In the European Steppes the cold often reaches 30° Reaumur, or far below the point at which boiling water cast up in the air falls to the earth in a shower of frozen hailbeads. Even where some of the most southern Asiatic Steppes assume the character of the African Sahara, and where the camel in the summer sinks up to his knees in the burning sand, in winter the icicles gather as thickly on the few straggling hairs of the Tartar’s chin, as they do on the bushy beard of the Muscovite on the banks of the Neva. Perovski, the governor of Orenburg, on his expedition to Khiva, six winters since, was arrested by the impassable snow, on the very route which he dared not undertake in the summer months for fear of being buried under the hot and drifting sand, as it has not unfrequently happened to the caravans which ventured to invade the solitude of this desert.
The region of the Steppes is the home of the Cossacks, of a portion of the Mongol race, and of more than a score of Tartar tribes. It is the home of the camel and of the fat-tailed Kirghis sheep; of the wild steed and of the Taboon horse, scarcely tame; of the grey oxen, which furnish nearly all our tallow; of the antelope and the bustard. The wolf, driven to change his habits, burrows in these immense plains like a fox; the jackal infests portions of them; and the destroying locust falls like a blight and a curse on the young green grass of the free space, or on the rising harvest of the agricultural pioneer. On some parts of these wide Steppes dwell the most hideous of the human race, the Calmucks and Baskirs; and on other parts the Circassians, the most beautiful of their species, still sometimes descend in their predatory excursions.[1]
Revelations of Russia. Hommaire de Hell’s Steppes of the Caucasus.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CENTAUR—THE MONGOLS AND CALMUCKS—A RUSSIAN TABOON.
THE origin of the fabulous Centaur is referred by some of the learned to the Steppes, whence the first horses, and probably their riders also, passed into Thessaly. The equestrian skill acquired by the Thessalians at an early period when the horse was unknown in the rest of Greece, might have induced the imaginative beholders to declare in hyperbolical language that the horse and rider were one body:—