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 population 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. Civilization 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 north-eastern shore of the Sea of Azov, stretches to the foot of Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and is thence prolonged beyond the Ural range, to the north and south of the metaliferous Altaï; but mainly between the latter and the Thian-Shian mountains, to the seas of Okhotsk and Jesso. The word _Steppe_, supposed to be of Tartar origin, primarily signifies an uncultivated plain, a prairie. The Steppes, in short, are ordinarily plains of very considerable extent interrupted at intervals by chains of hills or mountains; but, on the whole, of a level, monotonous character, and with a considerable part below the level of the ocean. Their area may be roughly computed at 4,200,000 square miles. Occasionally, in traversing them, we meet with lakes or brackish ponds, with forests of pines, even with patches of cultivated ground. Sometimes they form lofty and extensive plateaux, as in the case of the plateau of Gobi, also called, but most inappropriately, _Scha-mo_, or the Sandy Desert, and _Scha-ho_, or the Sandy River.