HONG KONG.
At Zayau-Tologoï, the Chinese drivers were replaced by Mongolian postillions, and the Chinese mandarins gave up the responsibility of escort to Mongolian officials.
The Mongolian mode of harnessing is very strange: a long wooden transversal bar is fastened to the end of the shafts, and on each side a horseman glides under his saddle; then they set off at full gallop. When they halt the horsemen disappear, the shafts fall abruptly to the ground; and the travellers, if they have not a good strong hold, are projected from the vehicle.
The officers of the escort go in advance to prepare tents or wigwams formed of hurdles, upon which is stretched a great awning of felt; the whole has very much the appearance of an enormous umbrella, with a hole at the top, to let out the heated air, and at need the smoke.
As the travellers carried with them a large stock of provisions, and fresh meat could generally be obtained from the nomad shepherds, their table was well served; but owing to the absolute dearth of any other kind of fuel, they were compelled to kindle their fires with argols, or dried cow-dung.
In due time they entered upon the great desert of Gobi, where the grassy plain is covered by a countless multitude of mole-hills, which render locomotion very difficult. This apparently boundless desert, notwithstanding its lack of trees and shrubs and flowers, and its monotonous uniformity, is not without a certain charm, as many travellers have acknowledged. Madame de Bourboulon, writing of it, says:—
"I grew accustomed to the desert; it is only for a few days that I have had experience of tent-life, and yet it seems to me as if I had always lived so. The desert is like the ocean: the human eye plunges into the infinite, and everything speaks of God. The Mongolian nomad loves his horse as the sailor loves his ship. It is useless to ask him to be bound by the sedentary habits of the Chinese, to build fixed habitations, and cultivate the soil. This free child of Nature will let you treat him as a rude barbarian, but in himself he despises civilized man, who creeps and crawls like a worm about the small corner of land which he calls his property. The immense plain belongs to him, and his herds, which follow his erratic courses, supply him with food and clothing. What wants he more, so long as the earth does not fail him?"
There is another light in which this vast desert may be looked at. Unquestionably, its influence on the destinies of the human race has been injurious; it has checked the progress of the Semitic civilization. The primitive peoples of India and Tibet were civilized at an early period of the world's history; but the immense wilderness put an impassable barrier between them and the barbarous tribes of Northern Asia. More than the Himalaya, more than the snow-capped peaks of Sirinagur and Gorkha, these boundless wastes, alternately withered by a tropical summer, and blighted by a rigorous winter, have prevented for ages all intercommunication, all fusion between the inhabitants of Northern and those of Southern Asia; and it is thus that India and Tibet have remained the only regions of this part of the world which have enjoyed the benefits of civilization, of the refinement of manners, and of the genius of the arts.
The barbarians who, in the last agonies of the Roman Empire, invaded and devastated Europe, issued from the steppes and table-lands of Mongolia. As Humboldt says—"If intellectual culture has directed its course from the East to the West, like the vivifying light of the sun, barbarism at a later period followed the same route, when it threatened to plunge Europe again into darkness. A tawny race of shepherds of Thon-Klüu—that is to say, of Turkish origin, the Hioungum—inhabited, living under sheepskin tents, the elevated table-land of Gobi. Long formidable to the Chinese power, a portion of the Hioungum were driven south into Central Asia. The impulse thus given, uninterruptedly propagated itself to the primitive country of the Fins, on the banks of the Ural, whence irrupted a torrent of Huns, Avars, Chasars, and divers mixtures of Asiatic races. The armies of the Huns first appeared on the banks of the Volga, then in Pannonia, finally on the borders of the Marne and the Po, ravaging the beautiful plains where, from the time of Antwor, the genius of man had accumulated monuments upon monuments. Thus blew from the Mongolian desert a pestilential wind which, even as far as the Cisalpine plains, blighted the delicate flower of art, the object of cares so constant and so tender."[18]