THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
the Karakorum and Tibet on the south, and losing itself in the Siberian 
plains on the north, come under one descriptive area. Mongolia, the 
deserts of Gobi, Manchuria and far north-eastern Siberia are reserved 
for another chapter. 
Inner Asia, on the whole, is a region of uniformity, occasionally broken 
by violent contrasts. It is all more or less in the same latitude, it is all of 
the arid type of country, a land of immense steppes and deserts, bordered 
and ridged by great mountain ranges. The plains of Central Asia are 
without variety and extraordinarily monotonous, they are practically 
of one character throughout. But the highlands, although all of the same 
type, are exceptionally beautiful and surpassingly interesting. To the 
hunter they are a veritable paradise and provide some of the finest hill 
stalking in the world. So the desert frontiers of Inner Asia are passed 
by heedlessly, the attraction almost always being the plateaux of the 
secluded mountain ranges. Long, tiring journeys are necessary in 
order to reach one’s ground, and still more tedious stages in order to 
return to civilization. The finest hunting grounds are 800 miles from 
railhead in Russian territory, or two and a half months’ journey from 
railhead in India. Yet these inconveniences mean nothing to the man 
who can possibly obtain the time necessary for carrying out such a 
journey. 
Of innermost Asia, the Pamirs have always been the most romantic 
locality. Its native name, Bam-i-Dunya , the Roof of the World, has an 
attraction beyond a mere geographical significance; its position as the 
meeting-place of three great empires has an historical and political interest; 
while as the home of that gigantic sheep, Ovis poli , named after its discoverer, 
the great Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, the Pamirs are the ambition 
of every hunter. The size of the giant wild sheep of the Pamirs has appealed 
to the imagination of every traveller who has come in contact with him. 
Marco Polo described him as “ a wild sheep of great size, whose horns are 
good six palms in length. From these horns the shepherds make great 
bowls to eat from, and they use the horns also to enclose folds for their 
cattle at night.” Six palms as the length of their horns is no exaggeration, 
for there are heads in existence which measure 75 inches in length, and 
men have shot them with 65 -inch horns. In height at the shoulder they 
are as big as a donkey, and their horns weigh as much as 50 lbs. Yet 
no one hunted this truly magnificent beast, no man even saw him in the 
flesh, until that pioneer of frontier exploration, Captain Wood, in 1837 
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