Wild Sheep in Khorassan 171 



of green hills stretching away to the line of 

 the Turkoman desert, through whose thirsty 

 sands beyond our ken flowed the great Oxus. 

 A historic country indeed was this over which 

 we looked, one that from the dim legendary 

 times of the wars of Afrasiab and the Toura- 

 nians, the "Gog and Magog" against whom 

 Alexander afterwards built his great wall, has 

 echoed to the tramp and thunder of armed 

 hosts ; the shout of battle and the rush and 

 turmoil of nations struggling for supremacy. 

 But not to the noise of arms only. Down 

 the long ages this corner of Asia, with its 

 comparatively low hills and easy valleys, the 

 only break in the great mountain barrier that 

 stretches across Asia, has been, as it were, 

 straits through which have flowed currents of 

 human migration, Aryan, Mongol, Turk, and 

 Tartar, set up by oceanic tides of which one 

 can but guess the origin. 1 It is for this reason 

 that the dwellers in the scattered towns and 

 hamlets of this part of Persia and Afghanistan 

 are so curious a flotsam and jetsam of bygone 

 nationalities. 



A flat -topped hill with grey scarped sides, 



1 The chief cause of human migration south and west from 

 Central Asia was probably the dessication of this region, or a 

 succession of periods of dessication or "pulsations of climate." 



