted with such crops as might be expected on a poor soil and from deficient cultivation. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod andunhewn and unmortared stones, clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes, pine-stakes and broad-leaved reeds, beneath which the meagrest looking cattle conceivable find a precarious shelter.[9]

The Landes are divided into the Little Landes, near Mont-de-Marsan; and the Great Landes, stretching to the north and west of the department of which that town is the capital, and uniting uninterruptedly with those that occupy the vast country situated south of the Gironde. The total superficial area of these plains is estimated at upwards of 2,400,000 acres, of which two-thirds belong to the department of the Landes, and the remainder to that of the Gironde.

Yet the reader must not believe this country to be a desert in the popular acceptation of the word; it has its forests of pines, where the extraction and preparation of resinous matter are carried on with considerable activity. It has its small towns, its pretty villages, its factories, and even its handsome villas. Finally, modern industry has cut the Landes in two by the Bordeaux railway, which traverses them from north to south, and bifurcates at Morans to throw off a line to Bayonne, and another to Tarbes.

In shape, the Great Landes may be compared to an immense rectangular triangle, having for its base the coast, which, from the mouth of the Gironde to Bayonne, or for a length of more than sixty leagues, is almost rectilineal. But they are separated from the sea by a long parallel chain of lakes and water-courses—a waste of shallow pools—a labyrinth of gulfs and morasses, and then by the continuous chain of the Dunes, of which we shall speak in the following chapter.

That which is commonly called the Great Lande is bounded on the north by theétang, or lake, of Cazau. It is a sandy, treeless plain, and upon which, for a traject of several leagues from east to west, not one habitation worthy of the name is perceptible until the traveller arrives at Mimizan, near the southern point of the lake of Aureilhan. This lake on the south-west pours its waters into the sea. To the north it communicates, through the canal of St. Eulalie,with the lake of Biscarosse, which is itself connected with that of Cazau. East of this chain of lakes lies the Lande; west of it stretches the range ofDunes, or sand-hills.

The lake or pool of Cazau is a small sea of fresh water, perfectly clear, profoundly deep, and fourteen to fifteen thousand acres in extent. It has its whirlwinds and its tempests, so that in certain seasons it is perilous to embark on its surface. And were its banks clothed with rich woods, or raised aloft in irregular or precipitous cliffs, it would surely attract as great a throng of tourists as the mountain-tarns and lochs of Scotland or Cumberland, or the Arcadian waters of Northern Italy. The lake of Biscarosse, in form a triangle, with one side formed by the Dunes, covers about twelve thousand acres. It derives its name from a village situated at its northern angle, on the bank of the canal which connects it with the lake of Cazau. The lake of Aureilhan is the smallest of the three; the St. Eulalie canal, which links it to the preceding, traverses a series of peat-bogs bounded eastward by gloomy pine-forests, and westward by the interminable Dunes, which, by arresting the flow of the rain-waters, have really created these so-called lakes and extensive swamps. Enormous quantities of rain fall every year in the Landes,—which district the Romans would certainly have dedicated to Jupiter Pluvius,—and find beneath the thin superficial stratum or crust of sand and earth, a sub-soil oftufaandallios—in other words, of compact chalk and sand agglutinated by a ferruginous sediment. Frequently thistufapossesses all the hardness of stone, and its imperviousness is its fundamental property. Hence it follows, that a portion of the heavy annual rainfall remains in the receptacles provided by the hollows and depressions of the soil, and in due time accumulates into marshes and lagoons, until gradually evaporated by the heat of spring.

When of old the scared peasants beheld the irresistible advance of these strange ministers of destruction, they had no other resource than to fell their woods, abandon their dwellings, and surrender their “little all” to the pitiless sand and devouring sea. What could avail against such a scourge? Efforts were made to repel it. It issaid that Charlemagne, during a brief residence in the Landes, on his return from his expedition against the Saracens, employed his veterans, and expended large sums of money in preserving the cities of the coast from imminent ruin; but whether the means employed were insufficient, or whether the imperial resources failed, and other urgent needs diverted the population and their leaders from this struggle against nature, the works were wholly abandoned.

Of late years they have been resumed, and with greater success, by a skilful agriculturist, M. Desbiey, of Bordeaux, and an able engineer, M. Bremontier, who have called in nature herself to assist man in his war against nature. Their system consists of sowing in the driest sand the seeds of the sea-pine, mixed with those of the broom (genista scoparia), and thepsamma arenaria. The spaces thus sown are then closely covered with branches to protect them from the action of the winds. These seeds germinate spontaneously. The brooms, which spring up rapidly, restrain the sand, while sheltering the young pines, and thenceforth the Dune ceases to move, because the wind can no longer unsettle its substance, and the grains are held together by the roots of the young plants. The work is always begun on the inland side, in order to protect the farmer and the peasant, and to withdraw the infant forest from the unwholesome influence of the ocean-winds. And, in order that the sown spaces shall not themselves be buried under the sands blown up from the shore, a palisade of wicker-work is raised at a suitable distance, which, reinforced by young plants of sandwort (psamma arenaria), check the moving sands for a sufficiently long time to favour the development of the seeds. Finally, the work is completed by the construction of a substantial wall, or rather an artificial cliff, which effectually prevents the further progress of the flood, or directs it seaward, to be arrested on its course by the barrier of the sand-hills. Unable to force a passage through these natural ramparts, they have excavated certain basins, more or less extensive, more or less deep, which have formed into inland seas, communicating with the Atlantic by one narrow issue.

It is a noteworthy fact that, owing to the encroachment of the Dunes, these lakes have been constantly forced back upon the inland country. Fortunately, this menacing invasion of the sands has been checked by the great engineering works executed a few years ago; which, on the one hand, have fixed, and, as it were, solidified the Dunes, and, on the other, have provided for the regular outflow of the waters. The Landes have thus been opened to the persevering labours of the cultivator. The culture of the pine, and the manufacture of resinous substances, have largely extended, and the time, perhaps, is not far distant when these deserts will almost completely disappear; when these desolate and unproductive plains will pleasantly bloom, transformed into shadowy woods or verdurous meadows.[10]

To so fortunate a result nothing will more powerfully contribute than the embankment of the Dunes. These have been, in reality, the true scourge of this country; these were the moving desert, the constantly ascending sea, which had already engulfed forests, villages, even towns, under its billows of sand, and driven before it the terrified inhabitants of the coast.

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THEDunes form the extreme line of the Brittany coast for nearly two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne. They are hills of white sand, as fine and soft as if it had been sifted through an hour-glass. Their outline, therefore, changes every hour. When the wind blows from the land, millions of tons of sand are hourly driven into the sea, to be washed up again on the beach and blown inland by the first Biscay gale. A water hurricane from the west will fillup with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters into the interior, dispersing them in shining pools among the “murmurous pines,” flooding and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and inundating their fields of rye and millet.[11]

enlarge-imageA FLOOD IN BRITTANY.A FLOOD IN BRITTANY.

Their origin is due to the prevalence of the sea-winds on those points of the coast which are not protected by rock and cliff, and whose slopes of sand descend very gradually to the margin of the waves. Their formation is easily explained. The sand of which they are composed is a silicious material, reduced to minute grains, generally rounded, by trituration. These grains, nevertheless, are often too big and too heavy for the wind to take them up and scatter them afar, like the dust of the highways or the ashes of volcanoes. But at low tide the sand, dried by the sun’s rays and the action of the wind, offers to the latter a sufficientholdfastto be dragged up the slopes which descend seaward, and deposited at a certain distance. This process being constantly repeated, the heaps are daily increasing in dimensions.

It will easily be understood that this accumulation along the shore cannot have taken place where the force and direction of the sands experience periodical or capricious changes; for then the sands cast upon the beach by the winds of the north and west would be driven back into the sea by the winds of the south and east. This is noticeable in many places where the nature of the coast is favourable for the production of such a phenomenon. But on other shores—as on the Atlantic littoral of France—the winds which blow most frequently and most violently are from the west and south-west. And it is there we encounter the Dunes. Those of Gascony are by far the most remarkable. Northward, they extend as far as the Point de Grave, which shuts in the mouth of the Gironde; southward, to the bank of the Adour, and even further, to the cliffs of Béarn. Here the basin of Arcachon constitutes one vast hollow; and some openings exist, moreover, in the department of Landes, between that basin and the Adour, for the overflow of the waters which descend from the interior. To the north and south of theTeste de Buch the chain of sand-hills measures from 4400 to 6600 feet in width. At other points it is still wider; but it narrows towards its extremities, and both at the Point de Grave and near Bayonne does not exceed 450 yards.

Owing to their extreme shiftiness of soil, the Dunes can attain no considerable elevation. The sand deposited by the wind on the summit of the hill is always in a state of precarious equilibrium. It has a constant tendency to be precipitated down the other side; and the higher the summit the greater is this tendency, so that there comes at last a moment when no further accumulation in height is possible. The Dune may then extend its basis, may even increase twofold in dimensions, but it no longer rises.

Let us note, moreover, that owing to its density the sand cannot be carried even by the most violent winds into the higher regions of the atmosphere; and that the Dunes, when they have reached a certain elevation, oppose to them an insuperable obstacle. This circumstance would consequently have a salutary effect, and the accumulation of sand would be determined by a law of its own, if the Dunes, once formed, had time to cohere. But this is not the case. Incessantly does the wind undo or modify its work; and the loftiest hills being the most exposed to its violence, are quickly reduced to the common level. In general, the greatest elevation of the Dunes corresponds to their greatest breadth. Thus the culminating point of those of Gascony is found in the belt situated between the lakes of Cazau and Biscarosse, where the chain is from 7500 to 9000 yards across. Their average height is 180 feet to 200 feet above the sea-level; but some of the hills in the forest of Biscarosse attain an altitude of 320 feet. In the neighbourhood of the mouths of the Gironde and the Adour, where the chain is considerably narrowed, the height of the Dunes is only thirty to forty-five feet.

The reader must not suppose that the Dunes consist of a single series of sand-hills ranged along the shore. He will, however, have conjectured, from our statements respecting their width, that they really compose a chain of several more or less regular ridges. Thehills are separated from one another by valleys, locally namedlaitesorlettes. These valleys, where the pluvial waters flow and accumulate, exhibit a striking contrast, in their freshly-blooming verdure, to the naked, barren Dunes. The general aspect of the landscape may, therefore, be compared to that of the ocean. There is the same broken surface, the same extent of undulation, the billows of sand being upheaved by the wind like the billows of the sea, and sharing in their mobility. You must see, says a writer, in order to form an idea of those colossal masses of fine sand, which the wind incessantly skims, and which travel in this way towards the inland country: you must see their contours so softened that they look like mountains of plaster of Paris polished by the workman’s hand, and their surface so mobile that a little insect leaves upon it a conspicuous track; their slopes, at every degree of inclination; their everlasting sterility—not a blade of grass, not an atom of vegetation; their solitude, less imposing than that of the mountains, but still of a truly savage character. You must see, from the summit of one of these ridges, the ocean on your right hand, and on your left the extensive lakes which border the littoral; and, in the midst of this tumultuous sea of tawny sand, green grassy valleys, rich and fertile pastures, smiling oases of verdure, where herds of horses graze, and cows half-wild, guarded by shepherds scarcely less wild than they.[12]

The marked characteristic of the Dunes, as we have already said, is their mobility, which renders them a constant menace for the neighbouring populations. To the wind which creates them they owe their frequent changes and their inland movement. While the sea eats into the coast, assisted by the breezes which gradually sweep clear the ground before it, the Dunes extend, and drive before them the shallow lakes: these in their turn encroach upon the Landes, and until now man has been constrained to recoil, step by step, before his threefold enemy. It is in this phenomenon, rather than in the ungrateful soil of the Landes, that we must seek the cause of the curse which has seemed so long to rest upon this country-side. Youmust go back some twenty centuries to trace the origin of the Dunes of Gascony. Fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago the coast north of the Adour was inhabited, and comparatively flourishing. Mimizan was then a town and a sea-port, from which were exported the resinous products of the neighbouring forests. The Normans disembarked there on several occasions. Under its walls, in 506, was fought a great battle between the allied Goths and Ostrogoths on the one side, and the Béarnais, commanded by a bishop of Lescar, on the other. Both town and port to-day are buried under the sands. “Full fathom five” lie church and convent, and the busy street, the noisy mart, and the once peaceful home. The present village has nearly perished: the Dune was not three yards from the church when its progress was recently arrested. Other cities, laid down in old charts of the country, but of which not a trace remains, have in this manner disappeared, and entire forests have been ingulfed, now under the sands of the Dunes, now under the sands and waves of the sea.

Some parts of the chain have been rendered to a great extent immovable by the vegetation which has gradually covered them, and these have opposed a formidable obstacle to the encroachments of the sands. Yet here and there the barrier has been defied. For example, in the forest of Biscarosse the movable Dunes, actually sweeping over the ancient hills, have not only filled up the valleys, but ingulfed a great number of pines, and raised themselves several yards above the crest of the oldest trees, planted on the summit of the highest hills.

In whose favour, in this struggle of science against the elements, will the victory eventually be decided? The question is one which the future alone can resolve.[13]

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CROSSINGthe Channel, and surveying the limited expanse of our own “beloved England,” we become aware of certain districts which belong to the Desert World. Through the ceaseless energy of our race, and the introduction of mechanical inventions which economize time and labour and treble the reproductive power of capital, almost all England has been transformed into a rich and radiant garden, where the waste places are “few and far between,” where the solitude of desolation is scarcely known; yet, as already observed, there are districts which retain much of their ancient wildness of character.

Such a region is Dartmoor, the extensive and romantic table-land of granite which occupies the south-western part of the county of Devon. In its recesses still linger the eagle, the bustard, and the crane; its solitudes are broken by the hoarse cries of the sparrow-hawk, the hobby, and the goshawk; and the Cyclopean memorials of Druidism which cover its surface—cromlechs and kistvaens, tolmêns and stone-avenues—invest it with a peculiar air of mysterious awe. It extends in length about twenty-two miles (from north to south), and in breadth twenty miles (from east to west). Its total area exceeds 130,000 acres. It rises above the surrounding country like “the long, rolling waves of a tempestuous ocean, fixed into solidity by some instantaneous and powerful impulse.” A natural rampart is cast around it. Deep ravines, watered by murmuring streams, diversify its aspect, and lofty hills of granite, locally calledtors, of which the principal, Yes Tor, has an elevation of 2050 feet above the sea. Its soil is composed of peat, in some places twenty-five feetdeep; underneath which lies a solid mass of granite, occasionally relieved by trap (a volcanic rock), and traversed by veins of tin, copper, and manganese.[14]

Nearly in the centre of this dismal wilderness lies an immense morass, whose surface is in many places incapable of supporting the lightest animal, and whose inexhaustible reservoirs supply the fountains of many a river and stream—the Dart, the Teign, the Taw, the Tavy—all clear as crystal in the summer months, but after heavy rains running redly through the “stony vales.” The roaring of these torrents, when angry and swollen, is sublime to a degree inconceivable by those who have never heard the wild impressive music of untamed Nature.

The tors are remarkable for their quaint fantastic outlines, which, like the clouds, suggest all manner of strange similitudes—to dragons, and griffins, and hoary ruins, and even to human forms of gigantic size, apparently confronting the traveller as the lords and natural denizens of the rugged waste. The principal summits are Yes Tor, Cawsand Beacon, Fur Tor, Lynx Tor, Rough Tor, Holne Ridge, Brent Tor, Rippen Tor, Hound Tor, Sheep’s Tor, Crockern Tor, and Great Mis Tor. Not only must their variety of form delight the artist, but his eye rests well pleased on their manifold changes of colour; purple, and green, and gray, and blue—now softened by a delicate vaporous shadow, now glowing with intense fulness in the sun’s unclouded light.

Dartmoor is traditionally reputed to have been anciently clothed with forest. The sole relic now existing is the lonelyWistman’sWood, which occupies a sombre valley, bounded on the one side by Crockern Tor, on the other by Little and Great Bairdown; the slopes being strewn with gray blocks of granite in “admired disorder,” as if the Titans had been at their cumbrous play. Starting from this chaos of rocks, appears a wood or grove of dwarf weird-looking oaks, interspersed with the mountain-ash, and everywhere festooned about and garlanded with ferns and parasitical plants. None of these treesexceed twelve feet in height, but at the top they spread far and wide, and “branch and twist in so fantastic and tortuous a manner as to remind one of those strange things called mandrakes.” Their branches are literally covered with ivy and creeping plants, and their trunks so thickly embedded in a coating of moss that at first sight, says Mrs. Bray, “you would imagine them to be of enormous thickness in proportion to their height. Their whole appearance conveys to you the idea of hoary age in the vegetable world of creation; and on visiting Wistman’s Wood it is impossible to do other than think of those ‘groves in stony places’ so often mentioned in Scripture as being dedicated to Baal and Astaroth.”[15]

That heathen rites were celebrated here in the pre-historic era seems very probable, the best etymologists agreeing that the name is a corruption ofWise-man, orWish-man; that is, of the old Norse god Woden, who is still supposed to drive his spectral hounds across the silent wastes of Dartmoor. Celtic or Cymric memorials, as we have previously hinted, are very abundant and very various. There are cromlechs, where the Britons buried their dead; stone pillars, with which they commemorated their priests and heroes; avenues of upright stones leading up to the circles, where, perhaps, their priests celebrated their religious rites; kistvaens, or stone-chests, containing the body unburned; tolmêns, or holed stones, whose meaning cannot be determined, but which may probably have had some astronomical uses; bridges, huts, and walled villages, all bearing traces of the handiwork of our “rude forefathers.” There is no spot in England so thronged as this with the shadows of a remote, a mysterious, and an irrecoverable past.

From Dartmoor our wanderings take us to the eastern coast, and the district ofThe Fens, now so rapidly yielding to the labour of the agriculturist as to exhibit but rare glimpses of their ancient “savagery.” It extends inland, around an arm of the North Sea called the Wash, into the six counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon,Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk, with an area of upwards of 420,000 acres. Inland it is bounded by an amphitheatral barrier of high lands, and touches the towns of Bolingbroke, Brandon, Earith, Milton, and Peterborough. Into this great basin flow the waters of the greater part of the drainage of nine counties, which gather into the rivers Cam, Glen, Lark, Nene, Great and Little Ouse, Stoke, and Welland, these being linked together by a network of natural and artificial canals.

Anciently, the Fens were pleasant to the eye of the lover of the picturesque; for they contained shining meres and golden reed-beds, haunted by countless water-fowl, and strange, gaudy insects. “Dark-green alders,” says Kingsley,[16]“and pale-green reeds stretched for miles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see.” What strange transformations must this wild region have undergone! There was a time, in all probability, when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land, through which, into a vast estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of North-eastern Europe—Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber. Meanwhile, the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the Glen, and the Witham, were slowly “sawing themselves out” by the quiet action of rain and rivers. Then came an age when the lowland was swept away by the biting, corroding sea-wash still so powerfully destructive on the east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head. “Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land; these are God’s mighty mills in which he makes the old world new.” And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of physical,—

“‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;Though he sit and wait with patience, with exactness grinds he all.’”

These ever-active causes have converted the dry land into the fens. The mud brought down by the rivers cannot get away to sea; and, with thedébrisof the coast, is constantly swept southward by tide and current, and deposited within the great curving basin of the Wash, between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. There it is kept by the strong barrier of shifting sands coming inwards from the sea; a barrier which also confines the very water of the fens, and spreads it inland into a labyrinth of streams, shallow meres, and bogs. The rainfall, over the whole vast area of dull level, has found no adequate channels of escape for centuries; and hence we may understand how peat—the certain product of standing water—has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, and swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once spread far and wide over the blooming country.

“Many a green isle needs must beIn the deep wide sea of misery,”

sings Shelley; and this dreary outcome of mudbank and bog and mere had its wooded isles, very fair and lovely to behold, redeeming the desolation of the landscape. Such were Ramsey, Lindsey, Whittlesea, whose names remind us of their whilome characteristics (ea,ey, an island). In these green places the old monks loved to build their quiet abbeys, rearing their herds in rich pastures, feeding fat fish in their tranquil streams, and dreaming in the shadow of green alder and stately ash.

But these Eden-isles were few, and the surrounding marsh was black and dismal enough to scare the boldest spirit, and pestilential enough to sap and undermine the strongest frame. The Romans had attempted to drain and embank it, and theirvallummay still be tracked along the surface of the marsh-lands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. In the Middle Ages, however, it returned to its primeval desolateness—a waste and wilderness, haunted by the foul legends of an unwholesome superstition. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great monasteries ofCrowland and Ely, and of the thriving towns, the good work of drainage went on slowly; but elsewhere the land was given up to the bittern and the heron.

No comprehensive scheme was adopted, however, until Russel, Earl of Bedford, cut the great Bedford River, twenty-one miles long, and rescued from the desert the rich tract known by his name—the Bedford Level.

“ErstA dreary pathless waste, the coughing flockWas wont with hairy fleeces to deform;And, smiling with its lure of summer flowers,The heavy ox, vain struggling, to ingulf;Till one, of that high-honoured patriot name,Russel, arose, who drained the rushy fen,Confined the waves, bade groves and gardens bloom,And through his new creation led the OuseAnd gentle Camus, silver-winding streams.”[17]

The work was continued by William Earl of Bedford, who added, in 1649, to his father’s old “Bedford River” that noble parallel river the Hundred Foot, both rising high above the land to allow for flood water. It was carried on at a later period under the direction of Government surveyors. Then came Rennie, the great engineer, whose operations effectually shut out the desert, and handed over to the agriculturist nearly the whole level of the Fens, some seventy miles in length. Works are now in progress for rescuing a further portion of the basin of the Wash, to be formed into a new county, and named after the Queen. So that now, in tracts once covered by the sea, or knee-deep in reedy, slushy, pestilential slime, the grass grows luxuriantly, the crops wave in golden abundance, or the breeze takes up and carries afar—

“The livelong bleatOf the thick-fleecèd sheep from wattled folds.”

But the dominion of labour has not yet been established over the whole Fen-district. There are still dreary nooks, and gloomy corners, and unproductive wastes; wild scenes there are, which few Englishmenhave any conception of as contained within the boundaries of their own “inviolate isle.” Romantic scenery, remarks Mr. Walter White, must not be looked for on the Lincolnshire coast. In all the journey from the Wash till you see the land of Yorkshire, beyond the Humber, not an inch of cliff will your eyes discover. Monotonous is the prospect of—

“A level waste, a rounding gray”

of sand-hills, which vary but slightly in height, and bristle withmarum. “But tame though it be,” continues our authority,[18]“the scene derives interest from its peculiarity. Strange perspective effects appear in those irregular hills: yonder they run out and form a low dark, purple headland, against which the pale green and yellow of a nearer tongue look bright by contrast. Here for a few furlongs the range rises gray, cold, and monotonous; there it has a warmth of colour relieved by deep shadows, that change their tint during the hours that accompany the sun while he begins and ends his day. Sitting on the summit of those dry hills, you will remark the contrasted landscape: on the one side, the level pasture land, league after league of grassy green, sprinkled with villages, farms, churches, and schools, where work and worship will find exercise through ages yet to come; on the other, league after league of tawny sand, sloping gently outwards to meet the great sea that ever foams or ripples thereupon. On the one hand, a living scene bounded by the distant wolds; on the other, a desert, sea and shore alike solitary, bounded only by the overarching sky. More thoughts come crowding into the mind in presence of such a scene than are easy to express.”

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HITHERTOwe have only been speaking of miniature deserts, of the more limited of the world’s wildernesses, where some degree of victory seems to reward man’s arduous struggle with nature. Those which we have hitherto described are open to the “breath of civilization.” The pilgrim who visits them incurs no danger; he has nothing to dread from beasts of prey; the men he meets with obey the same general laws as himself; he is carried into their furthest recesses by the all-embracing railroad. He sees on every hand the efforts of science to confine the desert within ever narrower boundaries; to reclaim the moor, and the fen, and the sandy waste; to reap from the once barren soil an abundant harvest. But if he pass from England or France to Germany, and thence across the provinces of unhappy Poland, he will find himself daily advancing into a country of more and more savage aspect. He will observe that vegetation loses its happy variety; that the cultivated fields become scarcer; the morass and forest more frequent, and of greater extent; the population poorer, more squalid, and less numerous. Wide and dreary intervals separate the different towns; here and there, surrounded by gloomy woods, are scattered the melancholy-looking villages. Travelling becomes difficult, for the roads are ill-kept; he has left behind him the modern magician, the engineer; wild wolves haunt his path; and he has good cause to fear the robber’s knife. Civilization here has left barbarism for centuries to itself; we are approaching the great Deserts, the Steppes of Northern Asia.

The Steppes commence near the thirty-fifth degree of longitude, east of the Dnieper, as soon as we quit the fertile plains of the Ukraine to enter the country of the Don Cossacks. They are the characteristic feature of the immense zone which starts from thenorth-eastern shore of the Sea of Azov, stretches to the foot of Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and is thence prolonged beyond the Ural range, to the north and south of the metaliferous Altaï; but mainly between the latter and the Thian-Shian mountains, to the seas of Okhotsk and Jesso.

The wordSteppe, supposed to be of Tartar origin, primarily signifies an uncultivated plain, a prairie.

The Steppes, in short, are ordinarily plains of very considerable extent interrupted at intervals by chains of hills or mountains; but, on the whole, of a level, monotonous character, and with a considerable part below the level of the ocean. Their area may be roughly computed at 4,200,000 square miles.

Occasionally, in traversing them, we meet with lakes or brackish ponds, with forests of pines, even with patches of cultivated ground. Sometimes they form lofty and extensive plateaux, as in the case of the plateau of Gobi, also called, but most inappropriately,Scha-mo, or the Sandy Desert, andScha-ho, or the Sandy River.

The Gobi begins upon the confines of Chinese Tartary, and thence extends over thousands of leagues in a vast expanse of sterile wilderness towards the coast of the Pacific. It chiefly consists of bare rock, shingle, and loose sand, alternating with firm sand, sparsely clothed with vegetation. But a large portion of the country, though not less leafless and monotonous, assumes in the spring season the appearance of an undulating ocean of grass, supplying pasturage to the flocks and herds of the Mongolian nomades, who wander at will over its vast prairie grounds, and encamp wherever they find a stream of water or sheltering crag. The general elevation above the sea is probably not less than 3500 feet. The Gobi was crossed by Mr. Grant, in 1863, and, soon afterwards, by Mr. Bishop, a correspondent of theTimes.

Though their general aspect is chill and dreary, the Steppes are not without their romantic landscapes, and their vegetation is more varied as well as more abundant than is generally believed. You may find among them wide meads with a soil of sufficient fertility toproduce corn in great quantities, although too thin to permit the development of plants which have need of a certain depth. “The most agreeable portion of these plains,” says Humboldt, “is adorned with small shrubs of the familyRosaceæ, tulips, and thecypripedium. Just as the Torrid Zone is distinguished by the tendency of all its plants to become trees, so some of the Asiatic Steppes in the Temperate Zones have the peculiar characteristic that all their flowering herbaceous plants attain to a remarkable height, such as theSaussureaand other synantheraceæ, the leguminous shrubs, and, above all, an infinite variety of astragals. If the traveller attempts to go forward, in the small Tartar chariots, across these pathless, trackless prairies, he must keep standing, to ascertain his direction, and he will see the plants, interlaced as in a dense forest, bend before his wheels. Some of these Steppes are grassy plains; others are covered with saline plants, fleshy, articulated, and always green. Often, too, one sees afar the glitter of saline efflorescence, like lichens, spreading unevenly over the glassy soil, like newly-fallen snow.”[19]

Comparing the Asiatic Steppes with the Pampas of South America, Humboldt does not hesitate to declare that the former are far the richer. “In that part of the Steppes, inhabited by the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks, which I have traversed,” he says, “that is to say, from the Don, the Caspian Sea, and the Oural (Jaïk), to the Obi and the Upper Irtysh, near Lake Dsaisang, over a space of forty degrees of longitude, one can never discover, even at the most distant limit, a phenomenon frequent in the Llanos, the Pampas, and the Prairies of America; that horizon vague and boundless as the sea, which seems to support the vault of heaven. Seldom in Asia was the spectacle offered me of even a single side of the horizon. The Steppes are traversed by numerous chains of hills, or covered with forests of conifers. The vegetation of Asia, even in the richest pasturage, is nowhere confined to the families of theCyperaceæ. A great variety prevails there of herbaceous or frutescent plants. In the spring season, small rosaceæ and amygdalaceæ, with rosy orsnow-white blossoms—Spiræa, cratægus, prunus spinosa, amygdalus nana—present a graceful appearance. I have elsewhere spoken,” he adds, “of the vigorous growth of Synanthers, such asSuassurea amaraandsalsa, theartemisiasand bluecentaureas, which grow profusely in these deserts, and the leguminosæ, which are there represented by different species of astragal, cytisus, andcaragana. The fritillaria ruthenica, meleagroides, cypripedium, and tulip, delight the eye with the brilliance of their colours.”[20]

This almost exclusively herbaceous, but abundant and various, vegetation of which Humboldt speaks, is conspicuous in the spring, in the least favoured Steppes, after the rainy season. But it is there of a brief life. In the month of June the heat grows intense, and the dryness excessive. Then every herb perishes, cut down by the sun’s keen-smiting rays, like the Greeks before Troy by the arrows of Apollo.

“Bent was his bow, the Grecian hearts to wound;Fierce as he moved, his silver shafts resound.”[21]

The dust is whirled off the ground by the wind, and swept about in revolving tornados. The Steppes situated in a comparatively low latitude thus alternately assume the most discordant aspects. In winter the heavy rains inundate them, and transform them into impracticable marshes; spring clothes them with a thick carpet of grasses and other herbaceous plants, so that they reveal to the eye leagues upon leagues of delightful sward cropped by numerous flocks. In summer they undergo a third metamorphosis, and are converted into parched and sun-scathed deserts like those of Nubia or Arabia.

These periodical transformations are especially remarkable in the Steppes of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea; where winter comes attended with abundant snows and terrific tempests. No obstacle can arrest the fury of the gale, which accumulates the driven snow in fearful avalanches, and like thedemon in the old German legend, drives before it the wild horses in an access of violence. Half frozen by the cold, and exhausted with hunger, they fly in a complete panic. Oftentimes their giddy headlong course carries them forward upon the crust of ice which gathers over the waters close to the shore; it cracks, it breaks, and hundreds perish! The melting snow and heavy rains at the end of winter drown the plains under vast sheets of water, which, however, quickly evaporate in the first rays of the sun. Rain, in summer, is extremely rare, and as there are neither brooks nor springs to refresh the thin layer of earth in which the herbs and shrubs take root, all these plants enjoy only a butterfly existence; they bloom, they fade, they die, with startling rapidity.

The hurricanes are neither less numerous nor less furious in the hot than in the cold season; dust, however, takes the place of snow, when, as is sometimes the case, no tremendous deluge of rain follows in the track of the mighty wind. To sum up: the spring and summer of the Steppes are compressed (so to speak) into two months; all the rest of the year seems given over to desolation. Two months in the year of bloom, and sunshine, and colour, and beauty, are all that Nature grants the wandering Mongolian.

Such being the general configuration of the Steppes, one may easily imagine how stern and gloomy is the aspect of these immense plains, with no other interruptions of the soil than their tumuli, no other boundary than the sea. He who has not been habituated from youth to their monotony finds himself wholly unable to struggle against its depressing influence. Their dismal solitudes are in truth an immeasurable prison, where he wanders to and fro without hope of escape. In vain does he interrogate the north and south, the east and the west; in vain does he turn from one side to the other; it is always the same uniformity, the same immovability, the same solitude.[22]

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REFERENCEhas been made to the numerous troops of wild horse which haunt the Steppes on this side of the Oural. Similar troops of these animals wander over the whole extent of the Steppes of Central Asia, which the most accredited modern naturalists repute to be the original cradle of their race.

enlarge-imageThe Tarpan, or Wild Horse.The Tarpan, or Wild Horse.

These horses are calledtarpans, a word undoubtedly derived from the Tartar. Shall we look upon them as the representatives of the primitive breed, whence have sprung all the varieties known at the present day; or shall we see in them, as well as in the wandering horses of the prairies and pampas of the New World, the descendantsof individuals which had escaped from the thraldom of man? This latter hypothesis seems to be the most probable. But there is good ground for believing that, living a wild life, these animals are gradually returning to the primitive type. They have lost the harmonious graces of form, the beauty, and the vigour which we admire in the high-bred steed, perfected by the assiduous care of man. There seems as great a difference between the Arabian horse and the wild horse of the Steppes as between the accomplished European gentleman and a Malagasy savage. They are of small stature; their limbs are lank; their coat is coarse, woolly, rude, and rough. With the tarpans of the northern Steppes it is thick, flaky, and frizzled. Their mouth and nostrils are garnished with long hair, not unlike a goat. Their colour is generally brown, of the shade calledIsabelle, after a certain Queen of France who, in fulfilment of a vow, wore her linen unchanged for a considerable period. A few are black or white. They have a large head, with the forehead projecting above the eyes; a straight chamfer; and long ears, customarily laid back close to the head.

The troops of the tarpans are subdivided into groups of twenty to thirty individuals, each group usually living apart, and only uniting in a compact phalanx when a common danger threatens, or a necessity arises of migrating from one region to another. The gaunt grim wolves, which hunger drives from their neighbouring forests; and man, who hunts them hotly, either to reduce them into subjection, or kill them for their flesh, are almost the only enemies they have any reason to dread. The warlike nomade tribes of the Black and Caspian coasts, and of Central Asia, have no other breeding-grounds than the steppe which they inhabit. Thither come Cossack, and Mongol, and Kirghis, and Kalmuck, to choose their chargers. They catch them by means of a lasso, which they throw with surprising dexterity, and in a few days train them into a suitable docility. When in want of their hide or flesh, the nomades hunt them with gun, arrow, or spear; for hippophagy, which a few zealous amateurs are now endeavouring to popularize in France and England, has been practised from time immemorial by the inhabitants of the Steppes.

enlarge-imageWILD HORSES TERRIFIED BY A STORM.WILD HORSES TERRIFIED BY A STORM.

These barbarians, however, respect the life of their domestic animals, or sacrifice them only in cases of pressing need. They treat them also with a gentleness unknown to our European grooms and horse-dealers. With them, as with the Arabs, the horse is a friend rather than a slave; he is, in truth, one of the family; and it is with great difficulty that his master consents to part with him. Our travellers describe the Tartar, Mongol, and Kirghiz horsemen as realizing the celebrated fable of the Centaurs,—as becoming, so to speak, one with their horses. The exigencies of their wandering life require that they should be constantly on horseback; it is almost their home, their abode, their dwelling-place; there they are mounted day and night; there they sleep, prepare their food, and take their repasts. True that their cooking is of the rudest and simplest, and their taste not so fastidious as that of an European epicure! If, for example, they would make ready a piece of meat, they insert it between the saddle and the horse’s skin, and in this impromptu oven leave it for a few hours, while it undergoes the processes of heat, pressure, and frequent friction, serving in some degree to cook it; then a pinch of salt for seasoning; and lo! a dainty titbit which our cavalier devours with the best appetite in the world.

But it is to the inhabitants of the Steppes of the Black and Caspian Seas that the horse renders the most estimable services. To make use of a phrase of Buffon’s, “He shares with them the fatigue of war and the glory of battle;” he provides them with the best and swiftest means of transit; he nourishes them with his flesh, and the mare quenches their thirst with her milk. Intheirdairies mares take the place of our European milch-cows, and are regularly milked once or twice a-day. The milk, warm, is employed as a medicine. It is thicker and more saccharine than that of ruminating animals, and this, undoubtedly, is the reason that the Cossacks, Tartars, and Kalmucks have succeeded, by fermentation, in distilling alcohol from it, and procuring vinegar by acetifying it. They prepare with it an intoxicating liquor (koumis), to which they are very partial, and with which the wealthiest among them consider it an honour to be largely provided.

By the side of the horse, we naturally place his humble congener and compatriot, theAss.

Nor need we be ashamed to devote a few lines to this useful animal, though civilization has appointed to it a very different lot from that of the horse.

While man has devoted his utmost efforts to ennoble, as it were, and aggrandize the latter, to perfect his capabilities, develop his qualities, embellish and vary his form, for the former he has had nothing but contempt and harsh treatment. He has made the horse the companion of his campaigns, the minister to his sumptuous pleasures, the instrument of his grandest labours. He has dismissed the poor ass to the fields to carry the heaviest burdens, to share in the toil and privation of the peasant. In these different conditions, who will wonder that while the horse has become a strong, graceful, and proud-spirited animal, the ass, on the other hand, remains bowed and bent, with a rough coarse hide, lanky limbs, a heavy head,—always drooping, as if under the weight of continual lassitude and unconquerable melancholy,—and long ungraceful ears, which give his physiognomy an air of ridicule. Everything in him bears the impress of degradation. How has he merited so obscure a destiny? Alas, he is the victim of an iniquitous caprice of man. For see him in his natural condition; contrast with the well-worn servant of civilization theOnagra,[23]the free wild ass of the Steppes, with the Tarpan, and the parallel will be wholly to the advantage of the former. The onagra is at least of the same size; his ears are short; he carries aloft a well-proportioned head; his skin, of a handsome gray or yellowish-brown, is sleek and shining; his limbs are long, delicate, and nervous. He lives in very numerous troops, and migrates from north to south, and south to north, according to the season. The Tartars employ him as a beast of transport and the saddle rather than as a beast of burden. They eat his flesh, preferring it to that of the wild horse. Even the domestic ass of the East differs notablyfrom the slow, dogged, ill-used animal of European notoriety. Under a more favourable climate, and in the free life of the desert, he has preserved his tall stature, his vigour, and the haughtiness of his bearing. The wealthiest and most distinguished personages do not disdain to mount him or harness him to their carriage. He has a keen eye, a quick scent, a sure foot, a mild and resolute aspect. He accomplishes with ease from six to eight miles an hour; and, lastly—a fact worthy of notice—his life, which with us seldom exceeds fifteen years, in Asia is frequently prolonged to thirty or thirty-five. He is less subject to sickness than the horse, and he almost equals the camel in sobriety, docility, and endurance of hunger and fatigue.

enlarge-imageOnagra, or Wild Ass.Onagra, or Wild Ass.

Whether the Tartars and Kalmucks, who use mares’ milk as a medicine, attribute, as we do, certain therapeutical virtues to the milk of the ass, we are unable to say; but it is certain that this milk forms a portion of their daily food. On account of the strong proportion of saccharineserumwhich it contains, it is well adaptedfor the preparation of the fermented drink already spoken of, known to the Tartars under the name ofKoumisorKamuis. Mr. Atkinson speaks of the large leathernkoumissack or bottle, as an important piece of Mongolian furniture. One which he saw was five feet eight inches long, and four feet five inches wide, with a leathern tube at the corner about four inches in diameter, through which the milk is poured into the bag, and thekoumisdrawn out. A wooden instrument is introduced into this bag, its handle passing through the tube, not unlike a churning staff; with this thekoumisis frequently agitated. The Kirghiz begin making it in April, and its due agitation and fermentation occupy about fourteen days.[24]

The horse, and a few flocks of sheep and herds of horned cattle, amply suffice for the wants of the warlike tribes in the south of Asiatic Russia. These tribes have almost entirely abandoned the use of the camel. But as we advance eastward, we find these gigantic and mis-shapen ruminants in great numbers, the faithful companions and indispensable auxiliaries of the nomades of the East. They wander freely about the Steppes, in troops of several hundreds, browzing indifferently on the grass of the wide pastures or the foliage of the bushes. They are without fierceness, and the traveller who intrudes upon their immense domains seems only to inspire in them a benevolent curiosity. “It is impossible to describe,” says Madame Hommaire de Hell, “the astonishment they exhibited as we passed them. As soon as they caught sight of us, they ran with all speed towards us, and then stood motionless, with heads turned towards our cavalcade, until we had got to such a distance as to be no longer distinguishable.”

“Gold and silk,” says Buffon, “are not the true wealth of Asia. Thecamelis the treasure of the East.” It is a fact that this animal is wonderfully adapted to supply the wants of the desert races. It may be said to supply them with every object of primary necessity; food, clothing, and even habitation, fire, and the means of transport.

The flesh of the young camel, though inferior to beef or mutton, is savoury and easy of digestion; the she-camel yields an abundance of milk as substantial and agreeable to the taste as that of the cow. The camel’s skin is, it is true, a coarse wool, but long, tenacious, and readily wrought. The Mongols make it into tissues and cord. Out of the tissues they weave their clothing, coverings, and tents; with the cord, which is of various thicknesses, they fabricate the harness of their horses and other objects of equipment. Camel-leather is not inferior in suppleness and solidity to that which we make use of in Europe. The dung of these animals, dried in the sun, serves as fuel not only for cooking food, but even for working metals. Finally, as a beast of burden, the camel surpasses every other in strength, swiftness, endurance of fatigue, and, above all, in that proverbial sobriety which enables him to accomplish a journey of several successive days without taking either food or drink. From nature he has received a special organization, which well justifies his Arab name of “the ship of the desert.” It consists essentially in the structure of his feet, in that of his stomach, and in the species of hunch or hump which he carries on his back.

We know, in the first place, that the camel’s foot does not resemble that of other ruminants; it is bifurcated, but the two toes, very strong and much elongated, are furnished not with a hoof, but with a short nail, adhering only to the final phalange; they are, moreover,palmated; that is to say, reunited near the extremity by a carneous membrane, which is supplied underneath with a veritable thick and hornysole. The foot can thus plant itself on a wide surface, and seems expressly adapted to the shifting sandy soil which the camel usually traverses.

As for the stomach, beside the four compartments into which the stomach of all ruminants is divided, we notice, on the sides of the paunch, a mass of cubic cells, or partitions, always containing a quantity of tolerably pure water, very drinkable, and kept as a kind of reserve supply; so that more than one traveller, when crossing the desert, and perceiving neither fountain, well, nor stream in which toquench his devouring thirst, has preserved his life at the expense of that of his camel, by killing the poor animal, and opening his reservoir to drink its contents.

enlarge-imageBactrian Camel.Bactrian Camel.

The hump, of which the Arabian camel, or dromedary, has but one, while the Bactrian, or camel properly so called, has two, is, in truth, “a storehouse of solid nutriment, on which he can draw for supplies long after every digestible part has been extracted from the contents of the stomach: this storehouse consists of one or two large collections of fat stored up in ligamentous cells supported by the spines of the dorsal vertebræ. When the camel is in a region of fertility, the hump becomes plump and expanded; but after a protracted journey in the wilderness it becomes shrivelled and reduced to its ligamentous constituent, in consequence of the absorption of the fat.”[25]

To be deprived of drink for from eight to ten days is no hardship to the camel. Accredited authorities testify that without any seriousinconvenience he can go without drink for twenty-three and even twenty-five days. In the way of solid food, a ball of cake weighing from a pound to a pound and a quarter, will suffice him for a whole day. Often when he has set out on his journey fasting, he contents himself with browsing on the way a few green or dry bushes, and in the evening sups on a handful of dried beans. But this singular abstemiousness is not his sole good quality; his vigour, his docility, his swiftness render him equally valuable.

The ordinary burden of a small camel is from 600 to 800 lbs.; a large camel will carry 1000 lbs. or upwards, from thirty to thirty-five miles a-day; but themaharis, or those which are used for speed alone, will travel daily from twenty to thirty leagues.

The camel of the Steppes, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, is, as I have already hinted, the Bactrian or camel strictly so called. This animal differs from his African congener in several very important physical characteristics, and perhaps also in some moral peculiarities. His two humps are smaller than the one hump of the dromedary. He is a little larger than the latter; his average stature is from six feet and a half to seven feet. His hair, of a deep chestnut brown, almost woolly on the humps, the head, and the upper part of the neck, is short and smooth on the body, and hangs in long fringes below the neck and around the fore-legs. He endures without inconvenience the most opposite temperatures, great heat and extreme cold, so that his habitat naturally ranges over an immense extent of country. He is found throughout the zone of the Steppes, even to the confines of Siberia, on the borders of Lake Baïkal; he was formerly still more common in Hindostan, but has now almost disappeared, owing to the great consumption entailed by the military expeditions of our East Indian Government.

The camel is an excellent traveller, but his gait is rough and awkward, and almost insupportable by those who have not been long habituated to it. In this relation we may borrow an anecdote from Madame Hommaire de Hell:[26]Her dragoman, a Frenchman, namedAntoine, curious to essay this new species of equestrian practice, begged a Kalmuck in the escort to lend him his camel. The request being readily granted, he perched himself on the extremity of the saddle, in “measureless contentment” with his lofty post, and by no means mindful of the malicious smiles exchanged between the Cossacks and the camel-drivers. Scarcely had the beast advanced four paces, however, before his face turned pale, and he clung to the saddle, with a most pitiful countenance, and imploring help in the most agonizing tones. “One need be a Kalmuck,” says Madame de Hell, “to be capable of enduring the trot of a camel. His jerky gait shakes the body so severely, that a long journey is a positive punishment, even for the Cossacks. The unfortunate Antonio, left some distance behind by the escort, made a vain effort to overtake us; he was compelled, willy-nilly, to retain his steed as far as the Caspian Sea, where he arrived about two hours after ourselves. I have never seen a man moredemoralized. His groans, when he was lifted off the camel, were so lamentable, that we really hardly knew what to think of his condition.”

As for the camel’s moral qualities, the same lively writer furnishes a very different estimate to what we gather from the majority of travellers. She represents him as idle, pettish, and very vindictive.

“All that we had read,” says she, “of the rapidity of these ships of the desert; their insensibility to fatigue, to hunger, to thirst; their tractability to the will of man exceeding the obedience of the leaf to the wind, was completely contradicted by the conduct of these quadrupeds, little careful to maintain their reputation for agility. Despite of a stout cord passed through one of the nostrils, and which caused them a sharp pain every time they became refractory, they would not march more than two successive hours without flinging themselves on the ground. We had to battle with them incessantly to rouse them from their torpor, and prevent them from biting one another. Whenever a camel-driver pulled a little roughly his animal’s guiding-string, we heard a succession of cries, all the more frightful from their resemblance to the human voice. In a word, these camels behaved so illduring their short journey, that we entirely lost the good opinion our great naturalist (Buffon) had given us of their species, in descriptions more poetical than true.”

Notwithstanding Antoine’s discouraging experience of camel-riding, Madame de Hell, a few days afterwards, essayed the same experiment, with the result that, like her poor dragoman, she made a vow never to repeat it. Somewhat later, she had an opportunity of witnessing a very curious illustration—and one very amusing to the lookers-on—of the natural vindictiveness of these rough steeds. We give the adventure in her own words:—

“Everybody knows that the camel possesses the faculty of ruminating the food already stored in one of his stomachs, and that he willingly enough grants himself this pleasure when he has nothing to eat; but it is not generally known, perhaps, that he possesses sufficient malice to make, when an opportunity arises, this prerogative a means of vengeance.

“I had noticed in the morning that one of our camel-drivers appeared on bad terms with his beast. He vainly tried to master him by punishment, pulling with all his might the cord which passed through the animal’s nostril; the latter was obstinate, and threw himself every moment on the ground, a proof of rebellion. The Kalmuck, irritated by the struggle, profited by a halt to dismount, and inflict severe chastisement on the recalcitrant; but the camel, disdainfully raising his long neck, followed with so malicious an eye all his tyrant’s movements, that without doubt he was revolving some project of revenge in his head. And so it happened that he quietly waited until the Kalmuck stood opposite to him; then, opening his great mouth, he ejected full in the camel-driver’s face a double volley of masticated herbs, mixed with slaver and all sorts of filthiness. It would be impossible to describe the air of satisfied vengeance with which the camel raised his neck, and moved his head from one side to another, as if in quest of applause. What astonished me most in this affair was his master’s moderation after undergoing such an outrage. He wiped himself coolly, remounted his saddle, and caressedthe neck of the ill-bred animal, as if he had received the most flattering compliment. A good understanding being thus strangely re-established, they went on their way peaceably, without giving another thought to what had taken place.”

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BESIDESthose species of which we have just spoken, and which man has subjugated to his service, the Steppes nourish a host of other animals which seem for ever destined to a savage life. Some are spread through the entire zone of the Steppes, and include representatives of the genera or species belonging to the temperate latitudes of Europe. But most of them are circumscribed in more or less limited habitats, out of which they would not meet with the conditions of climate or provision that are essential to their existence.

The mammalia which are found in the plains of Eastern Europe and Central Asia belong principally to the orders ofRuminants,[27]Rodents, andCarnaria.

Cuvier divides the ruminants into two great sections: one comprising the ruminants without horns (genera,camel,lama, andchevrotain); and the other, thosewithhorns. The latter he again divides into ruminants with decaying or wooden horns (these are thecervidæof the new nomenclature), ruminants with membraneous horns (as the giraffes), and ruminants with hollow horns (oxen, goats, antelopes, sheep).

enlarge-imageThe Eland (Antilope oreas).The Eland(Antilope oreas).

The section of Ruminants without horns is represented in the Steppes by the camel. Of the three groups of horned ruminants, oneonly is wanting in this region of the Old Continent—namely, that of the ruminants with membranous horns; but we meet there with varieties of all the species included among the cervidæ, except the reindeer, which is confined to the glacial countries of both continents. The common European stag is found on this side of the Oural, in the Steppes bordering on the forests, where he prefers to seek an asylum. Theahu, or roebuck of Tartary, inhabits the valleys and plains which stretch to the north of the Himalaya and along the chain of the Thian-Chan. Deer wander in troops, or in isolated couples, in all the temperate and fertile portions of the zone of the Steppes, and the eland is spread over all Asia between the 45th and 41st degree of latitude. The latter is the largest of all the cervidæ. It ordinarily attains, and sometimes exceeds, the stature of the horse. His antlers,spread out perpendicularly to the axis of his head, take at first a nearly horizontal direction, then spring upwards in an abrupt curve. At their extremity they terminate in a broad palm, set with sharp snags around its outer edge. Their weight, for adults, averages from fifty-five to sixty-five pounds. The eland has a short robust neck, which is necessary to enable him to support the burden of his branching honours; but which, joined to the projection of his shoulders, and the disproportionate length of his fore-legs, gives him a very ungraceful aspect. Nor can he browse the herbage without making a great digression or falling on his knees. The male, moreover, under the throat has a sort of goître, or swelling, garnished with a rude pointed beard. The female wears a beard, but has no goître. The neck is surmounted with a short, stiff, blackish mane. The rest of the hair is of a pronounced gray.

The eland inhabits the marshy plains and banks of rivers; he dreads the heat, and to escape it will often remain during the long summer days plunged up to his neck in the cool waters. He lives with his comrades in tolerably numerous herds. The first birth of the female is only one; afterwards she produces two at a time. Frequently the eland attains a prodigious stature. An individual killed in the Altaï measured four feet and a half in height to the shoulder, and four feet and a third in length. His flesh is said to be light and nourishing; his hide excellent for making shoulder-belts; and his antlers are converted to the same uses as the horns of the stag.

Among the hollow-horned ruminants I may mention theSaiga, a kind of antelope which inhabits the Asiatic Steppes, and is met with even in Poland. In figure he takes the poetical elegance of the gazelle; his horns are of a clear yellow colour, and of a transparency which rivals that of tortoise-shell. His forehead is covered with transversal folds; he has no muzzle, properly speaking, but a kind of snout like that of a hog. It is said that he drinks through his nostrils. The saigas travel in herds of about two thousand each, of whom a certain number keep always some distance in advance, inthe rear, and on the flanks of the main host, so as to watch over their security.

Another kind of gazelle, theDseren, is peculiar to the Mongolian Deserts, and named by the inhabitants theyellow stag. His stature is little inferior to that of the deer. The female is without horns.

TheMoufflon,[28]the original of our domestic sheep, sometimes strays into the plains of Central Asia, but prefers the solitude of the mountains. His general size is that of a small fallow deer, but though clothed with hair instead of wool, he bears a closer resemblance to the ram than to any other animal. In summer his hair is close, but in winter it becomes rough, wavy, and slightly curled. On the upper part of the body it is brown, but the under part and insides of the limbs are whitish. The hair is considerably longer under the throat, and about the neck and shoulders, than elsewhere.

We may refer, in this connection, to theEgagra, or wild goat, which Cuvier considers to have been the original stock of the numerous races of goats spread over various regions of the globe.

The Steppes nourish two species ofRodents: the Varying Hare (Lepus variabilis), so called because he changes from tawny gray in summer to white in winter; and a gray squirrel, which is probably only a variety of our common European squirrel. He is not a climber and a “haunter of the woods,” like his congener. He abounds in the Mongolian Steppes, where he lives in holes excavated under the earth, like the rats and rabbits. He is, however, much more ingenious than the other troglodyte-rodents; he shelters the entrance to his abode under a domed roof, skilfully constructed of dry herbs woven together, and covered with clay. These works closely resemble the mounds upheaved by moles.

The Carnaria of theFelidæ, or feline family, are wanting, ornearly so, in the immense zone which we are considering. Except a species of lynx, theChilasonorChulon, whose existence has been recognized in the north of Tartary; and a few tigers which adventure into Mongolia, we may say that the Asiatic Steppes, and, therefore, also those of Europe, are exempt from these inconvenient guests. The most dangerous, and almost the only enemy which man and the herbivora have reason to dread, is theWolf. This animal, now very rare in Western Europe, where his race will soon disappear, is still found in great numbers in the wild Lithuanian forests, in Russia, and all Northern and Central Asia. To him, as to other animals of theCanidæ, cold appears more favourable than heat, and it is in countries where the average temperature seldom rises high he attains his greatest dimensions. In Lithuania wolves are often met with which measure three feet and a half in length, without the tail. Those of Northern Asia are also of a great size and nerve, of terrible strength and audacity; they have been seen to pounce on a sheep, and carry it off at full speed. They intrude in quest of victims into the towns, the villages, and the encampments; combat to the last with their enemies; and when vanquished die without a groan. Generally they lurk in the woods and forests; but hunger, according to the proverb, drives them forth from their lairs. Then they assemble in vast hordes; they pursue, they assail, they defend, with ingenious tactic, skilfully availing themselves of the disposition and accidents of the ground. Their manœuvres vary according to the nature of the game or the enemy. In general, if a man preserve an upright bearing and a bold countenance, they will not attack him; they follow him stealthily, however, prepared to pounce upon him if, unhappily, he should stumble or falter. But the wolves of Tartary, far from sharing in this deference towards the lord of creation, display a singular bitterness against him. “It is remarked,” says the Jesuit missionary Huc, “that the Mongolian wolves attack man more willingly than any animals; one sees them sometimes galloping through innumerable flocks of sheep, without inflicting any injury, in order to dash upon the shepherd. In the neighbourhood of the Great Wall theyfrequently descend upon the Tartar-Chinese villages, enter the farms, turn aside with contempt from the domestic animals which they encounter, and penetrate even into the interior of the houses to select their victims, seizing them invariably by the throat and strangling them. Not a village in Tartary but has every year to deplore some calamity of this kind. One might say that the wolves of this country sought specially to avenge themselves on men for the blood-thirsty war the Tartars wage against them.” And it is true that in their pursuit of these animals the inhabitants of the Steppes display not only an ardour which would be legitimate, but a fierce and uncontrollable cruelty.

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