but
its "local colour" is founded on good evidence. Probably the Huns,
despite the terrors of their name, the echoes of which still come down
the corridors of time; despite the awful titles which their leaders won
(such as Attila, "the Scourge of God"), were not on a very much lower
plane of civilisation than the Goths with whom they fought, or with the
other barbarians who tore at the prostrate body of the Roman Empire. One
may see people of very much the same type to-day on the outer edges of
Islam in some desert quarters; one may see and, if one has such taste
for the wild and the free in life as has Cunninghame Graham, one may
admire:

There in the Sahara the wild old life, the life in which man and
the animals seem to be nearer to each other than in the
countries where we have changed beasts into meat-producing
engines deprived of individuality, still takes its course, as it
has done from immemorial time. Children respect their parents,
wives look at their husbands almost as gods, and at the tent
door elders administer what they imagine justice, stroking their
long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial
functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels' hair
bound round their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat
on which they sit a woolsack or a judge's bench, with a carved
wooden canopy above it, decked with the royal arms.

Thus, when the blue baft-clad, thin, wiry desert-dweller on his
lean horse or mangy camel comes into a town, the townsmen look
on him as we should look on one of Cromwell's Ironsides, or on a
Highlander, of those who marched to Derby and set King George's
teeth, in pudding time, on edge.

The Huns' movement from the north-east was the first Asiatic invasion of
Europe since the fall of the Persian Empire. Almost simultaneously with
it the Saracen first entered from the south, as the ally of the
Christian Emperor against the Goths; and another Gothic chronicler,
Ammianus, tells how the Saracen warriors inspired also a lively horror
in the Gothic mind. They came into battle almost naked, and having
sprung upon a foe "with a hoarse and melancholy howl, sucked his
life-blood from his throat." The Saracen of Ammianus was the forerunner
of the Turk, the Hun of Jordanes, the forerunner of the Bulgarian. In
neither case, of course, can the Gothic chronicler be accepted as an
unprejudiced witness. But it i