iformity, is not without a certain charm, as many
travellers have acknowledged. Madame de Bourboulon, writing of it,
says:--

"I grew accustomed to the desert; it is only for a few days that I have
had experience of tent-life, and yet it seems to me as if I had always
lived so. The desert is like the ocean: the human eye plunges into the
infinite, and everything speaks of God. The Mongolian nomad loves his
horse as the sailor loves his ship. It is useless to ask him to be bound
by the sedentary habits of the Chinese, to build fixed habitations, and
cultivate the soil. This free child of Nature will let you treat him as
a rude barbarian, but in himself he despises civilized man, who creeps
and crawls like a worm about the small corner of land which he calls his
property. The immense plain belongs to him, and his herds, which follow
his erratic courses, supply him with food and clothing. What wants he
more, so long as the earth does not fail him?"

There is another light in which this vast desert may be looked at.
Unquestionably, its influence on the destinies of the human race has
been injurious; it has checked the progress of the Semitic civilization.
The primitive peoples of India and Tibet were civilized at an early
period of the world's history; but the immense wilderness put an
impassable barrier between them and the barbarous tribes of Northern
Asia. More than the Himalaya, more than the snow-capped peaks of
Sirinagur and Gorkha, these boundless wastes, alternately withered by a
tropical summer, and blighted by a rigorous winter, have prevented for
ages all intercommunication, all fusion between the inhabitants of
Northern and those of Southern Asia; and it is thus that India and
Tibet have remained the only regions of this part of the world which
have enjoyed the benefits of civilization, of the refinement of manners,
and of the genius of the arts.

The barbarians who, in the last agonies of the Roman Empire, invaded and
devastated Europe, issued from the steppes and table-lands of Mongolia.
As Humboldt says--"If intellectual culture has directed its course from
the East to the West, like the vivifying light of the sun, barbarism at
a later period followed the same route, when it threatened to plunge
Europe again into darkness. A tawny race of shepherds of Thon-Klueu--that
is to say, of Turkish origin, the Hioungum--inhabited, living under
sheepskin tents, the elevated table-land of Gobi. Long formidable to the