and the different tribes set out on their
return to their several homes.

CHAPTER XII.

DOMINIONS OF GENGHIS KHAN.

1203

Karakorom.--Insignificance of cities and towns.--Account of
Karakorom.--The buildings.--The grand encampments.--Construction
of the tents.--Dwellings of the women.--Mountains and wild
beasts.--Hunting.--The danger of hunting in those days.--Modern
weapons.--Carabines.--Fulminating balls.--Devisme's establishment
in Paris.--Specimens.--Great danger.--Wild beasts more formidable
than men.--Grand huntsman.--Timid animals.--Stratagems.--Mode of
taking deer.--Training of the horses.--Great desert.--Cold.--No
forests.--Pasturage.--Burning the grass on the plains.

After the ceremonies of the inauguration were concluded, Genghis Khan
returned, with the officers of his court and his immediate followers,
to Karakorom. This town, though nominally the capital of the empire,
was, after all, quite an insignificant place. Indeed, but little
importance was attached to any villages or towns in those days, and
there were very few fixed places of residence that were of any
considerable account. The reason is, that towns are the seats of
commerce and manufactures, and they derive their chief importance from
those pursuits; whereas the Monguls and Tartars led almost exclusively
a wandering and pastoral life, and all their ideas of wealth and
grandeur were associated with great flocks and herds of cattle, and
handsome tents, and long trains of wagons loaded with stores of
clothing, arms, and other movables, and vast encampments in the
neighborhood of rich and extended pasture-grounds. Those who lived
permanently in fixed houses they looked down upon as an inferior
class, confined to one spot by their poverty or their toil, while they
themselves could roam at liberty with their flocks and herds over the
plains, riding fleet horses or dromedaries, and encamping where they
pleased in the green valleys or on the banks of the meandering
streams.

Karakorom was accordingly by no means a great and splendid city. It
was surrounded by what was called a mud wall--that is, a wall made of
blocks of clay dried in the sun. The houses of the inhabitants were
mere hovels, and even the palace of the king, and all the other public
buildings, were of very frail construction; for all the architecture
of the Monguls in those days took its character from the tent, which
was the type and model, so to speak, of all other build