THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
where the great feeding grounds of the Alichur, the Great and Little 
Pamirs and Kara-Kul still afford a safe retreat. The further west one goes, 
the more likely one would be to find untrodden valleys, where wild sheep 
remain unhunted. Probably the westernmost portions of the Alichur and 
Sarez Pamirs are their real strongholds in these days. 
Further than this into the western declivities of the Pamirs they do 
not range, but to the west of Kara-Kul Lake, at the head waters of the 
Panj River, there are said to be sheep. This seems to be the western limit 
of Ovis poli. Throughout Karategin, Baljuan, the mountainous portion 
of Eastern Bokhara and the Zarafschan district there are no wild sheep. 
The nature of the actual haunts of these sheep, as well as the nature of 
the so-called “roof of the world,” has been much misrepresented. Snow 
and ice, precipices and crags have nothing in common with the habitat 
of Ovis poli , any more than the Pamirs are a tableland or a high-lifted 
plateau like Tibet. Luxuriant meadows and rolling downlands are the 
feature of wild sheep country in the Pamirs, as much as it is of sheep 
grounds elsewhere. One can ride over the greater portion of their 
country. A sketch of the Pamirs will show the type of country which the 
poli inhabit, and the difficulties with which the hunter has to contend. 
The Pamirs are in reality a succession of broad, open mountain valleys 
situated at a high altitude. The word Pamir should be only applied to six 
or eight of these, which are in amongst a vast world of high mountain 
ranges, covering the whole area bordered by the Oxus River, the plains of 
Chinese Turkestan, the Ferghana of Russian Turkestan and the Hindu 
Kush. The title “ Pamirs ” is generally broadly applied to this whole region, 
but to be exact the word really only describes the big, open pasture lands 
which are the resorts of Kirghiz nomads and the Ovis poli. There are eight 
localities of this type — the Taghdumbash, Wakham, the Alichur, Sarez, 
Rang-Kul, Kara-Kul and the Little and Great Pamirs. All these are true 
Pamirs, the intervening country and the bordering region being high 
snow-capped mountains. 
The conditions of such a country are peculiar. The mountains rise to 
20,000 feet, the high, open valleys average 12,000 feet. The encircling 
ranges cut off all moisture from its inner portion, consequently the Pamirs 
have the least rainfall of any other locality in the Russian Empire. The 
mean yearly temperature of this remarkable region is only just above 
freezing-point, but it experiences phenomenal changes between great 
heat and great cold, the variation between the maximum and minimum 
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