or climb over them.
Besides, there are squalls of wind, and tornadoes of snow
which attack the pilgrims. Even with double shoes, and in
thick furs, one cannot help trembling and shivering.'

During the seven days that Hiouen-thsang crossed these Alpine passes
he lost fourteen of his companions.

What is most important, however, in this early portion of the Chinese
traveller is the account which he gives of the high degree of
civilisation among the tribes of Central Asia. We had gradually
accustomed ourselves to believe in an early civilisation of Egypt, of
Babylon, of China, of India; but now that we find the hordes of Tatary
possessing in the seventh century the chief arts and institutions of
an advanced society, we shall soon have to drop the name of barbarians
altogether. The theory of M. Oppert, who ascribes the original
invention of the cuneiform letters and a civilisation anterior to that
of Babylon and Nineveh to a Turanian or Scythian race, will lose much
of its apparent improbability; for no new wave of civilisation had
reached these countries between the cuneiform period of their
literature and history and the time of Hiouen-thsang's visit. In the
kingdom of Okini, on the western frontier of China, Hiouen-thsang
found an active commerce, gold, silver, and copper coinage;
monasteries, where the chief works of Buddhism were studied, and an
alphabet, derived from Sanskrit. As he travelled on he met with mines,
with agriculture, including pears, plums, peaches, almonds, grapes,
pomegranates, rice, and wheat. The inhabitants were dressed in silk
and woollen materials. There were musicians in the chief cities who
played on the flute and the guitar. Buddhism was the prevailing
religion, but there were traces of an earlier worship, the Bactrian
fire-worship. The country was everywhere studded with halls,
monasteries, monuments, and statues. Samarkand formed at that early
time a kind of Athens, and its manners were copied by all the tribes
in the neighbourhood. Balkh, the old capital of Bactria, was still an
important place on the Oxus, well fortified, and full of sacred
buildings. And the details which our traveller gives of the exact
circumference of the cities, the number of their inhabitants, the
products of the soil, the articles of trade, can leave no doubt in our
minds that he relates what he had seen and heard himself. A new page
in the history of the world is here opened, and new ruins pointe