anners of the Mongous, a pastoral nation, which consists of
about two hundred thousand families. [28] But the valor of the Huns had
extended the narrow limits of their dominions; and their rustic chiefs,
who assumed the appellation of Tanjou, gradually became the conquerors,
and the sovereigns of a formidable empire. Towards the East, their
victorious arms were stopped only by the ocean; and the tribes, which
are thinly scattered between the Amoor and the extreme peninsula of
Corea, adhered, with reluctance, to the standard of the Huns. On the
West, near the head of the Irtish, in the valleys of Imaus, they found
a more ample space, and more numerous enemies. One of the lieutenants
of the Tanjou subdued, in a single expedition, twenty-six nations; the
Igours, [29] distinguished above the Tartar race by the use of letters,
were in the number of his vassals; and, by the strange connection of
human events, the flight of one of those vagrant tribes recalled the
victorious Parthians from the invasion of Syria. [30] On the side of
the North, the ocean was assigned as the limit of the power of the Huns.
Without enemies to resist their progress, or witnesses to contradict
their vanity, they might securely achieve a real, or imaginary, conquest
of the frozen regions of Siberia. The Northren Sea was fixed as the
remote boundary of their empire. But the name of that sea, on whose
shores the patriot Sovou embraced the life of a shepherd and an exile,
[31] may be transferred, with much more probability, to the Baikal, a
capacious basin, above three hundred miles in length, which disdains the
modest appellation of a lake [32] and which actually communicates with
the seas of the North, by the long course of the Angara, the Tongusha,
and the Jenissea. The submission of so many distant nations might
flatter the pride of the Tanjou; but the valor of the Huns could be
rewarded only by the enjoyment of the wealth and luxury of the empire of
the South. In the third century [32a] before the Christian aera, a
wall of fifteen hundred miles in length was constructed, to defend
the frontiers of China against the inroads of the Huns; [33] but this
stupendous work, which holds a conspicuous place in the map of the
world, has never contributed to the safety of an unwarlike people.
The cavalry of the Tanjou frequently consisted of two or three hundred
thousand men, formidable by the matchless dexterity with which they
managed their bows and their hors