VALLEYS AXD GREAT LEVELS OF THE EARTH. 



225 



were no fences, and sometimes the route was marked at intervals by heaps of stones, 

 intended as guides when the ground should be covered with snow. I had some anxiety 

 about our carriage ; the breaking of a wheel would have left us perfectly helpless in a 

 desolate country, perhaps more than a hundred miles from any place where we could get 

 it repaired. Indeed, on the whole road to Chioff there was not a single place where we 

 could have had any material injury repaired ; and the remark of the old traveller is yet 

 emphatically true, that * there be small succour in these parts.' " Nothing is more 

 remarkable than the successive appearance of thousands of tumuli, which overspread the 

 great levels of southern Russia. They are mounds of earth the mansions of the dead 

 of past ages occupying sites which are now tenantless for leagues around them, and 

 only visited occasionally by droves of cattle and the passing traveller. Observing only a 

 few specimens, they might be concluded to be indications of the route between different 

 places, did not their number, symmetrical form, general resemblance, and contents, when 

 ever opened, disprove the idea. The earliest adventurers from the west of Europe into 

 these waste places mention the tumuli. " We journeyed," says William de Rubruquis, 

 " with no other objects in view than earth and sky, and occasionally the sea upon our 

 right, which is called the sea of Tanais ; and moreover the sepulchres of the Comani, 

 which seemed about two leagues distant, constructed according to the mode of burial 

 which characterised their ancestors." Simple as these funereal monuments are of an 

 ancient world, their very simplicity is sublime, harmonising with the appearances of 

 nature in the steppes, unaffected by the hand of Time, by which the Parian marble is 

 speedily defaced. Among the occurrences of the steppes, that of a grass fire is not 

 uncommon, occasioned by the unextinguished embers left by parties who have bivouacked 

 in them, which lay hold of the high and dry vegetation in their neighbourhood, and spread 

 temporary desolation over large tracts of country. The monotony of these plains gives 

 great effect to the appearance of the Caucasus. On the approach from the north, these 

 mountains are seen at a vast distance, rising abruptly from a level country, apparently an 



impassable barrier stretching from the Caspian 

 to the Black Sea, the white head of Elburz 

 towering above the lower summits of the range. 

 In the diagram is represented Mount Kasibeck, 

 the snowy region beginning at fig. 2., a height of 

 10,200 feet; opposite/^. 3. is the bed of the 

 Terek ; fig. 4. shows the profile of hill near the 

 Steppe ; 5. the level of the Caspian, and 6. of the 

 Black Sea. On the eastern side of the Volga, 

 the steppes extend far into the heart of Asia ; 

 but their physiognomy greatly alters. The soil 

 becomes more unfruitful ; vegetation only shows itself here and there ; the salt steppes 

 appear, abounding in pools and streams of salt and bitter waters, on the banks of which 

 the willow and the reed only grow the sole means of supporting the herds of the 

 Turcoman in winter, whom circumstances therefore render nomadic. 



The desert plains meaning not merely solitudes, but sandy and stony wastes occupy 

 an enormous space of the lowland regions of the globe. They are rare on the continent 

 of America, but occur in the lower part of Peru, where a considerable district is found, 

 exhibiting the features of a true Sahara a surface of rock covered with moveable sand, 

 not a drop of rain falling upon it. Still such tracts are seldom met with in the New 

 World, while they are so abundant upon the ancient continent as to constitute a marked 

 distinction between the two regions. The reproach is of old standing against Africa, of 

 being the most barren and unproductive of the great divisions of the earth a reproach 



Steppes of the Caucasus. 



