As I was picturing them careering over the plains, another scene presented itself and took their place.  Now I no longer saw around me tall pampas-grass with the long necks of the rheas appearing above it, for I was on the edge of a dreary, scantily covered plain between the Aral Sea and the Balkash Lake in Tartary.  To the south lies a barren sandy desert, to the north the fertile plains of the Kirghiz steppes, where the Tartar feeds his flocks, and herds of antelopes gallop over the fresh green pasture; and between these is a kind of no-man’s land, where low scanty shrubs and stunted grass seem to promise but a poor feeding-ground.

Yet here the small long-legged but powerful “Tarpans,” the wild horses of the treeless plains of Russia and Tartary, were picking their morning meal.  Sturdy wicked little fellows they are, with their shaggy light-brown coats, short wiry manes, erect ears, and fiery watchful eyes.  They might well be supposed to be true wild horses, whose ancestors had never been tamed by man; and yet it is more probable that even they escaped in early times from the Tartars, and have held their own ever since, over the grassy steppes of Russia and on the confines of the plains of Tartary.  Sometimes they live almost alone, especially on the barren wastes where they have been seen in winter, scraping the snow off the herbage as our ponies do on Dartmoor.  At other times, as in the south of Russia, where they wander between the Dnieper and the Don, they gather in vast herds and live a free life, not fearing even the wolves, which they beat to the ground with their hoofs.  From one green oasis to another they travel over miles of ground.

   “A thousand horse—­and none to ride! 
    With flowing tail, and flying mane,
    Wide nostrils—­never stretched by pain,
    Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
    And feet that iron never shod,
    And flanks unscarred by spur or rod,
    A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
    Like waves that follow o’er the sea."[11]

[11] Byron’s Mazeppa.

As I followed them in their course I fancied I saw troops of yet another animal of the horse tribe, the “Kulan,” or Equus hemionus, which is a kind of half horse, half ass (p. 393), living on the Kirghiz steppes of Tartary and spreading far beyond the range of the Tarpan into Tibet.  Here at last we have a truly wild animal, never probably brought into subjection by man.  The number of names he possesses shows how widely he has spread.  The Tartars call him “Kulan,” the Tibetans “Kiang,” while the Mongolians give him the unpronounceable name of “Dschiggetai.”  He will not submit to any of them, but if caught and confined soon breaks away again to his old life, a “free and fetterless creature.”