River. There is a forest belt along the eastern, outward face of the Kingan Range, by which the Mongolian upland drops to the lowland of Manchuria, but there is a last detached grassland in Manchuria, to be compared with the similarly detached grassland of Hungary five thousand miles away at the west end of the steppe belt. Grassy Manchuria does not, however, extend through to the Pacific shore, for there a coast range of mountains, thickly forested, enframes the open country and deflects the eastward flowing Amur to a northward mouth.
Let us clear this long ribbon of steppes of its modern railways and corn-fields, and people it again in imagination with horse-riding Tartars, who are none other than Turks; it is said that the Turkish language of Constantinople can to this day be understood by the Arctic tribe at the mouth of the Lena River. For some recurrent reason—it may have been owing to spells of droughty years—these Tartar mobile hordes have from time to time in the course of history gathered their whole strength together and fallen like a devastating avalanche upon the settled agricultural peoples either of China or Europe. In the West we hear of them first as the Huns, who in the middle of the fifth century after
