To the north of the Great Horde, in the government of Irkutsk (Siberia), we meet with the Agro-Mongolian people of the Buriäts, numbering about 35,000 families. They are given to Chamanism, an idolatrous worship widely spread through Eastern Siberia. Their supreme divinity inhabits the sun, and reigns over a host of lesser gods. * * * * * Finally, between Lake Baïkal and the Altaï Mountains to the north, the Ala-Tau mountains west, the Great Wall of China south, and the sea east, stretches the immense territory commonly known as Mongolia, and inhabited in part by the tribes which represent the Mongol type in all its primitive purity. This great desert, where grassy lands alternate with dry and sandy or saline plains, was formerly the seat of a flourishing empire, established by Chingis-Khán in 1227, which gave birth to the three Mongol kingdoms of Krim, Kasan, and Astrachan. Mongolic empires, at a later period, arose in China, Turkistan, Siberia, Southern Russia, and Persia. The Mongolian dynasty lost its hold on China in 1360, and a century later was driven out of Russia. In Central Asia it was rehabilitated in 1369, by the illustrious Timur; but a hundred years afterwards the empire was again crushed by its own weight. Baber, a descendant of Timur, conquered India, and erected there a Mongolian throne, which endured until the soldiers of Great Britain defeated Tippoo Saib and captured Delhi. Most Mongolic tribes are now under the rule of the nations whom they once had conquered, the Tungusic sovereigns of China, the Russian Czars, and the Turkish Sultans.[39] The ruins of Mongolian grandeur are still visible in those solitary cities, which the traveller in the desert discovers half overwhelmed in sand. "We met," says the Abbé Huc, "with an imposing and majestic memorial of antiquity. It was a great city, desolate and abandoned. The crenellated ramparts, the watch-towers, the four great gates, situated at the four cardinal points, were all in perfect preservation; but all was buried three-fourths deep in the ground, and covered with a thick sward. We entered its vast precinct with a profound emotion of awe and melancholy. We saw neither _débris_ nor ruins, but only the outline of a beautiful and spacious city, wrapped in grass and weeds as in a funeral shroud." Similar relics of the past are scattered over the deserts of Mongolia, but everything connected with their origin is enveloped in shadow.