The remarkable feature of the table-land is the desert of the Great Gobi, which occupies an area of 300,000 square miles in its eastern extremity, interrupted only by a few spots of pasture and low bushes. Wide tracts are flat, and covered with small stones or sand, and widely separated from one another are low hills destitute of wood and water; its general elevation is 4220 feet above the sea, but it is intersected from west to east by a depressed valley aptly named Shamo, or the “Sea of Sand,” which is also mixed with salt. West from it lies the Han-Hai, the “Dry Sea,” a barren plain of shifting sand blown into high ridges. Here, as in all deserts, the summer sun is scorching, no rain falls, and when thick fog occurs it is only the precursor of fierce winds. All the plains of Mongolia are intensely cold in winter, because the hills to the north are too low to screen them from the polar blast, and, being higher than the Siberian deserts, they are bitterly cold; no month in the year is free from frost and snow, yet it is not deep enough to prevent cattle from finding pasture. Sandy deserts like that of the Great Gobi occupy much of the country south of the Chinese branches of the Altaï. Such is the stupendous zone of high land that girds the old continent throughout its whole length. In the extensive plains on each side of it several independent mountain systems rise, though much inferior to it in extent and height. CHAPTER V. Secondary Mountain Systems of the Great Continent—That of Scandinavia— Great Britain and Ireland—The Ural Mountains—The Great Northern Plain. THE great northern plain is broken by two masses of high land, in every respect inferior to those described; they are the Scandinavian system and the Ural mountains, the arbitrary limit between Europe and Asia. The range of primary mountains which has given its form to the Scandinavian peninsula begins at Cape Lindesnaes, the most southerly point of Norway, and, after running along its western coast 1000 miles in a north-easterly direction, ends at Cape Nord Kyn, on the Polar Ocean, the extremity of Europe. The highest elevation of this chain is not more than 8412 feet. It has been compared to a great wave or billow, rising gradually from the east, which, after having formed a crest, falls perpendicularly into the sea in the west. There are 3696 square miles of this peninsula above the line of perpetual snow. The southern portion of the chain consists of ridges following the general direction of the range, 150 miles broad. At the distance of 360 miles from Cape Lindesnaes, the mountains form a single elevated mass, terminated by a table-land which maintains an altitude of 4500 feet for 100 miles. It slopes towards the east, and plunges at once in high precipices into a deep sea on the west.