THE QUEST FOR THE WILD HORSE 93 
mountains from the decaying civilization on the other, 
he found himself almost alone among the primitive 
animals and birds of the centre of the Old World ; 
and as the old Greeks imagined, and as Darwin found 
in Patagonia, and voyagers at either Pole, that at the 
ends of the world Nature was simplified, with fewer 
and more primitive forms, so, in the “ centre of the 
world,” Prejvalski found that in these remote and 
solitary regions he w r as face to face with some of the 
early and original types of those animals which man 
enslaved and turned to his own uses, at such a distance 
of time that the original types were believed to have 
perished for ever. The hope of discovering the 
“ undescended dark original ” of some of our do- 
mesticated animals, especially of those ancient servants 
of Eastern mankind, the camel and the horse, seems 
to have been ever present to the mind of Prejvalski, 
and to have affected his imagination as the vision 
of the shining walls of El Dorado did the old 
adventurers, or the hope of finding the mother-rock 
of the gold, the gold-seekers of our day. From the 
sapphire lake of Koko-Nor he pushed towards the 
North-West across the plain of Tsaidam, a strange, 
unfinished region, once the bed of a huge lake, a 
waste of sand, salt-impregnated clay, and marshes, 
through clouds of mosquitoes and gadflies, towards 
another lake, called Lob-Nor, lying in an extension of 
the great Desert of Gobi. He had marked how, as 
he journeyed across Asia westward, all the elements of 
Nature grew more simple and severe, and that as the 
