A E Brehm

BLACKIE & SON, LIMITED, LONDON, GLASGOW AND EDINBURGH.

FROM
NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR

FROM
North Pole to Equator

STUDIES OF WILD LIFE AND SCENES
IN MANY LANDS

BY THE NATURALIST-TRAVELLER

ALFRED EDMUND BREHM

AUTHOR OF “BIRD-LIFE”, “TIERLEBEN”, ETC. ETC.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
MARGARET R. THOMSON

EDITED BY
J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., F.R.S.E.

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WITH EIGHTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS
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LONDON

BLACKIE & SON, Limited, 50 OLD BAILEY, E.C.
GLASGOW AND DUBLIN

1896

PREFACE

TO THE GERMAN EDITION.

Six years have passed since the grave at Renthendorf closed over the remains of my esteemed father, whose death—all too early—was as great a loss to Science as to those who loved and honoured him. It was strange that his eventful and adventurous life, in the course of which he visited and explored four quarters of the globe, should have ended at the little spot in green Thuringia where he was born. He had just reached his fifty-fifth year when his lips, so apt in speech, were silenced, and the pen which he held so masterfully dropped from his hand. He was full of great plans as to various works, and it is much to be regretted that the notes which he had collected towards the realization of these were too fragmentary for anyone but their author to utilize. But the manuscripts which he left contained many a treasure, and it seemed to me a duty, both to the author and to all friends of thoughtful observation, to make these available to the reading public.

The following pages form the first book of the kind, and contain the most valuable part of the legacy—Alfred Edmund Brehm’s lectures, once so universally popular. I believe that, in giving these pages to the world, I am offering a gift which will be warmly welcomed, and I need add no commendatory words of mine, for they speak adequately for themselves. Writing replaces spoken words very imperfectly, and my father, who was never tied down to his paper, may often have delivered the same matter in different forms according to the responsiveness of his audience, abbreviating here, expanding there—yet to anyone who has heard him the following pages will recall his presence and the tones of his sonorous voice; everyone will not only recognize in them the individuality of the author of the Tierleben (Animal Life) and Bird Life, but will learn to know him in a new and attractive side of his character. For it is my father’s lectures almost more than any other of his works which show the wealth of his experiences, the many-sidedness of his knowledge, his masterly powers of observation and description, and not least his delicate kindly humour and the sympathetic interpretation of animate and inanimate nature which arose from his deeply poetic temperament.

Therefore I send these pages forth into the world with the pleasant confidence that they will add many to the author’s already numerous friends. May they also gain new and unprejudiced sympathizers for the animal world which he loved so warmly and understood so thoroughly; and may they, in every house where the love of literature, and of the beautiful is cherished, open eyes and hearts to perceive the beauty of nature, the universal mother; then will the highest and noblest aim of their author be achieved.

So may all success attend these pages, may they receive a joyful welcome, and wherever they gain an entrance may they remain as a prized possession.

HORST BREHM,

Doctor of Medicine.

Berlin, September, 1890.

PREFATORY NOTE

TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

It has been a privilege to make available to English readers a book which shows a great naturalist at his best—a book that presents the reader with a series of vivid pictures of wild life and scenery, painted from actual observation, and with all the truth and accuracy that belong to the artist and man of science combined. It consists of a number of papers or articles that were originally read as public lectures and were afterwards collected into a volume that has met with much success in Germany. The subjects treated range over a wide and varied field. Some of them are unfamiliar to the ordinary reader, and besides their inherent interest have the added charm of novelty; others, if more familiar, are here invested with a freshness and charm that such a trained observer and practised writer as the author could alone impart.

To the translation of the German original have been added an introductory essay, showing Brehm’s position among naturalist-travellers, an extended table of contents, an appendix containing a number of editorial notes, and an index. The number of pictorial illustrations has also been increased.

For a notice of the Author and his labours see the concluding part of the Introductory Essay.

M. R. T.
J. A. T.

University Hall,

Edinburgh, December, 1895.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

BY J. ARTHUR THOMSON.

BREHM’S PLACE AMONG NATURALIST-TRAVELLERS.

Though Brehm’s lectures might well be left, as his son has said, to speak for themselves, it seems useful to introduce them in their English dress with some notes on the evolution of the naturalist-traveller and on Brehm’s place in the honourable list; for an adequate appreciation of a book like this depends in part on a recognition of the position it occupies among analogous works, and on having some picture of the illustrious author himself.

In sketching the history of the naturalist-traveller it is not necessary to go very far back; for though it is interesting to recall how men of old followed their migrating herds, as the Lapp or Ostiak does his reindeer, and were led by them to fresh fields and new conquests, or how others followed the salmon down the rivers and became the toilers of the sea, this ancient lore is full of uncertainty, and is, besides, of more moment to the sociologist than to the naturalist. What we attempt here is merely to indicate the various types of naturalist-traveller who have in the course of time succeeded one another in the quest for the new.

I.

The foundations of zoology were laid by Aristotle some three hundred years before Christ, but they remained unbuilt on for nearly eighteen centuries. Here and there some enthusiast strove unaided, but only a fragmentary superstructure was reared. In fact, men were pre-occupied with tasks of civilization more serious than the prosecution of zoology, though that is not trivial. Gradually, however, great social movements, such as the Crusades and the collapse of Feudalism; great intellectual and emotional movements, such as those of the Renaissance; great inventions, such as that of printing, gave new life to Europe, and zoology shared in the re-awakening. Yet the natural history of the Middle Ages was in great part mystical; fancy and superstition ran riot along paths where science afterwards established order, and, for all practical purposes, the history of zoology, apart from the efforts of a few pioneers, may be said to date from the sixteenth century.

Now, one indubitable factor in the scientific renaissance of the sixteenth century was the enthusiasm of the early travellers, and this stimulus, periodically recurrent, has never failed to have a similar effect—of giving new life to science. But while science, and zoology as a branch of it, has been evolving during the last three centuries, the traveller, too, has shared in the evolution. It is this which we wish to trace.

I. The Romantic Type. Many of the old travellers, from Herodotus onwards, were observant and enthusiastic; most were credulous and garrulous. In days when the critical spirit was young, and verification hardly possible, there could not but be a strong temptation to tell extraordinary “travellers’ tales”. And they did. Nor need we scoff at them loudly, for the type dies hard; every year such tales are told.

Oderico de Pordenone and other mediæval travellers who give some substance to the mythical Sir John de Maundeville were travellers of this genial type. Oderico describes an interesting connecting link between the animal and vegetable kingdom, a literal “zoophyte”, the “vegetable lamb”, which seems to have been a woolly Scythian fern, with its counterpart in the large fungus which colonials sometimes speak of as the “vegetable sheep”. As for the pretended Sir John, he had in his power of swallowing marvels a gape hardly less than that of the great snakes which he describes. But even now do we not see his snakes in at least the picture-books on which innocent youth is nurtured? The basilisk (one of the most harmless of lizards) “sleyeth men beholding it”; the “cocodrilles also sley men”—they do indeed—“and eate them weeping, and they have no tongue”. “The griffin of Bactria hath a body greater than eight lyons and stall worthier than a hundred egles, for certainly he will beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back.” He was not readily daunted, Sir John, for when they told him of the lamb-tree which bears lambs in its pods, his British pluck did not desert him, and he gave answer that he “held it for no marvayle, for in his country are trees which bear fruit which become birds flying, and they are good to eate, and that that falleth on the water, liveth, and that that falleth on earth, dyeth; and they marvailed much thereat”. The tale of the barnacle-tree was a trump card in those days!

Another example of this type, but rising distinctly above it in trustworthiness, was the Venetian Marco Polo, who in the thirteenth century explored Asia from the Black Sea to Pekin, from the Altai to Sumatra, and doubtless saw much, though not quite so much as he describes. He will correct the fables of his predecessors, he tells us, demonstrating gravely that the unicorn or rhinoceros does not allow himself to be captured by a gentle maiden, but he proceeds to describe tailed men, yea, headless men, without, so far as can be seen, any touch of sarcasm. Of how many marvels, from porcupines throwing off their spines and snakes with clawed fore-feet, to the great Rukh, which could bear not merely a poor Sinbad but an elephant through the air, is it not written in the books of Ser Marco Polo of Venezia?

II. The Encyclopædist Type.—This unwieldy title, suggestive of an omnivorous hunger for knowledge, is conveniently, as well as technically, descriptive of a type of naturalist characteristic of the early years of the scientific renaissance. Edward Wotton (d. 1555), the Swiss Gesner (d. 1565), the Italian Aldrovandi (d. 1605), the Scotsman Johnson (d. 1675), are good examples. These encyclopædists were at least impressed with the necessity of getting close to the facts of nature, of observing for themselves, and we cannot blame them much if their critical faculties were dulled by the strength of their enthusiasm. They could not all at once forget the mediæval dreams, nor did they make any strenuous effort to rationalize the materials which they so industriously gathered. They harvested but did not thrash. Ostrich-like, their appetite was greater than their power of digesting. A hasty judgment might call them mere compilers, for they gathered all possible information from all sources, but, on closer acquaintance, the encyclopædists grow upon one. Their industry was astounding, their ambition lofty; and they prepared the way for men like Ray and Linnæus, in whom was the genius of order.

Associated with this period there were many naturalist-travellers, most of whom are hardly now remembered, save perhaps when we repeat the name of some plant or animal which commemorates its discoverer. José d’Acosta (d. 1600), a missionary in Peru, described some of the gigantic fossils of South America; Francesco Hernanded published about 1615 a book on the natural history of Mexico with 1200 illustrations; Marcgrav and Piso explored Brazil; Jacob Bontius, the East Indies; Prosper Alpinus, Egypt; Belon, the Mediterranean region; and there were many others. But it is useless to multiply what must here remain mere citations of names. The point is simply this, that, associated with the marvellous accumulative industry of the encyclopædists and with the renaissance of zoology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were numerous naturalist-travellers who described what they saw, and not what they fancied might be seen.

III. The General Naturalist Type.—As Ray (d. 1705) and Linnæus (d. 1778) began to reduce to order the accumulations of the encyclopædists, and as the anatomists and physiologists began the precise study of structure and function, the naturalist-travellers became more definite in their aims and more accurate in their observations. Linnæus himself sent several of his pupils on precisely scientific journeys. Moreover, in the eighteenth century there were not a few expeditions of geographical and physical purpose which occasionally condescended to take a zoologist on board. Thus Captain Cook was accompanied on his first voyage (1768-1781) by Banks and Solander, and on his second voyage by the Forsters, father and son. On his third voyage he expressly forbade the intrusion of any naturalist, but from all that we can gather it would have been better for himself if he had not done so. In these combined voyages there was nascent the idea of co-operative expeditions, of which the greatest has been that of the Challenger.

In illustration of travellers who were not specialists, but in varying degrees widely interested naturalists, it will be sufficient to cite three names—Thomas Pennant, Peter Pallas, and, greatest of all, Alexander von Humboldt.

Of Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) we may note that he was one of the early travellers in Scotland, which was then, as he says, almost as unknown as Kamchatka, and that he extorted from Dr. Johnson the admission, “He’s a Whig, sir, a sad dog; but he’s the best traveller I ever read; he observes more things than any one else does”. He knew Buffon and corresponded with Linnæus, and was the author of several works on British and North American zoology. His so-called Arctic Zoology is mainly a sketch of the fauna in the northern regions of North America, begun “when the empire of Great Britain was entire, and possessed the northern part of the New World with envied splendour”. His perspective is excellent! the botanist, the fossilist, the historian, the geographer must, he says, accompany him on his zoological tours, “to trace the gradual increase of the animal world from the scanty pittance given to the rocks of Spitzbergen to the swarms of beings which enliven the vegetating plains of Senegal; to point out the causes of the local niggardness of certain places, and the prodigious plenty in others”. It was about the same time (1777) that E. A. W. Zimmermann, Professor of Mathematics at Brunswick, published a quarto in Latin, entitled Specimen Zoologiæ Geographicæ Quadrupedum, “with a most curious map”, says Pennant, “in which is given the name of every animal in its proper climate, so that a view of the whole quadruped creation is placed before one’s eyes, in a manner perfectly new and instructive”. It was wonderful then, but the map in question looks commonplace enough nowadays.

Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) was a student of medicine and natural science, and did good work as a systematic and anatomical zoologist. He was the first, we believe, to express the relationships of animals in a genealogical tree, but his interest for us here lies in his zoological exploration of Russia and Siberia, the results of which are embodied in a series of bulky volumes, admirable in their careful thoroughness. We rank him rather as one of the forerunners of Humboldt than as a zoologist, for his services to ethnology and geology were of great importance. He pondered over the results of his explorations, and many of his questionings in regard to geographical distribution, the influence of climate, the variation of animals, and similar problems, were prophetic of the light which was soon to dawn on biological science.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was undoubtedly one of the greatest naturalists of the century which his life well nigh covered. Geologist, botanist, zoologist, and more, he was almost the last of the all-round naturalists. In this indeed lay his weakness as well as his strength, for great breadth of view is apt to imply a lack of precision as to details. In boyhood, “when life”, as he says, “appears an unlimited horizon”, he had strong desires after travel, which were in part gratified by excursions with George Forster and by Swiss explorations with the sagacious old geographer Leopold von Buch. These, however, only whetted his enthusiasm for journeys with a larger radius. At length, after many discouragements, he sailed in 1799 from Corunna, with Aimé Bonpland as companion, and spent five years in exploring the equinoctial regions of the New World. The full record of his voyage one cannot be expected to read, for there are about thirty volumes of it in the complete edition, but what we should all know is Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, in which the chief results of his explorations are charmingly set forth. Later in life (1829) he went with Ehrenberg and Rose to North Asia, and his crowning work was the publication of Cosmos (1845-58), which originated in a series of lectures delivered in the University of Berlin. In front of that building his statue now stands, along with that of his not less famous brother Wilhelm.

We think of Humboldt not so much as an early explorer of tropical America, nor because he described the habits of the condor and made observations on electric eels, nor because he furnished Cuvier and Latreille with many new specimens, but rather as a magnificent type of the naturalist-traveller, observant, widely interested, and thoughtful, who pointed forward to Darwin in the success with which he realized the complexity of inter-relations in nature. Many a traveller, even among his contemporaries, discovered more new plants and animals than the author of Cosmos, but none approached him as an all-round naturalist, able to look out on all orders of facts with keenly intelligent eyes, a man, moreover, in whom devotion to science never dulled poetic feeling. His work is of real importance in the history of geographical distribution, for he endeavoured to interpret the peculiarities of the various faunas in connection with the peculiar environment of the different regions—a consideration which is at least an element in the solution of some of the problems of distribution. It is especially important in regard to plants, and one may perhaps say that Humboldt, by his vivid pictures of the vegetable “physiognomy” of different regions, and by his observations on the relations between climate and flora, laid the foundations of the scientific study of the geographical distribution of plants. We find in some of his Charakterbilder, for example in his Views of Nature, the prototype of those synthetic pictures which give Brehm’s popular lectures their peculiar interest and value.

IV. The Specialist Type.—It would say little for scientific discipline if it were true that a man learned, let us say, in zoology, could spend years in a new country without having something fresh to tell us about matters outside of his specialism—the rocks, the plants, and the people. But it is not true. There have been few great travellers who have been narrow specialists, and one might find more than one case of a naturalist starting on his travels as a zoologist and returning an anthropologist as well. Yet it is evident enough that few men can be master of more than one craft. There have been few travellers like Humboldt, few records like Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1831-6). Hence we recognize more and more as we approach our own day that naturalist-travellers have been successful either as specialists, or, on the other hand, in so far as they have furnished material for generalization (Type V.). The specialism may of course take various forms: a journey may be undertaken by one who is purely an ornithologist, or it may be undertaken with one particular problem in view, or it may be organized, like the Challenger expedition, with the co-operation of a number of specialists.

The French took the lead in organizing zoological expeditions. As early as 1800 they sent out the Géographe, Naturaliste, and Casuarina, zoologically conducted by Bury de St. Vincent, Péron, and Lesueur. Further expeditions followed with Quoy and Gaimard, Lesson, Eydoux, Souleyet, Dupetit-Thouars, and others as zoological guides. The English whaling industry gave early opportunity to not a few naturalists; and it is now a long time since Hooker went with Sir James Ross on the South Polar expedition and Huxley went on the Rattlesnake to the Australian Barrier Reef. The Russians were also active, one of the more famous travellers being Kotzebue, who was accompanied on one of his two voyages (1823-6) round the world by Chamisso and Eschscholtz. In the early part of this century the Americans were also enterprising, the work of Dana being perhaps the most noteworthy. It would require several pages to mention even the names of the naturalists who have had their years of wandering, and have added their pages and sketches to the book of the world’s fauna and flora, but such an enumeration would serve no useful purpose here.

There is, however, one form of zoological exploration which deserves a chapter to itself, that is the exploration of the Deep Sea. Several generations of marine zoologists had been at work before a zoology of the deep sea was dreamed of even as a possibility. It is true that in 1818 Sir John Ross had found a star-fish (Astrophyton) at a depth of 800-1000 fathoms, but this was forgotten; and in 1841 Edward Forbes dredged to no purpose in fairly deep water in the Ægean Sea. Indeed those who thought about the great depths at all deemed it unlikely that there could be life there, and if it had not been for the practical affair of laying the ocean cables, we might possibly have been still in ignorance of the abyssal fauna.

But the cables had to be laid—no easy task—and it became important to know at least the topography of the depths. Cables broke, too, and had to be fished up again, and when that which ran between Sardinia and Algiers was lifted, in 1860, from a depth of 60-1000 fathoms, no less than 15 different species of animals were found on it. This was a discovery to fire enthusiasm, and Britain led the way in following it up. In 1868 Wyville Thomson began his explorations on the Lightning, and proved that most of the types of backboneless animals were represented at depths of at least 600 fathoms. Soon followed the similar cruise of the Porcupine, famous inter alia for the discovery of Bathybius, which many sceptics regard as a mare’s nest. From various quarters the quest after the deep-sea fauna began to be prosecuted.

It is now more than a score of years since the world-famous Challenger sailed from Portsmouth with Wyville Thomson, Moseley, John Murray, and Willemoes-Suhm as naturalists. During three and a half years the explorers cruised over 68,900 nautical miles, crossed the Atlantic no less than five times, reached with the long arm of the dredge to depths equal to reversed Himalayas, raised treasures of life from over 500 stations, and brought home spoils over which the savants of Europe have hardly ceased to be busy, and the records of which, now completed under Dr. Murray’s editorship, form a library of about forty huge volumes.

The Challenger expedition was important not only in itself, but in the wave of scientific enthusiasm which it raised. From Germany went forth the Gazelle; Norway sent the Vöringen to Spitzbergen; America has despatched the Tuscarora, the Blake, and the Albatross; from Sweden the Vega and the Sophia sailed to Arctic seas: Count Liechtenstein’s yacht Hertha explored Adria; the Prince of Monaco’s Hirondelle darted hither and thither; the French sent forth the Travailleur and Talisman; the Italians the Vettor Pisani and Washington; Austria and Hungary organized the Poli for work in the Mediterranean; the Germans again have recently specialized in investigating the Plankton, or surface-life of the ocean; and so, with a range even wider than we have indicated, the wave of enthusiasm has spread, one of the latest barques which it has borne being the Prince of Monaco’s, which was specially built for marine exploration.

Specialism in travelling has, of course, gone much further. Thus to cite only three examples, we have Semper’s zoological work on the Philippines, the researches of the Sarasins in Ceylon, and the first results of Semon’s recent visit to Australasia, all of them passing far beyond records of zoological exploration into monographs on the structure and development of characteristic members of the fauna of these countries. And it is no exaggeration to say that private enterprise, Royal Society subsidies, British Association grants, and the like have sent scores of naturalists from Britain half round the world in order to solve special problems, as to the larva of a worm, for instance, or as to the bird-fauna of some little island.

V. The Biological Type. In some ways the most important scientific journey ever made was Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. It was the Columbus-voyage of zoology. There is a great deal to be said for the Wanderjahre of the old students, for to have time to think is one of the conditions of intellectual progress. Not that the Beagle voyage was one of idleness, but it gave Darwin, at the age of twenty-two, a wealth of impressions and some measure of enforced leisure wherein to gloat intellectually over what he saw. He has said, indeed, that various sets of facts observed on his voyage, such as the aspect of the Galapagos Islands, started him on paths of pondering which eventually led to his theory of the origin of species.

We take Darwin as the type of the biological, or, we may almost say, evolutionist travellers; but he must share this position with his magnanimous colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose journeyings were more prolonged and not less fruitful. Before Darwin the naturalist-travellers had been, for the most part, describers, systematists, and analysts, and it goes without saying that such work is indispensable, and must continue; but in the light of the conception of evolution all things had become new; the present world of life was henceforth seen as a stage in a process, as a passing act in a drama, not merely as a phantasmagoria to be admired and pictured, but as a growth to be understood.

It is within this group of biological travellers, which includes such men as Bates and Belt, that we must also place Brehm. For although he perhaps had not the firmness of grasp or the fineness of touch necessary for the successful handling of the more intricate biological problems, especially those which centre around the factors of evolution, he had unusual power as an observer of the habits of animals. His contributions, which must be judged, of course, from his great Tierleben,[A] as well as from his popular lectures, were rather to the old natural history than to biology in the stricter sense. His works show that he was as much interested in men as in beasts, that he was specially an ornithologist, that he was beneath the naturalist a sportsman; but so scores of other travellers have been. His particular excellence is his power of observing and picturing animal life as it is lived in nature, without taking account of which biology is a mockery and any theory of evolution a one-sided dogma.

[A] This well-known treasure-house of Natural History appeared originally in 1863-69 in six big volumes, which have since increased to ten. Even the first edition took a foremost place among similar works on the Natural History of Animals. With a wealth of personal observation on the habits of animals in their native haunts, it combined the further charm of very beautiful pictorial illustration.

Let us now bring together briefly the outstanding facts of this historical outline.

In early days men followed their wandering herds or pursued their prey from region to region, or were driven by force of competition or of hunger to new lands. Many of the most eventful journeys have been among those which had to be taken.

I. Gradually, intellectual curiosity rather than practical need became the prompter, and men travelled with all manner of mixed aims seeking what was new. When they returned they told travellers’ tales, mostly in as good faith as their hunting ancestors had done in the caves of a winter night, or as the modern traveller does after dinner still. We pass insensibly from Herodotus to Marco Polo, from “Sir John Maundeville” to Mr. X. Y. Z., whose book was published last spring. This is the type romantic.

II. But when science shared in the renaissance there ensued the extraordinary industry of the encyclopædist school, with which many naturalist-travellers were associated. Some of these were great men—perhaps Gesner was greatest of all—but all had the defects of their qualities. They gathered into stackyards both wheat and tares, and seldom found time to thrash. The type survives afield in the mere collector, and its degenerate sedentary representatives are called compilers.

III. Just as Buffon represents the climax of the encyclopædists, and is yet something more, for he thrashed his wheat, so Humboldt, while as ambitious as any encyclopædist traveller, transcended them all by vitalizing the wealth of impressions which he gathered. He was the general naturalist-traveller, who took all nature for his province, and does not seem to have been embarrassed. Of successful representatives of this type there are few, since Darwin perhaps none.

IV. Meanwhile Linnæus had brought order, Cuvier had founded his school of anatomists, Haller had re-organized physiology, the microscope had deepened analysis, and zoology came of age as a specialism. Henceforth travellers’ tales were at a discount; even a Humboldt might be contradicted, and platitudinarian narratives of a voyage round the world ceased to find the publisher sympathetic or the public appetized. The naturalist-traveller was now a zoologist, or a botanist, or an ornithologist, or an entomologist; at any rate, a specialist. But it was sometimes found profitable to work in companies, as in the case of the Challenger expedition.

V. Lastly, we find that on the travellers, too, “evolution” cast its spell, and we have Darwin and Wallace as the types of the biological travellers, whose results go directly towards the working out of a cosmology. From Bates and Belt and Brehm there is a long list down to Dr. Hickson, The Naturalist in Celebes, and Mr. Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata. Not, of course, that most are not specialists, but the particular interest of their work is biological or bionomical.

I have added to this essay a list of some of the most important works of the more recent naturalist-travellers with which I am directly acquainted, being convinced that it is with these that the general, and perhaps also the professional student of natural history should begin, as it is with them that his studies must also end. For, not only do they introduce us, in a manner usually full of interest, to the nature of animal life, but they lead us to face one of the ultimate problems of biology—the evolution of faunas.

II.

Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829-1884) was born at Unter-Renthendorf in Sachsen-Weimar, where his father—an accomplished ornithologist—was pastor. Brought up among birds, learning to watch from his earliest boyhood, accompanying his father in rambles through the Thuringian forest, questioning and being questioned about all the sights and sounds of the woods, listening to the experts who came to see the famous collection in the Pfarr-haus, and to argue over questions of species with the kindly pastor, young Brehm was almost bound to become a naturalist. And while the father stuffed his birds in the evenings the mother read aloud from Goethe and Schiller, and her poetic feeling was echoed in her son. Yet, so crooked are life’s ways, the youth became an architect’s apprentice, and acted as such for four years!

But an opportunity presented itself which called him, doubtless most willing, from the desk and workshop. Baron John Wilhelm von Müller, a keen sportsman and lover of birds, sought an assistant to accompany him on an ornithological expedition to Africa, and with him the youth, not yet out of his teens, set forth in 1847. It was a great opportunity, but the price paid for it was heavy, for Brehm did not see his home again for full five years, and was forced to bear strains, to incur responsibilities, and to suffer privations, which left their mark on him for life. Only those who know the story of his African journeys, and what African travel may be with repeated fevers and inconsiderately crippled resources, can adequately appreciate the restraint which Brehm displays in those popular lectures, here translated, where there is so much of everything but himself.

After he returned, in 1852, rich in spoils and experience, if otherwise poor, he spent several sessions at the universities of Jena and Vienna. Though earnestly busy in equipping himself for further work, he was not too old to enjoy the pleasures of a student life. When he took his doctor’s degree he published an account of his travels (Reiseskizzen aus Nordostafrica. Jena, 1855, 3 vols.).

After a zoological holiday in Spain with his like-minded brother Reinhold—a physician in Madrid—he settled for a time in Leipzig, writing for the famous “Gartenlaube”, co-operating with Rossmässler in bringing out Die Tiere des Waldes, expressing his very self in his Bird-Life (1861), and teaching in the schools. It was during this period that he visited Lapland, of whose bird-bergs the first lecture gives such a vivid description. In 1861 he married Matthilde Reiz, who proved herself the best possible helpmeet.

In 1862, Brehm went as scientific guide on an excursion to Abyssinia undertaken by the Duke of Coburg-Gotha, and subsequently published a characteristic account of his observations Ergebnisse einer Reise nach Habesch: Results of a Journey to Abyssinia (Hamburg, 1863). On his return he began his world-famous Tierleben (Animal Life), which has been a treasure-house to so many naturalists. With the collaboration of Professors Taschenberg and Oscar Schmidt, he completed the first edition of this great work, in six volumes, in 1869.

Meanwhile he had gone to Hamburg as Director of the Zoological Gardens there, but the organizing work seems to have suited him ill, and he soon resigned. With a freer hand, he then undertook the establishment of the famous Berlin Aquarium, in which he partly realized his dream of a microcosmic living museum of nature. But, apart from his actual work, the business-relations were ever irksome, and in 1874 he was forced by ill-health and social friction to abandon his position.

After recovery from serious illness he took up his rôle as popular lecturer and writer, and as such he had many years of happy success. A book on Cage Birds (1872-1876), and a second edition of the Tierleben date from this period, which was also interrupted by his Siberian journeys (1876) and by numerous ornithological expeditions, for instance to Hungary and Spain, along with the Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria. But hard work, family sorrows, and finally, perhaps, the strain of a long lecturing tour in America aged Brehm before his time, and he died in 1884.

For these notes I am indebted to a delightful appreciation of Brehm which Ernest Krause has written in introduction to the third edition of the Tierleben, edited by Pechuel-Loesche, and as regards the naturalist’s character I can only refer to that essay. As to his published work, however, every naturalist knows at least the Tierleben, and on that a judgment may be safely based. It is a monumental work on the habits of animals, founded in great part on personal observation, which was always keen and yet sympathetic. It is a classic on the natural history of animals, and readers of Darwin will remember how the master honoured it.

Doubtless Brehm had the defects of his qualities. He was, it is said, too generous to animals, and sometimes read the man into the beast unwarrantably. But that is an anthropomorphism which easily besets the sympathetic naturalist. He was sometimes extravagant and occasionally credulous. He did not exactly grip some of the subjects he tackled, such as, if I must specify, what he calls “the monkey-question”.

It is frankly allowed that he was no modern biologist, erudite as regards evolution-factors, nor did he profess to attempt what is called zoological analysis, and what is often mere necrology, but his merit is that he had seen more than most of us, and had seen, above all, the naturalist’s supreme vision—the vibrating web of life. And he would have us see it also.

III.

The success of the pictures which Brehm has given us—of bird-bergs and tundra, of steppes and desert, of river fauna and tropical forest—raises the wish that they had been complete enough to embrace the whole world. As this ideal, so desirable both from an educational and an artistic standpoint, has not been realized by any one volume, we have ventured to insert here a list of some more or less analogous English works by naturalist-travellers, sportsmen, and others—

Adams, A. Leith. Notes of a Naturalist in the Nile Valley and Malta (Edinburgh, 1870).

Agassiz, A. Three Cruises of the “Blake” (Boston and New York, 1888).

Baker, S. W. Wild Beasts and their Ways: Reminiscences of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (London, 1890).

Bates, H. W. Naturalist on the Amazons (6th Ed. London, 1893).

Belt, T. Naturalist in Nicaragua (2nd Ed. London, 1888).

Bickmore, A. S. Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (1868).

Blanford, W. T. Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia (London, 1870).

Bryden, H. A. Gun and Camera in Southern Africa (London, 1893). Kloof and Karroo (1889).

Burnaby, F. A Ride to Khiva (8th Ed. London, 1877).

Buxton, E. N. Short Stalks, or Hunting Camps, North, South, East, and West (London, 1893).

Chapman, A. and C. M. Buck. Wild Spain (London, 1892).

Cunningham, R. O. Notes on the Natural History of the Straits of Magellan (Edinburgh, 1871).

Darwin, C. Voyage of the “Beagle” (1844, New Ed. London, 1890).

Distant, W. L. A Naturalist in the Transvaal (London, 1892).

Drummond, H. Tropical Africa (London, 1888).

Du Chaillu, P. B. Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London, 1861). Ashango Land (1867).

Eha. A Naturalist on the Prowl, or in the Jungle (London, 1894).

Forbes, H. O. A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago (London, 1885).

Guillemard. Cruise of the “Marchesa” (London, 1886).

Heilprin, A. The Bermuda Islands (Philadelphia, 1889).

Hickson, S. J. A Naturalist in North Celebes (London, 1889).

Holub, Emil. Seven Years in South Africa (1881).

Hudson, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata (London, 1892). Idle Days in Patagonia (London, 1893).

Humboldt, A. von. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America. Views of Nature (Trans. 1849). Cosmos (Trans. 1849-58).

Johnston, H. H. Kilima Ndjaro Expedition (1885).

Kingsley, C. At last! A Christmas in the West Indies (1889).

Lumholtz. Among Cannibals (London, 1889).

Moseley, H. N. Notes by a Naturalist on the “Challenger” (London, 1879. New Ed. 1892).

Nordenskiöld, A. E. Voyage of the “Vega” (London, 1881).

Oates, F., Ed. by C. G. Oates. Matabele Land, the Victoria Falls, a Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Interior of South Africa (1881).

Phillipps-Wolley. Big-Game Shooting (Badminton Libr. London, 1893).

Rodway, J. In the Guiana Forest (London, 1894). British Guiana (London, 1893).

Roosevelt, Th., and G. B. Grinell. American Big-Game Hunting (Edinburgh, 1893).

Schweinfurth, G. The Heart of Africa (1878).

Seebohm, H. Siberia in Europe (London, 1880), Siberia in Asia (London, 1882).

Selous, F. C. A Hunter’s Wanderings (1881). Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (London, 1893).

Sibree, Rev. J. The Great African Island (1879).

Solymos, B. (B. E. Falkenberg). Desert Life (London, 1880).

Stanley, H. M. How I Found Livingstone (1872, New Ed. 1885). The Congo (1885). Through the Dark Continent (1890). In Darkest Africa (1890).

Swayne, H. G. C. Seventeen Trips through Somaliland (London, 1895).

Tennent, J. E. Natural History of Ceylon (London, 1861).

Thomson, Wyville. The Depths of the Sea (London, 1873). Narrative of the Voyage of the “Challenger” (1885). And, in this connection, see S. J. Hickson. Fauna of the Deep Sea (London, 1894).

Tristram, H. B. The Land of Israel (1876). The Land of Moab (1873). The Great Sahara (1860).

Wallace, A. R. Malay Archipelago (London 1869). Tropical Nature (1878). Island Life (1880). Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1889).

Waterton, Ch. Wanderings in South America (Ed. by J. G. Wood, 1878).

Woodford, C. M. Naturalist among the Head-hunters (London, 1890).

FROM

NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR.

THE BIRD-BERGS OF LAPLAND.

“When the Creator of the worlds had made the earth, best loved of all, and was rejoicing in His perfect work, the devil was seized with a desire to bring it all to nought. Not yet banished from heaven, he lived among the archangels in the abodes of the blessed. Up to the seventh heaven he flew, and, seizing a great stone, hurled it with might down on the earth exulting in the beauty of its youth. But the Creator saw the ruthless deed, and sent one of His archangels to avert the evil. The angel flew even more swiftly than the stone to the earth beneath, and succeeded in saving the land. The huge stone plunged thundering into the sea, and hissing waves flooded all the shores for many a mile. The fall shattered the crust of the stone, and thousands of splinters sank on either side, some disappearing into the depths, and some rising above the surface, bare and bleak like the rock itself. Then God took pity, and in His infinite goodness resolved to clothe even this naked rock with life. But the fruitful soil was all but exhausted in His hand; there remained scarce enough to lay a little here and there upon the stone.”

So runs an ancient legend still current among the Lapps. The stone which the devil threw is Scandinavia; the splinters which fell into the sea on either side are the skerries which form a richly varied wreath around the peninsula. The rents and cracks in the rock are the fjords and the valleys; the sprinkling of life-giving soil which fell from the gracious Creator’s hand forms the few fertile tracts which Scandinavia possesses. To appreciate the full depth and meaning of the childish story one must one’s self have visited Scandinavia, and especially Norway, have steered a boat among the skerries, and have sailed round the country from the extreme south to the farthest north. Marvellous, indeed, is the country; marvellous are its fjords; still more marvellous is the encircling wreath of islands and reefs.

Scandinavia is an alpine country like Switzerland and the Tyrol, yet it differs in a hundred ways from both of these. Like our Alps it has lofty mountains, glaciers, torrents, clear, still alpine lakes, dark pine and fir forests low down in the gorges, bright green birch woods on the heights, far-stretching moors—or more strictly tundras—on the broad shoulders of the mountains, log-huts on the slopes, and the huts of the cowherds in the upland valleys. And yet all is very different from our Alps, as is obvious to anyone who has seen both. The reason of this difference lies in the wonderful way in which two such grand and impressive features of scenery as lofty mountains and the sea are associated and harmonized.

The general aspect of Scandinavia is at once grave and gay. Stern grandeur and soft beauty go hand in hand; gloom alternates with cheerfulness; with the dead and disquieting is linked the living and exhilarating. Black masses of rock rear themselves perpendicularly out of the sea, rise directly from the deeply-cut fjords, and, riven and cleft, tower precipitously upwards and lean threateningly over. On their heads lie masses of ice stretching for miles, covering whole districts and scaring away all life save the torrents to which they themselves have given birth. These torrents spread themselves everywhere in ribbons of silver over the dark masses, and not only give pleasure to the eye, but murmur to the ear the sublime melody of the mountains. They rush down through every cleft to the depths below, they burst forth from every gorge, or plunge in mad career from rock to rock, forming waterfall after waterfall, and awakening echoes from the farthest mountain sides. These rushing mountain-streams which hurry down to the valley through every channel, the gleaming bands of water on every wall of rock, the ascending smoke-like spray which betrays the most secluded falls—these call forth life even in the most dread wilderness, in places where otherwise nought can be seen but rocks and sky—and they are most truly characteristic of the scenery of the interior.

Fig. 1.—Scene on the Sogne Fjord, Norway.

But, majestic as this beauty is, bewildering and overwhelming as are the fjords with their precipitous walls, their ravines and valleys, headlands and peaks, they are yet less characteristic than the islands and skerries lying out in the sea, stretching from the south of the country up to the far north, and forming a maze of bays, sounds, and straits such as can hardly be seen elsewhere in the wide world.

The larger islands reproduce more or less faithfully the characters of the mainland; the smaller ones and the skerries present, under all circumstances, an aspect of their own. But, as one travels towards the north, this aspect changes more or less with every degree of latitude. Like the sea, the islands lack the richness of the south, but are, nevertheless, by no means devoid of beauty. Especially in the midnight hours, when the low midsummer sun stands large and blood-red on the horizon, its veiled brilliance reflected alike from the ice-covered mountain-tops and from the sea, they have an irresistible charm. This is enhanced by the homesteads which are dotted everywhere over the landscape—dwellings built of wood and roofed with turf, glowing in a strange, blood-red colour which contrasts sharply with the green turf roof, the black darkness of the adjacent mountain-side, and the ice-blue of the glaciers in the background of the picture.

The southerner remarks, with some surprise, that these homesteads become larger, handsomer, and more roomy the farther north he travels; that, though no longer surrounded by fields, but at the most by small gardens, they far excel in size and equipment the hut-like buildings of southern Scandinavia; and that the most pretentious of all may be on comparatively small islands, where the rocks are covered only with turf, and where not even a little garden can be won from the inhospitable soil.

The seeming riddle is solved when we remember that in Norland and Finland it is not the land but the sea that is ploughed; that there men do not sow and wield the scythe in summer, but reap in midwinter without having sowed; that it is in the months in which the long night holds its undisputed sway, when the light of the sun has given place to that of the moon, and the rosy flush of dawn and sunset to the glow of the Northern Lights, that the dwellers in the far north gather in the rich harvest of the sea.

About the time of the autumnal equinox strong men are preparing themselves all along the coasts of Norway to secure the harvest of the North. Every town, every village, every hamlet sends one or more well-manned ships to the islands and skerries within the Polar Circle, to anchor for months in every suitable bay. Making the ships or the homesteads on shore their head-quarters, the fishermen proceed to gather in the abundant booty. In the height of summer the whole country is still and deserted, but in winter the bays, islands, and sounds are teeming with busy men, and laborious hands are toiling night and day. Spacious as the dwelling-houses appear, they cannot contain the crowds of people who have assembled; many must remain in the ships, or even seek a rough-and-ready shelter in rudely-constructed turf-covered huts on the shore.

The bustle is at its height about the time of the winter solstice, when we celebrate our Christmas, and the Norsemen their Yule festival. For weeks the sea has been yielding its treasures. Impelled by the strongest impulse which moves living beings, guided by irresistible instinct to sow the seed of future generations, there rise from the depths of the sea innumerable shoals of fishes—cod, haddock, and the like. They ascend to the upper strata of the water, approach the coasts, and throng into the straits, sounds, and fjords in such numbers that they cover the surface of the sea for many miles. Animated, almost maddened, by one impulse, the fish swim so thickly that the boat has literally to force a way among them, that the overweighted net baffles the combined strength of the fishermen or breaks under its burden, that an oar placed upright among the densely packed crowd of swimmers remains for a few moments in its position before falling to one side.[1] Wherever the rocky islands are washed bare by the raging high tides, from the mean tide-mark to the lower edge of the turf which covers their summits, the naked rocks are covered by an unbroken ring of fish split open and laid out to dry, while trestles are also erected that other fish may be exposed for the same purpose to the sharp and drying air. From time to time the rocks and frames are cleared of dried fish, which are packed in bundles and stored in sheds, but only that room may be found for others which in the meantime have been caught and prepared.

For months the bustle continues, and the traffic is uninterrupted; for months the North continues to exchange its treasures with the South. Then in the days when about noon a clear light in the south heralds the coming of the sun still hidden, or when the first rays of sunlight fall for a brief space upon the land, the rich catch comes gradually to an end. The dried cod and ling are carried from the storing sheds to the ships, all available space from keel to deck is filled up, and the fishermen prepare to journey homewards, or abroad into the wide world. One ship after another hoists its brown-edged sails and steers away.

The North becomes quieter again, more deserted the land, desolate the sea. At last, by the time of the spring equinox, all the migrant fishermen have left the fishing grounds, and all the fish have returned to the depths of the sea. But the sea is already sending forth other children to people afresh the straits and sounds, and along with them the skerries and islands; and soon from those same cliffs, at whose base there was but lately all the bustle of the winter, millions of bright bird eyes look down upon the waves.

It is a deeply-affecting trait in the life of all true sea-birds that only two causes can move them to visit the land: the joyous spring-time sense of new-awakening love, and the mournful foreboding of approaching death. Not even Winter with its long night, its cold, and its storms can drive them to the land; they are proof against all the terrors of the North, and seek their food upon or under the waves; not even the threatening jaws of voracious fish scare them ashore. They may alight occasionally, but only for a short time, often on a solitary island in the sea, to oil their feathers more thoroughly than can be done in the water. But when, with the sun’s first brightness, love stirs in their breasts, all, old and young alike, though they may have to swim and fly thousands of miles, strive to reach the place where they themselves first saw the light of day. And if, in mid-winter, months after the breeding-places have been left desolate, a sea-bird feels death in his heart, he hastens as long as his strength holds out, that he may, if possible, die in the place where he was cradled.

The annual assembling of innumerable birds at the breeding-places fills these for several months with a most marvellous life. The communities differ like the sea-birds themselves, and the places, or bergs (as the Norsemen call them), which they people vary also. While some choose only those reefs which rise just above the high-tide mark, and bear no more vegetation than is enough to provide scanty material for the nest hollowed out in the sea-weed heaps, others select islands which rear themselves straight and steep for several hundred feet above the sea, and are either rich in shelves, ledges, cavities, fissures, and other hiding-places, or are covered by a thick layer of peat-like plant remains. The Norseman calls the lower islets ‘eider-holms’ (or eider bird-hills, as the German would say), for they are the favourite brooding-places of what is to him the most valuable, and, what is the same thing, the most useful of all sea-birds. The higher islands which rise precipitously from the sea, and are chiefly peopled by auks and gulls, are included under the general name of bird-bergs.

The observant naturalist is of course tempted to study and describe in detail each individual brooding bird of the sea, but the rich variety of the inhabitants of the bird-bergs of the far north and the variety of their habits impose certain limits. Similarly, lest I exceed the time allowed to me, I must refrain from giving detailed pictures of the habits of all the berg birds, though I think it well at least to outline those of a few in order to bring into prominence some of the chief characteristics of sea-bird life. Selection is difficult, but one, at any rate—the eider-duck, which returns every spring to these islands, and helps to beautify them and their surroundings so marvellously—must not be left undescribed.

Three species of these beautiful ducks inhabit or visit European shores; one of these, the true eider-bird, is to be found every summer, even on the north-western islands of Germany, especially Sylt. Its plumage is a faithful mirror of the northern sea. Black and red, ash-gray, ice-green, white, brown, and yellow are the colours harmoniously blended in it. The eider-duck proper is the least beautiful species, but it is nevertheless a handsome bird. The neck and back, a band over the wings, and a spot on the sides of the body are white as the crests of the waves; throat and crop have a white ground faintly flushed with rose-colour as though the glow of the midnight sun had been caught there; a belt on the cheeks is delicate green like the ice of the glacier; breast and belly, wings and tail, the lower part of the back and the rump are black as the depths of the sea itself. This splendour belongs only to the male; the female, like all ducks, wears a more modest yet not less pleasing garb, which I may call a house-dress. The prevailing rust-coloured ground, shading more or less into brown, is marked with longitudinal and transverse spots, lines and spirals, with a beauty and variety that words cannot adequately describe.

No other species of duck is so thoroughly a child of the sea as the eider-duck; no species waddles more clumsily on land, or flies less gracefully, but none swims more rapidly or dives more deftly and deeply. In search of food it sinks fully fifty yards below the surface of the sea, and is said to be able to remain five minutes—an extraordinarily long time—under water. Before the beginning of the brooding season it does not leave the open sea at all, or does so very rarely; following a whim rather than driven by necessity. Towards the end of winter the flocks in which they congregate break up into pairs, and only those males who have not succeeded in securing mates swim about in little groups. Between two mates the most perfect unanimity reigns. One will, undoubtedly that of the duck, determines the actions of both. If she rises from the surface of the water to fly for a hundred yards through the air, the drake follows her; if she dives into the sea, he disappears directly afterwards; wherever she turns he follows faithfully; whatever she does seems to express his wishes. The pair still live out on the sea, though only where the depth is not greater than twenty-five fathoms, and where edible mussels and other bivalves are found in rich abundance on the rocks and the sea-bottom. These molluscs often form the sole food of eider-ducks, and to procure them they may have to dive to considerable depths. But it is the abundance of this food which preserves the eiders from the scarcity from which so many other species of duck often suffer severely.

In April, or at the latest in the beginning of May, the pairs approach nearer and nearer the fringe of reefs and the shores of the mainland. Maternal cares are stirring in the breast of the duck, and to these everything else is subordinated. Out at sea the pair were so shy that they never allowed a ship or boat to get near them, and feared man, if he ever happened to approach them, more than any other living creature; now in the neighbourhood of the islands their behaviour changes entirely. Obeying her maternal instincts, and these only, the duck swims to one of the brooding-places, and paying no attention to the human inhabitants, waddles on to the land. Anxiously the drake follows her, not without uttering his warning “Ahua, ahua”, not without visible hesitation, for every now and then he remains behind as if reflecting for a while, and then swims forward once more. The duck, however, pays no heed to all this. Careless of the whole world around her, she wanders over the island seeking a suitable brooding-place. Being somewhat fastidious, she is not satisfied with the first good heap of sea-weed cast up by the tide, with the low juniper-bush whose branches straggling on the ground offer safe concealment, with the half-broken box which the owner of the island has placed as a shelter for her, or with the heaps of twigs and brushwood which he has gathered to entice her, but approaches the owner’s dwelling as fearlessly as if she were a domestic bird. She enters it, walks about the floor, follows the housewife through rooms and kitchen, and capriciously selects, it may be, the inside of the oven as her resting-place, thereby forcing the housewife to have her bread baked for weeks on another island. With manifest alarm the faithful drake follows her as far as he dares; but when she, in his opinion, so far neglects all considerations of safety as to dwell under the same roof with human beings, he no longer tries to struggle against her wayward whim, but leaves her to follow it alone, and flies out to the safety of the sea, there longingly to await her daily visit. His mate is in no wise distracted by his departure, but proceeds to collect twigs and brushwood—a task in which she willingly accepts the Norseman’s help—and to pile up into a heap her nest materials, which include sea-weed as well as twigs. She hollows out a trough with her wings and makes it circular by turning round and round in it with her smooth breast. Then she sets about procuring the lining and incorporating it with the nest. Thinking only of her brood, she plucks the incomparably soft down from her breast and makes with it a sort of felt, which not only lines the whole hollow but forms such a thick border at its upper edge that it serves as a cover to protect the eggs from cold when the mother leaves the nest. Before the work of lining is quite completed, the duck begins laying her comparatively small, smooth-shelled, clouded-green or grayish-green eggs. The clutch consists of from six to eight, seldom more or fewer.

This is the time for which the Norseman has been waiting, for it was self-interest that prompted all his hospitality to the bird. The host now becomes the robber. Ruthlessly he takes the eggs and the nest with its inner lining of costly down. From twenty-four to thirty nests yield about two pounds of down, worth at least thirty shillings on the spot. This price is sufficient explanation of the Norseman’s way of acting.

Fig. 2.—Colony of Eider-ducks.

With a heavy heart the duck sees the downfall of her hopes for that year. Perturbed and frightened, she flies out to sea, where her mate awaits her. Whether he takes the opportunity of repeating his warnings more urgently I cannot say, but I can testify that he very soon succeeds in consoling her. The joy and spirit of the spring-time still live in the hearts of both; and in a very few days our duck waddles on land again as though nothing had happened, to build a second nest! This time she probably avoids her former position and contents herself with the first available heap of tangle which is not fully taken up by other birds. Again she digs and rounds a hollow; again she begins to probe among her plumage in order to procure the lining of down which seems to her indispensable. But, however much she exert herself, stretching her neck and twisting it in intricate snake-like curves, she can find no more. Yet when was a mother, even a duck mother, at a loss when her children had to be provided for? Our duck is certainly at none. She herself has no more down, but her mate bears it untouched on his breast and back. Now it is his turn. And though he may perhaps rebel, having a lively recollection of former years, he is the husband and she the wife, therefore he must obey. Without compunction the anxious mother rifles his plumage, and in a few hours, or at most within two days, she has plucked him as bare as herself. That the drake, after such treatment, should fly out to the open sea as soon as possible, and associate for some months only with his fellows, troubling himself not in the least about his mate and her coming brood, seems to me quite comprehensible. And when, as happens on every nesting island, a drake is to be seen standing by the brooding duck, I think he must be one who has not yet been plucked![2]

Our duck broods once more assiduously. And now her house-dress is seen to be the only suitable, I might say the only possible, garment which she could wear. Among the tangle which surrounds the nest she is completely hidden even from the sharp eyes of the falcon or the sea-eagle. Not only the general colouring, but every point and every line is so harmonious with the dried sea-weed, that the brooding-bird, when she has drawn down her neck and slightly spread out her wings, seems to become almost a part of her surroundings. Many a time it has happened that I, searching with the practised eye of a sportsman and naturalist, have walked across eider-holms and only become aware of the brooding duck at my feet, when she warned me off by pecking at my shoes. No one who knows the self-forgetting devotion with which the birds brood will be surprised that it is possible to come so near an eider-duck sitting in her nest, but it may well excite the astonishment of even an experienced naturalist to learn that the duck suffers one to handle the eggs under her breast without flying away, and that she does not even allow herself to be diverted from her brooding when one lifts her from the nest and places her upon it again, or lays her on the ground at some little distance in order to see the charmingly quaint way in which she waddles back to her brood.

The eider-duck’s maternal self-surrender and desire for offspring show themselves in another way. Every female eider-duck, perhaps every duck of whatever species, desires not only the bliss of bearing children, but wishes to have as many nestlings as possible under her motherly eye. Prompted by this desire, she has no scruples in robbing, whenever possible, other eiders brooding near her. Devoted as she is in her brooding, she must nevertheless forsake her nest once a day to procure her own food, and to cleanse, oil, and smooth her plumage, which suffers considerably from the heat developed in brooding. Throwing a suspicious glance at her neighbours to right and left, she rises early in the forenoon, after having perhaps suffered the pangs of hunger for some hours, stands beside her nest and carefully spreads the surrounding fringe of down with her bill, so that it forms a concealing and protecting cover for the eggs. Then she flies quickly out to the sea, dives repeatedly, and hastily fills crop and gullet to the full with mussels, bathes, cleans, and oils herself, and returns to land, drying and smoothing her feathers continuously as she walks towards her nest. Both her neighbours sit seemingly as innocent as before, but in the interval a theft has been perpetrated by at least one of them. As soon as the first had flown away, one of them rose from her nest, and lifting the cover of her neighbour’s nest, quickly rolled one, two, three, or four eggs with her feet into her own nest, then carefully replaced the cover, and resumed her place, rejoicing over her unrighteously-increased clutch. The returning duck probably notices the trick that has been played, but she makes not the slightest sign, and calmly settles down to brood again as though she thought, “Just wait, neighbour, you must go to the sea, too, and then I’ll do to you what you have done to me”. As a matter of fact, the eggs of several nests standing close together are shifted continuously from one to another. Whether it is her own or another’s children that come to life under her motherly breast seems to matter very little to the eider-duck—they are children, at any rate!

The duck sits about twenty-six days before the eggs are hatched. The Norseman, who goes to work intelligently, lets her do as she pleases this time, and not only refrains from disturbing her, but assists her as far as possible by keeping away from the island all enemies who might harass the bird. He knows his ducks, if not personally, at least to this extent, that he can tell about what time this or that one will have finished brooding, and will set out with her ducklings to seek the safety of the sea. The journey thither brings sudden destruction to many unwatched young eider-ducks. Not only the falcons breeding on or visiting the island, but even more the ravens, the skuas, and the larger gulls watch for the first appearance of the ducklings, attack them on the way, and carry off one or more of them. The owner of the island seeks to prevent this in a manner which enables one to appreciate how thoroughly the duck, ordinarily so wild and shy, has become a domestic bird during the breeding season. Every morning towards the end of the brooding-time he inspects the island in order to help the mothers and to gather in a second harvest of down. On his back hangs a hamper, and on one arm a wide hand-basket. Going from nest to nest he lifts each duck, and looks to see whether the young are hatched and are sufficiently dry. If this be the case, he packs the whole waddling company in his hand-basket, and with adroit grasp divests the nest of its downy lining, which he throws into his hamper, and proceeds to another nest. Trustfully the duck waddles after him or rather after her piping offspring, and a second, third, tenth nest is thus emptied, in fact the work goes on as long as the basket will accommodate more nestlings, and one mother after another joins the procession, exchanging opinions with her companions in suffering on the way. Arrived at the sea, the man turns the basket upside down and simply shakes the whole crowd of ducklings into the water. Immediately all the ducks throw themselves after their piping young ones; coaxing, calling, displaying all manner of maternal tenderness, they swim about among the flock, each trying to collect as many ducklings as possible behind herself. With obvious pride one swims about with a long train behind her, but soon a second, less favoured, crosses the procession and seeks to detach as many of the ducklings as she can, and again a third endeavours to divert a few in her own favour. So all the mothers swim about, quacking and calling, cackling and coaxing, till at length each one has behind her a troop of young ones, whether her own or another’s who can tell? The duck in question certainly does not know, but her mother-love does not suffer on that account—they are in any case ducklings who are swimming behind her!

In every case the flock thus collected follows the mother or foster-mother faithfully even in the first hours of free life. The mother leads them to places where edible mussels cover the rocks up to low-water mark, gathers as many as she and her family require, breaks the shells of the smallest and lays the contents before her brood. On the first day of their lives the ducklings are able to swim and dive as well as their parents, and they even excel them in one respect, for they are incomparably more nimble on land, being able to move about with surprising activity. If they become tired near an island the mother leads them on to it, and they run about like young partridges, and, by simply crouching down at the first warning cry, conceal themselves so effectively that they can only be found after long searching. If they get fatigued when they are far from land, the mother spreads out her wings a little and offers them these and her back as a resting-place. As they never know want they grow with extraordinary rapidity, and at the end of two months will have attained nearly the size, certainly all the adroitness, of their mother. The father soon joins them in order to pass the winter with his family—usually in company with many other families, so that a flock of thousands may occasionally be formed.

The high and annually increasing price of its incomparable down makes the eider-duck the most valuable of all berg-birds. A thousand pairs of ducks form a possession well worth having. At least three or four thousand pairs brood on each island, and the fortunate possessor of still more numerously visited breeding-places derives revenues through his birds which many a German land-owner might envy. But besides the eider-ducks there breed also on the holms oyster-catchers and black guillemots, whose eggs are preserved and used for food for months, or are exported to a distance. Furthermore, the flesh of the young birds is sometimes salted for winter use, and thus the holms yield a rich harvest. They are therefore strictly preserved and protected by special laws.[3]

A brooding island peopled by eider-ducks and other sea birds presents a spectacle as unique as it is fascinating. A more or less thick cloud of brilliantly white sea-gulls veils such an island. Without intermission troops and swarms of brooding birds arrive and fly out to sea again, visiting the neighbouring reefs also, and sometimes marvellously adorning the drained moorland, now covered with green turf, in front of the red log-huts. With justifiable pride a dweller on the Lofodens pointed to several hundred gulls which were assembled directly before his door seeking for insects. “Our land is too poor, too cold, and too rough”, he said, “for us to be able to keep domestic birds as you do in the south. But the sea sends us our doves, and, I ask, have you ever seen more beautiful?” I could but answer in the negative, for the picture of the dazzling white and delicate blue-gray gulls on the luxuriant green turf amid the grand environment of the northern mountains was indeed magnificent. It is these gulls chiefly which make the brooding holms conspicuous from a distance, and distinguish them from others which are physically the same. The other members of the feathered population are but little noticed, though they number many thousands. Only when one of the admirable light boats of the country is pushed off from the inhabited shores and rowed towards the holm does the quiet life of the birds change. Some oyster-catchers, which have been feeding directly above the high-water mark, have observed the boat and fly hastily towards it. These birds, which are absent from none of the larger islands, scarcely from any of the skerries, are the guardians of the safety and welfare of the peacefully united colony. More inquisitive and active than any other birds known to me, self-possessed, cautious, and deliberate, they possess all the qualities necessary to make them the sentinels of a mixed colony. Every new, unusual, or extraordinary event arouses their curiosity, and incites them to make closer examination. Thus they fly to meet the boat, sweep round it five or six times in ever-narrowing circles, screaming uninterruptedly the while, thus attracting others of their own species to the spot, and rousing the attention of all the cautious birds in the colony. As soon as they have convinced themselves of the presence of actual danger, they fly quickly back, and, with warning notes, communicate the result of their investigation to all the other birds on the berg who will pay any attention, as indeed many do. Some gulls now resolve to investigate the cause of the disturbance for themselves. Five or six of them fly towards the boat, hover falcon-like in the air, perhaps even dart boldly down upon the intruders, and return to the holm more quickly than they came. Just as if their report was mistrusted, twice, three, four—ten times the number take wing, proceeding exactly as the first spies had done, and soon a cloud of birds forms above the boat. This cloud becomes thicker and thicker, more and more threatening, for the birds not only endeavour with continually increasing boldness to strike against the intruders in the boat, but they bestow upon them stuff which does not exactly tend to adorn faces and clothing. In the neighbourhood of the breeding-place the excitement increases to an apparently distracted confusion, the cries of individuals unite to form a maddening noise a thousand times repeated. Before the boat has touched the land the eider-drakes, who have been visiting their mates, have waddled to the shore and are now swimming out to sea with a warning “Ahua-ahua”. The cormorants and mergansers follow them, but the oyster-catchers, plovers, black guillemots, eider-ducks, gulls, and terns, as well as the stone-chats and water-wagtails, cannot make up their minds to forsake the island. Running birds innumerable rush up and down the shore as if pursued by the evil one; the black guillemots, which had glided up the slanting blocks of rock, squat flat down upon them and stare in innocent wonder at the strangers, and the eider-ducks prepare to make themselves invisible after their fashion when the right moment comes.

The boat touches the shore. We step upon the holm. A screech rises from thousands of voices at once, the cloud of flying birds thickens to opaqueness; hundreds of brooding gulls rise croaking to join those in flight; dozens of oyster-catchers scream loudly, and the maze of moving birds and the noise of their screeching become so bewildering that one feels as if one perceived with the bodily senses the din and riot of the witches’ revel on the Blocksberg.

“Voices o’er us dost thou hear?

Voices far, and voices near?

All the mountain-range along

Streams a raving Witches’ Song.”

Mephisto’s words are realized. The noise and tumult, the confusion of forms and cries, fatigue all the senses; everything swims and flickers before our eyes; there is singing and ringing in our ears, till at length we are conscious of neither colour nor noise, scarcely even of the usually very penetrating odour. In whatever direction we may turn the cloud covers the island; nothing is to be seen but birds, and when thousands alight to rest thousands more take wing, their care and anxiety for their brood making them forget their own powerlessness, and encouraging them to a defence which, though not dangerous, is certainly embarrassing to the explorers.

Fig. 3.—The Bird-bergs of Lapland.

Essentially different from the life—after all very inoffensive—on an eider-holm is the picture presented by an island peopled by silver, herring, or great black-backed gulls. These also congregate on certain islands for the breeding season in hundreds and hundreds of pairs, one such island being sometimes inhabited by from three to five thousand pairs. The island presents quite as beautiful and noble a spectacle as the eider-holm. The large, dazzling white, and light or dark gray forms contrast wonderfully with the whole surroundings, and their movements possess much of the grace which characterizes all gulls. But these strong, powerful, rapacious gulls, though gregarious, are not peaceable neighbours. No member of such a colony trusts any other. Each pair lives by itself, marks out a definite brooding-ground, however small its diameter, allows no other pair within its boundaries, and both birds never leave the nest at the same time. If they have been disturbed by a powerful common enemy they hasten back as quickly as possible to the nest to protect it from others of their own species.

Less noisy, but certainly not less impressive, is the life on the real bird-bergs, the breeding-grounds of razor-bills, guillemots, and puffins, with at most here and there one or other of the gulls or of the cormorants. It will suffice if I attempt to describe one such berg in narrative form.

To the north of the large island belonging to the Lofoden group, and about three hundred yards from its shore, lie three bell-shaped rocky islands (the Nyken), rising rugged and steep for about three hundred feet above the surface of the sea, and closely surrounded by a circle of little reefs. One of these rocky cones is a bird-berg, and one can hardly imagine a finer of its kind.

We prepared to visit the island on a beautiful summer day when the sea was unusually smooth and calm, the sky clear and blue, the air warm and pleasant. Powerful Norsemen rowed our light boat in and out among innumerable skerries. Look where we would, we saw birds. Almost every rock which rose above the surface of the water was peopled with them. Some of the reefs were coated with white by the excrement of the cormorants which regularly spent a portion of each day there in rest. Arranged in rows, like soldiers drawn up, they sat in tens, twenties, or hundreds, in the most extraordinary positions, their necks stretched, their wings spread out so that every part of their bodies might have full benefit of the sunshine, waving their wings also as if to fan each other, and all the while casting watchful glances in every direction. On our approach, they threw themselves heavily with hollow cries into the sea, and then, swimming and diving, defied all our attempts to get near them. Other reefs were covered with gulls, hundreds and thousands of the same species; or with male eiders, which had probably come from some eider-holm or other, to amuse themselves after the fashion of their sex while their mates were busied with maternal cares. Around other rocky islands the dazzling eider-birds, perhaps newly-plucked males, had congregated and arranged themselves in a circle, suggestive of the great white water-lilies of our quiet freshwater lakes. In the sounds that were not too deep one could see the fishing mergansers and divers, one or other of which would every now and then give full vent to its shrill, far-reaching cry—a cry so long-drawn-out and so varied in tone that one might call it a song, were it not rather a wild melody such as can only be executed by a child of the North Sea who has listened to the howling and blustering of winter storms, and has echoed the roar of the surging waves. Proud as a prince upon his throne sat here and there a sea-eagle, the terror of all the feathered creatures of the sea; sometimes we saw a whole company of these robbers gorged with prey; the jerfalcon, who had his eyrie on one of the steep precipices, flew through his wide domain with the swiftness of an arrow; fluttering gulls and kittiwakes and fishing terns darted up and down; oyster-catchers greeted us with their trilling cries; razor-bills and guillemots appeared and disappeared all about us as they rose to the surface or dived underneath.

In such company we proceeded on our way. When we had traversed about ten nautical miles we came within range of the Nyke. In whatever direction we looked we saw some of the temporary dwellers on the berg, fishing and diving in the sea, or, startled by our boat, flying along so close to the surface of the water that their bright red webbed feet struck spray from the waves. We saw swarms of from thirty to fifty or a hundred birds streaming from or towards the berg, and we could not doubt that we were approaching a very populous breeding-colony. But we had been told of millions of brooding birds, and as yet we could see nothing of such numbers. At length, after we had rowed round a projecting ridge, the Nyke lay before us. In the sea, all around, were black points, at the foot of the hill white ones. The former were without order or regularity, the latter generally in rows, or sharply defined troops; the one set consisted of razor-bills swimming, with head, throat, and neck above the water, the others were the same birds sitting on the hill with their white breasts turned towards the sea. There were certainly many thousands, but not millions.

After we had landed at the opposite island and refreshed ourselves in the house of the proprietor of the Nyke, we crossed over to it, and choosing a place round which the seething waves did not surge too violently, we sprang out on the rock and climbed quickly up to the turf which covers the whole Nyke, with the exception of a few protruding peaks, ledges, and angles. There we found that the whole turf was so pierced with nest-hollows something like rabbit holes, that on the whole hill not a single place the size of a table could be found free from such openings. We made our way upwards in a spiral, clambering rather than walking to the top of the berg. The undermined turf trembled under our feet, and from every hole there peeped, crept, glided, or flew out birds rather larger than pigeons, slate-coloured on the upper part of the body, dazzlingly white on breast and belly, with fantastic bills and faces, short, narrow, pointed wings, and stumpy tails. Out of every hole they appeared and even out of the fissures and clefts in the rocks. Whichever way we turned we saw only birds, heard only the low droning noise of their combined weak cries. Every step onwards brought new flocks out of the bowels of the earth. From the berg down to the sea, from the sea up to the berg there flew swarms innumerable. The dozens became hundreds, the hundreds became thousands, and hundreds of thousands sprang incessantly from the brown-green turf. A cloud not less thick than that over the holm enveloped us, enveloped the island, so that it—magically indeed, but in a way perceptible by the senses—seemed transformed into a gigantic bee-hive, round which not less gigantic bees, humming and buzzing, hovered and fluttered.

The farther we went, the more magnificent became the spectacle. The whole hill was alive. Hundreds of thousands of eyes looked down upon us intruders. From every hole and corner, from every peak and ledge, out of every cleft, burrow, or opening, they hurried forth, right, left, above, beneath; the air, like the ground, teemed with birds. From the sides and from the summit of the berg thousands threw themselves like a continuous cataract into the sea in a throng so dense that they seemed to the eye to form an almost solid mass. Thousands came, thousands went, thousands fluttered in a wondrous mazy dance; hundreds of thousands flew, hundreds of thousands swam and dived, and yet other hundreds of thousands awaited the footsteps which should rouse them also. There was such a swarming, whirring, rustling, dancing, flying, and creeping all about us that we almost lost our senses; the eye refused duty, and his wonted skill failed even the marksman who attempted to gain a prize at random among the thousands. Bewildered, hardly conscious, we pushed on our way until at length we reached the summit. Our expectation here at last to regain quietness, composure, and power of observation, was not at once realized. Even here there was the same swarming and whirring as further down the slope, and the cloud of birds around us was so thick that we only saw the sea dimly and indefinitely as in twilight. But a pair of jerfalcons, who had their eyrie in a neighbouring precipice, and had seen the unusual bustle, suddenly changed the wonderful scene. The razor-bills, guillemots, and puffins were not afraid of us; but on the appearance of their well-known and irresistible enemies, the whole cloud threw themselves with one accord, as at the command of a magician, into the sea, and the outlook was clear and free. Innumerable black points, the heads of the birds swimming in the sea, stood out distinctly from the water, and broke up the blue-green colouring of the waves. Their number was so great that from the top of the berg, which was over three hundred feet high, we could not see where the swarm ended, could not discover where the sea was clear from birds. In order to make a calculation, I measured out a small square with my eye, and began to count the points in it. There were more than a hundred. Then I endeavoured mentally to place several similar squares together, and soon came to thousands of points. But I might have imagined many thousands of such squares together and yet not exhausted the space covered by birds. The millions of which I had been told were really there. This picture of apparent quiet only lasted for a few moments. The birds soon began to fly upwards again, and as before, hundreds of thousands rose simultaneously from the water to ascend the hill, as before a cloud formed round it, and our senses were again bewildered. Unable to see, and deafened by the indescribable noise about me, I threw myself on the ground, and the birds streamed by on all sides. New ones crept constantly out of their holes, while those we had previously startled now crept back again; they settled all about me, looking with comical amazement at the strange form among them, and approaching with mincing gait so close to me that I attempted to seize them. The beauty and charm of life showed themselves in every movement of these remarkable birds. With astonishment I saw that even the best pictures of them are stiff and cold, for I remarked in their quaint forms a mobility and liveliness with which I had not credited them. They did not remain still a single instant, their heads and necks at least were moved incessantly to all sides, and their contours often showed most graceful lines. It seemed as though the inoffensiveness with which I had given myself up to observing them, had been rewarded by unlimited confidence on their part. The thousands just about me were like domestic birds; the millions paid me no more attention than if I had been one of themselves.

I spent eighteen hours on this bird-berg in order to study the life of the auks.[4] When the midnight sun stood large and blood-red in the sky and cast its rosy light on the sides of the hill there came the peace which midnight brings even in the far North. The sea was deserted; all the birds which had been fishing and diving in it had flown up to the berg. There they sat wherever there was room to sit in long rows of tens, of hundreds, of hundreds of thousands, forming dazzling white lines as all, without exception, sat facing the sea. Their ‘arr’ and ‘err’, which had deafened our ears notwithstanding the weakness of the individual voices, were silent now, and only the roar of the surf breaking on the rocks far below resounded as before. Not till the sun rose again did the old bewildering bustle begin anew, and as we at length descended the hill by the way we had climbed it, we were once more surrounded by a thick cloud of startled birds.

It is not because of their enormous numbers alone that the auks are so fascinating; there is much that is attractive in their life and habits. During the brooding time their social virtues reach an extraordinary height. Till the beginning of that season they live entirely on the open sea, defying the severest winter and the wildest storms. Even in the long night of winter very few of them forsake their northern home, but they range, in flocks of hundreds and thousands, from one fishing-ground to another, finding all the open spaces among the ice as unfailingly as they do other promising feeding-grounds in the open sea. But when the sun reappears they are animated by one feeling—love, by one longing—to reach as soon as possible the hill where their own cradle stood. Then somewhere about Easter-time they all set out, swimming more than flying, for the bird-berg. But among the auks there are more males than females, and not every male is fortunate enough to secure a wife. Among other birds such a disproportion gives rise to ceaseless strife, yet among these auks peace is not disturbed. The much-to-be-pitied beings whom, making use of a human analogy, we may call bachelors, migrate to the berg as well as the fortunate pairs, who coquette and caress by the way; they fly up with these to the heights and accompany them on their hunting expeditions to the surrounding sea. As soon as the weather permits, the pairs begin to get the old holes in order; they clear them out, deepen them, enlarge their chambers, and, if necessary, hollow out a new brooding-place. As soon as this has been done the female lays, on the bare ground at the further end of the hollowed-out brooding-chamber, a single very large, top-shaped, brightly-spotted egg, and begins to brood alternately with the male. The poor bachelors have a sad time of it now. They, too, would dearly like to take parental cares upon themselves if they could only find a mate who would share them. But all the females are appropriated, and wooing is in vain. So they resolve to give practical proof of their good-will, at least in so far that they force themselves on the fortunate pair as friends of the family. In the hours about midnight, when the female broods on the nest, they sit with the male as he keeps watch before it, and, when the male relieves his mate that she may fish in the sea, they mount guard in his stead. But when both parents visit the sea at once the bachelors hasten to reap some reward for their faithfulness. Without delay they thrust themselves into the interior of the cavity, and sit for the time upon the forsaken egg. The poor birds who are condemned to celibacy want at least to brood a little! This unselfish devotion has one result for which men might envy the auks—there are no orphans on these bird-bergs. Should the male of a pair come to grief, his widow immediately consoles herself with another mate, and in the rarer case of both parents losing their lives at once the good-natured supernumeraries are quite ready to finish hatching the egg and to rear the young one. The young ones differ materially from those of the ducks and gulls. They are ‘altrices’, not ‘præcoces’ as the ornithologists say;[5] in plain language, they are not ready for active life as soon as they are hatched. In a dress of thick gray down the young auk slips from the egg in which it awakes to life, but it must spend many weeks in the hole before it is ready to attempt its first flight to the sea. This first flight is always a hazardous undertaking, as is proved by the countless dead bodies on the cliffs at the foot of the berg. The young bird, nervously using its unpractised legs, hardly less timidly its newly-developed wings, follows its parents as they lead the way down the hill towards some place from which the leap into the sea may be attempted with as little danger as possible. On a suitable ledge the parents often remain a long time with their young one before they can induce it to take a spring. Both father and mother persuade it coaxingly; the little one, usually obedient like all young birds, pays no heed to their commands. The father throws himself into the sea before the eyes of his hesitating offspring; the inexperienced young one remains where he was. More attempts, more coaxing, urgent pressure: at length he risks the great leap and plunges like a falling stone deep into the sea; then, unconsciously obeying his instincts, he works his way to the surface, looks all around over the unending sea, and—is a sea-bird who thenceforth shuns no danger.

Different again is the life and activity on the bergs chosen as brooding-places by the kittiwakes. Such a hill is the promontory Swärtholm, high up in the north between the Laxen and the Porsanger fjord, not far from the North Cape. I knew well how these gulls appear on their brooding-places. Faber, with his excellent knowledge of the birds of the far North, has depicted it, as usual, in a few vivid words:

“They hide the sun when they fly, they cover the skerries when they sit, they drown the thunder of the surf when they cry, they colour the rocks white when they brood.” I believed the excellent Faber after I had seen the eider-holms and auk-bergs, and yet I doubted, as every naturalist must, and therefore I ardently desired to visit Swärtholm for myself. An amiable Norseman with whom I became friendly, the pilot of the mail steamer by which I travelled, readily agreed to row me over to the breeding-place, and we approached the promontory late one evening. At a distance of six or eight nautical miles we were overtaken by flocks of from thirty to a hundred, sometimes even two hundred kittiwakes flying to their nesting-place. The nearer we approached to Swärtholm the more rapid was the succession of these swarms, and the larger did they become. At last the promontory became visible, a rocky wall about eight hundred yards long, pierced by innumerable holes, rising almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of from four hundred and fifty to six hundred feet. It looked gray in the distance, but with a telescope one could discern innumerable points and lines. It looked as though a gigantic slate had been scratched all over with all sorts of marks by a playful giant child, as though the whole rock bore a wondrous decoration of chains, rings, and stars. From the dark depths of large and small cavities there gleamed a brilliant white; the shelving ledges stood out in more conspicuous brightness. The brooding gulls on their nests formed the white pattern, and we realized the truth of Faber’s words, “they cover the rocks when they sit”.

Fig. 4.—Razor-bills.

Our boat, as it grated on the rocky shore, startled a number of the gulls, and I saw a picture such as I had seen on many eider-holms and gull-islands. A shot from my friend’s gun thundered against the precipice. As a raging winter storm rushes through the air and breaks up the snow-laden clouds till they fall in flakes, so now it snowed living birds. One saw neither hill nor sky, nothing but an indescribable confusion. A thick cloud darkened the whole horizon, justifying the description “they hide the sun when they fly”. The north wind blew violently and the icy sea surged wildly against the foot of the cliffs, but more loudly still resounded the shrill cries of the birds, so that the truth of the last part also of Faber’s description was fully proved, “they drown the thunder of the surf when they cry”. At length the cloud sank down upon the sea, the hitherto dim outlines of Swärtholm became distinct again, and a new spectacle enchained our gaze. On the precipices there seemed to sit quite as many birds as before, and thousands were still flying up and down. A second shot scared new flocks, a second time it snowed birds down upon the sea, and still the hillsides were covered with hundreds of thousands. But on the sea, as far as the eye could reach, lay gulls like light foam-balls rocking up and down with the waves. How shall I describe the magnificent spectacle? Shall I say that the sea had woven millions and millions of bright pearls into her dark wave-robe? Or shall I compare the gulls to stars; and the ocean to the dome of heaven? I know not; but I know that I have seen nothing more gorgeous even on the sea. And as if the charm were not already great enough, the midnight sun, erewhile clouded over, suddenly shed its rosy light over promontory and sea and birds, lighting up every wave-crest as if a golden, wide-meshed net had been thrown over the water, and making the rose-tinted dazzling gulls appear more brilliant than before. We stood speechless at the sight! And we, with all our company, even the sailors of our boat, remained motionless for a long, long time, deeply moved by the wonderful picture before us, till at last one of us broke the silence, and, rather to recover himself through the sound of his own voice than to express his inner feeling, softly uttered the poet’s words:

Over the bergs the sun blood-red

Shone through the night;

Nor day nor dark was over head,

But weird twilight.

THE TUNDRA AND ITS ANIMAL LIFE.

Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable land, a desert which owes its special character rather to the water than to the sun. Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields of ice, towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field of snow and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees attempt the struggle for existence only in the deepest valleys or on the sunniest slopes. This region is the Tundra.[6]

It is a monotonous picture which I attempt to sketch when I seek to describe the tundra, a picture gray on gray, yet not devoid of all beauty; it is a desert with which we have to do, but a desert in which life, though for many months slumbering and apparently banished, stirs periodically in wondrous fulness.

Our language possesses no synonym for the word tundra, because our Fatherland possesses no such tract of country. For the tundra is neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places it may resemble one or other of these. “Moss-steppes” someone has attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense. In my opinion the tundra most resembles one of those moors which we find—and avoid—on the broad saddles of our lofty mountains; but it differs in many and important respects even from these boggy plateaus; indeed its character is in every respect unique. The region is sometimes divided into low and high tundra, though the differences between the land under three hundred feet above sea-level and that above this line are in the tundra more apparent than real.

The low tundra is bounded by flat, wavy outlines; its valleys are shallow troughs, and even the heights, which, from a distance, look like hills or even mountains, turn out to be only flat hillocks when one approaches their base. Flatness, uniformity, expressionlessness prevail, yet that there is a certain variety in the landscape, a diversity in some of its individual features, cannot be disputed. As one wanders through the tundra for days at a time, one’s attention is often arrested by dainty, even charming little pictures, but such pictures rarely stamp themselves on the memory, since on closer examination they prove, in all important details, in setting and surroundings, in contour and colour, like too many other scenes to make a distinct impression. Notwithstanding this monotony, the general aspect of the tundra has little unity, still less grandeur, and on this account one does not become enthusiastic about the region, does not reach to the heights of emotion which other landscapes awaken, perhaps does not even attain to full enjoyment of the real beauties which, it must be admitted, even this desert possesses.

The tundra receives its greatest beauty from the sky, its greatest charm from the water. The sky is seldom quite clear and bright, though even here the sun, shining uninterruptedly for months together, can beat down hot and oppressive on the flat hills and damp valleys. The blue sky is usually seen only in isolated places through light, white, loose-layered clouds; these are often massed together into cloud-banks which form on all sides of the apparently immeasurable horizon, continually changing, shifting, assuming new forms, appearing and vanishing again, so ravishing the eye with their changeful brilliance that one almost forgets the landscape underneath. When a thunder-storm threatens after a hot day the sky darkens here and there to the deepest gray-blue, the vapour-laden clouds sink beneath the lighter ones, and the sun shines through, clear and brilliant; then the dreary, monotonous landscape is magically beautified. For light and shade now diversify the hill-tops and valleys, and the wearisome monotony of their colour gains variety and life. And when, in the middle of a midsummer night, the sun stands large and blood-red in the heavens, when all the clouds are flushed with purple from beneath, when those hill-tops which hide the luminary bear a far-reaching flaming crown of rays, when a delicate rosy haze lies over the brown-green landscape, when, in a word, the indescribable magic of the midnight sun casts its spell over the soul: then this wilderness is transformed into enchanted fields, and a blissful awe fills the heart.

Fig. 5.—The High Tundra in Northern Siberia.

But variety and life are also given by the jewels of the tundra—its innumerable lakes. Distributed singly or in groups, lying beside or rising above each other, stretching out into water-basins miles in breadth, or shrinking into little pools, they occupy the centre of every hollow, beautify every valley, almost every glen, sparkle in the all-enlivening sunshine, and gray and colourless though they may be, assume, if seen from the top of a hill, the deep blue of mountain lakes. And when the sunlight flashes and twinkles on their mirroring waves, or when they, too, are touched by the rosy glow of midnight, they stand out from the surrounding gloom like living lights, on which the eye delights to linger.

Much grander, though still gloomy and monotonous, is the spectacle presented by the high tundra. Here the mountains—for such they are—have all the charms of height. They almost always rise precipitously, and the chains they form have much-broken lines, and in all suitable places the snowy sheets which cover them become glaciers. Tundra in the strict sense is only to be found where the water does not find rapid outlet; the whole remaining country seems so different from the low grounds that only the essentially similar vegetation proclaims it tundra. The boulders, which in the low grounds are turfed over with thick layers of dead plant remains, are here almost everywhere exposed; endless heaps of gigantic blocks cover the slopes and fill the valleys; boulders form the substratum of wide, almost flat surfaces on which the traveller treads hesitatingly, as he ponders over the difficult riddle regarding the forces which have distributed the blocks over these vast surfaces with almost unvarying regularity. But everywhere between them the water trickles and glides, ripples and swells, rushes and roars, rages and thunders down to the low ground. From the slopes it flows in trickling threads, converging runlets, and murmuring brooklets; from the crevices of the glaciers it breaks forth in milky torrents; it enters the water-basins in turbid rivulets; it escapes from the purifying lakes in crystalline streams, and whirling and foaming, hissing and raging, it hurries onwards down the valleys, forming alternate waterfalls and whirlpools, till it reaches the low tundra, a river, or the sea. But the sun, as often as it breaks through the clouds, floods this unique mountain region also with its magic colours, defines every hill and valley, illumines every snowfield, makes every glacier and ravine conspicuous and telling, gives effect to every peak, ridge and cliff, shows every lake as a clear and smiling mountain eye, spreads, morning and evening, the blue haze of distance like a delicate veil over the background of the picture, and, at midnight, floods the whole with its deepest rays, so that it is bathed in rosy light. Surely even the tundra is not without its charms.

In some places, though very rarely, the vegetation gives a certain form and beauty to the scenery. Pines and firs, if not altogether confined to the south, are only to be found in the most sheltered valleys. The few firs which are to be seen look as if they had been seized by a giant hand and twisted like a screw, and they do not thrive in the higher districts. The birches penetrate farther, but even they are stunted and bent like grizzled dwarfs. The larches alone here and there hold the field, and grow to be really trees, but they cannot be described as characteristic of the tundra. The most characteristic plant is certainly the dwarf-birch. Only under exceptionally favourable circumstances attaining to a yard in height, it predominates over by far the greater part of the tundra so absolutely that all other bushes and shrubs seem only to have sprung up between the birches. It spreads over all tracts where it can take root, from the shore of the sea or river to the tops of the mountains, a more or less thick covering so equal in height that great stretches look as if they had been shorn along the top; it recedes only where the ground is so soaked with water that it forms swamp or morass; it is stunted only where the heights are covered with infertile quartz or with stiff clay, which hardens readily in the sun; but it strives for mastery with the bog-moss on all the low grounds and with the reindeer-moss on every height. Areas of many square miles are so thickly clothed—one might almost say felted—that only the indestructible bog-moss ventures to assert its claim to the soil beside, or rather under the birches. In other less moist places we find dwarf-birches, sweet-willow, and marsh-andromeda mixed together. In the same way various berry-bearing bushes are often mixed, especially cowberries, crowberries, cranberries, and whortleberries.

If the ground lies below the level of the surrounding plains, and is therefore very moist, the bog-moss gains the day, and, gradually crowding out the dwarf-birch, forms great swelling cushions. As the root-parts rapidly die away into peat, these cushions become higher and more extensive until the water impedes any further advance, or else they break up into dome-like hillocks. If the basin be very flat, the accumulated water rarely forms a lake or pond, scarcely even a pool, but soaks through the soil to an indefinite depth, and so forms a morass whose thin but tough covering of interlacing sedge-roots can only be trodden in safety by the broad-hoofed reindeer; and even his steps, and the deeply-sinking runners of the sledge, make it yield and tremble like jelly.

When the depression becomes a short confined trough, without outlet, into which a streamlet flows, however slowly, the morass becomes a bog, or lower down, a swamp. In the first of these, reeds, in the second downy willows (sallows), a second characteristic plant of the tundra, attain to luxuriant growth. Though only in very favourable circumstances becoming as tall as a man, these plants form thickets which may be literally impenetrable. Their branches and roots interlace to an even greater extent than do those of the dwarf-firs on the mountains, forming an inextricable maze which can best be compared to a felt compacted out of all the different parts of the willow. It withstands the strongest arm, when one tries to clear a path through it, and it offers so much obstruction to the foot that the most persistent explorer soon gives up the attempt to pierce it, and turns aside, or retraces his steps. This he does the more readily as the substratum is in most cases morass or an almost continuous series of marshy, slimy pools whose fathomableness one is unwilling even to try.

As the traveller journeys through the tundra, he recognizes that the whole region presents to the eye the individual features already described, in regular alternation and monotonous repetition. Only where a large river of considerable volume flows through the low tundra is there any real change. Such a river deposits on its banks the masses of sand it has carried down; and the wind, which blows constantly and usually violently, piles these gradually up into dunes along the banks; thus a soil foreign to the tundra is formed. On these sand-hills the larch grows, even in the tundra of Siberia, to a stately tree, and becomes, in association with willows and dwarf alder bushes, an ornament to the landscape. In the neighbourhood of small lakes the trees may even be grouped together, and, with the shrubs already named, form a natural park which would not escape observation even in a much richer and more fertile district, and is here so very remarkable that it leaves a lasting impression.

Fig. 6.—Peregrine Falcons and Lemmings.

When the larch has taken root in the sand-hills, there grow up under its sheltering branches other tall-stemmed plants such as sharp-leaved willows, mountain ash, black alder, and woodbine bushes, and there spring from the sand many flowers which one thought to have left far behind in the south. The surprised southerner is cheered by the red glory of the willow-herb; the charming wild rose clings close to the motherly earth, decorating it with its slender stems and its flowers; the bright forget-me-not looks up with home-like greeting; here hellebore and chives, valerian and thyme, carnations and blue-bells, bird-vetch and alpine vetch, ranunculus and immortelles, lady’s-smock, Jacob’s-ladder, cinquefoil, love-lies-bleeding, and others find a home in the desert. In such places more plants grow than one had expected, but the traveller is certainly modest in his expectations when he has seen the same poverty all around for days and weeks together, always dwarf-birches and sallows, marsh-andromeda and sedge, reindeer-moss and bog-moss; has refreshed himself with the stunted crowberries and cranberries half-hidden in the moss, half-creeping on the ground, and has been obliged to take the cloudberries which decorate the moss-cushion as flowers; when he has tramped over them and among them for days together always hoping for a change, and always being disappointed. Every familiar plant from the south reminds him of happier regions; he greets it as a dear friend whose value is only realized when he has begun to fear losing him.[7]

It seems strange that the plants above-named and many others should spring only from the dry sand of the dunes, but the apparent riddle is solved when we know that it is only the sand thus piled up, that becomes sufficiently warmed in the months of uninterrupted sunshine for these plants to flourish. Nowhere else throughout the tundra is this the case. Moor and bog, morass and swamp, even the lakes with water several yards in depth only form a thin summer covering over the eternal winter which reigns in the tundra, with destructive as well as with preserving power. Wherever one tries to penetrate to any depth in the soil one comes—in most cases scarcely a yard from the surface—upon ice, or at least on frozen soil, and it is said that one must dig about a hundred yards before breaking through the ice-crust of the earth. It is this crust which prevents the higher plants from vigorous growth, and allows only such to live as are content with the dry layer of soil which thaws in summer. It is only by digging that one can know the tundra for what it is: an immeasurable and unchangeable ice-vault which has endured, and will continue to endure, for hundreds of thousands of years. That it has thus endured is proved indisputably by the remains of prehistoric animals embedded in it, and thus preserved for us. In 1807 Adams dug from the ice of the tundras the giant mammoth, with whose flesh the dogs of the Yakuts sated their hunger, although it must have died many thousands of years before, for the race became extinct in the incalculably distant past. The icy tundra had faithfully preserved the carcase of this primitive elephant all through these hundreds of thousands of years.[8]

Many similar animals, and others of a more modern time, are embedded in the ice, though it is not to be supposed that the tundra was ever able to sustain a much richer fauna than it has now. Bison and musk-ox traversed it long after the time of the mammoth; giant-elk and moose belonged to it once. Now its animal life is as poor and monotonous as its vegetation—as itself. This holds true, however, only with regard to species, not to individuals, for the tundra is, at least in summer, the home of numerous animals.

The year is well advanced before the tundra begins to be visibly peopled. Of the species which never leave it one sees very little in winter. The fish which ascend its rivers from the sea are concealed by the ice; the mammals and birds which winter in it are hidden by the snow, under which they live, or whose colour they wear. Not until the snow begins to melt on the southern slopes does the animal life begin to stir. Hesitatingly the summer visitors make their appearance. The wolf follows the wild reindeer, the army of summer birds follows the drifting ice blocks on the streams. Some of the birds remain still undecided in the regions to the South, behave as if they would breed there, then suddenly disappear from their resting-place by the way, fly hastily to the tundra, begin to build directly on their arrival, lay their eggs, and brood eagerly, as though they wished to make up for the time gained by their relatives in the South. Their summer life is compressed into few weeks. They arrive already united, paired for life, or at least for the summer; their hearts stirred by all-powerful love, they proceed, singing and rejoicing, to build a nest; unceasingly they give themselves up to their parental duties, brood, rear, and educate their young, moult, and migrate abroad again.

Fig. 7.—The White or Arctic Fox (Canis lagopus).

The number of species which may be looked upon as native to the tundra is small indeed, yet it is much greater than that of those which may be regarded as characteristic of the region. As the first of these, I should like to place the Arctic fox. He ranges over the whole extent of the tundra, and is sure of maintenance and food in the south at least, where he occurs along with our fox and other allied species. Like some other creatures he wears the colours of his home, in summer a rock-coloured dress, in winter a snow-white robe, for the hairs of his thick fur coat are at first stone-gray or grayish-blue, and become snow-white in winter.[9] He struggles through life with ups and downs like other foxes, but his whole character and conduct are quite different from those of our reynard and his near relatives. One scarcely does him injustice in describing him as a degenerate member of a distinguished family, unusually gifted, intelligent, and ingenious. Of the slyness and ingenuity, the calculating craft, the never-failing presence of mind of his congeners he evinces hardly any trace. His disposition is bold and forward, his manner officious, his behaviour foolish. He may be a bold beggar, an impudent vagabond, but he is never a cunning thief or robber, weighing all circumstances, and using all available means to attain his end. Unconcernedly he stares at the huntsman’s gun; unwarned by the ball, which passes whistling over his body, he follows his worst enemy; unhesitatingly he forces his way into the birch-bark hut of the wandering reindeer-herdsmen; without fear he approaches a man sleeping in the open, to steal the game he has caught, or even to snap at a naked limb. On one occasion an Arctic fox at which I had several times fired in vain in the dusk, kept following my steps like a dog. My old sporting friend, Erik Swenson of Dovrefjeld, relates that one night a fox nibbled the fur rug on which he lay, and old Steller vouches for many other pranks which this animal plays, pranks which every one would declare incredible were they not thoroughly guaranteed by corroborating observations. An insufficient knowledge of human beings, so sparsely represented in the tundra, may to some extent account for the extraordinary behaviour of this fox, but it is not the only reason. For neither the red fox nor any other mammal of the tundra behaves with so little caution; not even the lemming approaches him in this respect.

A strange creature certainly is this last inhabitant of our region whatever species of his family we consider. He, or at least his tracks, may be seen everywhere throughout the tundra. The tracks run in all directions, often through places overgrown by dwarf-birches, narrow, smooth, neatly-kept paths in the moss, going straight for several hundred yards, then diverging to right or left, and only returning to the main path after many circuits. On these we may often see, in great numbers during a dry summer, a little, short-tailed, hamster-like animal nimbly pattering along and soon disappearing out of sight. This is the lemming, a rodent smaller than a rat, but larger than a mouse, and with brightly but irregularly marked skin, usually brown, yellow, gray, and black. If we dissect the animal we see, not without surprise, that it consists almost entirely of skin and viscera. Its bones and muscles are fine and tender; its viscera, especially the alimentary and the reproductive organs, are enormously developed. This state of things explains some phenomena of its life which were long considered unintelligible: the almost abrupt occurrence of well-nigh unlimited fertility, and the vast, apparently organized migrations of the animal. In ordinary circumstances the lemming leads a very comfortable life. Neither in summer nor in winter has he any anxiety about subsistence. In winter he devours all sorts of vegetable matter,—moss-tips, lichen, and bark; in summer he lives in his burrow, in winter in a warm, thick-walled, softly-lined nest. Danger indeed threatens from all sides, for not only beasts and birds of prey, but even the reindeer devour hundreds and thousands of lemmings;[10] nevertheless they increase steadily and rapidly, until special circumstances arise when millions, which have come into existence within a few weeks, are annihilated within a few days. Spring sets in early, and a more than usually dry summer prevails in the tundra. All the young of the first litter of the various lemming females thrive, and six weeks later, at the most, these also multiply. Meantime the parents have brought forth a second and a third litter, and these in their turn bring forth young. Within three months the heights and low grounds of the tundra teem with lemmings, just as our fields do with mice under similar circumstances. Whichever way we turn, we see the busy little creatures, dozens at a single glance, thousands in the course of an hour. They run about on all the paths and roads; driven to extremity, they turn, snarling and sharpening their teeth, on the defensive even against man, as if their countless numbers lent to each individual a defiant courage. But the countless and still-increasing numbers prove their own destruction. Soon the lean tundra ceases to afford employment enough for their greedy teeth. Famine threatens, perhaps actually sets in. The anxious animals crowd together and begin their march. Hundreds join with hundreds, thousands with other thousands: the troops become swarms, the swarms armies. They travel in a definite direction, at first following old tracks, but soon striking out new ones; in unending files—defying all computation—they hasten onwards; over the cliffs they plunge into the water. Thousands fall victims to want and hunger; the army behind streams on over their corpses; hundreds of thousands are drowned in the water, or are shattered at the foot of the cliffs; the remainder speed on; other hundreds and thousands fall victims to the voracity of Arctic and red foxes, wolves and gluttons, rough-legged buzzards and ravens, owls and skuas which have followed them; the survivors pay no heed. Where these go, how they end, none can say, but certain it is that the tundra behind them is as if dead, that a number of years pass ere the few who have remained behind, and have managed to survive, slowly multiply, and visibly re-people their native fields.[11]

Fig. 8.—The Reindeer (Tarandus rangifer).

A third animal characteristic of the tundra is the reindeer. Those who know this deer, in itself by no means beautiful, only in a state of captivity and slavery, can form no idea of what it is under natural conditions. Here in the tundra one learns to appreciate the reindeer, to recognize and value him as a member of a family which he does not disgrace. He belongs to the tundra, body and soul. Over the immense glacier and the quivering crust of the unfathomable morass, over the boulder-heaps and the matted tops of the dwarf-birches or over the mossy hillocks, over rivers and lakes he runs or swims with his broad-hoofed, shovel-like, extraordinarily mobile feet, which crackle at every step. In the deepest snow he uses his foot to dig for food. He is protected against the deadly cold of the long northern night by his thick skin, which the arrows of winter cannot pierce, against the pangs of hunger by the indiscriminateness of his appetite. From the wolf, which invariably follows close on his heels, he is, in some measure at least, saved by the acuteness of his senses, by his speed and endurance. He passes the summer on the clear heights of the tundra, where, on the slopes just beside the glaciers, the soil, belted over with reindeer-moss, also brings forth juicy, delicate alpine plants; in winter he ranges through the low tundra from hill to hill seeking spots from which the snow has been cleared off by the wind.[12] Shortly before this, having attained to his full strength and fully grown his branching antlers, he had in passionate violence engaged in deadly combat with like-minded rivals as strong as himself until the still tundra resounded with the clashing of their horns. Now, worn out with fighting and with love, he ranges peacefully through his territory with others of his kind, associated in large herds, seeking only to maintain the struggle with winter. The reindeer is certainly far behind the stag in beauty and nobility, but when one sees the great herds, unhampered by the fetters of slavery, on the mountains of their native tundra, in vivid contrast to the blue of the sky and the whiteness of the snowy carpet, one must acknowledge that he, too, takes rank among noble wild beasts, and that he has more power than is usually supposed to quicken the beating of the sportsman’s heart.

The tundra also possesses many characteristic birds. Whoever has traversed the northern desert must have met one, at least, of these, the ptarmigan:

“In summer gay from top to toe,

In winter whiter than the snow”.

I do not allude to the ptarmigan of our mountains, which is here also restricted to the glacier region, but to the much more abundant willow-grouse. Wherever the dwarf-birch thrives it is to be found, and it is always visible, but especially when the silence of night has fallen upon the tundra, even though the sun be shining overhead. It never entirely forsakes its haunts, but, at the most, descends from the heights to the low grounds in winter. It is lively and nimble, pert and self-possessed, jealous and quarrelsome towards its rivals, affectionate and devoted towards its mate and young. Its life resembles that of our partridge, but its general behaviour has a much greater charm. It is the embodiment of life in the desert. Its challenging call rings out through the still summer night, and the coveys enliven the wintry tundra, forsaken by almost all other birds. Its presence gladdens and charms naturalist and sportsman alike.

During summer the golden plover, which also must be described as a faithful child of the tundra, is to be met almost everywhere. As the swift ostrich to the desert, the sand-grouse to the steppes, the rock-partridge to the mountains, the lark to the corn-fields, so the golden plover belongs to the tundra. Gay as its dress may be, they are the colours of the tundra which it wears; its melancholy cry is the sound most in keeping with this dreary region. Much as we like to see it in our own country, we greet it without pleasure here, for its cry uttered day and night makes us as sad as the tundra itself.

With much greater pleasure does one listen to the voice of another summer guest of the region. I do not refer to the tender melodies of the blue-throated warbler, which is here one of the commonest of brooding birds and justly named the “hundred-tongued singer”, nor to the ringing notes of the fieldfare, which also extends to the tundra, nor to the short song of the snow bunting, nor to the shrill cries of the peregrine falcon or the rough-legged buzzard, nor to the exultant hooting of the sea-eagle or the similar cry of the snowy owl, nor to the resounding trumpet-call of the musical swan or the plaintive bugle-like note of the Arctic duck, but to the pairing and love cry of one or other of the divers—a wild, unregulated, unrestrained, yet sonorous and tuneful, resonant and ringing northern melody, comparable to the roar of the surge or to the thunder of a waterfall as it rushes to the deep. Wherever a lake rich in fish is to be found, with a secret place in the reeds thick enough to conceal a floating nest, we find these children of the tundra and the sea, these soberly-joyous fishers in the calm fresh waters and fearless divers in the northern sea. Thence they have come to the tundra to brood, and back thither they will lead their young as soon as these are able, like themselves, to master the waves. Over the whole extent of the tundra they visit its waters, but they prefer to the broad inland lakes the little ponds on the hills along the coast, whence they can daily plunge, with their wildly jubilant sea song, into the heaving, bountiful ocean, which is their home.

From the sea come other two birds very characteristic of the tundra. The eye follows every movement of the robber-gulls with real delight, of the phalarope with actual rapture. Both breed in the tundra: the one on open mossy moors, the other on the banks of the most hidden ponds and pools among the sallows. If other gulls be the “ravens of the sea” the skuas may well be called the “sea-falcons”. With full justice do they bear the names of robber and parasitic gulls, for they are excellent birds of prey when there is no opportunity for parasitism, and they become parasites when their own hunting has been unsuccessful. Falcon-like they fly in summer through the tundra, in winter along the coast regions of the North Sea; they hover over land or sea to find their prey, then swoop down skilfully and gracefully and seize without fail the victim they have sighted. But even these capable hunters do not scruple, under some circumstances, to become bold beggars. Woe to the gull or other sea-bird which seizes its prey within sight of a skua! With arrow-like swiftness he follows the fortunate possessor uttering barking cries, dances, as if playfully, round him on all sides, cunningly prevents any attempt at flight, resists all defence, and untiringly and ceaselessly teases him till he gives up his prize, even though it has to be regurgitated from his crop. The life and habits of the Arctic skua, its skill and agility, its courage and impudence, untiring watchfulness and irresistible importunity are extraordinarily fascinating; even its begging can be excused, so great are its charms. Yet the phalarope is still more attractive. It is a shore bird, which unites in itself the qualities of its own order and those of the swimming birds, living, as it does, partly on land, partly in the water, even in the sea. Buoyant and agile, surpassing all other swimming birds in grace of motion, it glides upon the waves; quickly and nimbly it runs along the shore; with the speed of a snipe it wings its zigzag flight through the air. Confidently and without fear it allows itself to be observed quite closely, and in its anxiety for the safety of its brood usually betrays its own nest, with the four pear-shaped eggs, however carefully it has been concealed among the reeds. It is perhaps the most pleasing of all the birds of the tundra.[13]

Fig. 9.—Skuas, Phalarope, and Golden Plovers.

Likewise characteristic of the tundra are the birds of prey, or, at least, their manner of life there is characteristic. For it is only on the southern boundary of the region or among the heights that there are trees or rocks on which they can build their eyries, and they are perforce obliged to brood on the ground. Among the winding branches of the dwarf-birch is the nest of the marsh-owl, on its crown that of the rough-legged buzzard; on the bare ground lie the eggs of the snowy-owl and the peregrine falcon, though the latter chooses a place as near as possible to the edge of a gully, as though he would deceive himself by vainly attempting to make up for the lack of heights. That it and all the others are fully conscious of the insecurity of their nesting-place is shown by their behaviour on the approach of man. From a distance the traveller is watched suspiciously and is greeted with loud cries; the nearer he approaches the greater grows the fear of the anxious parents. Hitherto they have been circling at a safe distance, about twice as far as a shot would carry, over the unfamiliar but dreaded enemy; now they swoop boldly down, and fly so closely past his head that he distinctly hears the sharp whirr of their wings, sometimes indeed he has reason to fear that he will be actually attacked. Meanwhile the young birds, which are visible even from a distance as white balls, bend timidly down and await the approach of this enemy,—suspected at least, if not known as such,—sitting so still in their chosen, or perhaps forced position that one can sketch them without fear of being disturbed by a single movement—a charming picture!

Many other animals might be enumerated if I thought them necessary to a picture of the tundra. At least one more is characteristic—the mosquito. To call it the most important living creature of the tundra would be scarcely an exaggeration. It enables not a few of the higher animals, especially birds and fishes, to live; it forces others, like man, to periodic wanderings; and it is in itself enough to make the tundra uninhabitable in summer by civilized beings. Its numbers are beyond all conception; its power conquers man and beast; the torture it causes beggars description.

It is well known that the eggs of all mosquitoes are laid in the water, and that the larvæ which creep forth in a few days remain in the water till their metamorphosis is accomplished. This explains why the tundra is more favourable than any other region to their development, and to their occurrence in enormous numbers. As soon as the sun, once more ascending, has thawed the snow, the ice, and the upper crust of the earth, the life of the mosquito, latent in winter but not extinguished, begins to stir again. The larvæ escape from the eggs which have been buried, but not destroyed, in the frozen mud; in a few days these larvæ become pupæ, the pupæ become winged insects, and generation follows generation in quick succession. The heyday of the terrible pests lasts from before the beginning of the summer solstice until the middle of August.

During the whole of this time they are present on the heights as in the low grounds, on the mountains or hills as in the valleys, among the dwarf-birches and sallow bushes as on the banks of rivers and lakes. Every grass-stalk, every moss-blade, every twig, every branch, every little leaf sends forth hundreds and thousands of them all day long. The mosquitoes of tropical countries, of the forests and marshes of South America, the interior of Africa, India, and the Sunda islands, so much dreaded by travellers, swarm only at night; the mosquitoes of the tundra fly for ten weeks, for six of these actually without interruption. They form swarms which look like thick black smoke; they surround, as with a fog, every creature which ventures into their domains; they fill the air in such numbers that one hardly dares to breathe; they baffle every attempt to drive them off; they transform the strongest man into an irresolute weakling, his anger into fear, his curses into groans.

As soon as the traveller sets foot on the tundra their buzzing is heard, now like the singing of a tea-kettle, now like the sound of a vibrating metal rod, and, a few minutes later, he is surrounded by thousands and thousands. A cloud of them swarms round head and shoulders, body and limbs, follows his steps, however quickly he moves, and cannot possibly be dispersed. If he remain standing, the cloud thickens; if he move on, it draws itself out; if he run as quickly as possible, it stretches into a long train, but does not remain behind. If a moderate wind is blowing against them, the insects hasten their flight to make headway against the current of air; when the wind is more violent all the members of the swarm strain themselves to the utmost so as not to lose their victim, and pounce like pricking hailstones on head and neck. Before he knows, he is covered from head to foot with mosquitoes. In a dense swarm, blackening gray clothes, giving dark ones a strange spotted appearance, they settle down and creep slowly about, looking for an unappropriated spot from which to suck blood. They creep noiselessly and without being felt to the unprotected face and neck, the bare hands and the feet covered only with stockings, and a moment later they slowly sink their sting into the skin, and pour the irritant poison into the wound. Furiously the victim beats the blood-sucker to a pulp, but while the chastising hand still moves, three, four, ten other gnats fasten on it, while others begin work on the face, neck, and feet, ready to do exactly as the slain ones had done. For when blood has once flowed, when several insects have met their death on the same place, all the rest seek out that very spot, even though the surface becomes gradually covered with bodies. Specially favourite points of attack are the temples, the forehead just under the hat-brim, the neck and the wrist, places, in short, which can be least well protected.

If an observer can so far restrain himself as to watch them at their work of blood, without driving them away or disturbing them, he notices that neither their settling nor their moving about is felt in the least. Immediately after alighting they set to work. Leisurely they walk up and down on the skin, carefully feeling it with their proboscis; suddenly they stand still and with surprising ease pierce the skin. While they suck, they lift one of the hind-legs and wave it with evident satisfaction backwards and forwards, the more emphatically the more the translucent body becomes filled with blood. As soon as they have tasted blood they pay no heed to anything else, and seem scarcely to feel though they are molested and tortured. If one draws the proboscis out of the wound with forceps, they feel about for a moment, and then bore again in the same or a new place; if one cuts the proboscis quickly through with sharp scissors, they usually remain still as if they must think for a minute, then pass the forelegs gently over the remaining portion and make a prolonged examination to assure themselves that the organ is no longer present; if one suddenly cuts off one of their hind-legs, they go on sucking as if nothing had happened and continue to move the stump; if one cuts the blood-filled body in half, they proceed like Münchausen’s horse at the well, but at length they withdraw the proboscis from the wound, fly staggeringly away and die within a few minutes.

Careful observation of their habits places it beyond doubt that, in the discovery of their victim, they are guided less by sight than by smell, or perhaps, more correctly, by a sense which unites smell and tactile sensitiveness.[14] It can be observed with certainty that, if a human being approach within five yards of their resting-place, they rise and fly to their prey without hesitating or diverging. If anyone crosses a bare sand-bank usually free from them he can observe how they gather about their victim. Apparently half carried by the wind, half moving by their own exertions, but at any rate wandering aimlessly, some float continually over even this place of pilgrimage, and a few thus reach the neighbourhood of the observer. At once their seeming inactivity is at an end. Abruptly they alter their course, and make straight for the happily-found object of their longing. Others soon join them, and before five minutes have passed, the martyr is again surrounded by a nimbus. They find their way less easily through different strata of air. While observing them on a high dune I had been followed and tormented for some time by thousands, so I led the swarm to the edge of the steep slope, let it thicken there, and then sprang suddenly to the foot. With much satisfaction I saw that I had shaken off the greater number of my tormentors. They swarmed in bewildered confusion on the top of the dune, forming a dense cloud for some time over the place from which I had leaped. A few hundreds had, however, followed me to the lower ground.

Though the naturalist knows that it is only the female mosquitoes which suck blood, and that their activity in this respect is indubitably connected with reproduction, and is probably necessary to the ripening of the fertilized eggs, yet even he is finally overcome by the tortures caused by these demons of the tundra, though he be the most equable philosopher under the sun. It is not the pain caused by the sting, or still more, by the resulting swelling; it is the continual annoyance, the everlastingly recurring discomfort under which one suffers. One can endure the pain of the sting without complaint even at first, still more easily when the skin has become less sensitive to the repeatedly instilled poison; thus one can hold out for a long time. But sooner or later every man is bound to confess himself conquered and beaten by these terrible torturing spirits of the tundra. All resistance is gradually paralysed by the innumerable, omnipresent armies always ready for combat. The foot refuses its duty; the mind receives no impressions; the tundra becomes a hell, and its pests an unutterable torture. Not winter with its snows, not the ice with its cold, not poverty, not inhospitality, but the mosquitoes are the curse of the tundra.[15]

During the height of their season the mosquitoes fly almost uninterruptedly, during sunshine and calm weather with evident satisfaction, in a moderate wind quite comfortably, in slightly warm weather gaily, before threatening rain most boisterously of all, in cool weather very little, in cold, not at all. A violent storm banishes them to the bushes and moss, but, as soon as it moderates, they are once more lively and active, and in all places sheltered from the wind they are ready for attack even while the storm is raging. A night of hoar-frost plays obvious havoc among them, but does not rid us of them; cold damp days thin their armies, but succeeding warmth brings hosts of newly developed individuals on the field. The autumn fogs finally bring deliverance for that year.

Autumn in the tundra comes on as quickly as spring came slowly. A single cold night, generally in August, or at the latest in September, puts an end to its summer life. The berries, which, in the middle of August, looked as if they would scarcely ripen at all, have become as juicy and sweet as possible by the end of the month; a few damp, cold nights, which lightly cover the hills with snow, hasten their ripening more than the sun, which is already clouded over all day long. The leaves of the dwarf-birch become a pale but brilliant lake-red on the upper surface, a bright yellow beneath; all the other bushes and shrubs undergo a similar transformation: and the gloomy brown-green of the tundra becomes such a vivid brown-red that even the yellow-green of the reindeer-moss is no longer conspicuous. The winged summer guests fly southwards or towards the sea, the fishes of the tundra swim down the rivers. From the hills the reindeer, followed by the wolf, comes down to the low grounds; the ptarmigan, now congregated in flocks of thousands, fly up to the heights to remain until winter again drives them down to the low tundra.

After a few days this winter, as much dreaded by us as by the migratory birds, yet longed for by the human inhabitants of the tundra, sets in on the inhospitable land, to maintain its supremacy longer, much longer than spring, summer, and autumn together. For days and weeks in succession snow falls, sometimes coming down lightly in sharp-cornered crystals, or sometimes in large flakes, driven by a raging storm. Hills and valleys, rivers and lakes are gradually shrouded in the same winter dress. A brief ray of sunshine still gleams occasionally at mid-day over the snowy expanse; but soon only a pale brightness in the south proclaims that there the sunny day is half-gone. The long night of winter has begun. For months only the faint reflection of the stars twinkles in the snow, only the moon gives tidings of the vitalizing centre of our system. But when the sun has quite disappeared from the tundra another light rises radiant: far up in the north there flickers and flashes “Soweidud”, the fire of God, the flaming Northern Light.

THE ASIATIC STEPPES AND THEIR FAUNA.

There is perhaps monotony, but there is also the interest of a well-marked individuality in that immense tract of country which includes the whole of Central Asia, and extends into Southern Europe, and which forms the region of the steppes. To the superficial observer it may seem an easy thing to characterize these steppes, but the difficulty of the task is soon felt by the careful observer. For the steppes are not so invariably uniform, so absolutely changeless as is usually supposed. They have their time of blooming and their time of withering, their summer and their winter aspects, and some variety at every season is implied in the fact that there are mountains and valleys, streams and rivers, lakes and marshes. The monotony is really due to the thousand-fold repetition of the same picture, what pleased and even charmed when first seen becoming tame by everyday familiarity.

The Russian applies the word steppe, which we have borrowed from his language, to all unwooded tracts in middle latitudes, when they are of considerable extent, and bear useful vegetation. It matters not whether they be perfectly flat or gently undulating plains, highlands or mountains, whether there be patches of fat, black soil, admitting of profitable agriculture, or merely great tracts of poor soil covered with such vegetation as grows without man’s aid, and is useful only to the nomadic herdsman. This wide usage of the term is convenient, for throughout the whole region we find the same plants rising from the ground, the same types of animal life, and approximately the same phenomena of seasonal change.

Unwooded the steppe-lands must be called, but they are not absolutely treeless. Neither shrubs nor trees are awanting where the beds of the streams and rivers form broad and deep valleys. In very favourable circumstances, willows, white and silver poplars, grow to be lofty trees, which may unite in a thick fringe by the river banks, or birches may establish themselves and form groves and woods, or pines may plant their feet firmly on the sand-dunes, and form small settlements, which, though not comparable to true forests, are, at least, compact little woods, like the growths along the river-banks. But, after all, such wooded spots are exceptions, they constitute to some extent a foreign element in the steppe scenery, and suggest oases in a desert.

At one place the steppe may stretch before the eye as a boundless plain, here and there gently undulating; at another place the region has been much upheaved, is full of variety, and may even be mountainous. Generally the horizon is bounded on all sides by ranges of hills of variable height, and often these hills inclose a trough-like valley from which it seems as if the water must be puzzled to find its way out, if, indeed, it does so at all. From the longer cross valleys of the often much-ramified ranges a small stream may flow towards the lowest part of the basin and end in a lake, whose salt-covered shores sparkle in the distance as if the winter snow still lay upon them. Viewed from afar, the hills look like lofty mountains, for on these vast plains the eye loses its standard for estimating magnitude; and when the rocks stand out above the surface and form domes and cones, sharp peaks and jagged pinnacles on their summits, even the practised observer is readily deceived. Of course there are some genuinely lofty mountains, for, apart from those near the Chinese boundary, there are others on the Kirghiz steppes, which even on close view lose little of the impressiveness that the ruggedness of their peaks and slopes gives them when seen from a distance. The higher and more ramified the mountains, the more numerous are the streams which they send down to the lower grounds, and the larger are the lakes that occupy the depressions at their base—basins which their feeders are unable to fill, even though unable to find a way through the surrounding banks. The more extensive, also, are the salt-steppes around these lakes—salt because they have no outlet. But apart from these variations, the characteristics of the steppes are uniform; though the composition of the picture is often changed, its theme remains the same.

Fig. 10.—View in the Asiatic Steppes.

We should convey a false impression if we denied charm, or even grandeur, to the scenery of the steppes. The North German moorland is drearier, Brandenburg is more monotonous. In the gently undulating plain the eye rests gratefully on the lakes which fill all the deeper hollows; in the highlands or among the loftier mountains the gleaming water-basins are a real ornament to the landscape. It is true that the lake is, in most cases, though not invariably, without the charm of surrounding verdure, often without so much as a fringe of bushes. But, even when it lies naked and bare, it brightens the steppes. For the blue sky, mirrored on its surface, smiles kindly towards us, and the enlivening effect of water makes itself felt even here. And when a lake is ringed round by hills, or framed, as at Alakul, by lofty mountains; when the steppes are sharply and picturesquely contrasted with the glittering water-surface, the dark mountain-sides, and the snowy summits; when the soft haze of distance lies like a delicate veil over hill and plain, suggesting a hidden beauty richer than there really is; then we acknowledge readily and gladly that there is a witchery of landscape even in the steppes.

Fig. 11.—A Salt Marsh in the Steppes.

Even when we traverse the monotonous valleys many miles in breadth, or the almost unbroken plains, whose far horizon is but an undulating line, when we see one almost identical picture to north, south, east, and west, when the apparent infinitude raises a feeling of loneliness and abandonment, even then we must allow that the steppes have more to show than our heaths, for the vegetation is much richer, more brilliant, and more changeful. Indeed, it is only here and there, where the salt-steppes broaden out around a lake, that the landscape seems dreary and desolate. In such places none of the steppe plants flourish, and their place is taken by a small, scrubby saltwort, not unlike stunted heather, only here and there attaining the size of low bushes. The salt lies as a more or less thick layer on the ground, filling the hollows between the bushes so that they look like pools covered with ice. Salt covers the whole land, keeping the mud beneath permanently moist, adhering firmly to the ground, and hardly separable from it. Great balls of salt and mud are raised by the traveller’s feet and the horses’ hoofs at every step, just as if the ground were covered with slushy snow. The waggon makes a deep track in the tough substratum, and the trundling wheels sometimes leave marks on the salt like those left on snow in time of hard frost. Such regions are in truth indescribably dismal and depressing, but elsewhere it is not so.

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.

But every day adds some new tint. There is less and less of the yellowish tone which last year’s withered stalks give even in spring to the steppes; the garment already so bright continues to gain in freshness and brightness. After a few weeks, the steppe-land lies like a gay carpet in which all tints show distinctly, from dark green to bright yellow-green, the predominant gray-green of the wormwoods being relieved by the deeper and brighter tones of more prominent herbs and dwarf-shrubs. The dwarf-almond, which, alone or in association with the pea-tree and the honeysuckle, covers broad stretches of low ground, is now, along with its above-mentioned associates, in all its glory. Its twigs are literally covered all over with blossom; the whole effect is a shimmer of peach-red, in lively contrast to the green of the grass and herbage, to the bloom of the pea-trees, and even to the delicate rose-red or reddish-white of the woodbine. In suitable places the woodbine forms quite a thicket, and, when in full bloom, seems to make of all surrounding colour but a groundwork on which to display its own brilliancy. Various, and to me unknown, shrubs and herbs give high and low tones to the picture, and the leaves of others, which wither as rapidly as they unfold, become spots of yellow-green and gold. Seen from a distance, all the colours do indeed merge into an almost uniform gray-green; but near at hand each colour tells, and one sees the countless individual flowers which have now opened, sees them singly everywhere, but also massed together in more favourable spots, where they make the shades of the bushes glorious. Amid the infinite variety of bulbous plants there are exquisite vetches; among many that are unfamiliar there are old friends well known in our flower-gardens; more and more does the feeling of enchantment grow on one, until at last it seems as if one had wandered into an unending, uncared-for garden of flowers.

With the spring and the flowers the animal life of the steppes appears also to awaken. Even before the last traces of winter are gone, the migratory birds, which fled in autumn, have returned, and when the spring has begun in earnest the winter sleepers open the doors of the burrows within which they have slumbered in death-like trance through all the evil days. As the migratory birds rejoin the residents, so the sleepers come forth and join those mammals which are either careless of winter or know how to survive it at least awake. At the same time the insects celebrate their Easter, hastening from their hidden shelters or accomplishing the last phase of their metamorphosis; and now, too, the newts and frogs, lizards and snakes leave their winter quarters to enjoy in the spring sunshine the warmth indispensable to their activity and full life, and to dream of the summer which will bring them an apathetic happiness.

The steppe now becomes full of life. Not that the animal life is of many types, but it is abundant and everywhere distributed. The same forms are met with everywhere, and missed nowhere. There are here no hosts of mammals comparable to the herds of antelopes on the steppes of Central Africa, nor to the troops of zebras and quaggas[17] in the South African karoo, nor to the immeasurable trains of buffaloes on the North American prairies;[18] nor are the birds of the steppes so numerous as those on the continental shores or on single islands, or on the African steppes, or in equatorial forests. But both birds and mammals enter into the composition of a steppe landscape; they help to form and complete the peculiarity of this region; in short, the steppes also have their characteristic fauna.

The places at which the animals chiefly congregate are the lakes and pools, rivers and brooks. Before the existence of a lake is revealed by the periodically or permanently flooded reed-forests surrounding it, hundreds and thousands of marsh-birds and swimmers have told the practised observer of the still invisible sheet of water. In manifoldly varied flight, fishing-gulls, common gulls, and herring-gulls sweep and glide over its surface; more rapidly and less steadily do the terns pursue the chase over the reeds and the pools which these inclose; in mid-air the screaming eagles circle; ducks, geese, and swans fly from one part of the lake to another; kites hover over the reeds; even sea-eagles and pelicans now and then show face. As to the actual inhabitants of these lakes, as to the number of species and individuals, one can only surmise until one has stationed oneself on the banks, or penetrated into the thicket of reeds. In the salt-steppe, as is readily intelligible, the animal life is sparser. With hasty flight most of the water-birds pass over the inhospitable, salt-covered shores, as they wend from lake to lake; only the black-headed gulls and fishing-gulls are willing to rest for a time by the not wholly dry, but shallow, briny basins; only the sheldrake fishes there in company with the charming avocet, who seeks out just these very places, and, living in pairs or small companies, spends his days stirring up the salt water, swinging his delicate head with upturned bill from side to side indefatigably. Of other birds I only saw a few, a yellow or white wagtail, a lapwing, a plover; the rest seem to avoid the uninviting desolateness of these brine pools, all the more that infinitely more promising swamps and pools are to be found quite near them. About the lake itself abundant food seems to be promised to all comers. Thus not only do thousands of marsh and water birds settle on its surface, but even the little songsters and passerine birds, unprovided for by the dry steppes, come hither. Not the fishers alone, but other hungry birds of prey find here their daily bread. The steppe-lakes cannot indeed be compared with those of North Africa, where, during winter, the feathered tribes of three-quarters of the globe have their great rendezvous, nor with the equatorial water-basins, which are thronged by hundreds of thousands of birds at every season, nor even with the marsh-lands of the Danube, where, all through the summer, countless children of the air find rest; in proportion to the extent of water in the steppes the number of winged settlers may seem small, but the bird-fauna is really very considerable, and the lakes of the steppes have also a certain uniqueness in regard to the nesting-places chosen by the birds.

Fig. 13.—Lake Scene and Water-fowl in an Asiatic Steppe.

Here every creature has its home among the reeds: the wolf and the boar, the eagle and the wild-goose, the kite and the swan, the raven and the mallard, the gadwall or teal, the thrush and the white-throat, the reed-tit and the sparrow, the reed-bunting and the ortolan, the willow wren and the blue-throated warbler, the lesser kestrel and the red-footed falcon, the crane and the lapwing, the shrike and the snipe, the starling, the yellow and white wagtails, the quail and the kingfisher, the great white heron and the spoonbill, the cormorant and the pelican. The reed-thickets afford home and shelter to all; they take the place of woods in affording hiding and security; in their retreats the secrets of love are told, and the joys of family life are expressed, exuberant rejoicings are uttered, and the tenderest cares are fulfilled; they are the cradles and the schools of the young.

Of the mammals which congregate among the reeds one usually sees only the tracks, provided, of course, that one does not resort to forceful measures and ransack the thicket with dogs. Of the flitting bird-life, however, in its general features at least, the practised eye of the naturalist may at any time obtain a lively picture.

When we leave the dry steppes and approach a lake, the widely-distributed larks disappear, and their place is taken by the plovers, whose plaintive cries fall mournfully on the ear. One of them may be seen running by fits and starts along the ground, with the characteristic industry of its race, stopping here and there to pick up some minute booty, and then running off again as swiftly as ever. Before we reach the reeds we see the black-headed gulls, probably also the common gulls, and, in favourable circumstances, even a great black-backed gull. The first fly far into the steppes to seek out the grazing herds, and are equally decorative whether they sweep gracefully over and around them in thick crowds, catching in their flight the insects which the grazing beasts have disturbed, or whether they run behind the herd like white pigeons seeking their food in the fields. Near the reeds we also see one or other of the wild-geese—a male who for a short time has left his mate sitting upon the eggs, to graze, while it is still possible, on the grassy patches near the reed-thicket. Soon, however, parental cares, in which all ganders share, will recall him to the recesses of the willows close by the lake, to the nook where the careful parents have their gray-greenish-yellow goslings well hidden. Over all the flooded shallows there is a more active life. On the margins of the pools small littoral birds have their well-chosen fighting-grounds. Fighting-ruffs,[19] now arrayed in their gayest dress, meet there in combat; with depressed head each directs his beak like a couched lance against the bright neck-collar which serves his foe for shield. The combatants stand in most defiant attitudes, irresistibly amusing to us; for a moment they look at one another with their sharp eyes and then make a rush, each making a thrust, and at the same time receiving one on his feathery shield. But none of the heroes is in any way injured, and none allows the duelling to interfere with less exciting business; for if, during the onslaught, one see a fly just settling on a stem, he does not allow it to escape him, and his opponent is equally attentive to the swimming beetle darting about on the surface of a small pool; hastily they run, one here and the other there, seize the booty which they spied, and return refreshed to the fray. Meantime, however, other combatants have taken the field, and the fight seems as if it would never have an end. But suddenly a marsh-harrier comes swooping along, and the heroes hastily quit the field; they rise together in close-packed flight, and hurry to another pond, there to repeat the same old game. The dreaded harrier is the terror of all the other birds of the lake. At his approach the weaker ducks rise noisily, and, a moment later, their stronger relatives, more disturbed by the ducks than by the bird of prey, rise impetuously, and with whizzing beating of wings, circle several times over the lake and sink again in detachments. With trilling call the redshanks also rise, and with them the snipe, whose cry, though tuneless, is audible from afar. The robber sweeps past all too near, but both redshank and snipe forget his menace as soon as they reach a safe height; they seem to feel only the golden spring-tide and the joy of love which now dominates them. For the redshank sinks suddenly to the water far beneath, flutters, and hovers with his wings hanging downwards and forwards, rises again with insistent calls and sinks once more, until a response from his mate near by invites him to cease from his love-play and to hasten to her. So is it also with the snipe, who, after he has ended his zigzag flight, and ascended to twice the height of a tower, lets himself fall suddenly. In the precipitous descent he broadens out his tail, and opposes the flexible, narrow, pointed lateral feathers to the resisting air, thus giving rise to that bleating noise to which he owes his quaint name of sky-goat.[20] Only a pair of the exceedingly long-legged black-winged stilts, which were pursuing their business in apparently aristocratic isolation from the throng, have remained undisturbed by the marsh-harrier; perhaps they saw the bold black-headed gulls hastening to drive off the disturber of the peace. Moreover, a Montagu’s harrier and a steppe-harrier have united their strength against the marsh-harrier, whom they hate with a bitterness proportionate to his near relationship. Without hesitation the robber makes for the open country, and next minute there is the wonted whistling and warbling, scolding and cackling over the water. Already there is a fresh arrival of visitors, drawn by that curiosity common to all social birds, and also, of course, by the rich table which these lakes afford.

When at length we reach the thicket of reeds the smaller birds become more conspicuous, the larger forms being more effectively concealed. The crane, which breeds on the most inaccessible spots, the great white heron, which fishes on the inner margin of the thicket, the spoonbill, which forages for food on the shallowest stretches among the reeds, all these keep themselves as far as possible in concealment, and of the presence of the bittern in the very heart of the reeds we are aware only by his muffled booming. On the other hand, all the small birds to which I have referred expose themselves to view almost without any wariness, singing and exulting in their loudest notes. The yellow wagtails run about confidently on the meadow-like plots of grass around the outer margin of the thicket; that marvel of prettiness, the bearded titmouse, climbs fearlessly up and down on the reeds, whose tops are graced here by a redbreast and there by a gray shrike. From all sides the cheerful, though but slightly melodious song of the sedge-warblers strikes the ear, and we listen with pleasure to the lay of the black-throated thrush, to the lovely singing of the blue-throat, the wood-wren, and the icterine warbler, and to the call of the cuckoo. On the open pools among the reeds there is sure to be a pair of coots swimming with their young brood, and where the water is deeper there is perchance an eared grebe among the various kinds of ducks. When it draws to evening the red-footed falcon, the lesser kestrel, the starlings and the rose-starlings also seek the thicket for the night, and of chattering and fussing there is no end. Even the spotted eagle, the raven, and the hooded-crow appear as guests for the night, and, on the inner margins at least, the cormorant and the pelican rest from their fishing.

Finally, over the surface of the lake the gulls fly and hover, the terns dart hither and thither, the ernes and ospreys pursue their prey, and, where the water is not too deep, the pelicans and swans vie in their fishing industry with the greedy cormorants and grebes.

The beds of streams fringed with trees and bushes are hardly less rich in life. The trees bear the nests of large and small birds of prey, and serve also for their perches. From their tops may be heard the resonant call of the golden oriole, the song of the thrush, the laughter of the woodpecker, and the cooing of the ring-dove and stock-dove; while from the thick undergrowth the glorious song of the nightingale is poured forth with such clearness and power, that even the fastidious ear of the critic listens in rapture to the rare music. On the surface of the stream many different kinds of water-birds swim about as on the lake; among the bushes on the banks there is the same gay company that we saw among the reeds; the lesser white-throat chatters, the white-throat and the barred warbler sing their familiar songs.

When we traverse the dry stretches of the steppes we see another aspect of animal life. Again it is the bird-life which first claims attention. At least six, and perhaps eight species of larks inhabit the steppes, and give life to even the dreariest regions. Uninterruptedly does their song fall on the traveller’s ear; from the ground and from the tops of the small bushes it rises; from morning to evening the rich melody is poured forth from the sky. It seems to be only one song which one hears, for the polyphonous calandra lark takes the strophes of our sky-lark and of the white-winged lark and combines them with its own, nor despises certain notes of the black lark, the red lark, and the short-toed lark, but blends all the single songs with its own, yet without drowning the song of its relatives, no matter how loudly it may pour forth its own and its borrowed melodies. When, in spring, we listen enraptured to our own sky-larks in the meadows, and note how one sweet singer starts up after another in untiring sequence, heralding the spring with inspired and inspiring song, we hardly fancy that all that we can hear at home is surpassed a hundredfold on the steppes. Yet so it is, for here is the true home of the larks; one pair close beside another, one species and then another, or different kinds living together, and in such numbers that the broad steppes seem to have scarce room enough to hold them all. But the larks are not the only inhabitants of these regions. For proportionately numerous are the lark’s worst enemies, full of menace to the dearly loved young brood—the harriers, characteristic birds of the steppes. Whatever region we visit we are sure to see one or another of these birds of prey, in the north Montagu’s harrier, in the south the steppe-harrier, hurrying over his province, sweeping along near the ground in wavy, vacillating flight. Not unfrequently, over a broad hollow, four, six, eight or more may be seen at once absorbed in the chase. Even more abundant, but not quite so widely distributed, are two other children of the steppes, almost identical in nature and habits, and vieing with one another in beauty, grace of form, and vigour of movement,—the lesser kestrel and the red-footed falcon. Wherever there is a perching-place for these charming creatures, where a telegraph-line traverses the country, or where a rocky hillock rises from the plain, there they are sure to be seen. As good-natured as they are gregarious, unenvious of each other’s gain, though they pursue the same booty, these falcons wage indefatigable war against insects of all sorts, from the voracious grasshopper to the small beetle. There they sit, resting and digesting, yet keeping a sharp look-out meanwhile; as soon as they spy booty they rise, and after an easy and dexterous flight begin to glide, then, stopping, they hover, with scarce perceptible vibrations, right over one spot, until, from the height, they are able to fasten their eyes surely on their prey. This done, they precipitate themselves like a falling stone, seize, if they are fortunate, the luckless insect, tear it and devour it as they fly, and, again swinging themselves aloft, proceed as before. Not unfrequently ten or twelve of both species may be seen hunting over the same spot, and their animated behaviour cannot fail to attract and fascinate the observer’s gaze. Every day and all day one comes across them, for hours at a time one may watch them, and always there is a fresh charm in studying their play; they are as characteristic parts of the steppe picture as the salt lake, the tulip or the lily, as the dwarf shrub, the tschi-grass, or the white wool-packs in the heavens. Characteristic also is the rose-starling, beautifully coloured representative of the familiar frequenter of our houses and gardens. He is the eager and successful enemy of the greedy grasshopper, the truest friend of the grazing herds, the untiring guardian of the crops and thus man’s sworn ally, an almost sacred bird in the eyes of those who inhabit the steppes. Notable also is the sand-grouse, a connecting link between fowl and pigeon,[21] which, with other members of its family, is especially at home in the desert. Not less noteworthy are the great bustard, its handsomer relative the ruffed bustard, and the little bustard. The last-named is of special interest to us, because a few years ago it wandered into Germany as far as Thuringia, where it now, as in the steppe, adds a unique charm to the landscape as it discloses its full beauty in whizzing flight. Other beautifully coloured, and indeed really splendid birds inhabit the steppes—the lovely bee-eater and roller, which live on the steep banks of the streams along with falcons and pigeons, the bunting and the scarlet bullfinch, which shelter among the tschi-grass and herbage, and many others. Even the swallows are not absent from this region in which stable human dwellings are so rare. That the sand-martin should make its burrows in all the steeper banks of the lakes will not seem strange to the ornithologist, but it is worthy of note that the swallow and martins are still in process of transition from free-living to semi-domesticated birds, that they still fix their nests to the cliffs, but leave these to establish themselves wherever the Kirghiz rear a tomb, and that the martins seek hospitality even in the tent or yurt.[22] They find it, too, when the Kirghiz is able to settle long enough to allow the eggs to hatch and the young to become fledged, in a nest fixed to the cupola ring of his hut.

But in these regions, whose bird-life I have been describing, there are other animals. Apart from the troublesome mosquitoes, flies, gadflies, wasps, and other such pests, there are only a few species of insects, but most of these are very numerous and are distributed over the whole of the wide area. The same is true of the reptiles; thus in the region which we traversed we found only a few species of lizards and snakes. Among the latter we noted especially two venomous species, our common viper and the halys-viper; neither indeed occurred in multitudes like the lizards, but both were none the less remarkably abundant. Several times every day as we rode through the steppe would one and the other of the Kirghiz who accompanied us bend from his horse with drawn knife, and slash the head off one of these snakes. I remember, too, that, at a little hill-town in the northern Altai, a place called “Schlangenberg” [or Snakemount], we wished to know whether the place had a good right to its name, and that the answer was almost embarrassingly convincing, so abundant was the booty with which those whom we had sent in quest soon returned. We had no longer any reason to doubt the truth of the tale according to which the place owed its name to the fact that, before the town was founded, the people collected thousands and thousands of venomous snakes and burned them. Amphibians and small mammals seem much rarer than reptiles; of the former we saw only a species of toad, and of the latter, several mice, a souslik, two blind mole-rats, and the dainty jerboa, popularly known as the jumping-mouse.

Fig. 14.—The Souslik (Spermophilus citillus).
(⅓ natural size.)

Fig. 15.—The Jerboa (Alactaga jaculus).
(⅓ natural size.)

The sousliks and the jerboas are most charming creatures. The former especially are often characteristic features of steppe-life, for in favourable places they readily become gregarious, and, like the related marmots, form important settlements. It is usually towards evening that one sees them, each sitting at the door of his burrow. On the approach of the waggon or train of riders they hastily beat a retreat, inquisitively they raise their heads once more, and then, at the proper moment, they vanish like a flash into their burrows, only to reappear, however, a few minutes later, peering out cautiously as if to see whether the threatened danger had passed safely by. Their behaviour expresses a continual wavering between curiosity and timidity, and the latter is fully justified, since, apart from man, there are always wolves and foxes, imperial eagles and spotted eagles, on their track. Indeed one may be sure that the sousliks are abundant when one sees an imperial eagle perching on the posts by the wayside or on the trees by a village. The jerboa—by far the prettiest of the steppe-mammals—is much less frequently seen, not indeed because he occurs less frequently, but because, as a nocturnal animal, he only shows himself after sunset. About this time, or later if the moon be favourable, one may see the charming creature steal cautiously from his hole. He stretches himself, and then, with his pigmy fore-limbs pressed close to his breast, trots off on his kangaroo-like hind-legs, going as if on stilts, balancing his slim erect body by help of his long hair-fringed tail. Jerkily and not very rapidly the jerboa jumps along the ground, resting here and there for a little, sniffing at things and touching them with its long whisker-hairs, as he seeks for suitable food. Here he picks out a grain of seed, and there he digs out a bulb; they say of him also that he will not disdain carrion, that he will plunder a bird’s nest, steal the eggs and young of those which nest on the ground, and even hunt smaller rodents, from all which accusations I cannot venture to vindicate him. Precise and detailed observation of his natural life is difficult, for, his senses being keen and his intelligence slight, timidity and shyness are his most prominent qualities. As soon as man appears in what seems dangerous proximity, the creature takes to flight, and it is useless to try to follow; even on horseback one could scarce overtake him. With great bounds he hurries on, jerking out his long hind-legs, with his long tail stretched out as a rudder; bound after bound he goes, and, before one has rightly seen how he began or whither he went, he has disappeared in the darkness.[23]

The fauna of the steppe-mountains differs from that of the low-grounds, differs at least, when, instead of gentle slopes or precipitous rocky walls, there are debris-covered hillsides, wild deeply-cut gorges, and rugged plantless summits. In the narrow, green valleys, through which a brook flows or trickles, the sheldrake feeds—an exceedingly graceful, beautiful, lively bird, scarce larger than a duck—the characteristic duck of the central Asiatic mountains. From the niches of the rocks is heard the cooing of a near relative of the rock-dove, which is well known to be ancestor of our domestic pigeons; from the rough blocks on which the wheatear, the rock-bunting, and the rock-grosbeak flit busily, the melodious song of the rock-thrush streams forth. Around the peaks the cheerful choughs flutter; above them the golden-eagle circles by day, and the horned owl flies silently as a ghost by night, both bent on catching one of the exceedingly abundant rock ptarmigan, or, it may be, a careless marmot. More noteworthy, however, is the Archar of the Kirghiz, one of the giant wild sheep of Central Asia, the same animal that I had the good fortune to shoot on the Arkat mountains.

According to the reports which I gathered after careful cross-examination of the Kirghiz, the archar occurs not only here, but also on other not very lofty ranges of the western Siberian steppes. They are said to go in small troops of five to fifteen head, rams and ewes living in separate companies until the breeding season. Each troop keeps its own ground unless it be startled or disturbed; in which case it hastens from one range to another, yet never very far. Towards sunset the herd ascends, under the guidance of the leader, to the highest peaks, there to sleep in places scarce accessible to other creatures; at sunrise, both old and young descend to the valleys to graze and to drink at chosen springs; at noon, they lie down to rest and ruminate in the shade of the rocks, in places which admit of open outlook; towards evening they descend again to graze. Such is their daily routine both in summer and winter. They eat such plants as domesticated sheep are fond of, and they are, when needs must, easily satisfied; but even in winter they rarely suffer from want, and in spring they become so vigorous that from that season until autumn they are fastidious, and will eat only the most palatable herbs. Their usual mode of motion is a rapid, exceedingly expeditious trot; and even when frightened they do not quicken their steps very markedly unless a horseman pursue them. Then they always take to the rocks and soon make their escape. When in flight either on the plain or on the mountains they almost always keep in line, one running close behind another, and, if suddenly surprised and scattered, they re-form in linear order as speedily as possible. Among the rocks they move, whether going upwards or downwards, with surprising ease, agility, and confidence. Without any apparent strain, without any trace of hurry, they clamber up and down almost vertical paths, leap wide chasms, and pass from the heights to the valley almost as if they were birds and could fly. When they find themselves pursued, they stand still from time to time, clamber to a loftier peak to secure a wider prospect, and then go on their way so calmly that it seems as if they mocked their pursuer. Consciousness of their strength and climbing powers seems to give them a proud composure. They never hurry, and have no cause to regret their deliberation except when they come within shot of the lurking ambuscade or the stealthy stalker.

Fig. 16.—Archar Sheep or Argali (Ovis Argali).

The sheep live at peace together throughout the year, and the rams only fight towards the breeding season. This occurs in the second half of October and lasts for almost a month. At this time the high-spirited, combative rams become greatly excited. The seniors make a stand and drive off all their weaker fellows. With their equals they fight for life or death. The rivals stand opposed in menacing attitudes; rearing on their hind-legs they rush at one another, and the crash of powerful horns is echoed in a dull rumble among the rocks. Sometimes it happens that they entangle one another, for the horns may interlock inseparably, and both perish miserably; or one ram may hurl the other over a precipice, where he is surely dashed to pieces.

During the last days of April or the first of May the ewe brings forth a single lamb or a pair. These lambs, as we found out from captive ones, are able in a few hours to run with their mother, and in a few days they follow her over all the paths, wherever she leads them, with the innate agility and surefootedness characteristic of their race. When serious danger threatens, the mother hides them in the nooks of the rocks, where the enemy may perchance overlook their presence. She returns, of course, after she has successfully eluded the foe. The lambkin, pressed close to the ground, lies as still as a mouse, and, looking almost like a stone, may often escape detection; but not by any means always is he safe, least of all from the golden eagle, which often seizes and kills a lamb which the mother has left unprotected. So we observed when hunting on the Arkat Mountains. Captive archar lambs which we got from the Kirghiz were most delightful creatures, and showed by the ready way in which they took to the udders of their foster-mothers that they might have been reared without special difficulty. Should it prove possible to bring the proud creatures into domestication the acquisition would be one of the greatest value. But of this the Kirghiz does not dream, he thinks only of how he may shoot this wild sheep or the other. Not that the chase of this powerful animal is what one could call a passion with him; indeed the sheep’s most formidable enemy is the wolf, and it is only in the deep snow in winter that even he manages to catch an archar.

Fig. 17.—Pallas’s Sand-grouse (Syrrhaptes paradoxus).

As on the mountains, so on the driest, dreariest stretches of the steppes, which even in spring suggest African deserts, there are characteristic animals. In such places almost all the plants of the highlands and valleys disappear except the low tufted grass and diminutive bushes of wormwood. Here, however, grows a remarkable shrub which one does not see elsewhere, a shrub called ramwood on account of its extreme hardness and toughness, which baffles the axe. It roots on those rare spots in the wilderness where the rain-storms have washed together some poor red clay. There it sometimes grows into bushwork of considerable extent, affording shelter and shade to other plants, so that these green spots come to look like little oases in the desert. But these oases are no more lively than the dreary steppes around, for apart from a shrike, the white-throat, and a wood-wren, one sees no bird, and still less any mammal. On the other hand, amid the desolation there live some of the most notable of the steppe animals, along with others which occur everywhere; besides the short-toed lark and calandra lark there is the coal-black Tartar lark, which those aware of the general colour-resemblance between ground-birds and the ground would naturally look for on the black earth. Along with the small plover there is the gregarious lapwing, along with the great bustard the slender ruffed bustard, which the Kirghiz call the ambler, along with the sand-grouse there is Pallas’s sand-grouse or steppe-grouse.[24] It was this last bird which some years ago migrated in large numbers into Germany and settled on the dunes and sandy places, but was so inhospitably received by us, so ruthlessly persecuted with guns, snares, and even poison, that it forsook our inhuman country and probably returned to its home. Here, too, along with the specially abundant souslik, there are steppe antelopes and the Kulan, the fleet wild horse of the steppes. I must restrict myself to giving a brief sketch of the last, so as not to overstep too far the limits of the time allowed me.

If Darwin’s general conclusions be reliable, we may perhaps regard the kulan as the ancestor of our horse, which has been gradually improved by thousands of years of breeding and selection. This supposition is more satisfactory than the vague and unsupported assertion that the ancestor of our noblest domestic animal has been lost, and to me it is more credible than the opinion which finds in the Tarpan which roams to-day over the Dnieper steppes an original wild horse, and not merely one that has reverted to wildness.[25] As recent investigations in regard to our dogs, whose various breeds we cannot compute with even approximate accuracy, point to their origin from still existing species of wolf and jackal, my conclusion in regard to the horse acquires collateral corroboration. Moreover, the ancestor of our domestic cat, now at last recognized, still lives in Africa, and the ancestor of our goat in Asia Minor and in Crete.[26] As to the pedigree of our sheep and cattle we cannot yet decide with certainty, but I have consistent information from three different quarters, including the report of a Kirghiz who declared that he had himself hunted the animal, to the effect that in the heart of the steppes of Mongolia there still lives a camel with all the characteristics of wildness.[27] I cannot doubt the truth of the reports which I received, and the only question is, whether this camel represents the original stock still living in a wild state, or whether, like the tarpan, it be only an offshoot of the domesticated race which has returned to wild life. As the veil is slowly being lifted which hid, and still hides, the full truth from our inquiring eyes, as the ancestors of our domesticated animals are being discovered one after the other, and that among species still living, why should we suppose that the ancestor of the horse, the conditions of whose life correspond so thoroughly with those of the broad measureless steppes, has died out without leaving a trace? It is, I maintain, among the still living wild horses of the Old World that we must look for the progenitor of our horse, and among these none has more claims to the honour of being regarded as the ancestor of this noble creature than the kulan. It may be that the tarpan more closely resembles our horse, but, if it be true that the Hyksos brought the horse to the ancient Egyptians (from whose stone records we have our first knowledge of the domesticated animal), or that the Egyptians themselves tamed the horse before the time of the Hyksos, and therefore at least one and a half thousand years before our era, then certainly the race had not its origin in the steppes of the Dnieper and the Don. For nearer at hand, namely in the steppes and deserts of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Persia, and in several valleys of Arabia and India, they had a wild horse full of promise, one which still lives, our kulan. This differs indeed in several features from our horse, but not more than the greyhound, the poodle, or the Newfoundland differs from the wolf or any other wild dog, not more than the dachshund, the terrier, or the spaniel from the jackal, not more than the pony from the Arabian horse, or the Belgian-French cart-horse from the English racer. The differences between our domesticated horse and the wild form which seems to me its most probable ancestor are indeed important, but horse and kulan seem to regard themselves as belonging to the same blood, since they seek each other’s company.

When, on the 3rd June, 1876, we were riding through the dreary desert steppes between the Saisan lake and the Altai—a region from which I have drawn the main features of the above sketch—we saw in the course of the forenoon no fewer than fifteen kulans. Among these we observed one pair in particular. They stood on the broad crest of a near hillock, their forms sharply defined against the blue sky, and powerfully did they raise the desire for the chase in us and in our companion Kirghiz. One of them made off as we appeared, and trotted towards the mountain; the other stood quietly, and seemed as if considering a dilemma, then raised its head once and again, and at last came running towards us. All guns were at once in hand; the Kirghiz slowly and carefully formed a wide semicircle with the intention of driving the strangely stupid and inconceivably careless creature towards us. Nearer and nearer, halting now and then, but still steadily nearer he came, and we already looked upon him as a sure captive. But a smile broke over the face of the Kirghiz riding beside me; he had not only discovered the motive of the creature’s apparently foolish behaviour, he had recognized the animal itself. It was a Kirghiz horse, dappled like a kulan, which, having strayed from his master’s herd, had fallen in with wild horses, and, for lack of better company, had stayed with them. In our horses he had recognized his kin, and had therefore forsaken his friends in need. Having come quite near to the Kirghiz, he stopped again as if to reflect whether he should once more yield his newly-healed back to the galling saddle; but the first steps towards return were followed by others, and without an attempt at flight he allowed them to halter him, and in a few minutes he was trotting as docilely by the side of one of the horsemen as if he had never known the free life of his ancestors. Thus we were able to confirm by personal experience the already accepted fact, that horse and kulan do sometimes keep company.