Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/172

150 oasis around a blue steppe lake, where we found ourselves in a beautiful natural flower-garden crowded with rose-bushes, hollyhocks, asters, daisies, fringed pinks, rosemary, flowering pea, and splendid dark-blue spikes of aconite standing shoulder high.

Animals and birds were much more plentiful than they had been in the province of Tobólsk, and were, moreover, remarkably tame. Magnificent eagles perched upon the telegraph poles and did not fly away until we were almost opposite them; slate-colored steppe quails with tufted heads ran fearlessly along the very edge of the road as we passed, and even the timid little jerboa that the Cossacks call tarbogán stopped every now and then to look at us as it hopped away into the dry grass.

As we went farther and farther from Omsk the steppe became more and more sea-like in its appearance, until, shortly after we passed the post-station of Piatorízhskaya Thursday afternoon, it looked like a great yellow ocean extending in every direction to the smooth horizon line. Its peculiar old-gold color was given to it apparently by the prevailing species of grass which, as it gradually dried up in the hot sunshine, turned from green through reddish-brown to the color of dead-ripe wheat. In places where the soil happened for any reason to be moist, as in the vicinity of small brackish ponds and lakes, the grass was still fresh and was sprinkled with flowers; but the steppe, as a rule, presented the appearance of a boundless ocean of wheat stubble, deepening here and there into the rich orange of goldenrod.

Just before sunset we passed at a distance of two or three hundred yards a lonely Kírghis cemetery, and, as we had never before seen a burial-place of this nomadic tribe, we stopped to examine it. It consisted of a few low, bare mounds of various shapes and dimensions, and three or four large, rectangular, fort-like structures of sun-dried bricks. The high walls of the latter had raised corners,