The Face of Manchuria, Korea, & Russian Turkestan by Emily Georgiana Kemp

The first day we travelled through a vast cultivated plain, and the landscape was dotted over with a sprinkling of houses and many trees. The children brought forget-me-nots and anemones to sell at the wayside stations; but on this line the towns and hamlets are fewer than on the one we had just left. Though the land seemed so uninhabited the train always seemed full, and the passengers made themselves thoroughly at home. The second-class travellers, who were going any distance, put on fresh clothes, the ladies dressed in _négligé_ costumes like tea-gowns. One amazingly stout lady put on a muslin gown over a pink slip, and looked just like an animated pin-cushion. These people seem to wear all their jewels too, when travelling. Often it was difficult to imagine where the few people visible at the stations had sprung from, especially to the south of Orenburg. This is one of the only two important places between Kinel and Tashkent, and is the principal town of the province of the same name. There are four mission stations in the Orenburg diocese, and twenty-seven Mohammedans were baptized last year. To the south of Orenburg the land becomes more and more desolate-looking, and the vegetation is so sparse that one can hardly believe it is possible for anything to subsist upon it. Perhaps that is the reason why the Kirghiz nomadic tribes, who inhabit this territory, known as the Kirghiz Steppes, cultivate a peculiar kind of sheep called "stéatopyge" by the French traveller Capus.

This sheep has a singularly fat tail, sometimes so long and heavy that it has to go on a little wheeled cart, and it is this tail which suffices to nourish the sheep in time of scarcity of herbage, in the same way that the camel is said to live on his hump; at the end of the winter the tail has dwindled to quite ordinary proportions. Unfortunately we did not see any of these interesting animals (though I once met one at Delhi), but during the following days we saw hardly any living things but camels, much used also by the Kirghiz. The earth seemed utterly barren, and exuded nothing but salt; hour by hour elapsed, only varied by the interest of stopping at some wayside station, standing alone in the desert, where samovars full of boiling water were eagerly sought by the passengers with their various pots and kettles; the ordinary charge for a potful is three farthings, and one wonders how the poor creatures who supply it are able to make any living out of so poor a harvest.