Page 91 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE HORSEMEN OF THE STEPPES

2000-1930 B.C.

the south marched the mountains of the Caucasus.
First the low green hills up which you could gallop and scarcely

wind your horses; but then, if you pushed on, the forested slopes,
the rock outcrops, the steep scree-swept valleys where fodder
was scarce; and finally the precipices and pinnacles of grey stone,

reaching up against the blue of the sky, streaked with snow and
crowned with the hanging snouts of glaciers, where no man went.

The mountains marched from sea to sea, all of a ten days’ hard
drive, and they were unbroken, save by a steep pass near the
western end, which brought you in three days, leading your

horses almost all the way, down to the blue haze of the western
sea, and the little estuary where the bronze traders came.

The nomads (let us call them the battle-ax people; it is more
than possible that that is what their neighbors called them) were

uneasy—as yet—when too near the mountain barrier of the
Caucasus, or the rocky shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian,

which hemmed them in on the west and the east. But to the
north it was different. There rolled the endless plains, the grass­
lands, parched brown in summer and white with snow in winter,

but in spring green as far as the eye could see. To the north and
northwest the grasslands stretched, only broken by the great

sluggish rivers of the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper. Even the
swiftest messengers of the nomads, with unending relays of
horses, would take a month or more to traverse them and to reach

die pine forests beyond, which in their turn stretched unbroken,
it was said, to the Ice Sea of the far north.