Читать книгу The Desert World - Arthur Mangin - Страница 12

“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 the demon 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]