5 2 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



of that terrible dessication x by which vast regions 

 in Asia are still becoming desert wastes. And on 

 all the grim Sphinx-like shape has looked down, 

 itself but little changed since the days when 

 wetted by the flying spray. In the long cycles 

 of existence, it was but yesterday that the legions 

 of Alexander thundered by, yesterday that on 

 men's tongues were such names as Chenghiz and 

 Halaku, Mahmud and Timur lang. And what of 

 to-morrow ? Beyond the veil hanging over the 

 desert lie the plains of Bakwa, the scene, accord- 

 ing to Eastern saying, of the world's final Arma- 

 geddon. And after that we can imagine the 

 stone figure yet watching on, after the disappear- 

 ance of life itself, gazing through the long aeons 

 over the whitened bones of a dead world. 



The reader will be beginning to wonder what all 

 this has to do with ibex shooting. It has in truth 

 but little, save that the table hill whither I have 

 attempted to carry him in spirit, and especially its 

 rocky walls and buttresses, is the haunt of some 



1 Professor Ellsworth Huntingdon, in a paper contributed to the 

 Royal Geographical Society's journal, referred to three cycles of 

 dessication (1) the retirement of Tertiary inland seas because of 

 the warping of the earth's crust ; (2) the change from the moisture 

 of glacial days to the aridity of the present time ; (3) a dessication 

 " which is the last faint undulation of the great climatic wave of 

 the glacial period." The latter has taken place in historic times, 

 and to it the Professor largely attributes some of the great human 

 migrations, such as that of the Huns. 



