40 , FROM WEST TO EAST. 



CHAPTER Y. 



THE STEPPES : THE DESERT IX RUSSIA, SIBERIA, AND TARTARY. 



HITHERTO we have only been speaking of miniature deserts, of the 

 more limited of the world's wildernesses, where some degree of victory 

 seems to reward man's arduous struggle with nature. Those which 

 we have hitherto described are open to the " breath of civilization." 

 The pilgrim who visits them incurs no danger ; he has nothing to 

 dread from beasts of prey ; the men he meets with obey the same 

 general laws as himself ; he is carried into their furthest recesses by 

 the all-embracing railroad. He sees on every hand the efforts of 

 science to confine the desert within ever narrower boundaries ; to 

 reclaim the moor, and the fen, and the sandy waste ; to reap from 

 the once barren soil an abundant harvest. But if he pass from 

 England or France to Germany, and thence across the provinces of 

 unhappy Poland, he will find himself daily advancing into a country 

 of more and more savage aspect. He will observe that vegetation 

 loses its happy variety ; that the cultivated fields become scarcer ; the 

 morass and forest more frequent, and of greater extent ; the popula- 

 tion poorer, more squalid, and less numerous. Wide and dreary 

 intervals separate the different towns ; here and there, surrounded 

 by gloomy woods, are scattered the melancholy-looking villages. 

 Travelling becomes difficult, for the roads are ill-kept ; he has left 

 behind him the modern magician, the engineer ; wild wolves haunt 

 his path ; and he has good cause to fear the robber's knife. Civili- 

 zation here has left barbarism for centuries to itself ; we are 

 approaching the great Deserts, the Steppes of Northern Asia. 



The Steppes commence near the thirty-fifth degree of longitude, 

 east of the Dnieper, as soon as we quit the fertile plains of the 

 Ukraine to enter the country of the Don Cossacks. They are the 

 characteristic feature of the immense zone which starts from the 



