Flora, Fauna, Lakes of the Pamir.
The Pamir is frequented in summer by Kirghiz nomads, with their flocks from Khokand and Karateghin in the north, and from Shignan in the west. Cairns are scattered here and there, marking old camping grounds, or the graves of Kirghiz "saints," decked with sheep's horns and fluttering rags. Above the line of arborescent vegetation, indicated by the willow, dwarf birch, juniper, and thorny shrubs, the only available fuel is that afforded by the wood of roots of a species of lavender, while still higher up even this resource fails. Yet in many places, even at altitudes of 13,000 feet, the grass is as thick as on the grazing grounds of West Europe, and perhaps richer. Marco Polo's statement that the Pamir affords the best pasture in the world, fattening a lean hack in ten days, is confirmed by recent explorers and their Wakhi guides. In the upland Sirikol valley sloping towards Kashgaria barley, haricots, and other plants are cultivated as high as 10,300 feet. Yet the parallel ridges, especially in the north, are almost destitute of vegetation, and here nothing grows except in the moist hollows on the banks of the lakes and rivulets.
| Fig. 87.—Relief of the Highlands and Plateaux between the Hindu-Kush and Tian-shan. |
| Scale 1 : 13,900,000. |
|
 300 Miles.
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The fauna is much richer than was formerly supposed. Sieverzov found in 1878 no less than 112 species of birds at an elevation at which on the Alps there are no more than a dozen. The muddy shores of the lakes show traces of the chamois, hare, deer, fox, bear, wolf, lynx, leopard, and on the Great Pamir are wild goats like those of the Himalayas. But the typical animal of the plateau is the so-called kachkar, or arkhar (Ovis poli), a species of sheep over 3 feet high, weighing from 400 to 430 lbs., and distinguished by enormous horns inclined backwards in a double spiral. Formerly very numerous, the kachkar seems disappearing from the Pamir, and in the north it was nearly swept away by the epidemic of 1869. Potagos appears to have met a small species of monkey in the upland valleys of the south; but the bear has vanished from the north, and the tiger spoken of by some travellers was more probably a leopard.
Traces of increasing aridity are no less evident on the Pamir than elsewhere in the Aralo-Caspian basin. A great many lakes have already ceased to overflow, and have been gradually changed to isolated saline or brackish tarns. Such is the
