494 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



as a poet. But if a woman is inspired to poetry she is sure of 

 universal admiration, and if she consents to sing in competition 

 with a man, the enthusiastic listeners extol her above all others 

 of her sex. 



The vast steppe is much less favourable to regular instruction 

 than it is to poetry. This explains why so few Kirghiz are able to 

 write, and why there is so little written literature. Only the sons 

 of the wealthiest and highest in rank among them are taught to 

 read and write. In the two schools founded by the government in 

 Ustkamenegorsk and Zaizan Kirghiz boys are taught, — indeed, they 

 only are admitted to that in the first-named town, — ^but the influ- 

 ence of these institutions does not reach to the heart of the steppe. 

 There a boy only learns if he happens to come in contact with a 

 mollah who has as much desire to teach as the boy has to learn. 

 But even then his instruction is confined to the simplest things, and 

 consists chiefly in learning to read and form Arabic characters. 

 The contents of the principal, if not the only text-book, the Koran, 

 are not usually intelligible to the mollah himself; he reads the 

 sentences without knowing their meaning. I have only known one 

 Kirghiz who understood Arabic, and he was a sultan. Everyone 

 else who was distinguished above his fellows by his knowledge of 

 the sacred writings, and who, as a faithful adherent of Islam, per- 

 formed the five prescribed prayers, understood at most the words of 

 the call to prayer and of the first sentences of the Koran; the rest 

 he repeated with the seriousness of all Mohammedans, but without 

 understanding the meaning. And yet I was deeply impressed when, 

 in the midst of the vast steppe, where no minaret towered up towards 

 heaven, the voice of the mueddin uttered the call to prayer, and the 

 faithful knelt in long rows behind the Iman or leader, and pressed 

 their foreheads to the ground in prayer, as the law of the Prophet 

 ordains. 



The consciousness of strength and dexterity, of skill in riding 

 and hunting, of poetic talent and general mental activity, and the 

 feeling of independence and freedom caused by the vastness of the 

 steppe gives confidence and dignity to the bearing of the Kirghiz. 

 The impression he makes upon an unprejudiced observer is therefore 



