_A_. Siwalik type. A fifteen-hand horse, lightly built like the
modern thoroughbred. The forehead recedes at an angle from the line
of the face, and there is a prominence between the eyes. The limbs
are long, withers high, and tail set on high.
_B_. Prejevalski Tarpan steppe type, the Dun of Northern Asia. The
face is long, narrow and straight. The nasal chambers are large,
causing a Roman nose. The limbs are clean, with close hocks and
narrow feet. Height twelve to thirteen hands.
We must think then of such types as the Forest and Siwalik adapting
themselves to the soils of North-western Europe.
{42}
PART VII. THE CHANGING LAND.
The North Sea is only a recent flood in an old river valley. We must
consider it not as a tract of permanent water, but as a lost hunting
ground of our own ancestors, a pasturage for horses not very long ago.
[Sidenote: A valley in Cloudland]
In the year 5200 B.C. the Scandinavian glaciers, shrinking at the
rate of about one mile a year (the rate of shrinkage in the Alps of
St. Elias), withdrew from the province of Finland and the Baltic
Lake. Let us suppose that, in that year a traveller from civilised
Egypt made his way down the Rhine, and so entered the valley of North
River, which is now flooded by the North Sea. At first this river
wound its level way between low chalk downs, but presently the Thames
came in from the West, and forested swampy clay-lands extended
northward. Abreast of Aberdeen came the last chalk downs, and beyond
that lay Arctic tundras where the delta widened to an ice-drifted sea
nearly abreast of Faroe.
The whole valley was as varied in rock and soil as Eastern England,
with little lakes, ridges of boulder clay, and downs of gorse and
bracken. Northward across this verdant land crept succeeding waves
of the fir, the oak, and the beech.
{43}
Out on the delta coast, far to the right, beyond a deep sea channel,
rose the white Ice-cap of Sweden, whose Ice-flood filled the Norway
fjords with berg-breeding glaciers. Far to the left rose the
ice-clad Grampians.
The Delta people and those of the Baltic Lake were poor savages
living upon shell fish, and making mounds of shell refuse round their
hearths. Inland were stronger peoples who had lake villages or
trenched encampments on headlands of the downs.
[Sidenote: Cloudland horses]
As the grass followed the advancing fir woods, the primitive stock of
Cloudland returned to pastures from whence it had been driven by the
cold. These were not Duns, Bays, or striped, but native Cloudland
horses adapted to this region of little sunshine. Strong Dun was not
needed to guard them from the actinic rays of sunlight, so their dull
colour had yellowish, brownish and reddish tones which blended with
the landscape, such colours as are worn by the Celtic ponies of
Britain and other Atlantic isles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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