Ovis Poli
CHAPTER XII
THE OVIS POLI OF THE PAMIR
By St. George Littledale
The great Pamir, or ‘roof of the world,’ forms the nucleus of the whole Central Asiatic highland system, and consists of a vast plateau formation some 30,000 square miles in extent, with a mean elevation of at least 15,000 ft.
This, shortly, is what modern geographers have to say of the home of Ovis Poli:
The plain is called Pamier, and you ride across it for twelve days together—finding nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing, so that travellers are obliged to carry with them whatever they have need of; North-east, you travel forty days over mountains and wilderness, and you find no green thing. The people are savage idolaters, clothing themselves in the skins of beasts; they are in truth an evil race. There are numbers of wild beasts—among others wild sheep of great size, whose horns are a good six palms in length. From these horns shepherds make great bowls to eat from, and they use the horns also to make folds for their cattle at night.
So Marco Polo wrote of the Pamir six hundred years ago, and six centuries earlier still some Chinese pilgrims, in describing it, said that ‘it was midway between heaven and earth: the snowdrifts never cease winter or summer: the whole tract is but a dreary waste without a trace of human kind.’
These descriptions are nearly as true to-day as they were when they were first written, and this Pamir is the home of the grandest of all the sheep tribe, the great Ovis Poli.