Every attempt has been made to replicate the original book as printed. Some typographical errors have been corrected. [A list follows the etext]. No attempt has been made to correct or normalize printed botanical names. The footnotes have all been moved to the end of the etext. Some illustrations have been moved from within paragraphs for ease of reading. (etext transcriber’s note)

[Preface.]
[Contents.]
[Index.]
[List of Illustrations.]
[Footnotes.]

T H E D E S E R T W O R L D.

“For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity.”
Wordsworth

THE DESERT WORLD.

FROM THE FRENCH OF ARTHUR MANGIN.
Edited and Enlarged
BY
THE TRANSLATOR OF “THE BIRD, BY MICHELET.”
———
WITH 160 ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. FREEMAN, FOULQUIER, AND YAN DARGENT.
———
LONDON:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW;
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.
———
1869.

Preface.

HE area of our present work would be very limited if we understood the word Desert in its more rigorous signification; for we should then have only to consider those desolate wildernesses which an inclement sky and a sterile soil seem to exclude for ever from man’s dominion.

But, by a license which usage authorizes, we are able to attribute to this term a much more extended sense; and to call Deserts not only the sandy seas of Africa and Asia, the icy wastes of the Poles, and the inaccessible crests of the great mountain-chains; but all the regions where man has not planted his regular communities or permanent abodes; where earth has never been appropriated, tilled, and subjected to cultivation; where Nature has maintained her inviolability against the encroachments of human industry.

Thus understood, the picture we are about to trace assumes not only vast proportions, but an infinite variety of aspects.

Here and there, it is true, our eyes will rest on the gloomy spectacle of rugged solitudes, where the soil churlishly refuses almost every kind of product, where the boldest traveller cannot penetrate without a shudder, and where the very beast of prey is rather a visitor than an inhabitant: lugubrious regions, on whose threshold one might write the legend written, according to Dante, on the gates of hell—

“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”
(All hope abandon, ye who enter here.)

But, on the whole, these true Deserts offer ample material for the admiration of the artist, the meditations of the thinker, the researches of the naturalist and the physician. Theirs is that kind of beauty which borders on the sublime, and which impresses us so powerfully in the Ocean. And, like the Ocean, they awake in the soul the feeling of infinity. They render it forgetful of the tumultuous regions which are perturbed by petty passions, and vexed by the contentions of ephemeral interests, and transport it to the boundless space and the eternal spheres, or allow it to draw back within itself and muse upon its future destiny.

Finally, what grave problems does the Desert place before the man of science! And first, why do life and fertility prevail elsewhere,—here, sterility and death? Why does an irrevocable curse seem to weigh upon certain parts of the world, while others rejoice in Nature’s fairest gifts? It is by examining the constitution of the soil and the character of the climate that we discover the key to this enigma, and recognize in this apparent anomaly a necessary effect of the harmonious laws of the universe. Then the Desert has a geology and a meteorology of its own; is the theatre of special phenomena, which we do not observe in more favoured regions. Life itself is not completely absent from it; specimens of the organic kingdoms are rare, no doubt, but for this very reason are the more interesting.

And if, from the Desert properly so called, we pass to those countries where the genial air and the abundant waters favour the action of the productive forces, the interest increases with the increasing development of life. The picture changes every moment, and every moment grows more animated. The scenes of the savage world unfold before our eyes like a moving panorama; unexpected incidents and dramatic episodes multiply one upon another. Every region appears before us with its primitive aspect, its grand and picturesque landscapes, its characteristic fauna and flora—frequently, also, with its tribes of white, or tawny, or black, or copper-coloured men, whose singular manners, brutal instincts, fierce passions, and wretched condition offer, in all its mournful reality, the spectacle of that “state of nature” celebrated by a great writer as the ideal of virtue and happiness.

To conclude: the task which I here pursue is the same which I recently commenced by the publication of my “Mysteries of the Ocean;”[1] to invite and prepare the general reader and the young for the study of the physical and natural sciences, by bringing before them the most interesting results of the discoveries and the observations with which these sciences have been enriched. Only, this new essay is entirely descriptive, and has no didactic pretensions. I have contented myself with sketching the physiognomy of the great regions not yet conquered by civilization, with indicating the more remarkable features they present, the peoples by whom they are inhabited, and the important plants and animals they nourish.

THE AUTHOR.

[The Translator has only to add, that he has made copious additions to the original work, with the view of rendering its scope more comprehensive and complete, and of adapting it specially to the requirements of the English reader. He has also corrected and confirmed M. Mangin’s statements by reference to the best and most recent authorities, without, he would hope, any injury to the original scheme, or any detriment to the value of M. Mangin’s agreeable and highly interesting chapters.]

A.

Contents.

THE DESERT WORLD.

BOOK I.
THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND ASIA: THE LANDES, THE DUNES, AND THE STEPPES.

CHAPTER I.
THE DESERT IN FRANCE:—THE LANDES OF BRITTANY.

O those whose imaginations have been kindled by glowing pictures of the African Sahara and the Arabian wilderness, it will be, perhaps, a matter of surprise to learn that even fertile and civilized Europe includes within her boundaries regions which are scarcely less cheerless or desolate, though, happily, of far inferior extent.

Thus, it would be possible for a Frenchman whom the engagements of business, the pressure of limited means, or the ties of home, prevented from undertaking any distant voyages, to obtain a vivid conception of the great Deserts of the World without crossing the confines of his own country.

In France, so richly cultivated, so laborious, and so blessed by genial Nature, there are, nevertheless, a few districts where her sons may wholly forget—may almost disbelieve in the existence of—her cities stirring with the “hum of men,” her vineyards and her gardens, her grassy pastures, her prolific meadows, her well-ordered highways, and those “iron roads” which are the incessant channels of such restless energy, movement, and vigorous life.

Bare and desolate enough, and as yet unconquered by advancing civilization, are the mountains of France: among its gigantic ranges of the Jura, the Vosges, and the Cevennes,[2] the traveller may still ascend precipitous rocks, may hearken to the deafening roar of foamy torrents, may contemplate with astonished gaze the masses of stone upheaved in some convulsion of the ancient world, may listen to the hoarse cry of the eagle, a s

“Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands.”

In the Alps, profaned as they now-a-days are by noisy tourists; in the Pyrenees, whither Alpine clubs have not yet extended their encroachments, he who ascends some 8000 or 9000 feet may still wander among ice and snow which the sun’s rays never loosen, and gather in his mind’s eye a picture of the colossal peaks of Asia and the New World, of the virgin summits of the Himalaya and the Cordilleras. There you may follow with entranced vision the swooping wing of the lammergeyer; or trace the nimble feet of the shy chamois; or, like Manfred, muse and wonder, while

“The sunbow’s rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of heaven,
And roll the sheeted silver’s waving column
O’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular.”

Mayhap, if favoured by Fortune, you may even find yourself face to face, in the abrupt bend of some obscure ravine, with a bear, which, calm and unsuspicious, looks on as you pass by, as if he were ignorant of men, and had never heard the ringing echoes of the hunter’s rifle.

It is less easy—in France, at least—to discover the old shadowy, leafy, almost impervious forest. The most celebrated—that of Fontainebleau—despite its enormous trees, its rudely broken surface, its stags and roebucks reserved for imperial sport, despite its few adders and problematical vipers, is now little better than a rendezvous for amateur artists and listless idlers. Its well-kept avenues resound with rapid wheels, and you can scarcely stir a step without finding the associations of the place interrupted by the stalls of vendors of cakes or the apparatus of itinerant gamblers. This profanation is surely to be regretted, for the Forest exhibits many landscapes of surpassing interest, as the rocks of Franchart, the glens of Apremont, and, above all, that Sahara in miniature, the sands of Arbonne. Nor would one willingly forget the historical memories which immortalize the famous palace where Francis I. received his after-time conqueror, Charles V.; where the wayward and half-insane Christina of Sweden listened with cruel delight to the groans of the murdered Monaldeschi; where Madame Du Barry lavished her shameless graces; where Pope Pius VII. lingered through two years of gilded captivity; and where Napoleon bade farewell to his dreams of universal empire.[3]

Among the uncultivated regions of France we may mention the marshes of the Bresse, of Forez, of the Sologne, of Upper Brittany, and of Picardy. The greater portion of these marshes, owing to the peat which forms their bed, is vigorously and not unsuccessfully worked. They are traversed by trenches dug at right angles, and on whose border are placed the turf-cutter’s little hut, and the furnace in which the peat is baked. Their lagoons, and the canals which connect them, swarm with flat-bottomed boats. Man, in a word, has taken possession of them; braving the unhealthy vapours which enfeeble his frame and shorten his life, he builds his squalid abode on the rising ground left uncovered by the waters. The largest of these peat-bogs are those of Montoir and the Grand Brière, near Savenay, in the department of the Loire Inférieure. They occupy a considerable area of a vast desolate plain, where a few lean sheep crop an insufficient food from the scanty herbage, and whose sole product is turf. “This country,” says Jules Janin,[4] “has no other harvest, no other wealth than its peat; neither fruit, nor flowers, nor corn, nor pastures, nor repose, nor well-being; the earth is wild, the sky one of iron. It is a region of stagnant waters, pestiferous exhalations, decrepit men, famished animals.”

The swampy levels of Montoir form the natural vestibule to the Armorican Peninsula, which of all the French provinces has the longest and the most vigorously withstood the advance of civilization, its ideas, and its modern institutions, and has the most rigidly preserved its primitive character. There are many nooks and corners in Brittany scarcely changed in outward aspect or inner life since the remote days when it was a valued appanage of the English crown. They seem to have been plunged in a sleep of centuries, from which the shrill whistle of the steam-engine is only just awakening them. The country is undulating and broken; in the central districts it assumes quite a mountainous character. It is true that its heights are only of moderate elevation, the loftiest not exceeding 2000 feet; but they are barren, rude, and sombre in appearance. The coast is picturesque enough to delight the most zealous artist, bordered with high and abrupt cliffs, and lined, as it were, with a beach where the waters of the Channel ever break in floods of spray and foam, and where masses of rock lie scattered of immense size and the most fantastic forms.

Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation of our English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of France, they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast convulsion opened in the solid land a chasm through which the oceans poured their meeting waters, and separated our beloved island from the European continent; the sole condition under which, perhaps, it was possible for the English people to have accomplished their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting seas, we are able to regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the convulsions that sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we cannot refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult; but it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from our security, and mingle in the fray.

Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and intermediary formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal trenches: those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, granite and porphyry; the central appertains to a more recent formation, to the group of intermediary or secondary rocks, composed in the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist prevails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity of the peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely bare in many places; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are covered but by a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the rains to settle.

Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of furze, broom, and fern.

Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray memorials: the masses of granite of different shapes known as Maen hirs, or “long stones,” and peulvens, which appear to have been employed as sepulchral monuments; dolmens, or “table-stones;” and cromlechs (crom, bowed or bending, and lech, a stone), which antiquaries are now agreed to regard as the remains of the ancient cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near Quiberon Bay, may be seen a truly remarkable example of the Parallelitha, or avenues of upright stones, forming five parallel rows, which extend for miles over the dreary moorland. What were their uses it is impossible to determine, for there seems little ground to believe, as some writers would have us believe, that they were “serpent temples,” where the old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze at them in wonder: mile upon mile of gray lichen-stained stones, some twenty feet high, laboriously fashioned and raised in their present places by the hand of man some twenty centuries agone.[5]

On these very dolmens, where the priests of the Tentates were wont to immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the mediæval sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or Mass of Satan, in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, concocted their abominable philtres, and performed their dreary incantations. Alas for human nature! In every age it is a prey to the wildest credulity. Even in the present day more than one superstition hovers around the monuments of the Celtic epoch. The Bretons believe them haunted by demons called poulpiquets, who love to make sport of the passing stranger, but will sometimes give both counsel and encouragement to those who know how to address them in the prescribed formulas; who, like the Ladye in the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” at their bidding can bow

“The viewless forms of air.”

For, in the Breton mind, the superstitions of Druidism have not been wholly uprooted by the teachings of Christianity, still less by those of science and reason. Many a dark and dismal legend flourishes in the lonely recesses of the landes.[6]

Brittany, like England, has its Cornouaille, or Cornwall, and it is here, particularly in North Cornwall, that we see it under its most desolate aspect, with its chains of black treeless hills covered with heath and furze; with its deserts of broom and fern, its ruins scattered along the winding roads, its attenuated herds wandering at their will across the moors, and its savage, ignorant, and scanty population. The Bretons of Cornwall, according to a French writer, are elevated but a little above the true savage life. Those who dwell upon the coast live on the products of their fishing, except when the fortunate occurrence of a wreck provides them with temporary abundance. At bottom, they possess the qualities and defects of characters strongly tempered, but absolutely uncultivated. They are as hard and bare as their own granite rocks. Persevering, courageous, resolute, they make excellent sailors, the best which France can find; the sea is for them a second country. Progress, which they do not understand, inspires them with a sort of terror, a gloomy mistrust. When the railway surveyors first intruded upon their solitudes, these rigid conservatives assailed them with volleys of stones, and when the railroads were laid down flung beams across the lines to overthrow the hissing, whirring trains which threatened to disturb their prescriptive barbarism. They asked but to be let alone—to be suffered to live as their forefathers lived—to be spared the ingenuities, successes, vices, and virtues of the New World. But modern civilization, like Thor’s hammer, or Siegfried’s magic sword Balmung, will break down the last barriers raised by ignorance and superstition. It will shed its light upon the wilds and wastes of Brittany, and compel their inhabitants in the course of years to acknowledge its value and accept its benefits.

CHAPTER II.
THE LANDES OF GASCONY.

HE Breton “Cornwall” has been called by a popular French writer, “the Arabia Petrea of Brittany.” But we might, perhaps, with greater justice apply to this sombre region, peopled as it is with fantastic visions, the name of “Land of Fear,” which the Arabs bestow on the Great Desert. Less vivid, it may be, but graver and more profound is the impression produced by the Landes and Dunes of Gascony. These deserts of the south, which Michelet terms “the vestibule and threshold of the Ocean,” appeal less powerfully to the imagination. They are haunted by no historical memories, no traditions or marvellous legends in which man has rudely embodied his dim conceptions of the mysteries of nature; they are crowded with no monuments of antiquity to revive the shadows of the heroes and priests of ancient Gaul; and when these are wanting, what shall supply their place? But ample scope exists for the assiduous labours of the naturalist, who here may see at work those unresting forces which have inspired every revolution of the globe’s surface; who may contemplate here the phenomena that occur with the same regularity as in the days when man had not been fashioned after his Maker’s image—

“Him framing like himself, all shining bright;
A little living sun, son of the living light.”[7]

These despoiled plains, these inhospitable wilds, alternately dry and marshy; these sullen pools, these mountains of shifting sand, speak forcibly to his mind of their past history, which is not one of the least curious episodes of the history of the physical world.

The department which borrows its name from the Landes of Gascony is divided by the Adour into two wholly dissimilar parts.

To the south of the river lies a rich, undulating, vine-bearing country, rich in pasturage and harvest, sown with pleasant villages and smiling country houses, and watered by full streams and little rivers. To the north, the appearance of the country changes abruptly. When the traveller has crossed the alluvial zone of the Adour he sees before him a thin, dry, sandy level of a comparatively recent marine formation. Its only products are rye, millet, and maize; its only vegetation, forests of pines and scattered coppices of oaks; beyond these, and they do not extend far, all cultivation ceases, and the soil is stripped of verdure; you enter upon the Landes—seemingly vast as a sea—occupied by permanent or periodical swamps; and where, over a space of several square leagues, in an horizon apparently boundless, you perceive nothing but heaths, sheepfolds or steadings for the flocks of sheep that traverse these deserts, and shepherds keeping mute watch over their animals, living wholly among them, and having no intercourse with the rest of humanity, except when once a week they seek their masters’ houses to procure their supply of provisions. It is these shepherds only (Landescots and Aouillys), and not, as is generally supposed, all the peasants of the Landes, who are perched upon stilts, so as to survey from afar their wandering flocks, and to traverse more safely the marshes which frequently lie across their path.

Wild and uncouth are the figures which these stilt-walkers present, as they move rapidly over the country, often at the rate of six or seven miles an hour; occasionally indulging in an interval of rest, by the aid of a third wooden support at the back (curved at the top, so as to fit the hollow of the body), while they pursue their favourite pastime of knitting. The dress of the Landescot is singularly rude. His coat or paletôt is a fleece; cuisses and greaves of the same material protect his legs and thighs; his feet are thrust into sabots and coarse woollen socks, which cover only the heels and instep. Over his shoulder hangs the gourd which contains his week’s store of provisions: some mouldy rye-bread, a few sardines, some onions and cloves of garlic, and a flask of thin sour wine. From sunrise to sunset he lives upon the stilts, never touching the ground. Sometimes he drives his flock home at eventide; sometimes he bivouacs sub jove frigido, under the cold heaven of night. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing his flint and steel, he soon kindles a cheery fire of fir-branches, and gathering his sheepskins round him, composes himself to sleep; his only annoyances being the musquitoes, and his fears of the evil tricks of wizard or witch, who may peradventure catch a glimpse of him in the moonlight, as they ride past on their besom to some unholy gathering or demon-dance.

An English traveller has sketched in vivid colours the landscape of the Landes. Over all its gloom and barrenness, he remarks, over all its “blasted heaths,” its monotonous pine-woods, its sudden morasses, its glaring sand-heaps, prevails a strong sense of loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which invests the scene with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from the black shadows of the forest, the pilgrim treads a plain, “flat as a billiard-table,” apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken garb of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young fir trees appear rising from the horizon on the right, and sinking into it again on the left. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and water weeds, giant rushes, and “clustered marish mosses,” will tell of the “blackened waters” beneath—

“Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarlèd bark;
For leagues no other tree doth mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.”[8]

The dwellings which stud this dreary, yet not wholly unpoetic landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated oftentimes by many miles. Round them spreads a miserable field or two, planted with such crops as might be expected on a poor soil and from deficient cultivation. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones, clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes, pine-stakes and broad-leaved reeds, beneath which the meagrest looking cattle conceivable find a precarious shelter.[9]

The Landes are divided into the Little Landes, near Mont-de-Marsan; and the Great Landes, stretching to the north and west of the department of which that town is the capital, and uniting uninterruptedly with those that occupy the vast country situated south of the Gironde. The total superficial area of these plains is estimated at upwards of 2,400,000 acres, of which two-thirds belong to the department of the Landes, and the remainder to that of the Gironde.

Yet the reader must not believe this country to be a desert in the popular acceptation of the word; it has its forests of pines, where the extraction and preparation of resinous matter are carried on with considerable activity. It has its small towns, its pretty villages, its factories, and even its handsome villas. Finally, modern industry has cut the Landes in two by the Bordeaux railway, which traverses them from north to south, and bifurcates at Morans to throw off a line to Bayonne, and another to Tarbes.

In shape, the Great Landes may be compared to an immense rectangular triangle, having for its base the coast, which, from the mouth of the Gironde to Bayonne, or for a length of more than sixty leagues, is almost rectilineal. But they are separated from the sea by a long parallel chain of lakes and water-courses—a waste of shallow pools—a labyrinth of gulfs and morasses, and then by the continuous chain of the Dunes, of which we shall speak in the following chapter.

That which is commonly called the Great Lande is bounded on the north by the étang, or lake, of Cazau. It is a sandy, treeless plain, and upon which, for a traject of several leagues from east to west, not one habitation worthy of the name is perceptible until the traveller arrives at Mimizan, near the southern point of the lake of Aureilhan. This lake on the south-west pours its waters into the sea. To the north it communicates, through the canal of St. Eulalie, with the lake of Biscarosse, which is itself connected with that of Cazau. East of this chain of lakes lies the Lande; west of it stretches the range of Dunes, or sand-hills.

The lake or pool of Cazau is a small sea of fresh water, perfectly clear, profoundly deep, and fourteen to fifteen thousand acres in extent. It has its whirlwinds and its tempests, so that in certain seasons it is perilous to embark on its surface. And were its banks clothed with rich woods, or raised aloft in irregular or precipitous cliffs, it would surely attract as great a throng of tourists as the mountain-tarns and lochs of Scotland or Cumberland, or the Arcadian waters of Northern Italy. The lake of Biscarosse, in form a triangle, with one side formed by the Dunes, covers about twelve thousand acres. It derives its name from a village situated at its northern angle, on the bank of the canal which connects it with the lake of Cazau. The lake of Aureilhan is the smallest of the three; the St. Eulalie canal, which links it to the preceding, traverses a series of peat-bogs bounded eastward by gloomy pine-forests, and westward by the interminable Dunes, which, by arresting the flow of the rain-waters, have really created these so-called lakes and extensive swamps. Enormous quantities of rain fall every year in the Landes,—which district the Romans would certainly have dedicated to Jupiter Pluvius,—and find beneath the thin superficial stratum or crust of sand and earth, a sub-soil of tufa and allios—in other words, of compact chalk and sand agglutinated by a ferruginous sediment. Frequently this tufa possesses all the hardness of stone, and its imperviousness is its fundamental property. Hence it follows, that a portion of the heavy annual rainfall remains in the receptacles provided by the hollows and depressions of the soil, and in due time accumulates into marshes and lagoons, until gradually evaporated by the heat of spring.

When of old the scared peasants beheld the irresistible advance of these strange ministers of destruction, they had no other resource than to fell their woods, abandon their dwellings, and surrender their “little all” to the pitiless sand and devouring sea. What could avail against such a scourge? Efforts were made to repel it. It is said that Charlemagne, during a brief residence in the Landes, on his return from his expedition against the Saracens, employed his veterans, and expended large sums of money in preserving the cities of the coast from imminent ruin; but whether the means employed were insufficient, or whether the imperial resources failed, and other urgent needs diverted the population and their leaders from this struggle against nature, the works were wholly abandoned.

Of late years they have been resumed, and with greater success, by a skilful agriculturist, M. Desbiey, of Bordeaux, and an able engineer, M. Bremontier, who have called in nature herself to assist man in his war against nature. Their system consists of sowing in the driest sand the seeds of the sea-pine, mixed with those of the broom (genista scoparia), and the psamma arenaria. The spaces thus sown are then closely covered with branches to protect them from the action of the winds. These seeds germinate spontaneously. The brooms, which spring up rapidly, restrain the sand, while sheltering the young pines, and thenceforth the Dune ceases to move, because the wind can no longer unsettle its substance, and the grains are held together by the roots of the young plants. The work is always begun on the inland side, in order to protect the farmer and the peasant, and to withdraw the infant forest from the unwholesome influence of the ocean-winds. And, in order that the sown spaces shall not themselves be buried under the sands blown up from the shore, a palisade of wicker-work is raised at a suitable distance, which, reinforced by young plants of sandwort (psamma arenaria), check the moving sands for a sufficiently long time to favour the development of the seeds. Finally, the work is completed by the construction of a substantial wall, or rather an artificial cliff, which effectually prevents the further progress of the flood, or directs it seaward, to be arrested on its course by the barrier of the sand-hills. Unable to force a passage through these natural ramparts, they have excavated certain basins, more or less extensive, more or less deep, which have formed into inland seas, communicating with the Atlantic by one narrow issue.

It is a noteworthy fact that, owing to the encroachment of the Dunes, these lakes have been constantly forced back upon the inland country. Fortunately, this menacing invasion of the sands has been checked by the great engineering works executed a few years ago; which, on the one hand, have fixed, and, as it were, solidified the Dunes, and, on the other, have provided for the regular outflow of the waters. The Landes have thus been opened to the persevering labours of the cultivator. The culture of the pine, and the manufacture of resinous substances, have largely extended, and the time, perhaps, is not far distant when these deserts will almost completely disappear; when these desolate and unproductive plains will pleasantly bloom, transformed into shadowy woods or verdurous meadows.[10]

To so fortunate a result nothing will more powerfully contribute than the embankment of the Dunes. These have been, in reality, the true scourge of this country; these were the moving desert, the constantly ascending sea, which had already engulfed forests, villages, even towns, under its billows of sand, and driven before it the terrified inhabitants of the coast.

CHAPTER III.
THE DUNES, OR SAND-HILLS.

THE Dunes form the extreme line of the Brittany coast for nearly two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne. They are hills of white sand, as fine and soft as if it had been sifted through an hour-glass. Their outline, therefore, changes every hour. When the wind blows from the land, millions of tons of sand are hourly driven into the sea, to be washed up again on the beach and blown inland by the first Biscay gale. A water hurricane from the west will fill up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters into the interior, dispersing them in shining pools among the “murmurous pines,” flooding and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and inundating their fields of rye and millet.[11]

Their origin is due to the prevalence of the sea-winds on those points of the coast which are not protected by rock and cliff, and whose slopes of sand descend very gradually to the margin of the waves. Their formation is easily explained. The sand of which they are composed is a silicious material, reduced to minute grains, generally rounded, by trituration. These grains, nevertheless, are often too big and too heavy for the wind to take them up and scatter them afar, like the dust of the highways or the ashes of volcanoes. But at low tide the sand, dried by the sun’s rays and the action of the wind, offers to the latter a sufficient holdfast to be dragged up the slopes which descend seaward, and deposited at a certain distance. This process being constantly repeated, the heaps are daily increasing in dimensions.

It will easily be understood that this accumulation along the shore cannot have taken place where the force and direction of the sands experience periodical or capricious changes; for then the sands cast upon the beach by the winds of the north and west would be driven back into the sea by the winds of the south and east. This is noticeable in many places where the nature of the coast is favourable for the production of such a phenomenon. But on other shores—as on the Atlantic littoral of France—the winds which blow most frequently and most violently are from the west and south-west. And it is there we encounter the Dunes. Those of Gascony are by far the most remarkable. Northward, they extend as far as the Point de Grave, which shuts in the mouth of the Gironde; southward, to the bank of the Adour, and even further, to the cliffs of Béarn. Here the basin of Arcachon constitutes one vast hollow; and some openings exist, moreover, in the department of Landes, between that basin and the Adour, for the overflow of the waters which descend from the interior. To the north and south of the Teste de Buch the chain of sand-hills measures from 4400 to 6600 feet in width. At other points it is still wider; but it narrows towards its extremities, and both at the Point de Grave and near Bayonne does not exceed 450 yards.

Owing to their extreme shiftiness of soil, the Dunes can attain no considerable elevation. The sand deposited by the wind on the summit of the hill is always in a state of precarious equilibrium. It has a constant tendency to be precipitated down the other side; and the higher the summit the greater is this tendency, so that there comes at last a moment when no further accumulation in height is possible. The Dune may then extend its basis, may even increase twofold in dimensions, but it no longer rises.

Let us note, moreover, that owing to its density the sand cannot be carried even by the most violent winds into the higher regions of the atmosphere; and that the Dunes, when they have reached a certain elevation, oppose to them an insuperable obstacle. This circumstance would consequently have a salutary effect, and the accumulation of sand would be determined by a law of its own, if the Dunes, once formed, had time to cohere. But this is not the case. Incessantly does the wind undo or modify its work; and the loftiest hills being the most exposed to its violence, are quickly reduced to the common level. In general, the greatest elevation of the Dunes corresponds to their greatest breadth. Thus the culminating point of those of Gascony is found in the belt situated between the lakes of Cazau and Biscarosse, where the chain is from 7500 to 9000 yards across. Their average height is 180 feet to 200 feet above the sea-level; but some of the hills in the forest of Biscarosse attain an altitude of 320 feet. In the neighbourhood of the mouths of the Gironde and the Adour, where the chain is considerably narrowed, the height of the Dunes is only thirty to forty-five feet.

The reader must not suppose that the Dunes consist of a single series of sand-hills ranged along the shore. He will, however, have conjectured, from our statements respecting their width, that they really compose a chain of several more or less regular ridges. The hills are separated from one another by valleys, locally named laites or lettes. These valleys, where the pluvial waters flow and accumulate, exhibit a striking contrast, in their freshly-blooming verdure, to the naked, barren Dunes. The general aspect of the landscape may, therefore, be compared to that of the ocean. There is the same broken surface, the same extent of undulation, the billows of sand being upheaved by the wind like the billows of the sea, and sharing in their mobility. You must see, says a writer, in order to form an idea of those colossal masses of fine sand, which the wind incessantly skims, and which travel in this way towards the inland country: you must see their contours so softened that they look like mountains of plaster of Paris polished by the workman’s hand, and their surface so mobile that a little insect leaves upon it a conspicuous track; their slopes, at every degree of inclination; their everlasting sterility—not a blade of grass, not an atom of vegetation; their solitude, less imposing than that of the mountains, but still of a truly savage character. You must see, from the summit of one of these ridges, the ocean on your right hand, and on your left the extensive lakes which border the littoral; and, in the midst of this tumultuous sea of tawny sand, green grassy valleys, rich and fertile pastures, smiling oases of verdure, where herds of horses graze, and cows half-wild, guarded by shepherds scarcely less wild than they.[12]

The marked characteristic of the Dunes, as we have already said, is their mobility, which renders them a constant menace for the neighbouring populations. To the wind which creates them they owe their frequent changes and their inland movement. While the sea eats into the coast, assisted by the breezes which gradually sweep clear the ground before it, the Dunes extend, and drive before them the shallow lakes: these in their turn encroach upon the Landes, and until now man has been constrained to recoil, step by step, before his threefold enemy. It is in this phenomenon, rather than in the ungrateful soil of the Landes, that we must seek the cause of the curse which has seemed so long to rest upon this country-side. You must go back some twenty centuries to trace the origin of the Dunes of Gascony. Fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago the coast north of the Adour was inhabited, and comparatively flourishing. Mimizan was then a town and a sea-port, from which were exported the resinous products of the neighbouring forests. The Normans disembarked there on several occasions. Under its walls, in 506, was fought a great battle between the allied Goths and Ostrogoths on the one side, and the Béarnais, commanded by a bishop of Lescar, on the other. Both town and port to-day are buried under the sands. “Full fathom five” lie church and convent, and the busy street, the noisy mart, and the once peaceful home. The present village has nearly perished: the Dune was not three yards from the church when its progress was recently arrested. Other cities, laid down in old charts of the country, but of which not a trace remains, have in this manner disappeared, and entire forests have been ingulfed, now under the sands of the Dunes, now under the sands and waves of the sea.

Some parts of the chain have been rendered to a great extent immovable by the vegetation which has gradually covered them, and these have opposed a formidable obstacle to the encroachments of the sands. Yet here and there the barrier has been defied. For example, in the forest of Biscarosse the movable Dunes, actually sweeping over the ancient hills, have not only filled up the valleys, but ingulfed a great number of pines, and raised themselves several yards above the crest of the oldest trees, planted on the summit of the highest hills.

In whose favour, in this struggle of science against the elements, will the victory eventually be decided? The question is one which the future alone can resolve.[13]

CHAPTER IV.
WILD SCENES OF ENGLAND:—DARTMOOR AND THE FEN COUNTRY.

CROSSING the Channel, and surveying the limited expanse of our own “beloved England,” we become aware of certain districts which belong to the Desert World. Through the ceaseless energy of our race, and the introduction of mechanical inventions which economize time and labour and treble the reproductive power of capital, almost all England has been transformed into a rich and radiant garden, where the waste places are “few and far between,” where the solitude of desolation is scarcely known; yet, as already observed, there are districts which retain much of their ancient wildness of character.

Such a region is Dartmoor, the extensive and romantic table-land of granite which occupies the south-western part of the county of Devon. In its recesses still linger the eagle, the bustard, and the crane; its solitudes are broken by the hoarse cries of the sparrow-hawk, the hobby, and the goshawk; and the Cyclopean memorials of Druidism which cover its surface—cromlechs and kistvaens, tolmêns and stone-avenues—invest it with a peculiar air of mysterious awe. It extends in length about twenty-two miles (from north to south), and in breadth twenty miles (from east to west). Its total area exceeds 130,000 acres. It rises above the surrounding country like “the long, rolling waves of a tempestuous ocean, fixed into solidity by some instantaneous and powerful impulse.” A natural rampart is cast around it. Deep ravines, watered by murmuring streams, diversify its aspect, and lofty hills of granite, locally called tors, of which the principal, Yes Tor, has an elevation of 2050 feet above the sea. Its soil is composed of peat, in some places twenty-five feet deep; underneath which lies a solid mass of granite, occasionally relieved by trap (a volcanic rock), and traversed by veins of tin, copper, and manganese.[14]

Nearly in the centre of this dismal wilderness lies an immense morass, whose surface is in many places incapable of supporting the lightest animal, and whose inexhaustible reservoirs supply the fountains of many a river and stream—the Dart, the Teign, the Taw, the Tavy—all clear as crystal in the summer months, but after heavy rains running redly through the “stony vales.” The roaring of these torrents, when angry and swollen, is sublime to a degree inconceivable by those who have never heard the wild impressive music of untamed Nature.

The tors are remarkable for their quaint fantastic outlines, which, like the clouds, suggest all manner of strange similitudes—to dragons, and griffins, and hoary ruins, and even to human forms of gigantic size, apparently confronting the traveller as the lords and natural denizens of the rugged waste. The principal summits are Yes Tor, Cawsand Beacon, Fur Tor, Lynx Tor, Rough Tor, Holne Ridge, Brent Tor, Rippen Tor, Hound Tor, Sheep’s Tor, Crockern Tor, and Great Mis Tor. Not only must their variety of form delight the artist, but his eye rests well pleased on their manifold changes of colour; purple, and green, and gray, and blue—now softened by a delicate vaporous shadow, now glowing with intense fulness in the sun’s unclouded light.

Dartmoor is traditionally reputed to have been anciently clothed with forest. The sole relic now existing is the lonely Wistman’s Wood, which occupies a sombre valley, bounded on the one side by Crockern Tor, on the other by Little and Great Bairdown; the slopes being strewn with gray blocks of granite in “admired disorder,” as if the Titans had been at their cumbrous play. Starting from this chaos of rocks, appears a wood or grove of dwarf weird-looking oaks, interspersed with the mountain-ash, and everywhere festooned about and garlanded with ferns and parasitical plants. None of these trees exceed twelve feet in height, but at the top they spread far and wide, and “branch and twist in so fantastic and tortuous a manner as to remind one of those strange things called mandrakes.” Their branches are literally covered with ivy and creeping plants, and their trunks so thickly embedded in a coating of moss that at first sight, says Mrs. Bray, “you would imagine them to be of enormous thickness in proportion to their height. Their whole appearance conveys to you the idea of hoary age in the vegetable world of creation; and on visiting Wistman’s Wood it is impossible to do other than think of those ‘groves in stony places’ so often mentioned in Scripture as being dedicated to Baal and Astaroth.”[15]

That heathen rites were celebrated here in the pre-historic era seems very probable, the best etymologists agreeing that the name is a corruption of Wise-man, or Wish-man; that is, of the old Norse god Woden, who is still supposed to drive his spectral hounds across the silent wastes of Dartmoor. Celtic or Cymric memorials, as we have previously hinted, are very abundant and very various. There are cromlechs, where the Britons buried their dead; stone pillars, with which they commemorated their priests and heroes; avenues of upright stones leading up to the circles, where, perhaps, their priests celebrated their religious rites; kistvaens, or stone-chests, containing the body unburned; tolmêns, or holed stones, whose meaning cannot be determined, but which may probably have had some astronomical uses; bridges, huts, and walled villages, all bearing traces of the handiwork of our “rude forefathers.” There is no spot in England so thronged as this with the shadows of a remote, a mysterious, and an irrecoverable past.

From Dartmoor our wanderings take us to the eastern coast, and the district of The Fens, now so rapidly yielding to the labour of the agriculturist as to exhibit but rare glimpses of their ancient “savagery.” It extends inland, around an arm of the North Sea called the Wash, into the six counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk, with an area of upwards of 420,000 acres. Inland it is bounded by an amphitheatral barrier of high lands, and touches the towns of Bolingbroke, Brandon, Earith, Milton, and Peterborough. Into this great basin flow the waters of the greater part of the drainage of nine counties, which gather into the rivers Cam, Glen, Lark, Nene, Great and Little Ouse, Stoke, and Welland, these being linked together by a network of natural and artificial canals.

Anciently, the Fens were pleasant to the eye of the lover of the picturesque; for they contained shining meres and golden reed-beds, haunted by countless water-fowl, and strange, gaudy insects. “Dark-green alders,” says Kingsley,[16] “and pale-green reeds stretched for miles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see.” What strange transformations must this wild region have undergone! There was a time, in all probability, when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land, through which, into a vast estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of North-eastern Europe—Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber. Meanwhile, the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the Glen, and the Witham, were slowly “sawing themselves out” by the quiet action of rain and rivers. Then came an age when the lowland was swept away by the biting, corroding sea-wash still so powerfully destructive on the east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head. “Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land; these are God’s mighty mills in which he makes the old world new.” And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of physical,—

“‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though he sit and wait with patience, with exactness grinds he all.’”

These ever-active causes have converted the dry land into the fens. The mud brought down by the rivers cannot get away to sea; and, with the débris of the coast, is constantly swept southward by tide and current, and deposited within the great curving basin of the Wash, between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. There it is kept by the strong barrier of shifting sands coming inwards from the sea; a barrier which also confines the very water of the fens, and spreads it inland into a labyrinth of streams, shallow meres, and bogs. The rainfall, over the whole vast area of dull level, has found no adequate channels of escape for centuries; and hence we may understand how peat—the certain product of standing water—has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, and swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once spread far and wide over the blooming country.

“Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery,”

sings Shelley; and this dreary outcome of mudbank and bog and mere had its wooded isles, very fair and lovely to behold, redeeming the desolation of the landscape. Such were Ramsey, Lindsey, Whittlesea, whose names remind us of their whilome characteristics (ea, ey, an island). In these green places the old monks loved to build their quiet abbeys, rearing their herds in rich pastures, feeding fat fish in their tranquil streams, and dreaming in the shadow of green alder and stately ash.

But these Eden-isles were few, and the surrounding marsh was black and dismal enough to scare the boldest spirit, and pestilential enough to sap and undermine the strongest frame. The Romans had attempted to drain and embank it, and their vallum may still be tracked along the surface of the marsh-lands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. In the Middle Ages, however, it returned to its primeval desolateness—a waste and wilderness, haunted by the foul legends of an unwholesome superstition. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great monasteries of Crowland and Ely, and of the thriving towns, the good work of drainage went on slowly; but elsewhere the land was given up to the bittern and the heron.

No comprehensive scheme was adopted, however, until Russel, Earl of Bedford, cut the great Bedford River, twenty-one miles long, and rescued from the desert the rich tract known by his name—the Bedford Level.

“Erst
A dreary pathless waste, the coughing flock
Was wont with hairy fleeces to deform;
And, smiling with its lure of summer flowers,
The heavy ox, vain struggling, to ingulf;
Till one, of that high-honoured patriot name,
Russel, arose, who drained the rushy fen,
Confined the waves, bade groves and gardens bloom,
And through his new creation led the Ouse
And gentle Camus, silver-winding streams.”[17]

The work was continued by William Earl of Bedford, who added, in 1649, to his father’s old “Bedford River” that noble parallel river the Hundred Foot, both rising high above the land to allow for flood water. It was carried on at a later period under the direction of Government surveyors. Then came Rennie, the great engineer, whose operations effectually shut out the desert, and handed over to the agriculturist nearly the whole level of the Fens, some seventy miles in length. Works are now in progress for rescuing a further portion of the basin of the Wash, to be formed into a new county, and named after the Queen. So that now, in tracts once covered by the sea, or knee-deep in reedy, slushy, pestilential slime, the grass grows luxuriantly, the crops wave in golden abundance, or the breeze takes up and carries afar—

“The livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleecèd sheep from wattled folds.”

But the dominion of labour has not yet been established over the whole Fen-district. There are still dreary nooks, and gloomy corners, and unproductive wastes; wild scenes there are, which few Englishmen have any conception of as contained within the boundaries of their own “inviolate isle.” Romantic scenery, remarks Mr. Walter White, must not be looked for on the Lincolnshire coast. In all the journey from the Wash till you see the land of Yorkshire, beyond the Humber, not an inch of cliff will your eyes discover. Monotonous is the prospect of—

“A level waste, a rounding gray”

of sand-hills, which vary but slightly in height, and bristle with marum. “But tame though it be,” continues our authority,[18] “the scene derives interest from its peculiarity. Strange perspective effects appear in those irregular hills: yonder they run out and form a low dark, purple headland, against which the pale green and yellow of a nearer tongue look bright by contrast. Here for a few furlongs the range rises gray, cold, and monotonous; there it has a warmth of colour relieved by deep shadows, that change their tint during the hours that accompany the sun while he begins and ends his day. Sitting on the summit of those dry hills, you will remark the contrasted landscape: on the one side, the level pasture land, league after league of grassy green, sprinkled with villages, farms, churches, and schools, where work and worship will find exercise through ages yet to come; on the other, league after league of tawny sand, sloping gently outwards to meet the great sea that ever foams or ripples thereupon. On the one hand, a living scene bounded by the distant wolds; on the other, a desert, sea and shore alike solitary, bounded only by the overarching sky. More thoughts come crowding into the mind in presence of such a scene than are easy to express.”

CHAPTER V.
THE STEPPES:—THE DESERT IN RUSSIA, SIBERIA, AND TARTARY.

HITHERTO we have only been speaking of miniature deserts, of the more limited of the world’s wildernesses, where some degree of victory seems to reward man’s arduous struggle with nature. Those which we have hitherto described are open to the “breath of civilization.” The pilgrim who visits them incurs no danger; he has nothing to dread from beasts of prey; the men he meets with obey the same general laws as himself; he is carried into their furthest recesses by the all-embracing railroad. He sees on every hand the efforts of science to confine the desert within ever narrower boundaries; to reclaim the moor, and the fen, and the sandy waste; to reap from the once barren soil an abundant harvest. But if he pass from England or France to Germany, and thence across the provinces of unhappy Poland, he will find himself daily advancing into a country of more and more savage aspect. He will observe that vegetation loses its happy variety; that the cultivated fields become scarcer; the morass and forest more frequent, and of greater extent; the population poorer, more squalid, and less numerous. Wide and dreary intervals separate the different towns; here and there, surrounded by gloomy woods, are scattered the melancholy-looking villages. Travelling becomes difficult, for the roads are ill-kept; he has left behind him the modern magician, the engineer; wild wolves haunt his path; and he has good cause to fear the robber’s knife. Civilization here has left barbarism for centuries to itself; we are approaching the great Deserts, the Steppes of Northern Asia.

The Steppes commence near the thirty-fifth degree of longitude, east of the Dnieper, as soon as we quit the fertile plains of the Ukraine to enter the country of the Don Cossacks. They are the characteristic feature of the immense zone which starts from the north-eastern shore of the Sea of Azov, stretches to the foot of Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and is thence prolonged beyond the Ural range, to the north and south of the metaliferous Altaï; but mainly between the latter and the Thian-Shian mountains, to the seas of Okhotsk and Jesso.

The word Steppe, supposed to be of Tartar origin, primarily signifies an uncultivated plain, a prairie.

The Steppes, in short, are ordinarily plains of very considerable extent interrupted at intervals by chains of hills or mountains; but, on the whole, of a level, monotonous character, and with a considerable part below the level of the ocean. Their area may be roughly computed at 4,200,000 square miles.

Occasionally, in traversing them, we meet with lakes or brackish ponds, with forests of pines, even with patches of cultivated ground. Sometimes they form lofty and extensive plateaux, as in the case of the plateau of Gobi, also called, but most inappropriately, Scha-mo, or the Sandy Desert, and Scha-ho, or the Sandy River.

The Gobi begins upon the confines of Chinese Tartary, and thence extends over thousands of leagues in a vast expanse of sterile wilderness towards the coast of the Pacific. It chiefly consists of bare rock, shingle, and loose sand, alternating with firm sand, sparsely clothed with vegetation. But a large portion of the country, though not less leafless and monotonous, assumes in the spring season the appearance of an undulating ocean of grass, supplying pasturage to the flocks and herds of the Mongolian nomades, who wander at will over its vast prairie grounds, and encamp wherever they find a stream of water or sheltering crag. The general elevation above the sea is probably not less than 3500 feet. The Gobi was crossed by Mr. Grant, in 1863, and, soon afterwards, by Mr. Bishop, a correspondent of the Times.

Though their general aspect is chill and dreary, the Steppes are not without their romantic landscapes, and their vegetation is more varied as well as more abundant than is generally believed. You may find among them wide meads with a soil of sufficient fertility to produce corn in great quantities, although too thin to permit the development of plants which have need of a certain depth. “The most agreeable portion of these plains,” says Humboldt, “is adorned with small shrubs of the family Rosaceæ, tulips, and the cypripedium. Just as the Torrid Zone is distinguished by the tendency of all its plants to become trees, so some of the Asiatic Steppes in the Temperate Zones have the peculiar characteristic that all their flowering herbaceous plants attain to a remarkable height, such as the Saussurea and other synantheraceæ, the leguminous shrubs, and, above all, an infinite variety of astragals. If the traveller attempts to go forward, in the small Tartar chariots, across these pathless, trackless prairies, he must keep standing, to ascertain his direction, and he will see the plants, interlaced as in a dense forest, bend before his wheels. Some of these Steppes are grassy plains; others are covered with saline plants, fleshy, articulated, and always green. Often, too, one sees afar the glitter of saline efflorescence, like lichens, spreading unevenly over the glassy soil, like newly-fallen snow.”[19]

Comparing the Asiatic Steppes with the Pampas of South America, Humboldt does not hesitate to declare that the former are far the richer. “In that part of the Steppes, inhabited by the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks, which I have traversed,” he says, “that is to say, from the Don, the Caspian Sea, and the Oural (Jaïk), to the Obi and the Upper Irtysh, near Lake Dsaisang, over a space of forty degrees of longitude, one can never discover, even at the most distant limit, a phenomenon frequent in the Llanos, the Pampas, and the Prairies of America; that horizon vague and boundless as the sea, which seems to support the vault of heaven. Seldom in Asia was the spectacle offered me of even a single side of the horizon. The Steppes are traversed by numerous chains of hills, or covered with forests of conifers. The vegetation of Asia, even in the richest pasturage, is nowhere confined to the families of the Cyperaceæ. A great variety prevails there of herbaceous or frutescent plants. In the spring season, small rosaceæ and amygdalaceæ, with rosy or snow-white blossoms—Spiræa, cratægus, prunus spinosa, amygdalus nana—present a graceful appearance. I have elsewhere spoken,” he adds, “of the vigorous growth of Synanthers, such as Suassurea amara and salsa, the artemisias and blue centaureas, which grow profusely in these deserts, and the leguminosæ, which are there represented by different species of astragal, cytisus, and caragana. The fritillaria ruthenica, meleagroides, cypripedium, and tulip, delight the eye with the brilliance of their colours.”[20]

This almost exclusively herbaceous, but abundant and various, vegetation of which Humboldt speaks, is conspicuous in the spring, in the least favoured Steppes, after the rainy season. But it is there of a brief life. In the month of June the heat grows intense, and the dryness excessive. Then every herb perishes, cut down by the sun’s keen-smiting rays, like the Greeks before Troy by the arrows of Apollo.

“Bent was his bow, the Grecian hearts to wound;
Fierce as he moved, his silver shafts resound.”[21]

The dust is whirled off the ground by the wind, and swept about in revolving tornados. The Steppes situated in a comparatively low latitude thus alternately assume the most discordant aspects. In winter the heavy rains inundate them, and transform them into impracticable marshes; spring clothes them with a thick carpet of grasses and other herbaceous plants, so that they reveal to the eye leagues upon leagues of delightful sward cropped by numerous flocks. In summer they undergo a third metamorphosis, and are converted into parched and sun-scathed deserts like those of Nubia or Arabia.

These periodical transformations are especially remarkable in the Steppes of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea; where winter comes attended with abundant snows and terrific tempests. No obstacle can arrest the fury of the gale, which accumulates the driven snow in fearful avalanches, and like the demon in the old German legend, drives before it the wild horses in an access of violence. Half frozen by the cold, and exhausted with hunger, they fly in a complete panic. Oftentimes their giddy headlong course carries them forward upon the crust of ice which gathers over the waters close to the shore; it cracks, it breaks, and hundreds perish! The melting snow and heavy rains at the end of winter drown the plains under vast sheets of water, which, however, quickly evaporate in the first rays of the sun. Rain, in summer, is extremely rare, and as there are neither brooks nor springs to refresh the thin layer of earth in which the herbs and shrubs take root, all these plants enjoy only a butterfly existence; they bloom, they fade, they die, with startling rapidity.

The hurricanes are neither less numerous nor less furious in the hot than in the cold season; dust, however, takes the place of snow, when, as is sometimes the case, no tremendous deluge of rain follows in the track of the mighty wind. To sum up: the spring and summer of the Steppes are compressed (so to speak) into two months; all the rest of the year seems given over to desolation. Two months in the year of bloom, and sunshine, and colour, and beauty, are all that Nature grants the wandering Mongolian.

Such being the general configuration of the Steppes, one may easily imagine how stern and gloomy is the aspect of these immense plains, with no other interruptions of the soil than their tumuli, no other boundary than the sea. He who has not been habituated from youth to their monotony finds himself wholly unable to struggle against its depressing influence. Their dismal solitudes are in truth an immeasurable prison, where he wanders to and fro without hope of escape. In vain does he interrogate the north and south, the east and the west; in vain does he turn from one side to the other; it is always the same uniformity, the same immovability, the same solitude.[22]

CHAPTER VI.
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE STEPPES:—THE WILD HORSE—THE CAMEL.

REFERENCE has been made to the numerous troops of wild horse which haunt the Steppes on this side of the Oural. Similar troops of these animals wander over the whole extent of the Steppes of Central Asia, which the most accredited modern naturalists repute to be the original cradle of their race.

These horses are called tarpans, a word undoubtedly derived from the Tartar. Shall we look upon them as the representatives of the primitive breed, whence have sprung all the varieties known at the present day; or shall we see in them, as well as in the wandering horses of the prairies and pampas of the New World, the descendants of individuals which had escaped from the thraldom of man? This latter hypothesis seems to be the most probable. But there is good ground for believing that, living a wild life, these animals are gradually returning to the primitive type. They have lost the harmonious graces of form, the beauty, and the vigour which we admire in the high-bred steed, perfected by the assiduous care of man. There seems as great a difference between the Arabian horse and the wild horse of the Steppes as between the accomplished European gentleman and a Malagasy savage. They are of small stature; their limbs are lank; their coat is coarse, woolly, rude, and rough. With the tarpans of the northern Steppes it is thick, flaky, and frizzled. Their mouth and nostrils are garnished with long hair, not unlike a goat. Their colour is generally brown, of the shade called Isabelle, after a certain Queen of France who, in fulfilment of a vow, wore her linen unchanged for a considerable period. A few are black or white. They have a large head, with the forehead projecting above the eyes; a straight chamfer; and long ears, customarily laid back close to the head.

The troops of the tarpans are subdivided into groups of twenty to thirty individuals, each group usually living apart, and only uniting in a compact phalanx when a common danger threatens, or a necessity arises of migrating from one region to another. The gaunt grim wolves, which hunger drives from their neighbouring forests; and man, who hunts them hotly, either to reduce them into subjection, or kill them for their flesh, are almost the only enemies they have any reason to dread. The warlike nomade tribes of the Black and Caspian coasts, and of Central Asia, have no other breeding-grounds than the steppe which they inhabit. Thither come Cossack, and Mongol, and Kirghis, and Kalmuck, to choose their chargers. They catch them by means of a lasso, which they throw with surprising dexterity, and in a few days train them into a suitable docility. When in want of their hide or flesh, the nomades hunt them with gun, arrow, or spear; for hippophagy, which a few zealous amateurs are now endeavouring to popularize in France and England, has been practised from time immemorial by the inhabitants of the Steppes.

These barbarians, however, respect the life of their domestic animals, or sacrifice them only in cases of pressing need. They treat them also with a gentleness unknown to our European grooms and horse-dealers. With them, as with the Arabs, the horse is a friend rather than a slave; he is, in truth, one of the family; and it is with great difficulty that his master consents to part with him. Our travellers describe the Tartar, Mongol, and Kirghiz horsemen as realizing the celebrated fable of the Centaurs,—as becoming, so to speak, one with their horses. The exigencies of their wandering life require that they should be constantly on horseback; it is almost their home, their abode, their dwelling-place; there they are mounted day and night; there they sleep, prepare their food, and take their repasts. True that their cooking is of the rudest and simplest, and their taste not so fastidious as that of an European epicure! If, for example, they would make ready a piece of meat, they insert it between the saddle and the horse’s skin, and in this impromptu oven leave it for a few hours, while it undergoes the processes of heat, pressure, and frequent friction, serving in some degree to cook it; then a pinch of salt for seasoning; and lo! a dainty titbit which our cavalier devours with the best appetite in the world.

But it is to the inhabitants of the Steppes of the Black and Caspian Seas that the horse renders the most estimable services. To make use of a phrase of Buffon’s, “He shares with them the fatigue of war and the glory of battle;” he provides them with the best and swiftest means of transit; he nourishes them with his flesh, and the mare quenches their thirst with her milk. In their dairies mares take the place of our European milch-cows, and are regularly milked once or twice a-day. The milk, warm, is employed as a medicine. It is thicker and more saccharine than that of ruminating animals, and this, undoubtedly, is the reason that the Cossacks, Tartars, and Kalmucks have succeeded, by fermentation, in distilling alcohol from it, and procuring vinegar by acetifying it. They prepare with it an intoxicating liquor (koumis), to which they are very partial, and with which the wealthiest among them consider it an honour to be largely provided.

By the side of the horse, we naturally place his humble congener and compatriot, the Ass.

Nor need we be ashamed to devote a few lines to this useful animal, though civilization has appointed to it a very different lot from that of the horse.

While man has devoted his utmost efforts to ennoble, as it were, and aggrandize the latter, to perfect his capabilities, develop his qualities, embellish and vary his form, for the former he has had nothing but contempt and harsh treatment. He has made the horse the companion of his campaigns, the minister to his sumptuous pleasures, the instrument of his grandest labours. He has dismissed the poor ass to the fields to carry the heaviest burdens, to share in the toil and privation of the peasant. In these different conditions, who will wonder that while the horse has become a strong, graceful, and proud-spirited animal, the ass, on the other hand, remains bowed and bent, with a rough coarse hide, lanky limbs, a heavy head,—always drooping, as if under the weight of continual lassitude and unconquerable melancholy,—and long ungraceful ears, which give his physiognomy an air of ridicule. Everything in him bears the impress of degradation. How has he merited so obscure a destiny? Alas, he is the victim of an iniquitous caprice of man. For see him in his natural condition; contrast with the well-worn servant of civilization the Onagra,[23] the free wild ass of the Steppes, with the Tarpan, and the parallel will be wholly to the advantage of the former. The onagra is at least of the same size; his ears are short; he carries aloft a well-proportioned head; his skin, of a handsome gray or yellowish-brown, is sleek and shining; his limbs are long, delicate, and nervous. He lives in very numerous troops, and migrates from north to south, and south to north, according to the season. The Tartars employ him as a beast of transport and the saddle rather than as a beast of burden. They eat his flesh, preferring it to that of the wild horse. Even the domestic ass of the East differs notably from the slow, dogged, ill-used animal of European notoriety. Under a more favourable climate, and in the free life of the desert, he has preserved his tall stature, his vigour, and the haughtiness of his bearing. The wealthiest and most distinguished personages do not disdain to mount him or harness him to their carriage. He has a keen eye, a quick scent, a sure foot, a mild and resolute aspect. He accomplishes with ease from six to eight miles an hour; and, lastly—a fact worthy of notice—his life, which with us seldom exceeds fifteen years, in Asia is frequently prolonged to thirty or thirty-five. He is less subject to sickness than the horse, and he almost equals the camel in sobriety, docility, and endurance of hunger and fatigue.

Whether the Tartars and Kalmucks, who use mares’ milk as a medicine, attribute, as we do, certain therapeutical virtues to the milk of the ass, we are unable to say; but it is certain that this milk forms a portion of their daily food. On account of the strong proportion of saccharine serum which it contains, it is well adapted for the preparation of the fermented drink already spoken of, known to the Tartars under the name of Koumis or Kamuis. Mr. Atkinson speaks of the large leathern koumis sack or bottle, as an important piece of Mongolian furniture. One which he saw was five feet eight inches long, and four feet five inches wide, with a leathern tube at the corner about four inches in diameter, through which the milk is poured into the bag, and the koumis drawn out. A wooden instrument is introduced into this bag, its handle passing through the tube, not unlike a churning staff; with this the koumis is frequently agitated. The Kirghiz begin making it in April, and its due agitation and fermentation occupy about fourteen days.[24]

The horse, and a few flocks of sheep and herds of horned cattle, amply suffice for the wants of the warlike tribes in the south of Asiatic Russia. These tribes have almost entirely abandoned the use of the camel. But as we advance eastward, we find these gigantic and mis-shapen ruminants in great numbers, the faithful companions and indispensable auxiliaries of the nomades of the East. They wander freely about the Steppes, in troops of several hundreds, browzing indifferently on the grass of the wide pastures or the foliage of the bushes. They are without fierceness, and the traveller who intrudes upon their immense domains seems only to inspire in them a benevolent curiosity. “It is impossible to describe,” says Madame Hommaire de Hell, “the astonishment they exhibited as we passed them. As soon as they caught sight of us, they ran with all speed towards us, and then stood motionless, with heads turned towards our cavalcade, until we had got to such a distance as to be no longer distinguishable.”

“Gold and silk,” says Buffon, “are not the true wealth of Asia. The camel is the treasure of the East.” It is a fact that this animal is wonderfully adapted to supply the wants of the desert races. It may be said to supply them with every object of primary necessity; food, clothing, and even habitation, fire, and the means of transport.

The flesh of the young camel, though inferior to beef or mutton, is savoury and easy of digestion; the she-camel yields an abundance of milk as substantial and agreeable to the taste as that of the cow. The camel’s skin is, it is true, a coarse wool, but long, tenacious, and readily wrought. The Mongols make it into tissues and cord. Out of the tissues they weave their clothing, coverings, and tents; with the cord, which is of various thicknesses, they fabricate the harness of their horses and other objects of equipment. Camel-leather is not inferior in suppleness and solidity to that which we make use of in Europe. The dung of these animals, dried in the sun, serves as fuel not only for cooking food, but even for working metals. Finally, as a beast of burden, the camel surpasses every other in strength, swiftness, endurance of fatigue, and, above all, in that proverbial sobriety which enables him to accomplish a journey of several successive days without taking either food or drink. From nature he has received a special organization, which well justifies his Arab name of “the ship of the desert.” It consists essentially in the structure of his feet, in that of his stomach, and in the species of hunch or hump which he carries on his back.

We know, in the first place, that the camel’s foot does not resemble that of other ruminants; it is bifurcated, but the two toes, very strong and much elongated, are furnished not with a hoof, but with a short nail, adhering only to the final phalange; they are, moreover, palmated; that is to say, reunited near the extremity by a carneous membrane, which is supplied underneath with a veritable thick and horny sole. The foot can thus plant itself on a wide surface, and seems expressly adapted to the shifting sandy soil which the camel usually traverses.

As for the stomach, beside the four compartments into which the stomach of all ruminants is divided, we notice, on the sides of the paunch, a mass of cubic cells, or partitions, always containing a quantity of tolerably pure water, very drinkable, and kept as a kind of reserve supply; so that more than one traveller, when crossing the desert, and perceiving neither fountain, well, nor stream in which to quench his devouring thirst, has preserved his life at the expense of that of his camel, by killing the poor animal, and opening his reservoir to drink its contents.

The hump, of which the Arabian camel, or dromedary, has but one, while the Bactrian, or camel properly so called, has two, is, in truth, “a storehouse of solid nutriment, on which he can draw for supplies long after every digestible part has been extracted from the contents of the stomach: this storehouse consists of one or two large collections of fat stored up in ligamentous cells supported by the spines of the dorsal vertebræ. When the camel is in a region of fertility, the hump becomes plump and expanded; but after a protracted journey in the wilderness it becomes shrivelled and reduced to its ligamentous constituent, in consequence of the absorption of the fat.”[25]

To be deprived of drink for from eight to ten days is no hardship to the camel. Accredited authorities testify that without any serious inconvenience he can go without drink for twenty-three and even twenty-five days. In the way of solid food, a ball of cake weighing from a pound to a pound and a quarter, will suffice him for a whole day. Often when he has set out on his journey fasting, he contents himself with browsing on the way a few green or dry bushes, and in the evening sups on a handful of dried beans. But this singular abstemiousness is not his sole good quality; his vigour, his docility, his swiftness render him equally valuable.

The ordinary burden of a small camel is from 600 to 800 lbs.; a large camel will carry 1000 lbs. or upwards, from thirty to thirty-five miles a-day; but the maharis, or those which are used for speed alone, will travel daily from twenty to thirty leagues.

The camel of the Steppes, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, is, as I have already hinted, the Bactrian or camel strictly so called. This animal differs from his African congener in several very important physical characteristics, and perhaps also in some moral peculiarities. His two humps are smaller than the one hump of the dromedary. He is a little larger than the latter; his average stature is from six feet and a half to seven feet. His hair, of a deep chestnut brown, almost woolly on the humps, the head, and the upper part of the neck, is short and smooth on the body, and hangs in long fringes below the neck and around the fore-legs. He endures without inconvenience the most opposite temperatures, great heat and extreme cold, so that his habitat naturally ranges over an immense extent of country. He is found throughout the zone of the Steppes, even to the confines of Siberia, on the borders of Lake Baïkal; he was formerly still more common in Hindostan, but has now almost disappeared, owing to the great consumption entailed by the military expeditions of our East Indian Government.

The camel is an excellent traveller, but his gait is rough and awkward, and almost insupportable by those who have not been long habituated to it. In this relation we may borrow an anecdote from Madame Hommaire de Hell:[26] Her dragoman, a Frenchman, named Antoine, curious to essay this new species of equestrian practice, begged a Kalmuck in the escort to lend him his camel. The request being readily granted, he perched himself on the extremity of the saddle, in “measureless contentment” with his lofty post, and by no means mindful of the malicious smiles exchanged between the Cossacks and the camel-drivers. Scarcely had the beast advanced four paces, however, before his face turned pale, and he clung to the saddle, with a most pitiful countenance, and imploring help in the most agonizing tones. “One need be a Kalmuck,” says Madame de Hell, “to be capable of enduring the trot of a camel. His jerky gait shakes the body so severely, that a long journey is a positive punishment, even for the Cossacks. The unfortunate Antonio, left some distance behind by the escort, made a vain effort to overtake us; he was compelled, willy-nilly, to retain his steed as far as the Caspian Sea, where he arrived about two hours after ourselves. I have never seen a man more demoralized. His groans, when he was lifted off the camel, were so lamentable, that we really hardly knew what to think of his condition.”

As for the camel’s moral qualities, the same lively writer furnishes a very different estimate to what we gather from the majority of travellers. She represents him as idle, pettish, and very vindictive.

“All that we had read,” says she, “of the rapidity of these ships of the desert; their insensibility to fatigue, to hunger, to thirst; their tractability to the will of man exceeding the obedience of the leaf to the wind, was completely contradicted by the conduct of these quadrupeds, little careful to maintain their reputation for agility. Despite of a stout cord passed through one of the nostrils, and which caused them a sharp pain every time they became refractory, they would not march more than two successive hours without flinging themselves on the ground. We had to battle with them incessantly to rouse them from their torpor, and prevent them from biting one another. Whenever a camel-driver pulled a little roughly his animal’s guiding-string, we heard a succession of cries, all the more frightful from their resemblance to the human voice. In a word, these camels behaved so ill during their short journey, that we entirely lost the good opinion our great naturalist (Buffon) had given us of their species, in descriptions more poetical than true.”

Notwithstanding Antoine’s discouraging experience of camel-riding, Madame de Hell, a few days afterwards, essayed the same experiment, with the result that, like her poor dragoman, she made a vow never to repeat it. Somewhat later, she had an opportunity of witnessing a very curious illustration—and one very amusing to the lookers-on—of the natural vindictiveness of these rough steeds. We give the adventure in her own words:—

“Everybody knows that the camel possesses the faculty of ruminating the food already stored in one of his stomachs, and that he willingly enough grants himself this pleasure when he has nothing to eat; but it is not generally known, perhaps, that he possesses sufficient malice to make, when an opportunity arises, this prerogative a means of vengeance.

“I had noticed in the morning that one of our camel-drivers appeared on bad terms with his beast. He vainly tried to master him by punishment, pulling with all his might the cord which passed through the animal’s nostril; the latter was obstinate, and threw himself every moment on the ground, a proof of rebellion. The Kalmuck, irritated by the struggle, profited by a halt to dismount, and inflict severe chastisement on the recalcitrant; but the camel, disdainfully raising his long neck, followed with so malicious an eye all his tyrant’s movements, that without doubt he was revolving some project of revenge in his head. And so it happened that he quietly waited until the Kalmuck stood opposite to him; then, opening his great mouth, he ejected full in the camel-driver’s face a double volley of masticated herbs, mixed with slaver and all sorts of filthiness. It would be impossible to describe the air of satisfied vengeance with which the camel raised his neck, and moved his head from one side to another, as if in quest of applause. What astonished me most in this affair was his master’s moderation after undergoing such an outrage. He wiped himself coolly, remounted his saddle, and caressed the neck of the ill-bred animal, as if he had received the most flattering compliment. A good understanding being thus strangely re-established, they went on their way peaceably, without giving another thought to what had taken place.”

CHAPTER VII.
THE ANIMAL LIFE OF THE STEPPES:—WILD RUMINATING ANIMALS—RODENTS—CARNIVORA—BIRDS.

BESIDES those species of which we have just spoken, and which man has subjugated to his service, the Steppes nourish a host of other animals which seem for ever destined to a savage life. Some are spread through the entire zone of the Steppes, and include representatives of the genera or species belonging to the temperate latitudes of Europe. But most of them are circumscribed in more or less limited habitats, out of which they would not meet with the conditions of climate or provision that are essential to their existence.

The mammalia which are found in the plains of Eastern Europe and Central Asia belong principally to the orders of Ruminants,[27] Rodents, and Carnaria.

Cuvier divides the ruminants into two great sections: one comprising the ruminants without horns (genera, camel, lama, and chevrotain); and the other, those with horns. The latter he again divides into ruminants with decaying or wooden horns (these are the cervidæ of the new nomenclature), ruminants with membraneous horns (as the giraffes), and ruminants with hollow horns (oxen, goats, antelopes, sheep).

The section of Ruminants without horns is represented in the Steppes by the camel. Of the three groups of horned ruminants, one only is wanting in this region of the Old Continent—namely, that of the ruminants with membranous horns; but we meet there with varieties of all the species included among the cervidæ, except the reindeer, which is confined to the glacial countries of both continents. The common European stag is found on this side of the Oural, in the Steppes bordering on the forests, where he prefers to seek an asylum. The ahu, or roebuck of Tartary, inhabits the valleys and plains which stretch to the north of the Himalaya and along the chain of the Thian-Chan. Deer wander in troops, or in isolated couples, in all the temperate and fertile portions of the zone of the Steppes, and the eland is spread over all Asia between the 45th and 41st degree of latitude. The latter is the largest of all the cervidæ. It ordinarily attains, and sometimes exceeds, the stature of the horse. His antlers, spread out perpendicularly to the axis of his head, take at first a nearly horizontal direction, then spring upwards in an abrupt curve. At their extremity they terminate in a broad palm, set with sharp snags around its outer edge. Their weight, for adults, averages from fifty-five to sixty-five pounds. The eland has a short robust neck, which is necessary to enable him to support the burden of his branching honours; but which, joined to the projection of his shoulders, and the disproportionate length of his fore-legs, gives him a very ungraceful aspect. Nor can he browse the herbage without making a great digression or falling on his knees. The male, moreover, under the throat has a sort of goître, or swelling, garnished with a rude pointed beard. The female wears a beard, but has no goître. The neck is surmounted with a short, stiff, blackish mane. The rest of the hair is of a pronounced gray.

The eland inhabits the marshy plains and banks of rivers; he dreads the heat, and to escape it will often remain during the long summer days plunged up to his neck in the cool waters. He lives with his comrades in tolerably numerous herds. The first birth of the female is only one; afterwards she produces two at a time. Frequently the eland attains a prodigious stature. An individual killed in the Altaï measured four feet and a half in height to the shoulder, and four feet and a third in length. His flesh is said to be light and nourishing; his hide excellent for making shoulder-belts; and his antlers are converted to the same uses as the horns of the stag.

Among the hollow-horned ruminants I may mention the Saiga, a kind of antelope which inhabits the Asiatic Steppes, and is met with even in Poland. In figure he takes the poetical elegance of the gazelle; his horns are of a clear yellow colour, and of a transparency which rivals that of tortoise-shell. His forehead is covered with transversal folds; he has no muzzle, properly speaking, but a kind of snout like that of a hog. It is said that he drinks through his nostrils. The saigas travel in herds of about two thousand each, of whom a certain number keep always some distance in advance, in the rear, and on the flanks of the main host, so as to watch over their security.

Another kind of gazelle, the Dseren, is peculiar to the Mongolian Deserts, and named by the inhabitants the yellow stag. His stature is little inferior to that of the deer. The female is without horns.

The Moufflon,[28] the original of our domestic sheep, sometimes strays into the plains of Central Asia, but prefers the solitude of the mountains. His general size is that of a small fallow deer, but though clothed with hair instead of wool, he bears a closer resemblance to the ram than to any other animal. In summer his hair is close, but in winter it becomes rough, wavy, and slightly curled. On the upper part of the body it is brown, but the under part and insides of the limbs are whitish. The hair is considerably longer under the throat, and about the neck and shoulders, than elsewhere.

We may refer, in this connection, to the Egagra, or wild goat, which Cuvier considers to have been the original stock of the numerous races of goats spread over various regions of the globe.

The Steppes nourish two species of Rodents: the Varying Hare (Lepus variabilis), so called because he changes from tawny gray in summer to white in winter; and a gray squirrel, which is probably only a variety of our common European squirrel. He is not a climber and a “haunter of the woods,” like his congener. He abounds in the Mongolian Steppes, where he lives in holes excavated under the earth, like the rats and rabbits. He is, however, much more ingenious than the other troglodyte-rodents; he shelters the entrance to his abode under a domed roof, skilfully constructed of dry herbs woven together, and covered with clay. These works closely resemble the mounds upheaved by moles.

The Carnaria of the Felidæ, or feline family, are wanting, or nearly so, in the immense zone which we are considering. Except a species of lynx, the Chilason or Chulon, whose existence has been recognized in the north of Tartary; and a few tigers which adventure into Mongolia, we may say that the Asiatic Steppes, and, therefore, also those of Europe, are exempt from these inconvenient guests. The most dangerous, and almost the only enemy which man and the herbivora have reason to dread, is the Wolf. This animal, now very rare in Western Europe, where his race will soon disappear, is still found in great numbers in the wild Lithuanian forests, in Russia, and all Northern and Central Asia. To him, as to other animals of the Canidæ, cold appears more favourable than heat, and it is in countries where the average temperature seldom rises high he attains his greatest dimensions. In Lithuania wolves are often met with which measure three feet and a half in length, without the tail. Those of Northern Asia are also of a great size and nerve, of terrible strength and audacity; they have been seen to pounce on a sheep, and carry it off at full speed. They intrude in quest of victims into the towns, the villages, and the encampments; combat to the last with their enemies; and when vanquished die without a groan. Generally they lurk in the woods and forests; but hunger, according to the proverb, drives them forth from their lairs. Then they assemble in vast hordes; they pursue, they assail, they defend, with ingenious tactic, skilfully availing themselves of the disposition and accidents of the ground. Their manœuvres vary according to the nature of the game or the enemy. In general, if a man preserve an upright bearing and a bold countenance, they will not attack him; they follow him stealthily, however, prepared to pounce upon him if, unhappily, he should stumble or falter. But the wolves of Tartary, far from sharing in this deference towards the lord of creation, display a singular bitterness against him. “It is remarked,” says the Jesuit missionary Huc, “that the Mongolian wolves attack man more willingly than any animals; one sees them sometimes galloping through innumerable flocks of sheep, without inflicting any injury, in order to dash upon the shepherd. In the neighbourhood of the Great Wall they frequently descend upon the Tartar-Chinese villages, enter the farms, turn aside with contempt from the domestic animals which they encounter, and penetrate even into the interior of the houses to select their victims, seizing them invariably by the throat and strangling them. Not a village in Tartary but has every year to deplore some calamity of this kind. One might say that the wolves of this country sought specially to avenge themselves on men for the blood-thirsty war the Tartars wage against them.” And it is true that in their pursuit of these animals the inhabitants of the Steppes display not only an ardour which would be legitimate, but a fierce and uncontrollable cruelty.

“They pursue them everywhere à outrance,” remarks M. Huc; “they regard them as their chief enemy, on account of the terrible losses they inflict upon their flocks. The news that a wolf has made his appearance in the neighbourhood is for everybody a signal to ‘mount and ride away.’ And as each cavalier has always two or three saddled horses in waiting near his tent, the plain is speedily covered, as if by enchantment, with a cloud of eager horsemen. Their weapon is a long rod.[29] Thus, in whatever direction the wolf may seek to escape, he encounters a band of determined adversaries, whose cry, as they precipitate themselves upon their traditional foe, is ‘No quarter!’ There are no mountain-sides so rugged or so difficult, that the nimble horses of the Tartars cannot pursue him thither. The cavalier who finally overtakes the beast, flings a lasso round his neck as he passes at full gallop, and drags him in his rapid track to the nearest tent. There they firmly bind up his muzzle, that they may proceed to torture him with impunity, closing up the tragic scene by flaying him alive, and then setting him free. In the summer the miserable animal will live in this condition for several days; but in winter, exposed without his furry coat to the rigour of the season, he dies almost immediately, frozen to death.”[30]

It is generally considered that the wolf is an animal as cowardly as he is fierce, because he flies before man when man does not retreat before him, and because he kills unoffending animals. But we forget that man acts in a precisely similar manner. Numerous experiments, and especially those of Cuvier, have clearly proved that the wolf is fully capable of being domesticated, is very sensible of kindly treatment, and will as readily grow familiar with, and attached to, his master, as the best of dogs. We must, therefore, refer his ferocity to the instinct of self-preservation and of a vengeance too frequently excited; just as at the Cape of Good Hope, the unfortunate Bosjesmen, formerly treated like beasts by the Dutch colonists, though naturally of a peaceable disposition, became active and cruel aggressors, and daring assailants, against the enemies who had exhausted their patience.

Two other wild beasts of the dog genus, the Korsak and the Karogun, are eagerly hunted by the Tartars, especially by the Kirghiz. But the chase, in this instance, is carried on for industrial purposes. The fur of these animals is very valuable, and the Kirghiz hunters carry thousands every year to the great market of Orenburg. The korsak is a species of fox. In colour he closely resembles the jackal; but he has a long tail, with a black tuft at the tip, and on each side of the head a brown stripe extends from the eye to the muzzle. He ranges over all the Steppes of Tartary, and lives in burrows like the foxes. The natives pretend that he never drinks. He is a very handsome animal, and when, towards the close of the sixteenth century, several individuals were brought to Europe, he became quite the fashion. All the great ladies of the court were desirous of possessing one, which they tended in their chambers, and when promenading in the parks, often led about like a spaniel. The mania was of brief duration, but it clearly showed how easily the animal could be tamed and reared.

Buffon has confounded the karogun with the isatis or polar fox, and other animals with the korsak. He is equally distinct from the one as from the other, and the Kirghiz never make a mistake, though they hunt for both in the same districts. His skin is of an ashen gray on the back, and a pale yellow under the belly. His fur is not less precious than that of the korsak.

The wild Ornithology of the Steppes comprises some migratory palmipedes, a few gallinaceæ, and some predatory birds of the falcon family. Gulls, wild ducks, herons, curlews, and especially pelicans, people the shores of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian, with the banks of the rivers that flow into them, and the neighbouring pools. The Cossack and Kalmük chiefs, who now ardently cherish the love of falconry that was so marked a trait in the character of the mediæval nobles, hunt these birds with much enthusiasm, save, indeed, the pelican, whose flesh is not edible.

The herons form, in the order Grallatores and the tribe Cultirostres (knife-like beak), a family (Ardeidæ) composed of numerous species, several of which inhabit or frequent the marshes, lakes, and streams of the region of the Steppes.

“O’er yonder lake the while,
What bird about that wooded isle,
With pendant feet and pinions slow,
Is seen his ponderous length to row?
’Tis the tall heron’s awkward flight,
His crest of black, and neck of white,
Far sunk his gray-blue wings between,
And giant legs of murky green.”[31]

The most remarkable species is the great white heron (Ardea alba), or yellow-billed white egret, clothed in plumage of snowy white, with a long yellow bill, long lank limbs, and black feet; length about forty inches. On the nape and the croup his feathers are long and flexible, wavy, and with tapering ends; they are eagerly sought after for purposes of adornment. We may also mention the great bittern, the “bird of desolation” (Botauris stellaris)—which the French expressively name eau-mère, or “water-mother,” and which derives its zoological appellation from the Latin words bos and taureau, in allusion to the booming, bellowing sound of his hoarse voice. His plumage is of a pale yellow, marked with brown and nest-coloured zig-zag patches and shades. From the fulness of the feathers about his neck, he presents a very quaint, and even ridiculous appearance; but he is a bird of courage, and even of ferocity, striking with keen bill at the eyes of his antagonist. When attacked by dogs or other carnivora, he will throw himself upon the ground, and fight with both claws and bill unto the very last.

The curlew is allied to the ibis, differing from it only in secondary particulars, and notably in the form of his bill, which is thinner, and rounded in its whole length. His tail resembles the hen’s; the plumage of the head, neck, and fore part of the back, is light reddish-gray, streaked with dark-brown; the hind part of the back is white, with dark narrow longitudinal markings; the tail, breast, and abdomen are white, the former crossed with black bars, and the latter with dark marks and spots of a similar shape to those on the back. The female lays four excessively large pyriform eggs, about three inches long. The cry of the curlew is loud, wild, and plaintive. These birds assemble in numerous flocks, and live on the sea-coast and the marsh-border, feeding on worms and molluscs. At breeding-time they separate into pairs, and haunt the wild hills and dreary moorlands,—

“Remote from human sight,
In lonely pairs their vernal flight
They speed o’er heathy mountain rude,
On some waste marsh’s solitude,
To the tall grass or bristling reed
Their wild unnestled young to breed.”

The species of Pelican which inhabits the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas is the Common (Pelicanus Onocrotalus). We must not pass unnoticed this well-known wader, which has for ages been invested with an atmosphere of song and fable, and which is specially remarkable for the bright yellow membranous pouch attached to the lower mandible of his long robust bill. This pouch, says Broderip, will hold a considerable number of fish, and thus enables the bird to dispose of the superfluous quantity which may be taken during fishing excursions, either for his own consumption or for the nourishment of his young. “In feeding the nestlings—and the male is said to supply the wants of the female, when sitting, in the same manner—the under mandible is pressed against the neck and breast, to assist the bird in disgorging the contents of the capacious pouch; and during this action the red nail of the upper mandible would appear to come in contact with the breast, thus laying the foundation, in all probability, for the fable that the pelican nourishes her young with her blood, and for the attitude in which the imagination of painters has placed the bird in books of emblems, with the blood spirting from the wounds made by the terminating nail of the upper mandible into the gaping mouths of her offspring.”

It is usually in the evening or the morning that these birds gather about the lonely shores to fish in company, like a party of sociable Izaak Waltons, and proceeding, as Nordmann remarks, upon a systematic plan, which is apparently the result of a kind of concerted agreement. They select a suitable station—a shallow bay with a smooth bottom. There they arrange themselves in a half-circle, the bill turned towards the ground, and keeping at a distance of from ten to twelve feet. With their wings they beat the water hurriedly, and sometimes plunge in up to their middle, gradually wading towards the beach, and driving the fish before them into a very narrow channel. Now the feast commences, and other birds never fail to profit by the ingenious labours of the pelican. Nordmann counted, on one occasion, forty-nine pelicans fishing together in this fashion on the shores of the Black Sea.

“Besides these forty-nine,” he adds, “there were assembled on the heaps of algæ, confervæ, and shells cast ashore by the sea, hundreds of sea-mews, sea-swallows, sea-daws, preparing to snatch the fish out of the water, and to divide amongst themselves the remains of the banquet. Finally, several grebes swimming in the area circumscribed by the semicircle of fishers, while this space was still sufficiently broad, played their part at the welcome feast, frequently plunging after the scared and terrified fish.”

The bustard and the grouse, or heather-cock, are common enough in the prairies of Central Asia. Crows and numerous birds of prey also flock thither in search of their dead or living prey. Travellers speak of a black eagle of Mongolia which the Mongols and Kalkas train to hunt the moufflon, the yellow goat, and the saiga. We cannot find the bird described under this name by any naturalist, nor can we determine whether he is an eagle properly so called, or whether he is not rather the cosmopolitan black kite (milvus ater), which rises so fiercely on his plumed wings,

“And hunts the air for plunder.”

We may mention, as also proper to Central Asia, the Aquila bifasciata of Dr. Gray, and several species of buzzards, hawks, and falcons. These Raptores live very peacefully in the desert solitudes, where none disturb them; and so little do they fear man, that they venture into the Mongol encampments and carry off the provisions destined for the travellers’ refreshment. An incident of this nature is recorded by the Abbé Huc, who, with his companions, was at the time preparing to sup on a quarter of a kid skilfully “dished up” by their Tartar neophyte, Samdadchiemba.

“We had just seated ourselves,” says M. Huc, “in a triangle on the grassy sward, having in our midst the lid of the pot which served instead of a dish, when suddenly a noise like thunder broke over our heads. A great eagle fell like an arrow on our supper, and rose again with the same rapidity, carrying off in his claws some slices of kid. When we had recovered from our surprise, we had nothing better to do than laugh at the adventure. However, Samdadchiemba could not laugh, not he; he was exceedingly wroth, not on account of the stolen kid, but because the eagle, in flying off, had insolently buffeted him with the tip of his wing....

“The eagle,” adds our author, “is found almost everywhere in the deserts of Tartary. You see him sometimes hovering and wheeling round and round in the air; sometimes, perched upon a hillock in the middle of the plain, he remains there for a long time as motionless as a sentinel. Often we encounter him on the ground, apparently larger than an ordinary sheep; when we draw near, he is compelled, before he can rise into the air, to make a long detour, agitating his heavy wings; after which, succeeding in lifting himself a little above the ground, he soars aloft at pleasure.”

The Erpetological fauna of the Steppes is little known, and is probably very scanty. Unfortunately, this region has not been explored by scientific naturalists, and the unprofessional travellers who have visited it do not appear to have met with any reptiles which seemed to them worthy of detailed notice. Atkinson, however, speaks of the stony ridges of the plain as “swarming with serpents.”—“I observed,” he says,[32] “four varieties: A black one, three feet eight inches long, and about one inch and an eighth in diameter. Another was of slaty-gray colour, from two to three feet long, and smaller in diameter than the black snake. This breed was numerous, and often difficult to see, they so nearly resembled the colour of some of the rocks. We also found some of an ashy-green and black, with deep crimson specks on the sides; as they moved along in the sun the colours were most brilliant.” Another, which Mr. Atkinson’s companions killed, was of a dark-brown, with greenish and red marks on the sides, and evidently very venomous. He measured five feet two inches and a half without his head, and four inches and a quarter round his body.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE INHABITANTS OF THE STEPPES:—TARTARS, COSSACKS, KALMÜKS, KIRGHIZ, MONGOLS.

THE Steppes of Tartary and Mongolia, interrupted, says Humboldt,[33] by chains of mountains of various aspects, separate the ruder peoples of Northern Asia from the primitive races, which have been for ages civilized, of Hindostan and Thibet. Their existence has influenced the destinies of mankind in various important ways. They have rolled back the populations towards the south, and more than the Himálaya, more than the snow-crowned peaks of Serinagur and Goorkha, have raised an obstacle to the alliances of peoples, while opposing, in the north of Asia, insuperable barriers to the refinement of manners and the genius of the arts.

But it is not only as barriers that History should regard the plains of Central Asia; they have several times let loose on earth a torrent of calamity and devastation. The pastoral races of the Steppes—Mongols, Getæ, Alans, and Huns—have convulsed the world. If, in the course of ages, intellectual culture has directed its course from east to west, like the vivifying light of the sun, Barbarism at a later period has followed in the same track, when threatening to plunge all Europe into darkness. A people of tawny shepherds, Tou-Kin (that is to say, Turkish) in origin, the Hioung-Nou, inhabited, under tents of skin, the elevated Steppe of the Gobi. Long formidable to the Chinese power, a horde of the Hioung-Nou was driven back towards the south into Central Asia. The impulse which they gave spread uninterruptedly even into the native country of the Fins, on the borders of the Oural, and thence the Huns, the Avars, the Chasurs, and various mixtures of Asiatic races, poured forth in furious violence. The Hunnish hosts first appeared on the banks of the Volga, then in Pannonia, and finally on the banks of the Marne, and on those of the Po, ravaging the beautiful fields where, from the days of Antenor, the genius of man had accumulated its glorious monuments. Thus from the Mongolian deserts blew a pestiferous wind, which choked even in the Cisalpine plains the delicate blossom of art, the object of such tender and continual cares.

Our English traveller, Atkinson, has called the Steppes “the cradle of invasions;” and this not only because from their solitudes issued the hordes which devastated Europe in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, but because Russia and Austria have found therein those truculent soldiers of repulsive aspect who, in their hands, have become, even in our own day, the scourge of the free and civilized nations they would fain have subjugated.

In the present day the Steppes of Eastern Europe and of Asia are still the asylum of savagery, if not of barbarism. The tribes scattered over them are more or less closely allied to that fraction of the human family which ethnographists designate under the name of the “Turanian.” Those of the East belong exclusively to the Mongolian branch, and those of the West partly to the Mongolian and partly to the Turkish, more or less modified by their mixture with the Slave branch of the great Caucasian family. To all these peoples we commonly apply the term Tartaro, or Tartars, which originally “was a name of the Mongolic races, but through their political ascendancy in Asia after Chingis-Khan (A.D. 1227), it became usual to call all the tribes which were under Mongolian sway by the name of Tartar.”[34] It now really belongs to the small tribe of Turkic origin which, after occupying Turkistan, has spread even into the Crimea. We must distinguish from it, however, the Cossacks, or Kosaks, who inhabit the Ukraine, the banks of the Don and the Dnieper, and who are more closely related to the Slave family than the Mongolian race.

We shall pass in rapid review the principal hordes which inhabit the Steppes, from the western border to the eastern extremity of these deserts.

The first tribe which we encounter on the shores of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea is that of the Tartar-Nogáis, who formerly lived north-east of the Caspian. “Pressed by the Kalmüks, or Mongolic tribe, the Nogáis advanced westward as far as Astrachan. Peter I. transferred them thence to the north of the Caucasian mountains, where they still graze their flocks on the shores of the Kuban and the Kuma.” Of late years, however, they have begun to settle themselves in permanent habitations, owing to the exertions of a French emigré, Count Maison, who was appointed their governor in 1808.

They now occupy (according to Madame Hommaire de Hell) all the territory comprised between the Sea of Azov and the river of Malochnia-Vodi. They number about 32,000 souls, spread over seventy villages. Their huts are small, with a roof constructed of beams of timber, covered with reeds, which are afterwards loaded with clay and ashes. They occupy themselves wholly in rearing horses and cattle. The horses of the Kalmük-Kirghiz breed are of moderate stature, but nimble and robust. All the year round they roam across the plains, and in winter seek their provender beneath the snow. The horned cattle are small and puny, the cows yield but a poor supply of milk, and are of scarcely any value.

The aged Nogáis shave the hair entirely off; the young people preserve a single tuft on the top of the head. This custom compels them to wear constantly a bonnet of wool or lamb’s skin. A short caftan over a shirt of cotton or woollen, bound round the waist by a leather belt; loose, wide trousers; in winter a pelisse of sheep’s skin and a kind of hood enveloping the head and shoulders, compose the dress of the males. As for the women, they wear above the chemise a caftan of cloth, girded about the form by a large belt ornamented with great metal buckles; they likewise figure in Turkish trousers and slippers, with a long white veil fastened round the head, and allowed to fall upon the shoulders; small silver rings adorn the fingers and the nose; heavy ear-drops hang from their ears, the two being frequently linked together by a chain passing under the chin. The young girls dress their hair in a multiplicity of curls, and instead of the veil wear a small red fez, garnished with pieces of metal and all kinds of trinkets.

The Nogáis are Mohammedans, of the sect called Sunnites (or believers in the “Sunna,” the sayings and aphorisms traditionally attributed to the Prophet). Their name is derived from that of their first chief, the grandson of Chingis-Khán, who, about 1260, declared himself independent of the Kapchakian empire, and established himself with his warriors on the borders of the Black Sea.

The Kosaks (or Cossacks) are, as we have said, Slaves rather than Tartars. They have blue eyes, red hair, thick lips, a flat nose. Nimble, robust, indefatigable, skilful horsemen, they furnish the Russian army with a formidable host of irregulars. Some have fixed their homes in the towns, but the majority inhabit the villages or stanitzas scattered over the Steppes. Very few are agriculturists. Either they devote themselves to breeding horses and cattle, or live on the small pension allowed them for their military services. Nearly all the young and hardy of the males have no other trade but that of arms. The Cossack chieftains, their Hetmans, or Attamans, derive their authority directly from the Czar. Their religion is that of the Russian Greek Church; and they are, we believe, the only Christians in the entire zone of the Steppes.

Bold and resolute robbers in time of war, the Cossacks “at home” are peaceable, kindly-natured, and more honest than the Russian Mongiks. The erroneous ideas which still prevail respecting their character are mainly due to French prejudices, excited by the disastrous events of 1814 and 1815, when the jingle of their arms resounded in the streets of Paris. But they are not really so black as they have been painted. The traveller passes through the country which they inhabit with the utmost security, and is received in their stanitzas with a hospitable welcome.

These stanitzas, if we may credit Madame Hommaire de Hell, present a far more agreeable appearance than the Russian villages. They consist of small wooden houses, gaily painted. There is but one story, which is surrounded by a miniature gallery, and seems expressly constructed to please the eye. The interior is exceedingly neat and pretty, indicating an intelligence and an idea of comfort which the Russians never exhibit. You will find it enriched with towels, dishes of delft ware, forks, and all the most necessary utensils. Usually two huts are built in one block; the first, which we have just described, is occupied for a summer residence; it contains, generally, one room hung with paper of a lively design, and adorned with images, flowers, and trophies of arms, which is reserved for state occasions and the entertainment of strangers. The second hut, built of dried clay, resembles the Russian kates, consisting of a single chamber, where all the household huddle together during the winter to shelter themselves from the cold.

The traveller seldom sees in these stanitzas any but women and children. With the exception of a few gray veterans, who have purchased by forty years of service the right of dying under the home-roof, the entire male population is under arms. Thus all the work falls upon the shoulders of the women, who must repair the houses, cleanse and dry the furs, take care of the children, and watch the cattle.

The Cossack soldiers, regulars and irregulars, are the guardians of the Steppes. To them is intrusted the security of the traveller, who is much exposed to the attacks of nomadic Turkomen, whose only occupation is robbery. The surveillance of these immense plains is not so difficult, however, nor does it necessitate so large a force as you might suppose. Small watch-posts, or platforms, of extreme simplicity of design, are raised at intervals on the higher grounds; they consist of four long stout poles planted in the earth, and supporting a timber floor, which is sometimes sheltered by a roof of timber. These are the observatories, the prospect-towers of the Cossacks, who can thus obtain a survey over an immense sweep of country, and exchange signals with one another. The horsemen always remain stationed under the platform, ready to leap into the saddle and to gallop wherever their presence may be required.

In the Steppes of the Caspian Sea the Cossacks give place to the Kalmüks, or Olöts, a people of the Mongolic race, who originally inhabited Turkistan, but abandoned that country, in 1778, for the banks of the Volga. Their life is wholly nomadic. They encamp under tents called kibitkas, formed of a trellis-work of wood covered with thick felt. In stature they do not often exceed the middle height; they are thin and ugly, with a swarthy skin, a large flat countenance, little eyes, broad nose, thick lips, and frizzled beard. They are inoffensive, hospitable like all Eastern people, but idle and cunning. Their costume differs but little from that of the Tartars-Nogáis. They profess the Lamaii religion, and obey the chiefs whom they themselves elect, and who bear the title of khans. The Russian Government levies among the Kalmük tribes encamped on its territory a body of irregular troops, whom it employs in the defence of its eastern and southern frontiers.

According to Madame de Hell, the Kalmüks are as friendly as the Cossacks in their reception of a stranger. “The last encampment,” she says, “where we passed the night, appeared to us one of the most considerable which we had hitherto met with. The country, almost transformed, was no longer saddened by the great sandy plains of the Caspian Sea and the Manitch.... Herds of horses, camels, and oxen furrowed the surface of the Steppe, announcing the wealth of the hordes to which they belonged. No hostile manifestation on the part of the latter occurred to disturb our security. Happy in receiving us in the very midst of their tents, these good Kalmüks never attempted to rob us even of the most trifling article. Their desires and their wants are so limited! To tame a wild horse, to roam from one Steppe to another on their camels, to smoke, and to drink koumis, to shut out the cold airs of winter with smoke and ashes, and to observe devoutly the superstitious practices of a religion which they cannot understand—such is their whole life.”

At intervals, the traveller who crosses the Steppes of the Caspian encounters with astonishment, in the most dreary localities, far from every Cossack village and Kalmük kibitka, a group of men, women, and children with bronzed complexions, with features strongly defined, covered with squalid and grotesque rags, dragging their naked feet over the damp and burning soil, and leading small vehicles loaded with implements and utensils of every kind. He easily recognizes in these beings of sinister mien, audacious mendicants, skilful thieves, musicians, blacksmiths, conjurers—what shall I say?—the débris, in a word, of that once great, and perhaps powerful race, now so degraded and corrupt, whose problematical history is the despair of the scholar. The scorn and mistrust of every nation—impatient of all discipline, all education—without law, without religion, without country—these men speak a language which none can understand. Of their real name they are themselves ignorant, and they accept with indifference that which is imposed upon them in different countries: in the East, Romany; in Moldavia, Tsiganes; in Italy, Zingari; in Spain, Gilanos; in France, Bohemians; in England, Gipsies.[35] The Germans call them Zigeuner; the Dutch, expressively but intolerantly, Heathens; the Persians, Sisech; the Hindus, Kavachee; the Danes and Swedes, Tatars; and the Arabs, Haramé. Their origin has been a theme of speculation for centuries, and all that seems certain, after a vast amount of research and discussion, is, that the cradle of the race was India. To what Indian people they should be affiliated is still doubtful; whether to the Zuts or Djalts of the north; the Tshingani, who dwelt near the mouth of the Indus; or the Tshandalas, chronicled by name in the laws of Menou.

We know that their first immigration into Europe occurred about the close of the tenth century, for we find them referred to in a paraphrase of the book of Genesis, written by an Austrian monk, about 1122. They are there spoken of as “Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling through the wide world, having neither house nor home, cheating the people with their tricks, and secretly deceiving mankind.” In the fourteenth century a considerable body settled in Wallachia, Hungary, and the island of Cyprus. Next, they invaded Germany, broke into Switzerland, and appeared in Bologna and other Italian cities. Like a besieging army they set down before Paris in 1427, but were not suffered to enter its precincts. A few years later they crossed into England, and gradually they overspread the whole of Europe. Their own account of themselves represented that they came from “Little Egypt;” that about four thousand of their number had been compulsorily baptized by the king, and condemned to seven years’ wanderings, while the remainder had been slain. At first, their wealth, their pomp, and their supposed penitence secured them a favourable reception; but when their wealth was dissipated, their pomp decayed, and their penitence discovered to be a sham, a storm of obloquy broke over their heads. Every European government levelled the most arbitrary decrees against them, which continued in force down to the middle of the eighteenth century. Various attempts have since been made to civilize and incorporate them with the general body of the population, but these have obtained a very limited success. They still remain a race apart, with their own language (Romany Tschib), their own traditions, their own customs, their distinct personal characteristics. They still remain a race cursed with the curse of perpetual restlessness; a mysterious impulse constrains them to wander; they live secluded from all other peoples; an atmosphere of secrecy enshrouds their inner life, their language, and their creed. They are gifted with a remarkable love of and capacity for music, and a strange wild charm invests their own gipsy-melodies. Their character is a grotesque combination of the most opposite qualities; for they are brave and yet cowardly; revengeful, yet loyal; treacherous, yet capable of the most passionate attachment; indolent, yet energetic; chaste, yet fond of licentious songs and dances. In a word, they are a problem to the ethnologist, the moralist, and the historical student; and fence themselves about with so impenetrable a reserve, that we may well doubt whether the full truth respecting them will ever be ascertained.[36]

The Tsiganes or Romany are very numerous in Southern Russia. They pass from town to town, from village to village, sometimes begging or stealing, sometimes exercising their peculiar trades and industries, and providing for their wants more honestly. They never establish themselves permanently in any place. They halt wherever the evening shades may chance to overtake them, stretch a few fragments of woollen stuff across the poles of their vehicles to serve for tents, kindle a fire with herbs, twigs, and dry branches, partly to cook their food, and partly to scare away the wild beasts, and fling themselves down pell-mell to sleep on mats or the naked earth. When morning dawns, they resume their life-long march—giving no thought to the future, no dream to the past—without object, hope, or purpose.

The Steppes of the interior of Asia, from the Aral river to the Ala-Tau mountains, are occupied by the great nation of the Kirghiz, who have, from time immemorial, been divided into the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes. To the former belongs the territory north of the Ala-Tau, with portions of China and Tartary. They are subject to the sovereigns of the countries in which they dwell. The Middle Horde inhabits the district between the Ishim, Irtish, Lake Balkhush, and Khokan. The Little (and far most numerous) Horde wanders over the grassy plains bounded by the Yamba and the Ural, Turkistan (now a Russian province), and the country of the Middle Horde (or Siberian Kirghizes). Altogether, the Kirghizes number upwards of one and a quarter million of souls. They are of Turco-Tartaric origin, and Southern Siberia is their mother country.[37]

Though owing a nominal allegiance to the Russian Czar and the Chinese Emperor, they are virtually independent, and obey only their sultans or chiefs. They are frequently at war. Many live wholly by brigandage; suddenly descending, under cover of night, upon the richest aouls, or villages, slaying all who resist, and carrying off horses, cattle, and all objects of value, and men, women and children, whom they sell as slaves. These nocturnal razzias are designated, in the Kirghiz language, barantas.

The yourt, or tent of these nomades, resembles the kibitka of the Kalmüks. We borrow a description of one belonging to a Kirghiz chief from Mr. Atkinson’s entertaining pages.

“It was formed,” he says,[38] “of willow trellis-work, put together with untanned strips of skin, made into compartments which fold up. It was a circle of thirty-four feet in diameter, five feet high to the springing of the dome, and twelve feet in the centre. This dome is formed of bent rods of willow, one and a quarter inch diameter, put into the mortice-hole of a ring about four feet across, which secures the top of the dome, admits light, and lets out the smoke. The lower ends of the willow-rods are tied with leathern thongs to the top of the trellis-work at the sides, which renders it quite strong and secure. The whole is then covered with large sheets of voilock, made of wool and camel’s hair, fitting close, making it water-tight and warm. A small aperture in the trellis-work forms a doorway, over which a piece of voilock hangs down and closes it; but in the daytime this is rolled up and secured on the top of the yourt.

“The furniture and fittings of these dwellings are exceedingly simple; the fire being made on the ground in the centre of the yourt, directly opposite to the door voilocks are spread: on these stand sundry boxes, which contain the different articles of clothing, pieces of Chinese silk, tea, dried fruits, ambas of silver (small squares, about two and a half inches long, one inch and a half wide, and about three-tenths of an inch thick). Some of the Kirghiz possess large quantities of these ambas, which are carefully hoarded up. Above these boxes are bales of Bokharian and Persian carpets, some of great beauty and value. In another part of the yourt is the large koumis sack, completely covered up with voilock to keep it warm and aid the fermentation.

“And near this bag stands a large leathern bottle, sometimes holding four gallons, often much ornamented; so are the small bottles made to carry on the saddle. In another place stands the large iron caldron, and the trivet on which it is placed when used for cooking in the yourt. There are usually half-a-dozen Chinese wooden bowls, often beautifully painted and japanned. These are used to drink the koumis from; some of them hold three pints, others more. On entering a Kirghiz yourt in summer, one of the Chinese bowls full of koumis is presented to each guest. It is considered impolite to return the vessel before emptying it, and a good Kirghiz is never guilty of this impropriety.

“The saddles are placed on the bales of carpets. Rich horse-trappings being highly prized by the wealthy Kirghiz, many of their saddles are beautiful and costly. If of Kirghiz workmanship, they are decorated with silver inlaid on iron, in chaste ornamental designs, and have velvet cushions; the bridles and other trappings covered with small iron plates inlaid in the same manner.

“Leathern thongs and ropes made of camel’s hair are hung up on the trellis-work, common saddles, saddle-cloths, and leathern tchimbar. This part of a Kirghiz costume is frequently made of black velvet, splendidly embroidered with silk, more especially the back elevation.”

Such is the dwelling of a Kirghiz chief in the Steppe.

The national garment of the Kirghiz is the khalat, a kind of pelisse, very long and very full, with large sleeves, in silk or cashmere, and of the most dazzling colours; but the poorer warriors substitute for this state dress a horse-skin jacket. Breeches fastened below the hips by a girdle of wool or cashmere, high-heeled madder-coloured boots, and a fox-skin cap, rising into a cone on the top, and lined inside with crimson cloth, complete his costume. His weapons are the spear, the gun, the axe, and the cutlass. The women wear a long and copious robe, and a veil of numerous folds, surmounted by a lofty calico head-dress, a part of which falls over the shoulders and covers up the neck.

The Kirghiz are fierce, cunning, and often cruel, but the life of a guest is esteemed sacred. They have not so much respect, however, for his property, and do not always resist the temptation of plundering him of any article which suits their fancy. Equestrian exercises and falconry are their favourite amusements. They love the chase, indeed, with a true sportsman’s passion; they love it for itself rather than for the game it secures, for they have no greater dainty than a dish of mutton. Their mode of preparing this viand is exquisitely simple. They content themselves with skinning the animal, cutting it into quarters, and plunging it into a pot, where they keep it boiling in a great quantity of water for a couple of hours. Generally, to prevent the loss of any portion, they cook with the meat the animal’s intestines, without even taking the trouble of cleaning them. The guests arrange themselves in a circle on carpets of felt; the men in the foremost rank, the women and children behind them. The smoking quarters of mutton are removed from the pot; each man draws his knife, slashes off a slice, eats a portion, and passes the remainder to his wife and children, who speedily finish it. The dogs come in for the bones. Afterwards, bowls of the liquor in which the meat has been boiled are handed round, and not a Kirghiz but swallows the greasy broth with delight. This broth, koumis, and tea are his customary drink; the tea is not made in the European fashion, but becomes a veritable soup, prepared with milk, flour, butter, and salt. In every well-to-do aoul the women keep constantly upon the fire a vessel full of this beverage, which they offer to visitors, just as the Turks serve up coffee, the Spaniards, chocolate, and the French, wine.

To the north of the Great Horde, in the government of Irkutsk (Siberia), we meet with the Agro-Mongolian people of the Buriäts, numbering about 35,000 families. They are given to Chamanism, an idolatrous worship widely spread through Eastern Siberia. Their supreme divinity inhabits the sun, and reigns over a host of lesser gods.

Finally, between Lake Baïkal and the Altaï Mountains to the north, the Ala-Tau mountains west, the Great Wall of China south, and the sea east, stretches the immense territory commonly known as Mongolia, and inhabited in part by the tribes which represent the Mongol type in all its primitive purity. This great desert, where grassy lands alternate with dry and sandy or saline plains, was formerly the seat of a flourishing empire, established by Chingis-Khán in 1227, which gave birth to the three Mongol kingdoms of Krim, Kasan, and Astrachan. Mongolic empires, at a later period, arose in China, Turkistan, Siberia, Southern Russia, and Persia. The Mongolian dynasty lost its hold on China in 1360, and a century later was driven out of Russia. In Central Asia it was rehabilitated in 1369, by the illustrious Timur; but a hundred years afterwards the empire was again crushed by its own weight. Baber, a descendant of Timur, conquered India, and erected there a Mongolian throne, which endured until the soldiers of Great Britain defeated Tippoo Saib and captured Delhi. Most Mongolic tribes are now under the rule of the nations whom they once had conquered, the Tungusic sovereigns of China, the Russian Czars, and the Turkish Sultans.[39]

The ruins of Mongolian grandeur are still visible in those solitary cities, which the traveller in the desert discovers half overwhelmed in sand. “We met,” says the Abbé Huc, “with an imposing and majestic memorial of antiquity. It was a great city, desolate and abandoned. The crenellated ramparts, the watch-towers, the four great gates, situated at the four cardinal points, were all in perfect preservation; but all was buried three-fourths deep in the ground, and covered with a thick sward. We entered its vast precinct with a profound emotion of awe and melancholy. We saw neither débris nor ruins, but only the outline of a beautiful and spacious city, wrapped in grass and weeds as in a funeral shroud.” Similar relics of the past are scattered over the deserts of Mongolia, but everything connected with their origin is enveloped in shadow.

The Mongolian family includes several branches, each subdivided into tribes, obeying chiefs of unequal rank. The most numerous people are the Kalkas, who occupy all the northern districts. The Mongols of the south, dwelling near the Great Wall, have been affected in their habits and manners by the neighbourhood of the Chinese; they have become industrious, and engage eagerly in commercial affairs. But the Kalkas, and the other tribes of the Great Gobi, are still nomadic, reckless, and indolent. Their religion is Buddhism; they profess for its head, the living Buddha or Great Lama (Dalai-lama, or Ocean-priest—i.e., wide as the ocean), a reverence and a blind obedience, which they also pay to the inferior lamas. “Under an external aspect of savagery,” says Huc, “the Mongol hides a character full of mildness and kindly feeling; he passes suddenly from the wildest and most extravagant gaiety to a sadness which has nothing forbidding. Timid to excess in his ordinary life, when impelled by fanaticism or revenge, he displays an irresistible impetuosity of courage. He is simple and credulous as a child, and passionately loves stories and legends of the marvellous.”

The Mongols are ugly in feature, of the middle height, agile and robust; their sight is wonderfully keen, their hearing of an extraordinary acuteness.[40] Their wants are restricted to the indispensable necessities of life; of luxury they have no conception; their few pleasures are easily enjoyed; their instincts lead them rather in the path of good than of evil, and their defects, to use an expression of M. Huc’s, are those of ill-trained children. They need, perhaps, but a well-directed impulse to develop their intellect, and guide them onward to a far higher civilization. In the great human family, it is true that as yet they do but fill the children’s place, and it is impossible to say whether their national genius is capable of any great or lasting work.

BOOK II.
THE DESERTS OF SAND:—THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND AFRICA.

CHAPTER I.
THE RAINLESS DESERT—THE BED OF A SEA—THE DEAD SEA.

HE Sandy Deserts may with equal, nay, with greater accuracy, be entitled Salt Deserts, Rainless Deserts, Seas of Sand; for they present at one and the same time all these characters, and the three last, though less generally known than the first, are the most essential.

The soil is generally covered with a thick stratum of sand; but in several places it also exhibits great walls of rock, and in others masses of rolled or shattered pebbles. The subsoil is nearly always of a gypseous or calcareous nature, rarely clayey; wherever it is porous and permeable, it is impregnated with salt, which rises to the surface, or is held in solution in the subterranean basins of water, the thermal springs, the ponds, and the lakes. The saline efflorescences of the deserts of Persia and Oriental Asia not only suffice for the wants of the inhabitants, but supply the great Asiatic caravans with their principal article of exportation.

The atmosphere of the Deserts is not less dry than their sands and rocks. The sky wears a perennial azure, more or less veiled in haze, or rather spotted with a few clouds. Johnstone represents them, in his admirable “Physical Atlas,” by two white unequal bands, characterised as “Rainless Districts.” Of these the larger occupies all the northern region of Africa, and the greater portion of Arabia, Syria, Persia, and Beloochistan, embracing an area of 80° of longitude over 17° of latitude. The other extends over the table-lands of Thibet and the Gobi. It is in form an irregular ellipsis, obliquely inclined from south-west to north-east. Its length is about 1100 leagues; its width, 450. From the former it is only separated by a narrow belt. In the region marked by these two species rain is an extraordinary phenomenon; several years will pass without the clouds shedding a single drop of water. This permanent, and nearly absolute, aridity, establishes a very marked difference between the Deserts properly so called, and the Landes, Steppes, and Prairies, condemned as these are during the hot season to a deadly dryness, but in winter inundated with rain or covered with snow; and in spring converted into immense marshes, where an exuberant vegetation makes its appearance, frequently capable of resisting the action of the summer sun and the withering winds.

In the Rainless Districts vegetation is a nullity; it becomes reduced to a very small number of saline plants and dwarf bushes, nourished by the brackish waters which, the soil conceals. Finally, the desert region may not only be compared to a sea in its aspect and immensity, but it is a true sea, or at least the bed of an ancient sea, which formerly communicated, and, perhaps, was confounded with the Mediterranean, and whose drying up, though still incomplete, took place at a recent geological epoch. We may reasonably conclude that, owing to a series of gradual upheavals, this sea was at first broken up into vast lagoons; that most of these successively disappeared, but not without leaving some certain evidences of the primitive submersion of the continent. “If we might hazard a conjecture,” says a recent writer,[41] “it would be that the same convulsions and upheavals which at the close of the tertiary epoch indented the southern coasts of Europe, at the same time drained the ocean which hitherto had rolled over the plains of the Sahara, and submerged the low-lying lands, which probably united the Canaries and Madeira to the mainland.” To a similar cause must be attributed the existence of the subterranean waters, springs, ponds, and salt lakes, of which I have already spoken, and of the inland seas—the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and the Dead Sea; while the Black Sea and its offshoots, the Sea of Azov and the Sea of Marmora, must have had the same origin. I shall discuss this subject further when describing the Great Sahara.

In Eastern and Central Asia, the Sandy or Salt Deserts alternate with the Steppes, and with lands susceptible of a certain amount of cultivation. The vast region which geographers designate the Great Gobi, or the Shamo, is intersected by many grassy Steppes and even by fertile fields, where the sedentary Mongols, and especially the Artons, yearly sow and gather hemp, millet, and buckwheat. The sombre picture of “a barren plain of shifting sand blown into high ridges where the summer sun is scorching, no rain falls, and when thick fog occurs it is only the precursor of fierce winds,”[42] is true only of special districts, such as the Han-hai, or “Dry Sea,” or the Desert of Sarkha. There, for instance, we meet with no other vegetable than the salsolæ, or salt-worts, which flourish around the small saline pools. Of these pools, when seen from a distance, Mr. Atkinson notices a remarkable characteristic: the salt crystals which accrete upon their banks frequently reflect the orange or crimson hues of flowers, and resemble glowing rubies set in a rich mounting.

As we advance in a south-easterly direction, we find the features of the desert region more prominently marked.

Immense plains of sand, with a bare and brackish surface, called Bejaban, traverse the whole of Persia, from the Caspian Sea to the Indus. They comprise the Deserts of Kerusan, Seistan, Beloochistan, and Mekran, rich in salts with a basis of soda. “The coasts of the Persian Gulf,” as Mrs. Somerville remarks, “are burning hot sandy solitudes, so completely barren, that the country from Bassora to the Indus, a distance of 1200 miles, is nearly a sterile waste. Three-tenths of Persia is a desert, and the tableland is nearly a wide scene of desolation. A great salt-desert occupies 27,000 square miles between Irak and Khorasan, of which the soil is a stiff clay, covered with efflorescence of common salt and nitre, often an inch thick, varied only by a few saline plants and patches of verdure in the hollows. This dreary waste joins the large sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman. Khelat, the capital of Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the sea; round it there is cultivation, but the greater part of that country is a lifeless plain, over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the north wind into ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet high, without a vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose hot and pestilential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these dismal sands impassable at certain seasons.”

The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the Indus. That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, is more than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes that the actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern landscapes which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those provinces where the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, the scene would hardly remind the traveller of

“That delightful province of the Sun.
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam.
Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream.”[43]

“To bare, dry mountain-ridges,” says M. Forgues, “succeed plains, sometimes incrusted with hard clay, sometimes clothed with thick sand. At the outset of spring, in the months of April and May, the country is coloured with some softer tints, the grass breaks here and there through the granite and the gravel; but in the first summer heats everything grows dry, and the soil resumes its monotonously brown or gray livery. Water fails for cultivation, which in the best districts is confined to a few scattered oases. In these vast spaces, when the eye surveys them from some mountain-crest, there occurs nothing to arrest the gaze; and when once the spring has past, the cultured fields become blended with those which the plough has suffered to lie fallow, the clay-built villages with the earth of which their walls are constructed. In these confused landscapes even a considerable town scarcely traces its blurred outline among the accumulated ruins in whose centre it persists in living, and whose extent attests its decadence. It is a marvel if, on arriving at the limit of these monotonous plains, the traveller distinguishes them from the deserts to whose threshold they have generally conducted him. He only recognizes the latter by the dazzling gleam of their saline efflorescence, which stretches far out of sight, and where at intervals abruptly projects some mass of ebon-black rock, transformed by the solar refraction, and assuming in quick succession the most fantastic aspects.”

I have spoken of the inland seas and salt lakes which testify to the primitive submersion of the whole region of the Great Deserts. Let us pursue our route towards the west, and we shall encounter the most remarkable of these vestiges of a remote past.

First, I shall speak of the Dead Sea, the Lake Asphaltes, which Dean Stanley justly designates “one of the most remarkable spots in the world,” and which, as the reader knows, is situated in the south of Palestine, at a short distance from Jerusalem. It is true that “a great mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the effect, partly the cause, of the old belief that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years. The glittering surface of the lake, with the thin mist of its own evaporations floating over its surface, will now no more be taken for a gloomy sea, sending forth sulphurous exhalations. The birds which pass over it without injury have long ago destroyed the belief that no living creature could survive the baneful atmosphere which hung upon its waters.” But still, for the scientific no less than for the historical student, it possesses an absorbing interest. It is the most depressed sheet of water in the world, lying fully thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean: as the Lake Sir-i-Kol, where the Oxus rises

“In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,”

is the most elevated.[44] “Its basin,” to quote Dean Stanley’s graphic description, “is a steaming caldron—a bowl which, from the peculiar temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can never be filled to overflowing. The river Jordan, itself exposed to the same withering influences, is not copious enough to furnish a supply equal to the demand made by the rapid evaporation. Its excessive saltness is even more remarkable than its deep depression. This peculiarity is, it is believed, mainly occasioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt at its south-west corner, and heightened by the rapid evaporation of the fresh water poured into it. Other like phenomena, though in a less striking form, exist elsewhere. But, without entering into its wider relations, this aspect is important, as that which most forcibly impressed the sacred writers. To them it was ‘the salt sea,’ and nothing more. They exhibit hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And so it is in fact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which is the prevailing characteristic of the Sea of Death. Follow the course of the Jordan to its end. How different from the first burst of its waters in Mount Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas! How different from the ‘riotous prodigality of life’ which has marked its downward course, almost to the very termination of its existence! Gradually, within the last mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and the river melts into its grave in a tame and sluggish stream; still, however, of sufficient force to carry its brown waters far into the bright green sea. Along the desert shore the white crust of salt indicates the cause of sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan washes down into the waters of the sea are destroyed. Hence arises the unnatural buoyancy and the intolerable nausea to taste and touch, which raise to the highest pitch the contrast between its clear, bitter waves, and the soft, fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along its desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict of life and death: trunks and branches of trees, torn down from the thickets of the river-jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust out into the sea, and thrown up again by its waves, dead and barren as itself. The dead beach shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep haze—that which to earlier ages gave the appearance of the ‘smoke going up for ever and ever’—veils its southern extremity, and almost gives it the dim horizon of a real sea. In the nearer view rises the low island close to its northern end, and the long promontory projecting from the eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal parts. This is all that I saw, and all that most pilgrims and travellers have seen, of the Dead Sea.”[45]

The sinister aspect of the valley of the Jordan, especially at the embouchure of the river, impresses itself on the mind of every spectator. There the traveller finds the path narrowed between two abrupt gigantic walls. On the right rises the Arabian chain, black and perpendicular; on the left, the Judæan range, less elevated, more irregular, and resembling a dismantled ruin. “The valley comprised between these two chains,” says the Père Laorty-Hadji, “exhibits a soil closely resembling the bed of a sea which has long been dry. You can discern but a few stunted trees. Ruined towns and castles appear in the distance. At the moment of flinging itself into the Dead Sea, the Jordan itself, traversing a muddy soil, changes its physiognomy and colour. It seems to drag reluctantly, towards the motionless lake, a burden of slow and tawny waters. The shores of the Dead Sea are low on the east and west; to the north and south high mountains enclose it.” “These mountains, separated by a formidable cleft, exhibit their beds of red sandstone, overlain by a thick stratum of compact chalk, interrupted by silicious fragments. One is surprised not to see a volcanic crater, when all about, in this convulsed site, the action of fire is visible—the violent, bitter struggle of the two Neptunian and Plutonian principles, which, during the geological eras, contended for the empire of the world. One might say that here the two antagonistic forces exhausted themselves, that they have equally lost their potency; so much so, that at the close of the combat all has sunk into the silence and immobility of death. And who knows if the volcanic crater, whose absence at first astonishes the observer, is not the Dead Sea itself? Is it unreasonable to admit that after the upheaval of the mountains which inclose it, and which a terrible explosion of subterranean fire will have separated, the neighbouring waters were precipitated into and swallowed up in the yawning gulf which they still fill to-day?... This hypothesis is so much the more probable, because in this fire-scathed region the lake affords manifest indications of an igneous travail even now accomplishing itself sullenly in the bowels of the globe. We know that its name of Lake Asphaltites is due to the semi-fluid bituminous matter which constantly rises to its surface and accumulates on its shores. With the vapours exhaled by this bitumen under the influence of heat, mingle sulphurous and ammoniacal exhalations, which render the atmosphere of the Dead Sea dangerous to breathe.”[46]

Before 1835 no one had ventured upon its waters. An Irish traveller, named Cottingham, was their first navigator; but after a five days’ voyage he returned to Jerusalem, and died of exhaustion. Two years later Messrs. Moore and Beke made a new attempt. For several days they withstood the pestilential exhalations of the lake, and succeeded in proving the deep depression of its basin; but at length, both of them being taken ill, they were compelled to cut short their explorations. In 1847 the enterprise was undertaken by a Frenchman—Lieutenant Molyneux—who sounded it in many places, but was speedily carried off by fever. The following year Lieutenant Lynch, of the American navy, embarked on the lake in iron boats, with competent crews. He navigated its waters for three weeks; but all who composed the expedition were more or less severely attacked, and one of them, Lieutenant Deane, succumbed.

Though, as we have said, geographical research has dissipated most of the wild stories formerly accepted in reference to the peculiarly fatal concomitants of the Dead Sea, it well deserves its expressive name. It is a dead sea: it has neither the ocean’s living movement nor deep-sounding roar; the surf and the spray never sparkle on its rocks; that “multitudinous laughter” which Homer ascribes to the sea is wholly wanting; the wind never wakes a smile on its passive and sombre countenance. By its shores one might realize Shelley’s mournful wish, and feel

“In the warm air
His cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er his dying brain its last monotony.”[47]

It is lifeless, untenanted; the fish found there, and brought down by the Jordan, are dead. Unlike the Caspian, it is never stirred by the whirr of wings—by the flight of gulls, or pelicans, or sea-mews. The migratory birds sweep across it without even a pause, without seeking the prey which they could not find. Its waters are denser than those of other seas: their constituents are different, and mingled in different proportions.

Laorty-Hadji is mistaken in his idea that they repose on a bed of rock salt. Rock salt is the chloride of sodium in a nearly pure condition. But the Dead Sea holds in solution a comparatively small portion of this salt, mixed with large proportions of other salts. Its water was analyzed for the first time in 1778 by Lavoiser, Macquer, and Sage. Experiments have also been made by Arcet, Klaproth, Gmelin, Gay-Lussac, and, more recently, by Boussingault. According to the latter, it contains:—

It will be seen that it possesses neither chloride of manganese nor chloride of aluminium, no nitrates, and no iodines; that it is, therefore, not sea water, properly so called, but a mineral water sui generis.

The enormous proportion of saline matter accounts for its exceptional density, and justifies the assertion of travellers that a man floats upon its surface like a log of wood; though we can hardly credit the statement of Pococke that it is impossible to sink to the bottom. Its gravity undoubtedly endows it with extraordinary buoyancy, and to dive to any considerable depth is a matter of difficulty; but in the Dead Sea, as in other seas, man must employ his strength and skill to keep his body afloat.

CHAPTER II.
ARABIA DESERTA AND ARABIA PETRÆA.

THE traveller who starts from the southern extremity of the Dead Sea encounters a succession of deserts. To the east extend wide plains, covered with ruins, where upwards of thirty cities are to be traced in their decay, like Palmyra, by the trunks of shattered columns and the wrecks of desecrated temples. This is the once flourishing country of the Nabatheans, now haunted by some tribes of Idumean Arabs. One might not inappropriately call it the vestibule of Arabia Deserta; a name applicable to all the central and southern districts—that is to say, to nearly three-fourths of the Arabian peninsula. There the sea of sand reveals itself in all its nakedness, in all its horrors; with its implacable sky and fiery atmosphere, its sandy billows, its masses of salt, and, in certain places, with its hidden quicksands capable of devouring entire armies. The Desert of Akhaf, situated towards the extremity of the peninsula, conceals, it is said, several of these abysses, where the hapless traveller, if he set his foot upon them, would be instantly swallowed up. Thus even the Arabs regard it with an unconquerable dread. It owes its name to a Saffite king who would fain have traversed it with his troops, and who saw them perish therein even to the last man. The tradition does not inform us how he himself escaped this immense disaster.