Valens consented to grant their petition on condition that they should surrender their arms, give up their children as hostages, and all be baptized in the Christian faith. Their terror and despair led them to assent to these conditions. So the entire nation, numbering one million souls,--counting men, women, and children,--were allowed to cross the river. Several days and nights were consumed in the transport of the vast multitudes. The writers of the times liken the passage to that of the Hellespont by the hosts of Xerxes. The enemy that had so terrified the Goths were the Huns, a monstrous race of fierce nomadic horsemen, that two centuries and more before the Christian era were roving the deserts north of the Great Wall of China (see p. 13). Migrating from that region, they moved slowly to the west, across the great plains of Central Asia, and, after wandering several centuries, appeared in Europe. They belonged to a different race (the Turanian) from all the other European tribes with which we have been so far concerned. Their features were hideous, their noses being flattened, and their cheeks gashed, to render their appearance more frightful, as well as to prevent the growth of a beard. Even the barbarous Goths called them "barbarians." Scarcely had the fugitive Visigoths been received within the limits of the empire before a large company of their kinsmen, the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths), also driven from their homes by the same terrible Huns, crowded to the banks of the Danube, and pleaded that they might be allowed, as their countrymen had been, to place the river between themselves and their dreaded enemies. But Valens, becoming alarmed at the presence of so many barbarians within his dominions, refused their request; whereupon they, dreading the fierce and implacable foe behind more than the wrath of the Roman emperor in front, crossed the river with arms in their hands. At this moment the Visigoths, rising in revolt, joined their kinsmen that were just now forcing the passage of the Danube, and began to ravage the Danubian provinces. Valens despatched swift messengers to Gratian in the West, asking for assistance against the foe he had so imprudently admitted within the limits of the empire.