THE QUEST FOR THE WILD HORSE.
THE sustaining hope of the discoverer of the unknown is seldom wholly vague or visionary. No man, as a rule, breaks into a new world by accident or hap-hazard. New -worlds, or lands, or men, or beasts, have lived in the imagina- tion, and been foreshadowed and foretold by a hundred minute and subtle inductions, grouping themselves round the central idea in minds so set on finding what they felt was to be found, that in the end their quest was gained, and they have been able to tell the world that what they felt must exist, did exist, and was found. Even though the nominal object of his search be prosaic and matter-of-fact, the explorer generally cherishes some dear ideal, some side-issue, some pet project of his own in the realm of discovery, which his efforts shall bring to light, and which will realise some reasoned result of his own sagacity and foresight. When Pythias, the first navigator of the Northern seas, was sent on a " commercial mission " by the colonists of Marseilles to find the tin- islands, he performed the practical part of his mission with all good faith and diligence ; but to him, the man of science, the mathematician, and astronomer, the bare discovery of new tribes of barbarians, new islands, and half-frozen seas, could have brought no such nights of triumph as that on which he tracked the Sun to his lair behind the Lapland mountain, and saw the brilliant creature slip again from his cavern, after his brief but necessary repose. Such must have been the triumph of Columbus when he fancied that he identi- fied on the shores of America the plants and streams of India and Cathay; and such, in some sense, the feelings of Prejvalski, the latest traveller to seek the Eastern limits of the Old World through new and untried paths, when he realised his hope of discovering in the deserts of Mongolia the wild camel and the wild horse.
The experiences of this Russian soldier when he had penetrated into the regions behind the plateau of Tibet to the mysterious lake of Koko-Nor, lying . 10,000 ft. -above the sea, are more in the spirit and setting of the journals of Columbus than any tale of travel of modern times. The lake, blue as a sapphire, lay in a setting of dull salt sand, with an encircling rim of snowy mountains. Outside and beyond the mountains lay on one side the forbidden land of China; on another, Tibet, with its frozen and stereotyped government of a priestly caste ; and on the west, the broken tribes of Eastern Turkestan. As he passed towards the great Desert of Gobi, which divides the dwindling population on one side of the mountains from the decaying civilisation on the other, he found himself almost alone among the primi- tive animals and birds of -the centre of .the Old World ; and as the old Greeks imagined, and as Darwin found in Pata- gonia, and voyagers at either Pole, that at the ends of the world Nature was simplified, with fewer and more primitive forms, so in the " centre of the world," Prejvalski found that in these remote and solitary regions he was face to face with some of the early and original types of those animals which .man enslaved and turned to his own uses at such a distance of time that the original types were believed to have perished for -ever. The hope of discovering the " undescended dark original " of some of our domesticated animals, especially of those ancient .servants of Eastern mankind, the camel and the horse, seems to have been ever present to the mind of Prejvalski, and to have affected his imagination as the vision of the shining walls of El Dorado did the old adventurers, or the hope of finding the mother-rock of the gold, the gold-seekers of our day. From the sapphire lake of Koko-Nor he pushed towards the north- west across the plain of Tsaidam, a strange, unfinished region, once the bed of a huge lake, a waste of sand, salt- impregnated clay, and marshes, through clouds of mosquitoes and gadflies, towards another lake, called Lob-Nor, lying in . an extension of the great Desert of Gobi. He had marked how, as he journeyed across Asia westward, all the elements -of Nature grew more simple and severe, and that as the more complex landscape resolved itself into waterless mountains, salt lakes, and rude vegetation, so the types of animal life
grew constantly more primitive. He had left behind him the semi-wild horses of the Don and Southern Russia, and seen the still wilder ponies of the Mongols, "under the average height, with thick necks, large heads, thick 1:gs, and long, shaggy coats." The camels of the Koko-Nor were smaller and rougher than those further west, and be rejoiced to think that he must now be approaching the original home of the. wild camel, and even of the wild horse. " Such a journey," he wrote, " must finally set at rest the question of the existence of wild camels and wild horses ; the people have repeatedly told me of both, and described them fully." The wild camels were said to live in North-West Tsaidam, and to have smaller humps and more pointed muzzles than the tame camels, and grey hair. They were hunted for food, and were exceedingly fleet, wary, and suspicions of man. These stories of the Mongols were found to be correct. Several skins of the wild camel were brought to the traveller, and he was at last rewarded by a sight of one of them, though the distance was too great to enable him to shoot it or compare it with the tame animals. Later, however, some have been taken alive, and the existence of the wild camel in the Desert of Gobi may be taken as established.
The Mongol accounts of the wild horses, though equally positive, were less satisfactory. They were certain that there did exist wild horses in the same districts as the wild camels ; and they were also certain that these were distinct from the horse-like kiang, the wild ass of Eastern Turkestan and Mongolia. The kiangs do, in fact, resemble a Mongol horse in many points. They have the same heavy head, square shoulder, and chestnut colour ; but they differ in having their lower parts almost white, long ears, and a true ass's tail. They neigh, but also bray, and, when going at full speed have the characteristic appearance of an ass with " great ugly head stretched out straight before, and scanty tail straight behind," as Prejvalski says. They are, in fact, probably-only a variety of the wild ass of Persia and Western Turkestan. But the Mongol accounts of the wild horse were quite inconsistent with the description of the kiangs. " The wild horses," they said, " were numerous near Lob-Nor, but were so shy that when frightened they continued their flight for days. They were of a uniform bay [P dun] colour, with black tails, and manes sweep- ing the ground ; and were never hunted, because they were too difficult of approach." Prejvalski obtained the skin of one of these wild horses ; but the evidence so obtained did not bear out the account given by the Mongols, who seem to have fallen into the usual error of imagining that in the " wild horse " they would find the species in a condition of original and primitive perfection. Of coarse nothing could be more contrary to probabilities. " Wild" animals, compared with domesticated descendants of the same species, occupy much the same position as " wild " plants do to their descendants in the garden ; and the absence of fine legs and a flowing mane in the Equus Prejvalskii made the place assigned to it as the ancestor of the modern horse all the more probable. Now the news comes that the wild horse of Prejvalski has been seen, hunted, and captured by two Russian travellers, the brothers Grum-Grizimailo, and that four specimens have been brought to Russia from their Central Asian homes. These creatures are said to correspond in all respects with the skin obtained by Prejvalski, and to represent the ancestors of all our modern horses. From a picture of the animal which appeared lately in the Graphic, there seems some reason to doubt whether they may not, after all, be only a variety of the kiang, or wild ass of Turkestan. They have the ass's hog-mane, and a tail in which the long hairs, though not confined to the tip, do not begin to grow until some inches from the root. Neither has the animal any forelock. On the other hand, the ears are short, not long, as in all the ass tribe, and the square shoulder is not more characteristic of the asses than of all neglected breeds of horses. Moreover, it is a common- place in natural history that the primitive characteristics are shown in the young ; and the thin tail, short neck, and head set on so as to make an angle with the throat instead of a curve, are as characteristic of a young colt, as of the Equus Prejvalskii. But, apart from all external differences between the ass and the horse, lies the inexplicable fact that the latter adapts itself to changed con- ditions in almost all climates, while the former does not. Under human care and selection, the horse varies so rapidly, that we meet with all extremes, from the dray-horse to the polo-pony, and all colours from black to white. But the ass in the last five thousand years has varied little. It will not thrive except in hot climates, and centuries of careful breeding have not caused it to change colour further than from grey to white, and have done little to make it a pleasant animal to ride, or big enough for heavy draught. These facts give a starting-point from which we may judge whether or no the Equus Prejvalskii is of the true stock. Let the animals lately brought to Russia be made the nucleus of a herd, and the variations of successive generations be noted. Then if they are true horses, they will vary first in colour, then in shape, and human selection ought to be able to guide the varieties towards different types. If, on the other hand, they be asses, they will refuse to vary, and remain true to the type of the steppes of Dsungaria.
Previous page
