paces of burning desert, tracts stretched out
beneath the tropical sun. Siberia goes for a proverb for cold: India is
a proverb for heat. It is not adequately supplied with rivers, and it
has little of inland sea. In these respects it stands in singular
contrast with Europe. If then the tribes which inhabit a cold country
have, generally speaking, more energy than those which are relaxed by
the heat, it follows that you will have in Asia two descriptions of
people brought together in extreme, sometimes in sudden, contrariety
with each other, the strong and the weak. Here then, as some
philosophers have argued,[22] you have the secret of the despotisms and
the vast empires of which Asia has been the seat; for it always
possesses those who are naturally fitted to be tyrants, and those also
whose nature it is to tremble and obey. But we may take another, perhaps
a broader, view of the phenomenon. The sacred writer says: "Give me
neither riches nor beggary:" and, as the extremes of abundance and of
want are prejudicial to our moral well-being, so they seem to be
prejudicial to our intellectual nature also. Mental cultivation is best
carried on in temperate regions. In the north men are commonly too cold,
in the south too hot, to think, read, write, and act. Science,
literature, and art refuse to germinate in the frost, and are burnt up
by the sun.

Now it so happened that the region in which this party of Huns settled
themselves was one of the fairest and most fruitful in Asia. It is
bounded by deserts, it is in parts encroached on by deserts; but viewed
in its length and breadth, in its produce and its position, it seems a
country equal, or superior, to any which that vast continent, as at
present known, can show. Its lower portion is the extensive territory of
Khorasan, the ancient Bactriana; going northwards across the Oxus, we
come into a spacious tract, stretching to the Aral and to the Jaxartes,
and measuring a square of 600 miles. It was called in ancient times
Sogdiana; in the history of the middle ages Transoxiana, or "beyond the
Oxus;" by the Eastern writers Maver-ul-nere, or Mawer-al-nahar, which is
said to have the same meaning; and it is now known by the name Bukharia.
To these may be added a third province, at the bottom of the Aral,
between the mouth of the Oxus and the Caspian, called Kharasm. These,
then, were the regions in which the Huns in question took up their
abode.

The two large countries I first