Chinese power, a portion of the Hioungum were driven south into Central
Asia. The impulse thus given, uninterruptedly propagated itself to the
primitive country of the Fins, on the banks of the Ural, whence irrupted
a torrent of Huns, Avars, Chasars, and divers mixtures of Asiatic races.
The armies of the Huns first appeared on the banks of the Volga, then in
Pannonia, finally on the borders of the Marne and the Po, ravaging the
beautiful plains where, from the time of Antwor, the genius of man had
accumulated monuments upon monuments. Thus blew from the Mongolian
desert a pestilential wind which, even as far as the Cisalpine plains,
blighted the delicate flower of art, the object of cares so constant and
so tender."[18]

The temperature is extremely variable in these steppes, so that Madame
de Bourboulon records having experienced in the morning a frost of one
degree below zero, and some hours afterwards a heat of thirty degrees
above zero (Centigrade). These changes are most numerous and most
violent in the spring.

The difficulty of travel is increased by the peculiar rapid trot of the
Mongol horses and the formidable unevenness of the ground. The jolting
is almost intolerable. However carefully the traveller's wares may have
been packed, they are infallibly damaged; and Madame de Bourboulon says
that they strewed the desert with the wreck of their wardrobe and their
linen. Her husband laughingly averred that the very money in the
iron-bound chests was broken by the violent friction, and his veracity,
at first impugned, was confirmed by the exhibition of a handful of
silver filings; a pile of piastres was found pared and ground down as if
by a file, and had the journey been much prolonged, "all would have been
reduced to dust."

* * * * *

As the travellers advanced, they observed the increasing scarcity of
vegetation; here and there might be seen a few tufts of saxifrage
lifting up amidst the stones their rose-tinted posies--a rank, thorny,
and creeping herbage--some attenuated heaths, and in the crevices and
hollows of the rocks, a little couch grass. They had taken leave of the
irises, white, purple, and yellow, and the scarlet anemones, which at
first had brightened the way, and filled the plains with their
delicious balmy odour.

Madame de Bourboulon affords us a glimpse, and an interesting one, of
the manners of the nomad tribes:--"Throughout the day a tropical heat
had pre