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Updated: October 8, 2025
Roughly speaking, Siberia may be divided into three longitudinal belts: first, the tundra, which borders the Arctic Ocean and extends several hundred miles south of it; second, the forest belt, several hundred miles wide, which extends across the continent; third, the southern part, consisting of desert steppes, swamps, grassy plains, and a few broken forests.
"Come up with me," he said; and in one moment she had been swept up before him on the little horse's neck, and was flying so wildly over the Steppes that her breath and sense failed her, and she knew no more till she was safe by Mrs. Bunker's fireside again. "Suppose now I go to sleep again; what should I like to see next? A sunny place, I think, where there is sea to look at.
The embroidery, Sons of the Blue Wolf, all fitted into a special pattern. But what a pattern! Scythian art, the ornament that the warriors of Genghis Khan bore so proudly. Tatars, Mongols the barbarians who had swept from the fastness of the steppes to change the course of history, not only in Asia but across the plains of middle Europe.
But westward from Chinese Mongolia extends a broad region of the steppes, bordering upon Europe on the west, and traversed by numerous wandering tribes known by the name of the Kirghis hordes.
Another, passing between the Caspian and the Black Sea, filled the steppes round the Crimea, and; passing on over the Balkan and the Carpathians towards the west, became that great Teutonic nationality which, under various names, but all closely akin, filled, when we first hear of them in historical times, the space between the Black Sea and the Baltic, and was then slowly but surely driving before them the great wave of the Celts which had preceded them in their wandering, and which had probably followed the same line of march as the ancestors of the Greeks and Latins.
A year of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it. All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi's flow to the man in Kansas.
In the bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist nothing was stirring; the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs, which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would still stand as they had stood, wit h no regret for the dead nor interest in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.
Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in Middle Europe, were utterly destroyed.
And in particular the roofs of the colossal Palazzo delle Finanze had a disastrous effect, spreading out like far, bare steppes of cruel hideousness. And it was upon the desolation and abomination of all the newly erected piles that the eyes of the old soldier of conquest at last rested. Silence ensued. Pierre felt the faint chill of hidden, unacknowledged sadness pass by, and courteously waited.
This great event which called forth abundant congratulations and outbursts of noisy delight was the main cause of the most tremendous and most disastrous war of modern times. If he had not blindly counted on his father-in-law's friendship, would Napoleon, in spite of all his audacity, have ventured to march to the Russian steppes, without even taking the precaution of reviving Poland?
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