Kalmyk Steppe

[2] The western Kalmuck Steppe occupied by the Yergeni hills, is deeply trenched by ravines and rises 300 and occasionally 630 ft. above the sea.

It is built up of Tertiary deposits, belonging to the Sarmatian division of the Miocene period and covered with bess and black earth, and its escarpments represent the old shore-line of the Caspian.

Post-Pliocene Aral-Caspian deposits, containing the usual fossils (Hydrobia, Neritina, eight species of Cardium, two of Dreissena, three of Adacna and Lithoglyphus caspius), attain thicknesses varying from 105 ft. to 7 or 10 feet, and disappear in places.

[1] A narrow tract of land along the coast of the Caspian, known as the "hillocks of Baer," is covered with hillocks elongated from west to east, perpendicularly to the coast-line, the spaces between them being filled with water or overgrown with thickets of reed, Salix, Ulmus campestris, almond trees, &c. An archipelago of little islands is thus formed close to the shore by these mounds, which are backed on the N. and N.W.

[1] Antony Beevor, in his 1998 book Stalingrad, said that "Russians from the north thought of [Kalmyk Steppe] as 'the end of the world'".