CENTRAL ASIA 
penetrated to the source of the Oxus and brought back a head of this 
wild sheep, thus enabling the naturalist Blyth to name it. A long time 
elapsed before any other Englishman visited the Pamirs. The next head 
of Ovis poli to be brought to England was a 65 § -inch head which Colonel 
T. E. Gordon, of the Forsyth Expedition to Yarkand, brought home to the 
British Museum in 1874. About this time the Pamirs were beginning 
to attract much attention on account of international jealousy. In 1860 
the Russians were already pushing southwards from their new-acquired 
possessions in the Central Asian Khanates; and it was only during the 
unsettled period that followed, when it was still undecided as to whom 
the Pamirs belonged, that the few hunters who have traversed the great 
plateau made their journeys. The first Englishman to make a hunting trip 
in these regions was Mr St George Littledale, who in 1889 visited the 
Great Kara-Kul Lake, and during the following year, in company with 
his wife, crossed the Pamirs from north to south. He crossed the main 
haunts of the Ovis poli and hunted on the Kara-Kul, Alichur, Great and Little 
Pamirs — magnificent hunting grounds long since closed to travellers not 
of Russian nationality. In the same year Major Cumberland killed Ovis 
poli in the Taghdumbash (or Chinese) Pamir, and in the following year 
hunted on the Kara-Kul Pamir on his way from Kashgar to Margelan. 
In 1892 there arrived the last British sportsman to be allowed to visit these 
highlands, which had by now become Russian property, namely, Lord 
Dunmore. Since then scientific explorations and journeys of political 
import have been the only means of bringing travellers to these solitudes. 
The ordinary sportsman has been rigorously excluded. 
The story of the hunting of Ovis poli is a sad one, for although the 
Britisher was first on the scene, the Russian has become the actual pos- 
sessor of these fine shooting grounds. No foreigner can to-day even visit 
the locality where Wood first found the great curling horns and brought 
them back as proof. Those were the palmy days, when the “ Roof of the 
World ” was a no-man’s land; but it only lasted a few short years, as the 
entire region became Russian territory within a few years of its discovery. 
Yet there remained a slice which belonged to the Chinese Empire, namely, 
the Taghdumbash Pamir, a name now familiar, for it is the only Ovis 
poli ground which remains open to us. But even this is only a 
small locality, one valley out of a world of ranges; already the great 
wild sheep know the line of demarcation between the two empires, and 
prefer Russian soil. For the most part the poli have retreated westwards, 
129 
s 
