What does the country look like? It is flat—a level plain. For hundreds of miles there are no mountains, no hills, no farms, no trees. This plain is called a steppe. Some rain falls in the summer time, and there is a little grass. This is the home of people called Kirghiz. They follow their flocks about wherever there is grass and water, as Hakim and the Arabs do in northern Africa and Arabia (Sec. 415). They are tall, strong-looking people, with dark skins and high cheek bones. They are polite, friendly, and very hospitable. They ask travelers to stay all night with them, and give them warm tents of thick felt, made of camel's hair, and beds of wool blankets piled four inches thick on the ground. For supper and breakfast they offer milk, both sweet and sour, and boiled lamb's flesh, for they kill a lamb in honor of guests. While one of their Swedish guests was looking at their things one day, an old grandmother slipped into his tent and mended his clothes for him. The needle and thread that she used came from England.
The route from Orenburg to Tashkend passes the shore of the Aral Sea, which is slowly drying up, leaving a bare dirt plain covered with salty dust. This is very desolate indeed. The map shows a big river, the Syr, flowing into the Aral Sea. Sometimes you would never guess that it was a river, for you would only see pools of water with sand bars between. The river flows only when the snows melt at its source on the high mountains.
473. The cities of the city of Tashkend nestles in a valley at the foot of the great mountains. On their high tops are shining white snow fields. Lower down are dark green forests of pine, such as we saw on the Rocky Mountains or the Alps. Below the forests are brown, dry pastures, like the plains of Arizona or Nevada. In the midst of the brown valley is a green island, made by the shade trees, orchards, and fields of the farmers around Tashkend. The farmers here use the melted snow water from the high mountains to irrigate their farms, as the people do in California.
These farms and gardens raise enough food to feed the people of the city. Near Tashkend, one may see fine gardens, with melons, pump kins, and many other kinds of fruit and vegetables. Children are building dams and making mud pies in the little streams of water that flow along the edges of the gardens. Apricots are ripe in the orchards, and every one is glad to get some fresh fruit after a long journey across the dry plain.
Tashkend is a city of one and two story houses made of sun-dried brick. In the city are thousands of dark skinned, dirty people. As we pass a house in a quiet street, we hear a clack, clack. It is the sound of a loom, but not so fast or so loud as the looms of South Carolina, or of Massachusetts, or of Manchester. (Sec. 222.) Let us go inside and see what
is going on. Within, a woman is weaving a rug of sheep's wool on a hand loom. It is a very fine rug. It will take her two years to finish it. The people of this country make some of the finest, most • beautiful, most costly rugs in the world. Sometimes these rugs are taken to the great fair at Nizhni Novgo rod, some go to Constanti nople, and many of them finally get to London, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, where they are sold as the Oriental rugs that we prize so highly.
At sunset, out in the street again, we hear a strange, loud call from the top of a tall, narrow tower, the steeple of a mosque or Mohammedan church. The cry is the call of the priest, or muezzin, calling the Mohammedan people to pi.ayer. In every Mohammedan city throughout the world, the muezzin calls the people to prayer at sunset.
South of the Aral Sea and the Syr River, much of the country is sandy desert. In this desert, near its southern edge, there are several cities,—Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarkand,—all much like the city of Tashkend. Their people are fed from farms which are irrigated by the waters of streams that flow down from the snow fields of the high mountains of central Asia.
474. The Central Asian mountain sys tem crosses all the belts of Asiatic Russia except the tundra. It was very hard to build over these mountains the railroad that runs from Petrograd and Moscow to the Pacific. There are not many Russian settlers east of the mountains. Most of the country on the east side of the moun tains is covered with forests. It is cold in winter and has but few people. Many of the people who live there were exiled by the Russian Czar. They are people who did not like his bad government, and said so. For this, he sent them away from their homes into Siberia, to get them out of his way.
In the highlands north of Lake Baikal, in central Siberia, the winters are colder than in any other place in the world, but in the deserts near the Caspian Sea, the summers are almost as hot as in any part of the world.
clay to make pottery and bricks. Thou sands of these books have been dug out of the ruins of these great cities. Some of them are letters written by children; others are school slates, and tell us that even six thousand years ago little boys made mis takes in their arithmetic. These are the oldest books known.
In those days of long ago the people there grew wheat, rice and grapes, and kept cattle, sheep, and horses. Such big cities needed a great deal of food.
476. The the sea coast of Palestine there is rain enough to grow wheat and barley, olives and grapes, just as the farmers did in Bible times. A short distance inland, beyond the Dead Sea, the land becomes desert. It is hard even for camels to cross from Damascus to Bagdad.