On the Road to the Caspian 257 



brace in the course of a morning's march. They 

 were not, as I had expected, at all inferior to the 

 English pheasant in size, their plumage was ex- 

 actly the same, and they ran with equal speed and 

 rose with the same fuss and commotion. But 

 when they appeared on the camp table in the 

 evening, not even the hunger that is said to 

 make the best sauce could blind us to the fact 

 that as table birds they were vastly inferior. It 

 was not so much tenderness in which they failed 

 as flavour. It is possible that if, instead of an 

 unlimited supply of hunger, we had had some 

 bread-sauce and fried crumbs, and the birds had 

 been cooked, in the higher and better sense of 

 the word, I should have been able to give these 

 original pheasants a greater meed of praise. 

 The Emperor Baber, in his memoirs, speaks of 

 a pheasant they shot in Farghana, " the extreme 

 border of the habitable world," and describes 

 them as "so fat that four persons may dine on 

 one and not finish it." The bird was perhaps 

 the same, but I must own that this was not 

 exactly the experience of D. and myself. In fact, 

 I think I remember sitting down to a pheasant 

 and a bustard and leaving little of either. 



It seemed odd that the ground on which we 

 found pheasants was almost invariably the swampy 

 reed brakes. In England one is inclined to be 



