One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the “hunger steppe” to the borders of Turkestan, and find the same monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east to China, with each day’s march a counterpart of the rest. Five hundred thousand square miles of area are covered with grass and gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 104°. In winter snow is everywhere,--in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to forty degrees below zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts. Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people, and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over the tremendous range. As the herds have become hardened through the centuries and survive in measure despite the severity, so also have the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures buried in skins, who keep guard over them. One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations,--flat faces, round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons of the Tatars, whose very name was distorted into that of a dweller in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become shopkeepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops, figures, gnome-like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the locomotive and passengers. [Illustration: DINING-CAR SALOON, VIEW OF THE LIBRARY] Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals over the mind--a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do as the Russians--pay no attention whatever to the landscape outside, but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary,--cards and cigarettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take days for the spinning.