THE ASIATIC STEPPES AND THEIR FAUNA. 107 



eater and roller, which live on the steep banks of the streams along 

 with falcons and pigeons, the bunting and the scarlet bullfinch, 

 which shelter among the tschi-grass and herbage, and many others. 

 Even the swallows are not absent from this region in which stable 

 human dwellings are so rare. That the sand-martin should make 

 its burrows in all the steeper banks of the lakes will not seem 

 strange to the ornithologist, but it is worthy of note that the swallow 

 and martins are still in process of transition from free-living to 

 semi-domesticated birds, that they still fix their nests to the cliffs, 

 but leave these to establish themselves wherever the Kirghiz rear a 

 tomb, and that the martins seek hospitality even in the tent or 

 yurt^^ They find it, too, when the Kirghiz is able to settle long 

 enough to allow the eggs to hatch and the young to become fledged, 

 in a nest fixed to the cupola ring of his hut. 



But in these regions, whose bird-life I have been describing, there 

 are other animals. Apart from the troublesome mosquitoes, flies, 

 gadflies, wasps, and other such pests, there are only a few species 

 of insects, but most of these are very numerous and are distributed 

 over the whole of the wide area. The same is true of the reptiles; 

 thus in the region which we traversed we found only a few species 

 of lizards and snakes. Among the latter we noted especially two 

 venomous species, our common viper and the halys- viper; neither 

 indeed occurred in multitudes like the lizards, but both were none 

 the less remarkably abundant. Several times every day as we rode 

 through the steppe would one and the other of the Kirghiz who 

 accompanied us bend from his horse with drawn knife, and slash 

 the head off" one of these snakes. I remember, too, that, at a little 

 hill-town in the northern Altai, a place called " Schlangenberg " [or 

 Snakemount], we wished to know whether the place had a good 

 right to its name, and that the answer was almost embarrassingly 

 convincing, so abundant was the booty with which those whom 

 we had sent in quest soon returned. We had no longer any reason 

 to doubt the truth of the tale according to which the place owed 

 its name to the fact that, before the town was founded, the people 

 collected thousands and thousands of venomous snakes and burned 

 them. Amphibians and small mammals seem much rarer than 



