The compromise is merely a temporary expedient.

Virgin soil gives very abundant harvests, sufficient to support both the labourer and the indolent proprietor, but after a few years the soil becomes exhausted and gives only a very moderate revenue.

A proprietor, therefore, must sooner or later dispense with the labourers who take half of the produce as their recompense, and must himself put his hand to the plough.
Thus we see the Bashkirs are, properly speaking, no longer a purely pastoral, nomadic people.

The discovery of this fact caused me some little disappointment, and in the hope of finding a tribe in a more primitive condition I visited the Kirghiz of the Inner Horde, who occupy the country to the southward, in the direction of the Caspian.

Here for the first time I saw the genuine Steppe in the full sense of the term--a country level as the sea, with not a hillock or even a gentle undulation to break the straight line of the horizon, and not a patch of cultivation, a tree, a bush, or even a stone, to diversify the monotonous expanse.
Traversing such a region is, I need scarcely say, very weary work--all the more as there are no milestones or other landmarks to show the progress you are making.