From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands

by Alfred Edmund Brehm

The vegetation of the steppes is much richer in species than is usually supposed, much richer indeed than I, not being a botanist, am able to compute. On the black soil, the tschi-grass, the thyrsa-grass, and the spiræa in some places choke off almost all other plants; but in the spaces between these, and on leaner soil, all sorts of gay flowers spring up. In the hollows, too, the vegetation becomes gradually that of the marsh, and reeds and rushes, which here predominate, leave abundant room for the development of a varied plant-life. But the time of blooming is short, and the time of withering and dying is long in the steppes.[16]

Perhaps it is not too much to say that the contrasts of the seasons are nowhere more vivid than in the steppes. Wealth of bright flowers and desert-like sterility, the charms of autumn and the desolation of winter, succeed one another; the disruptive forces are as strong as those which recreate, the sun’s heat destroys as surely as the cold. But what has been smitten by the heat and swept away by raging storms is replaced in the first sunshine of spring; and even the devouring fire is not potent enough wholly to destroy what has been spared by the sun and the storms. The spring may seem more potent in tropical lands, but nowhere is it more marvellous than in the steppes, where in its power it stands—alone—opposed to summer, autumn, and winter.

The steppes are still green when summer steals upon them, but already their full splendour has sped. Only a few plants have yet to attain their maturity, and they wither in the first days of the burning heat; soon the gay garment of spring is exchanged for one of gray and yellow. The sappy, green thyrsa-grass still withstands the drought; but its fine, flowing, thickly-haired beards have already attained their full growth, and wave about in the gentlest breeze, casting a silvery veil over the green beneath. A few days more, and both leaves and awns are as dry as the already yellowed tschi-grass, which appears in spring like sprouting corn, and is now like that which awaits the sickle. The broad leaves of the rhubarb lie dried on the ground, the spiræa is withered, the Caragan pea-tree is leafless, honeysuckle and dwarf-almond show autumnal tints; the thistle tops are hoary; only the wormwoods and mugworts preserve their gray-green leaves unchanged. Bright uninterrupted sunshine beats down upon the thirsty land, for it is but rarely that the clouds gather into wool-packs on the sky, and even if they are occasionally heavy with rain, the downpour is scarce enough to lay the whirling dust which every breath of wind raises. The animals still keep to their summer quarters, but the songs of the birds are already hushed. Creeping things there are in abundance, such as lizards and snakes, mostly vipers; and the grasshoppers swarm in countless hosts, forming clouds when they take wing over the steppes.

Before the summer has ended, the steppes have put on their autumnal garb, a variously shaded gray-yellow, but without variety and without charm. All the brittle plants are snapped to the ground by the first storm, and the next blast scatters them in a whirling dance over the steppes. Grappling one another with their branches and twigs, they are rolled together into balls, skipping and leaping like spooks before the raging wind, half-hidden in clouds of drifting dust with which the dark or snow-laden packs in the sky above seem to be running a race. The summer land-birds have long since flown southwards; the water-birds, of which there are hosts on every lake, are preparing for flight; the migratory mammals wend in crowded troops from one promise of food to another; the winter-sleepers have closed the doors of their retreats; reptiles and insects have withdrawn into their winter hiding-places.

A single night’s frost covers all the water-basins with thin ice; a few more days of cold and the fetters of winter are laid heavily on the lakes and pools; and only the rivers and streams, longer able to withstand the frost, afford a briefly prolonged shelter to the migratory birds which have still delayed their farewell. Gentle north-west winds sweep dark clouds across the land, and the snow drizzles down in small flakes. The mountains have already thrown on their snowy mantles; and now the low ground of the steppes puts on its garment of white. The wolf, apprehensive of storms, leaves the reed-thickets and the spiræa shrubberies which have hitherto served him well as hiding-places, and slinks hungrily around the villages and the winter quarters of the nomad herdsman, who now seeks out the most sheltered and least exhausted of the low grounds, in order to save his herds, as far as may be, from the scarcity, hardship, and misery of the winter. Against the greedy wolf the herdsman acts on the aggressive, as do the Cossack settlers and peasants; he rides out in pursuit, follows the thief’s tell-tale track to his lair, drives him out, and gives chase. With exultant shouts he spurs on his horse and terrifies the fugitive, all the while brandishing in his right hand a strong sapling with knobbed roots. The snow whirls around wolf, horse, and rider; the keen frost bites the huntsman’s face, but he cares not. After a chase of an hour, or at most of two hours, the wolf, which may have run a dozen or twenty miles, can go no further, and turns upon its pursuer. Its tongue hangs far out from its throat, the ice-tipped hairs of its reeking hide stand up stiffly, in its mad eyes is expressed the dread of death. Only for a moment does the noble horse hesitate, then, urged on by shout and knout, makes a rush at the fell enemy. High in the air the hunter swings his fatal club, down it whizzes, and the wolf lies gasping and quivering in its death agony. Wild horses and antelopes, impelled by hunger, like the wolf, shift their quarters at this season, in the endeavour to eke out a bare subsistence; even the wild sheep of the mountains wend from one hillside to another; only the hares and the imperturbable sand-grouse hold their ground, the former feeding on stems and bark, the latter on seeds and buds, but both finding only a scant subsistence.

Fig. 12.—A Herd of Horses during a Snowstorm on the Asiatic Steppes.

For many days in succession the fall of snow continues; then the wind, which brought the clouds, dies away, but the sky remains as dark as ever. The wind changes and blows harder and harder from east, south-east, south, or south-west. A thin cloud sweeps over the white ground—it is formed of whirling snow; the wind becomes a tempest; the cloud rises up to heaven: and, maddening, bewildering even to the most weather-hardened, dangerous in the extreme to all things living, the buran rages across the steppes, a snow-hurricane, as terrible as the typhoon or the simoom with its poisonous breath. For two or three days such a snow-storm may rage with uninterrupted fury, and both man and beast are absolutely storm-stayed. A man overtaken in the open country is lost, unless some special providence save him; nay, more, even in the village or steppe-town, he who ventures out of doors when the buran is at its height may perish, as indeed not rarely happens. When February is past, man and beast are fairly safe, and may breathe freely, though the winter still continues to press heavily on the steppes.

The sun rises higher in the heavens; its rays fall more warmly on the southern slopes of the mountains and hills, and dark patches of clear ground appear everywhere, growing larger day by day, except when an occasional fresh fall of snow hides them for a little. The first breath of spring comes at last, but only slowly can it free the land from winter’s shackles. Only when the life-giving sunshine is accompanied by the soft south wind, at the earliest in the beginning of April, usually about the middle of the month, does the snow disappear quickly from the lower slopes of the mountains and from the deep valleys rich in black earth. Only in gorges and steep-walled hollows, behind precipitous hills, and amid thick bushes, do the snow-wreaths linger for almost another month. In all other places the newly-awakened life bursts forth in strength. The thirsty soil sucks in the moisture which the melting snow supplies, and the two magicians—sun and water—now unite their irresistible powers. Even before the last snow-wreaths have vanished, before the rotten ice-blocks have melted on the lakes, the bulbous plants, and others which live through the winter, put forth their leaves and raise their flower-stalks to the sun. Among the sere yellow grass and the dry gray stems of all herbs which were not snapped by the autumnal storm, the first green shimmers. It is at this time that the settlers and the nomads set fire to the thick herbage of various sorts, and what the storms have spared the flames devour. But soon after the fire has cleared the ground, the plant-life reappears, in patches at least, in all its vigour. From the apparently sterile earth herbaceous and bulbous growths shoot up; buds are unpacked, flowers unfold, and the steppe arrays itself in indescribable splendour. Boundless tracts are resplendent with tulips, yellow, dark red, white, white and red. It is true that they rise singly or in twos and threes, but they are spread over the whole steppe-land, and flower at the same time, so that one sees them everywhere. Immediately after the tulips come the lilies, and new, even more charming colours appear wherever these lovely children of the steppes find the fit conditions for growth, on the hillsides and in the deep valleys, along the banks of all the streams, and in the marshes. More gregarious and richer in species than the tulips, they appear in much more impressive multitudes; they completely dominate wide stretches of country, and in different places remind one of a rye-field overgrown with corn-flowers, or of a rape-field in full blossom. Usually each species or variety is by itself, but here and there blue lilies and yellow are gaily intermingled, the two complementary colours producing a most impressive effect—a vision for rapture.

While these first-born children of the spring are adorning the earth, the heavens also begin to smile. Unclouded the spring sky certainly is not, rather it is covered with clouds of all sorts, even in the finest weather with bedded clouds and wool-packs, which stretch more or less thickly over the whole dome of heaven, and around the horizon appear to touch the ground. When these clouds thicken the heavens darken, and only here and there does the sunlight pierce the curtain and show the steppes warmed by the first breath of spring, and flushed with inconceivable wealth of colour.