Читать книгу The Desert World - Arthur Mangin - Страница 11

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HITHERTO we 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 the north-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 word Steppe, 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, and Scha-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 the Times.

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 to produce 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 family Rosaceæ, tulips, and the cypripedium. 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 the Saussurea and 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 the Cyperaceæ. A great variety prevails there of herbaceous or frutescent plants. In the spring season, small rosaceæ and amygdalaceæ, with rosy or snow-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 as Suassurea amara and salsa, the artemisias and blue centaureas, which grow profusely in these deserts, and the leguminosæ, which are there represented by different species of astragal, cytisus, and caragana. 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.