are
accustomed to levy on their slaves, on some extraordinary occasions; for
instance, marriages, burials, and distant voyages. On these occasions,
each collection of ten tents is obliged to furnish a horse and a camel.
Every Mongol who owns three cows must pay a pail of milk; if he possesses
five, a pot of koumis or wine, made of fermented milk. The owner of a
flock of 100 sheep, furnishes a felt carpet or a tent covering; he who
owns three camels must give a bundle of long cords to fasten the baggage.
However, in a country where everything is subject to the arbitrary will
of the chief, these regulations, as may be supposed, are not strictly
observed. Sometimes the subjects are altogether exempted from their
operation, and sometimes also there is exacted from them much more than
the law decrees.

Robbery and murder are very severely punished among the Mongols; but the
injured individuals, or their parents, are themselves obliged to
prosecute the prisoner before the tribunals: the worst outrage remains
unpunished if no one appears to prosecute. In the ideas of a
semi-barbarous people, the man who attempts to take the property or life
of any one, is deemed to have committed merely a private offence,
reparation for which ought to be demanded, not by the public, but by the
injured party or his family. Theses rude notions of justice are common
to China and to Thibet; and for that matter, we know that Rome herself
had no other until the establishment of Christianity, which caused the
right of the community to prevail over the right of the individual.

Mongolia, generally speaking, wears a gloomy and savage aspect; the eye
is nowhere recreated by the charm and variety of landscape scenery. The
monotony of the steppes is only interrupted by ravines, by vast rents of
the earth, or by stony and barren hills. Towards the north, in the
district of Khalkhas, nature is more animated; tall forests decorate the
summits of the mountains, and numerous rivers water the rich pastures of
the plains; but in the long winter season, the earth remains buried under
a thick bed of snow. Towards the Great Wall, Chinese industry glides
like a serpent into the desert. Towns arise on all sides. The Land of
Grass is crowned with harvests, and the Mongol shepherds find themselves
driven back northwards, little by little, by the encroachments of
agriculture.

Sandy plains occupy, perhaps, the greater part of Mongolia; you do not
see a sing