THE KIRGHIZ AND HIS HORSE. 55 



These barbarians, however, respect the life of their domestic 

 animals, or sacrifice them only in cases of pressing need. They treat 

 them also with a gentleness unknown to our European grooms and 

 horse-dealers. With them, as with the Ai-abs, the horse is a friend 

 rather than a slave ; he is, in truth, one of the family ; and it is 

 with great difficulty that his master consents to part with him. Our 

 travellers describe the Tartar, Mongol, and Kirghiz horsemen as 

 realizing the celebrated fable of the Centaurs, as becoming, so to 

 speak, one with their horses. The exigencies of their wandering 

 life require that they should be constantly on horseback ; it is almost 

 their home, their abode, their dwelling-place ; there they are mounted 

 day and night ; there they sleep, prepare their food, and take their 

 repasts. True that their cooking is of the rudest and simplest, and 

 their taste not so fastidious as that of an European epicure ! If, for 

 example, they would make ready a piece of meat, they insert it 

 between the saddle and the horse's skin, and in this impromptu oven 

 leave it for a few hours, while it undergoes the processes of heat, 

 pressure, and frequent friction, serving in some degree to cook it ; 

 then a pinch of salt for seasoning; and lo! a dainty titbit which our 

 cavalier devours with the best appetite in the world. 



But it is to the inhabitants of the Steppes of the Black and Caspian 

 Seas that the horse renders the most estimable services. To make 

 use of a phrase of Buffon's, "He shares with them the fatigue of war 

 and the glory of battle;" he provides them with the best and swiftest 

 means of transit ; he nourishes them with his flesh, and the mare 

 quenches their thirst with her milk. In their dairies mares take the 

 place of our European milch-cows, and are regularly milked once or 

 twice a-day. The milk, warm, is employed as a medicine. It is 

 thicker and more saccharine than that of ruminating animals, and 

 this, undoubtedly, is the reason that the Cossacks, Tartars, and Kal- 

 mucks have succeeded, by fermentation, in distilling alcohol from it, 

 and procuring vinegar by acetifying it. The} 7 prepare with it an intoxi- 

 cating liquor (koumis), to which they are very partial, and with which 

 the wealthiest among them consider it an honour to be largely provided. 



