In the autumn water is less scarce; a partial verdure springs through the withered stems of grass and plants, and the herds recover. The winter is intensely cold. The piercing winds which have swept across the North American continent and the Arctic regions of Siberia, howl over these now desolate and cheerless regions, where nothing breaks the monotony of thousands and thousands of miles of level ground, except the tumuli of the ancient Mongol warriors, the tents of the Kalmuck and the Tartar, and the huts of the Cossack or the herdsman, and where nothing intervenes to arrest the violence or to modify the rigour of the freezing blast. No language can give an adequate idea of these _metels_ as they are called in Southern Russia. They come down on the land with such whirling and driving gusts, such furious and continuous tempests, such whistlings and roarings of the wind, and a sky so murky and threatening, that no hurricane at sea can be more terrific. The snow is now piled up mountains high, now hollowed into deep valleys, now spread out into rushing and heaving billows; or it is driven through the air, fluttering like a long white veil, until the wind has scattered the last shreds before it. Whole flocks of sheep, surprised by the tempest close to their folds, and even herds of horses, have been driven into the Black Sea or the Caspian, and drowned. When beset by such dangers their instinct usually prompts them to cluster together in a circle and form a compact mass, so as to present a less surface to the _metel_. But the force of the wind gradually compels them onwards;—they reach the shore, their footing fails, and finally they are all engulphed in the waves. In the European Steppes the cold often reaches 30° Reaumur, or far below the point at which boiling water cast up in the air falls to the earth in a shower of frozen hailbeads. Even where some of the most southern Asiatic Steppes assume the character of the African Sahara, and where the camel in the summer sinks up to his knees in the burning sand, in winter the icicles gather as thickly on the few straggling hairs of the Tartar’s chin, as they do on the bushy beard of the Muscovite on the banks of the Neva. Perovski, the governor of Orenburg, on his expedition to Khiva, six winters since, was arrested by the impassable snow, on the very route which he dared not undertake in the summer months for fear of being buried under the hot and drifting sand, as it has not unfrequently happened to the caravans which ventured to invade the solitude of this desert.