TURKESTAN HIGHLANDS 61 



much poorer, and grows quite arid towards its eastern 

 extremity. 



Kirghiz Steppe. From north to south, east of the 

 Ural-Caspian line, there is a gradual impoverishment 

 of plant life from the wet Siberian tai'ga to the sandy 

 deserts of Turan. The wooded swamps of Siberia give 

 place to a flat or rolling country, where the marshes 

 are reduced to hundreds of small lakelets in the troughs 

 and hollows, and the climate is neither so rainy and cold 

 as that of the tai'ga, nor so dry and hot as that of Turan. 

 This is the region of steppes. 



The line between the forest and the grass-land is not 

 hard and fast. Over a belt 200 to 300 miles wide, the 

 transition is made by a park landscape, in which birches 

 are scattered over the prairie in groves, groups, and 

 sometimes in woods. The innumerable marshes are 

 marked by fringes of giant cow-parsnips, day-lilies, 

 willows, and poplars. Meadows and herb-mats are 

 interspersed in the steppe. Trees disappear gradually 

 towards the south ; the steppe assumes a typical, dry 

 aspect with its low covering of wiry grasses, in the 

 interstices of which the soil may be seen. Henceforth, 

 it is a heaving ocean of grass, the appearance of which 

 changes wholly from season to season: verdant and 

 flowery in spring, brown and parched in late summer, 

 dusty -grey with woolly wormwood in autumn and 

 winter. It sometimes conceals rich black earth and 

 loess, which forms a heavy and retentive soil. 



The climate, though not so hostile as that of Turan, 

 has an irregular rainfall oscillating between 10 and 

 20 inches distributed over spring and summer, with 

 droughts recurring every few years. Generally about 

 two-thirds of the year are very dry, and excessive alike 

 in cold and heat. (The combination of this type of 



