THE ASIATIC STEPPES AND THEIR FAUNA. 91 



such places none of the steppe plants flourish, and their place is 

 taken by a small, scrubby saltwort, not unlike stunted heather, 

 only here and there attaining the size of low bushes. The salt lies 

 as a more or less thick layer on the ground, filling the hollows 

 between the bushes so that they look like pools covered with ice. 

 Salt covers the whole land, keeping the mud beneath permanently 

 moist, adhering firmly to the ground, and hardly separable from it. 

 Great balls of salt and mud are raised by the traveller's feet and 

 the horses' hoofs at every step, just as if the ground were covered 

 with slushy snow. The waggon makes a deep track, in the tough 

 substratum, and the trundling wheels sometimes leave marks on 

 the salt like those left on snow in time of hard frost. Such regions 

 are in truth indescribably dismal and depressing, but elsewhere it is 

 not so. 



The vegetation of the steppes is much richer in species than is 

 usually supposed, much richer indeed than I, not being a botanist, 

 am able to compute. On the black soil, the tschi-grass, the thyrsa- 

 grass, and the spiraea in some places choke off almost all other 

 plants; but in the spaces between these, and on leaner soil, all sorts 

 of gay flowers spring up. In the hollows, too, the vegetation becomes 

 gradually that of the marsh, and reeds and rushes, which here pre- 

 dominate, leave abundant room for the development of a varied 

 plant-life. But the time of blooming is short, and the time of 

 withering and dying is long in the steppes. 16 



Perhaps it is not too much to say that the contrasts of the 

 seasons are nowhere more vivid than in the steppes. Wealth of 

 bright flowers and desert-like sterility, the charms of autumn and 

 the desolation of winter, succeed one another; the disruptive forces 

 are as strong as those which recreate, the sun's heat destroys as 

 surely as the cold. But what has been smitten by the heat and 

 swept away by raging storms is replaced in the first sunshine of 

 spring; and even the devouring fire is not potent enough wholly to 

 destroy what has been spared by the sun and the storms. The 

 spring may seem more potent in tropical lands, but nowhere is it 

 more marvellous than in the steppes, where in its power it stands 

 alone opposed to summer, autumn, and winter. 



