Even at the present time nocturnal illusion still recalls these images of the past. When the rapidly rising and descending constellations illumine the margin of the plain, or when their trembling image is repeated in the lower stratum of undulating vapour, we seem to see before us a shoreless ocean.[3] Like the ocean, the Steppe fills the mind with the feeling of infinity; and thought, escaping from the visible impressions of space, rises to contemplations of a higher order. Yet the aspect of the clear transparent mirror of the ocean, with its light, curling, gently foaming, sportive waves, cheers the heart like that of a friend; but the Steppe lies stretched before us dead and rigid, like the stony crust[4] of a desolated planet.
In every zone nature presents the phenomena of these great plains: in each they have a peculiar physiognomy, determined by diversity of soil, by climate, and by elevation above the level of the sea.
In northern Europe, the Heaths, which, covered with a single race of plants repelling all others, extend from the point of Jutland to the mouth of the Scheldt, may be regarded as true Steppes,—but Steppes of small extent and hilly surface, if compared with the Llanos and Pampas of South America, or even with the Prairies of the Missouri[5] and the Barrens of the Coppermine river, where range countless herds of the shaggy buffalo and musk ox.
A grander and severer aspect characterises the plains of the interior of Africa. Like the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, it is only in recent times that attempts have been made to explore them thoroughly. They are parts of a sea of sand, which, stretching eastward, separates fruitful regions from each other, or encloses them like islands; as where the Desert, near the basaltic mountains of Harudsh,[6] surrounds the Oasis of Siwah rich in date trees, and in which the ruins of the temple of Ammon mark the venerable site of an ancient civilisation. Neither dew nor rain bathe these desolate plains, or develope on their glowing surface the germs of vegetable life; for heated columns of air, every where ascending, dissolve the vapours, and disperse each swiftly vanishing cloud.
Where the Desert approaches the Atlantic Ocean, as between the Wadi Nun and Cape Blanco, the moist sea air pours in to supply the void left by these upward currents. The mariner, steering towards the mouth of the Gambia through a sea covered with weed, when suddenly deserted by the east trade wind of the tropics,[7] infers the vicinity of the widely extended heat-radiating desert. Herds of antelopes and swift-footed ostriches roam through these vast regions; but, with the exception of the watered Oases or islands in the sea of sand, some groups of which have recently been discovered, and whose verdant shores are frequented by nomade Tibbos and Tuaricks,[8] the African Desert must be regarded as uninhabitable by man. The more civilised nations who dwell on its borders only venture to enter it periodically. By trading routes, which have remained unaltered for thousands of years, caravans traverse the long distance from Tafilet to Timbuctoo, and from Moorzouk to Bornou; adventurous undertakings, the possibility of which depends upon the existence of the camel, the “ship of the desert,”[9] as it is called in the traditionary language of the eastern world.
These African plains occupy an extent nearly three times as great as that of the neighbouring Mediterranean sea. They are situated partly within, and partly in the vicinity of the tropics; and on this situation their peculiar character depends. In the eastern part of the old continent, the same geognostic phenomenon occurs in the temperate zone. On the plateaux of central Asia, between the gold mountains or the Altai and the Kuen-lun,[10] from the Chinese wall to beyond the Celestial mountains, and towards the sea of Aral, there extend, through a length of many thousand miles, the most vast, if not the most elevated, Steppes on the surface of the globe. I have myself had the opportunity, fully thirty years after my South American journey, of visiting a portion of them; namely, the Calmuck Kirghis Steppes between the Don, the Volga, the Caspian, and the Chinese lake Dsaisang, being an extent of almost 2800 geographical miles.
These Asiatic Steppes, which are sometimes hilly and sometimes interrupted by pine forests, possess (dispersed over them in groups) a far more varied vegetation than that of the Llanos and Pampas of Caraccas and Buenos Ayres. The finest part of these plains, which is inhabited by Asiatic pastoral tribes, is adorned with low bushes of luxuriant white-blossomed Rosaceæ, and with Fritillarias, Tulips, and Cypripedias.
As the torrid zone is characterised on the whole by a disposition in all vegetation to become arborescent, so some of the Asiatic Steppes in the temperate zone are characterised by the great height attained by flowering herbaceous plants, Saussureas and other Synantheræ, and Papilionaceæ especially a host of species of Astragalus. In traversing pathless portions of these Steppes, the traveller, seated in the low Tartar carriages, sees the thickly crowded plants bend beneath the wheels, but without rising up cannot look around him to see the direction in which he is moving. Some of the Asiatic Steppes are grassy plains; others are covered with succulent, evergreen, articulated soda plants: many glisten from a distance with flakes of exuded salt which cover the clayey soil, not unlike in appearance to fresh fallen snow.
These Mongolian and Tartarian Steppes, interrupted frequently by mountainous features, divide the very ancient civilisation of Thibet and Hindostan from the rude nations of Northern Asia. They have in various ways exercised an important influence on the changeful destinies of man. They have compressed the population towards the south, and have tended, more than the Himalaya, or than the snowy mountains of Srinagur and Ghorka, to impede the intercourse of nations, and to place permanent limits to the extension of milder manners, and of artistic and intellectual cultivation in northern Asia.
But, in the history of the past, it is not alone as an opposing barrier that we must regard the plains of Central Asia: more than once they have proved the source from whence devastation has spread over distant lands. The pastoral nations of these Steppes,—Moguls, Getæ, Alani, and Usuni,—have shaken the world. As in the course of past ages, early intellectual culture has come like the cheering light of the sun from the East, so, at a later period, from the same direction barbaric rudeness has threatened to overspread and involve Europe in darkness. A brown pastoral race,[11] of Tukiuish or Turkish descent, the Hiongnu, dwelling in tents of skins, inhabited the elevated Steppe of Gobi. Long terrible to the Chinese power, a part of this tribe was driven back into Central Asia. The shock or impulse thus given passed from nation to nation, until it reached the ancient land of the Finns, near the Ural mountains. From thence, Huns, Avari, Ghazarés, and various admixtures of Asiatic races, broke forth. Armies of Huns appeared successively on the Volga, in Pannonia, on the Marne, and on the Po, desolating those fair and fertile fields which, since the time of Antenor, civilised man had adorned with monument after monument. Thus went forth from the Mongolian deserts a deadly blast, which withered on Cisalpine ground the tender long-cherished flower of art.