[Illustration:  CULTURAL REGIONS OF AFRICA AND ARABIA.]

[Sidenote:  Mobility of pastoral nomads.]

Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility.  The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements.  His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer[1056] and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.[1057] “This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it,” he says,—­level, grassy, treeless.  The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient carrago camp of the nomadic Visigoths,[1058] or the laager of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.

[Sidenote:  Tendency to trek.]

Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum.  The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment’s notice.[1059] The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds.  Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels.  It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible.  That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.[1060] Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit.  Similar instances occur among modern peoples.  The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,[1061] was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people.  They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt.  The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive.  In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.

[Sidenote:  Seasonal migrations.]