112 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



in menacing attitudes; rearing on their hind-legs they rush at one 

 another, and the crash of powerful horns is echoed in a dull rumble 

 among the rocks. Sometimes it happens that they entangle one 

 another, for the horns may interlock inseparably, and both perish 

 miserably; or one ram may hurl the other over a precipice, where 

 he is surely dashed to pieces. 



During the last days of April or the first of May the ewe brings 

 forth a single lamb or a pair. These lambs, as we found out from 

 captive ones, are able in a few hours to run with their mother, and 

 in a few days they follow her over all the paths, wherever she leads 

 them, with the innate agility and surefootedness characteristic of 

 their race. When serious danger threatens, the mother hides them 

 in the nooks of the rocks, where the enemy may perchance overlook 

 their presence. She returns, of course, after she has successfully 

 eluded the foe. The lambkin, pressed close to the ground, lies as 

 still as a mouse, and, looking almost like a stone, may often escape 

 detection; but not by any means always is he safe, least of all from 

 the golden eagle, which often seizes and kills a lamb which the 

 mother has left unprotected. So we observed when hunting on the 

 Arkat Mountains. Captive archar lambs which we got from the 

 Kirghiz were most delightful creatures, and showed by the ready 

 way in which they took to the udders of their foster-mothers that 

 they might have been reared without special difficulty. Should it 

 prove possible to bring the proud creatures into domestication the 

 acquisition would be one of the greatest value. But of this the 

 Kirghiz does not dream, he thinks only of how he may shoot this 

 wild sheep or the other. Not that the chase of this powerful 

 animal is what one could call a passion with him; indeed the sheep's 

 most formidable enemy is the wolf, and it is only in the deep snow 

 in winter that even he manages to catch an archar. 



As on the mountains, so on the driest, dreariest stretches of the 

 steppes, which even in spring suggest African deserts, there are 

 characteristic animals. In such places almost all the plants of the 

 highlands and valleys disappear except the low tufted grass and 

 diminutive bushes of wormwood. Here, however, grows a remark- 

 able shrub which one does not see elsewhere, a shrub called ram- 



