XIV. PLAINS, STEPPES AND DESERTS…

XIV. PLAINS, STEPPES AND DESERTS

[Sidenote: Relief of the sea floor.]

Anthropo-geography has to do primarily with the forms and relief of the land. The relief of the sea floor influences man only indirectly. It does this by affecting the forms of the coast, by contributing to the action of tides in scouring out river estuaries, as on the flat beaches of Holland and England, by determining conditions for the abundant littoral life of the sea, the fisheries of the continental shelf which are factors in the food quest and the distribution of settlements. Moreover, the ocean floor enters into the problem of laying telegraph cables, and thereby assumes a certain commercial and political importance. The name of the Telegraph Plateau of the North Atlantic, crossed by three cables, points to the relation between these and submarine relief. So also does the erratic path of the cable from southwestern Australia to South Africa via Keeling Island and Mauritius.

Submarine reliefs have yet greater significance in their relation to the distribution of the human race over the whole earth; for what is now a shallow sea may in geologically recent times have been dry land, on which primitive man crossed from continent to continent. It is vital to the theory of the Asiatic origin of the American Indian that in Miocene times a land bridge spanned the present shallows of Bering Sea. Hence the slight depth of this basin has the same bio-geographical significance as that of the British seas, the waters of the Malay Archipelago, and the Melanesian submarine platform. The impressive fact about "Wallace's Line" is the depth of the narrow channel which it follows through Lombok and Macassar Straits and which, in recent geological times, defined the southeastern shore of Asia. In all these questions of former land connection, anthropo-geography follows the lead of bio-geography, whose deductions, based upon the dispersal of countless plant and animal forms, point to the paths of human distribution.

[Sidenote: Mean elevations of the continents.]

The mean elevation of the continents above sea level indicates the average life conditions of their populations as dependent upon relief. The 1010 meters (3313 feet) of Asia indicate its predominant highland character. The 330 meters (1080 feet) representing the average height of Europe, and the 310 meters (1016 feet) of Australia indicate the preponderance of lowlands. Nevertheless, anthropo-geography rarely lends itself to a mathematical statement of physical conditions. Such a statement only obscures the facts. The 660 meters (2164 feet) mean elevation of Africa indicates a relief higher than Europe, but gives no hint of the plateau character of the Dark Continent, in which lowlands and mountains are practically negligible features; while the almost identical figure (650 meters or 2133 feet) for both North and South America is the average derived from extensive lowlands in close juxtaposition to high plateaus capped by lofty mountain ranges. Such mathematical generalizations indicate the general mass of the continental upheaval, but not the way this mass is divided into low and high reliefs.[1026]

The method of anthropo-geography is essentially analytical, and therefore finds little use for general orometric statements, which may be valuable to the science of geo-morphology with its radically different standpoint. For instance, geo-morphology may calculate from all the dips and gaps in the crest of a mountain range the average height of its passes, Anthropo-geography, on the other hand, distinguishes between the various passes according as they open lines of greater or less resistance to the historical movement across the mountain barriers. It finds that one deep breach in the mountain wall, like the Mohawk Depression[1027] and Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian system,[1028] Truckee Pass in the Sierra Nevada[1029] and the Brenner in the Alps,[1030] has more far-reaching and persistent historical consequences than a dozen high-laid passes that only notch the crest. Pack-trail, road and railroad seek the former, avoid the latter; one draws from a wide radius, while the other serves a restricted local need. Therefore anthropo-geography, instead of clumping the passes, sorts them out, and notes different relations in each.

[Sidenote: Distribution of reliefs.]

In continents and countries the anthropo-geographer looks to see not what reliefs are present, but how they are distributed; whether highlands and lowlands appear in unbroken masses as in Asia, or alternate in close succession as in western Europe; whether the transition from one to the other is abrupt as in western South America, or gradual as in the United States. A simple and massive land structure lends the same trait of the simple and massive to every kind of historical movement, because it collects the people into large groups and starts them moving in broad streams, as it were. This fact explains the historical preponderance of lowland peoples and especially of steppe nomads over the small, scattered groups inhabiting isolated mountain valleys. The island of Great Britain illustrates the same principle on a small scale in the turbid, dismembered history of independent Scotland, with its Highlanders and Lowlanders, its tribes and clans separated by mountains, gorges, straits, and fiords,[1031] in contrast to the smoother, unified course of history in the more uniform England. Carl Ritter compares the dull uniformity of historical development and relief in Africa with the variegated assemblage of highlands and lowlands, nations and peoples, primitive societies and civilized states in the more stimulating environment of Asia.[1032]

[Sidenote: Homologous relief and homologous histories.]

The chief features of mountain relief reappear on a large scale in the continents, which are simply big areas of upheaval lifted above sea level. The continents show therefore homologous regions of lowlands, uplands, plateaus and mountains, each district sustaining definite relations to the natural terrace above or below it, and displaying a history corresponding to that of its counterpart in some distant part of the world, due to a similarity of relations. This appears first in a specialization of products in each tier and hence in more or less economic interdependence, especially where civilization is advanced. The tendency of conquest to unite such obviously complementary districts is persistent. Hence the Central Highland of Asia is fringed with low peripheral lands like Manchuria, China, India and Mesopotamia, into whose history it has repeatedly entered as a disturbing force. All the narrow Pacific districts of the Americas from Alaska to Patagonia are separated by the Cordilleras from the lowlands on the Atlantic face of the continents; all reveal in their history the common handicap arising from an overwhelming preponderance of plateau and mountain and a paucity of lowlands. Colombia, Ecuador and Peru have in the past century been stretching out their hands eastward to grasp sections of the bordering Amazon lowlands, where to-day is the world's great field of conflicting boundary claims. Chile would follow its geographical destiny if it should supplement its high, serrated surface by the plateaus and lowlands of Bolivia, as Cyrus the Persian married the Plateau of Iran to the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Romulus joined the Alban hills to the alluvial fields of the Tiber.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geography of lowlands.]

Well-watered lowlands invite expansion, ethnic, commercial and political. In them the whole range of historical movements meet few obstacles beyond the waters gathering in their runnels and the forests nourished in their rich soils. Limited to 200 meters (660 feet) elevation, lowlands develop no surface features beyond low hills and undulating swells of land. Uniformity of life conditions, monotony of climate as of relief, except where grades of latitude intervene to chill or heat, an absence of natural boundaries, and constant encouragement to intercourse, are the anthropo-geographic traits of lowlands, as opposed to the arresting, detaining grasp of mountains and highland valleys. Small, isolated lowlands, like the mountain-rimmed plains of Greece and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, the Nile flood-plain, Portugal, and Andalusia in Spain, may achieve precocious and short-lived historical importance, owing to the fertility of their alluvial soils, their character as naturally defined districts, and their advantageous maritime location; but while in these restricted lowlands the telling feature has been their barrier boundaries of desert, mountains and sea, the vast level plains of the earth have found their distinctive and lasting historical importance in the fact of their large and unbounded surface.

Such plains have been both source and recipient of every form of historical movement. Owing to their prevailing fitness for agriculture, trade and intercourse, they are favored regions for the final massing of a sedentary population. The areas of greatest density of population in the world, harboring 150 or more to the square kilometer (385 to the square mile), are found in the lowlands of China, the alluvial plains of India, and similar level stretches in the Neapolitan plain and Po Valley, the lowlands of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, England and Scotland. Such a density is found in upland districts (660 to 2000 feet, or 200 to 600 meters) bordering agricultural lowlands, only where industries based upon mineral wealth cause a concentration of population. [See maps pages 8, 9, 559.]

[Sidenote: Extensive plains unfavorable to early development.]

The level or undulating surface of extensive lowlands is not favorable to the early development of civilization. Not only do their wide extent and absence of barriers postpone the transition from nomadism to sedentary life, but their lack of contrasting environments and contrasted developments, which supplement and stimulate, puts chains upon progress. A flat, monotonous relief produces a monotonous existence, necessarily one-sided, needing a complement in upland or mountain. To the pioneer settlers in the lowlands of Missouri the Ozark Plateau was a boon, because its streams furnished water-power for much needed saw and flour mills. Treeless Egypt even before 2500 B. C. depended upon the cedars of the Lebanon Mountains for the construction of its ships; so that the conquest of Lebanon, begun by Thutmose I. and completed by Thutmose III. in about 1470 B. C., had a sound geographical basis.[1033] Similarly the exploitation of the copper, malachite, turquoise and lapis-lazuli of Mount Sinai, minerals not found in the Nile plain, led the ancient Egyptians into extensive mining operations there before 3000 B. C., and resulted in the establishment of Egyptian political supremacy in 2900 B. C., as a measure to protect the mines against the depredations of the neighboring Bedouin tribes.[1034] Lowlands lack the distinctive advantages of highlands found in diversity of climate, water-power, generally in more abundant forests and minerals. The latter are earlier discovered and worked in the tilted strata of mountains and uplands.

Plain countries suffer particularly from a paucity of varied geographic conditions and of resulting contrasts in their population. Their national characters tend to be less richly endowed; their possibilities for development are blighted or retarded, because even racial differences are rapidly obliterated in the uniform geographic environment, A small diversified country like Crete, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Saxony, or Japan, is a geographical multum in parvo. The western half of Europe bears the same stamp, endowing each country and nation with marked individuality born of partial isolation and a varied combination of environment. The larger eastern half of the continent embraced in the plains of Poland and Russia shows monotony in every aspect of human life. This comes out anthropologically in the striking similarity of head-form found everywhere north and east of the Carpathian Mountains, except in the secluded districts of Lithuania and Crimea, which shelter remnants of distinct races. Over all this vast territory the range of cephalic variation is only five units or one-third that in the restricted but diversified territory of western Europe. Italy, only one-eighteenth the size of European Russia, has a range of fifteen units, reflecting in the variety of its human types the diversity of its environment.[1035]

[Sidenote: Conditions for fusion in plains.]

In the plains geography makes for fusion. Russia shows this marked homogeneity, despite a motley collection of race ingredients which have entered into the make-up of the Russian people. Without boundary or barrier, the country has stood wide open to invasion; but the intruders found no secluded corners where they could entrench themselves and preserve their national individuality.[1036] They dropped into a vast melting-pot, which has succeeded in amalgamating the most diverse elements. The long-drawn Baltic-North Sea plain of Europe shows the same power to fuse. Here is found a prevailing blond, long-headed stock from the Gulf of Finland to the Somme River in France.[1037] Yet this natural boulevard has been a passway for races. Prehistoric evidences show that the dark, broad-headed Celtic folk once overspread this plain east to the Weser;[1038] it still tends to trickle down from the southern uplands into the Baltic lowland, and modify the Teutonic type along its southern margin throughout Germany.[1039] The Slavs in historic times reached as far west as the Weser, while the expansion of the Teutons has embraced the whole maritime plain from Brittany to the Finnish Gulf. Here it is difficult to draw an ethnic boundary on the basis of physical differences. The eastern Prussians are Slavonized Teutons, and the adjacent Poles seem to be Teutonized Slavs, while the purest type of Letto-Lithuanian at the eastern corner of the Baltic coast approximates closely to the Anglo-Saxon type which sprang from the western corner.[1040] A similar amalgamation of races and peoples has taken place in the lowlands of England and Scotland, while diversity still lingers in the highlands. In the Lowlands of Scotland, Picts in small numbers, Britons, Scots from Ireland, Angles, Frisians, Northmen and Danes have all been blended and assimilated in habits, customs and speech.[1041]

[Sidenote: Retardation due to monotonous environment.]

This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia. Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything. Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences. Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.[1042] While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or Tracht, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."

[Sidenote: Influence of soils in low plains.]

The more flat and featureless a lowland is, the more important become even the slightest surface irregularities which can draw faint dividing lines among the population. Here a gentle land-swell, river, lake, forest, or water-soaked moor serves as boundary. Especially apparent is the differentiating influence of difference of soils. Gravel and alluvium, sand and clay, chalk and more recent marine sediments, emphasize small geographical differences throughout the North German lowland and its extension through Belgium and Holland; here various soils differentiate the distribution of population. In the Netherlands we find the Frisian element of the Dutch people inhabiting chiefly the clay soils and low fens of the west and northwest, the Saxon in the diluvial tracts of the east, and the Frankish in the river clays and diluvium of the south. All the types have maintained their differences of dialect, styles of houses, racial character, dress and custom.[1043] The only distinctive region in the great western lowland of France, which comprises over half of the country, is Brittany, individualized in its people and history by its peninsula form, its remote western location, and its infertile soil of primary rocks. Within the sedimentary trough of the Paris Basin, a slight Cretacean platform like the meadow land of Perche[1044] (200 to 300 meters elevation) introduces an area of thin population devoted to horse and cattle raising in close proximity to the teeming urban life of Paris. The eastern lowland of England also can be differentiated economically and historically chiefly according to differences of underlying rocks, Carboniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, chalk, boulder clays, and alluvium, which also coincide often with slight variations of relief.[1045] In Russia the contrast between the glaciated surface of the north and the Black Mould belt of the south makes the only natural divisions of that vast country, unless we distinguish also the arid southeastern steppes on the basis of a purely climatic difference. [See map page 484.]

The broad coastal plain of our South Atlantic States contains only low reliefs; but it is diversified by several soil belts, which exert a definite control over the industries of the inhabitants, and thereby over the distribution of the negro population. In Georgia, for instance, the rich alluvial soil of the swampy coast is devoted to the culture of rice and sea-island cotton, and contains over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This belt, which is only 25 miles wide, is succeeded inland by a broader zone of sandy pine barrens, where the proportion of negroes drops to only 20 or 30 per cent. of the total. Yet further inland is another fertile belt, devoted chiefly to the cultivation of upland cotton and harboring from 35 to over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population.[1046] Alabama shows a similar stratification of soils and population from north to south over its level surface. Along the northern border of the state the cereal belt coincides with the deep calcareous soil of the Tennessee River Valley, where negroes constitute from 35 to 60 per cent. of the inhabitants. Next comes the mineral belt, covering the low foot-hills of the Appalachian Mountains. It contains the densest population of the state, less than 17 per cent. of which is negro. South of this is the broad cotton belt of various rich soils, chiefly deep black loam of the river bottoms, which stretches east and west across the state and includes over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This is succeeded by the low, coastal timber belt, marked by a decline in the quality of the soil and the proportion of negro inhabitants.[1047]

[Sidenote: Value of slight elevations.]

In the dead level of extensive plains even slight elevations are seized upon for special uses, or acquire peculiar significance. The Kurgans or burial mounds of the prehistoric inhabitants of Russia, often twenty to fifty feet high, serve to-day as watch-towers for herdsmen tending their flocks.[1048] Similarly the Bou-bous, inhabiting the flat grasslands of the French Congo between the Shari and Ubangui Rivers, use the low knolls dotted over their country, probably old ant-hills, as lookout points against raiders.[1049] The sand hills and ridges which border the southern edges of the North German lowland form districts sharply contrasted to the swampy, wooded depressions of the old deserted river valleys just to the north. Early occupied by a German stock, they furnished the first German colonists to displace the primitive Slav population surviving in those unattractive, inaccessible regions, as seen in the Spreewald near Kottbus to-day.

[Sidenote: Plains and political expansion.]

The boundless horizon which is unfavorable to a nascent people endows them in their belated maturity with the power of mastering large areas. Political expansion is the dominant characteristic of the peoples of the plains. Haxthausen observed that handicapped and retarded Russia commands every geographic condition and national trait necessary for virile and expansive political power.[1050] Muscovite expansion eastward across the lowlands of Europe and Asia is paralleled by the rapid spread of American settlement and dominion across the plains and prairies of the Mississippi Valley, and Hungarian domination of the wide Danubian levels from the foot-hills of the Austrian Alps to the far Carpathian watershed. It was the closely linked lowlands of the Seine and Loire which formed the core of political expansion and centralization in France. Nearly the whole northern lowland of Germany has been gradually absorbed by the kingdom of Prussia, which now comprises in its territory almost two-thirds of the total area of the Empire. Prussian statesmen formulated the policy of German unification and colonial expansion, and to Prussia fell the hereditary headship of the Empire.

Lowland states tend to stretch out and out to boundaries which depend more upon the reach of the central authority than upon physical features. We have seen American settlement and dominion overleap one natural boundary after another between the Mississippi River and the Pacific, from 1804 to 1848. Russia in an equally short period has pushed forward its Asiatic frontier at a dozen points, despite all barriers of desert and mountain. Argentina, blessed with extensive plains, fertile soil and temperate climate, which have served to augment its population both by natural increase and steady immigration (one-fourth of its population is foreign), has expanded across the Rio Negro over the grasslands of the Patagonian plain, and thereby enlarged its area by 259,620 square miles since 1881. The statesman of the plains is a nature-made imperialist; he nurses wide territorial policies and draws his frontiers for the future. To him a "far-flung battle line" is significant only as a means to secure a far-flung boundary line.

[Sidenote: Arid plains.]

From these low, accessible plains of adequate rainfall, which at first encourage primitive nomadism but finally make it yield to sedentary life and to dense populations spreading their farms and cities farther and farther over the unresisting surface of the land, we turn to those boundless arid steppes and deserts which Nature has made forever the homes of restless, rootless peoples. Here quiescence is impossible, the Voelkerwanderung is habitual, migration is permanent. The only change is this eternal restlessness. While the people move, progress stands still. Everywhere the sun-scorched grasslands and waterless waste have drawn the dead-line to the advance of indigenous civilization. They permit no accumulation of productive wealth beyond increasing flocks and herds, and limit even their growth by the food supply of scanty, scattered pasturage. The meager rainfall eliminates forests and therewith a barrier to migrations; it also restricts vegetation to grasses, sedges and those forms which can survive a prolonged summer drought and require a short period of growth.

[Sidenote: Distribution and extent of arid plains.]

The union of arid plains and steppe vegetation is based upon climate, and is therefore a widely distributed phenomenon. These plains, whether high or low, are found in their greatest extent in the dry trade-wind belts, as in the deserts and steppes of Arabia, Persia, Sudan, the Sahara, South Africa and Central Australia; and in vast continental interiors, where the winds arrive robbed of their moisture in passing intervening highlands, as in the grasslands of our western plains, the llanos and pampas of South America, and the steppes of Central Asia. But wherever they occur, whether in Argentina or Russian Turkestan or the higher plains of Mongolia and Tibet, they present the same general characteristics of land surface, climate, flora and fauna, and the same nomadic populations of pastoral or hunting tribes. In them the movement of peoples reaches its culminating point, permanent settlement its nil point. Here the hunting savage makes the widest sweep in pursuit of buffalo or antelope, and pauses least to till a field; here the pastoral nomad follows his systematic wandering in search of pasturage and his hardly less systematic campaigns of conquest. It is the vast area and wide distribution of these arid plains, combined with the mobility which they impose on native human life, that has lent them historical importance, and reproduced in all sections of the world that significant homologous relation of arid and well-watered districts.

[Sidenote: Pastoral life.]

The grasslands of the old world developed historical importance only after the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, horses, camels and yaks. This step in progress resulted in the evolution of peoples who renounced the precarious subsistence of the chase and escaped the drudgery of agriculture, to devote themselves to pastoral life. It was possible only where domesticable animals were present, and where the intelligence of the native or the peculiar pressure exerted by environment suggested the change from a natural to an artificial basis of subsistence. Australia lacked the type of animal. Though North America had the reindeer and buffalo, and South America the guanaco, llama and alpaca, only the last two were domesticated in the Andean highlands; but as these were restricted to altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where pasturage was limited, stock raising in primitive South America was merely an adjunct to the sedentary agriculture of the high intermontane valleys, and never became the basis for pastoral nomadism on the grassy plains. However, when the Spaniards introduced horses and cattle into South America, the Indians and half-breeds of the llanos and pampas became regular pastoral nomads, known as llaneros and gauchos. They are a race of horsemen, wielding javelin and lasso and bola, living on meat, often on horse-flesh like the ancient Huns, dwelling in leather tents made on a cane framework, like those of the modern Kirghis and medieval Tartars, dressed in cloaks of horsehide sewn together, and raiding the Argentinian frontier of white settlement for horses, sheep and cattle, with the true marauding instinct of all nomads.[1051]

[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads of Arctic plains.]

Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life. Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect. Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing. The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds. A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.[1052] Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.[1053] Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life. Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement. The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible. In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.[1054]

[Sidenote: Historical importance of steppe nomads.]

These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location. The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10 deg. and 60 deg. North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones. The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them. They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood. It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.[1055]

[Sidenote: Mobility of pastoral nomads.]

Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility. The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements. His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer[1056] and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.[1057] "This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it," he says,--level, grassy, treeless. The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient carrago camp of the nomadic Visigoths,[1058] or the laager of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.

[Sidenote: Tendency to trek.]

Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum. The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment's notice.[1059] The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds. Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels. It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible. That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.[1060] Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit. Similar instances occur among modern peoples. The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,[1061] was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people. They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt. The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive. In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.

[Sidenote: Seasonal migrations.]

Environment determines the nomadic habits of the dweller of desert and steppe. The distribution of pasture and water fixes the scope and the rate of his wandering; these in turn depend upon geographic conditions and vary with the season. The Papago Indians of southern Arizona range with their cattle over a territory 100 by 150 miles in extent, and wander across the border into Mexico. When their main water supply, derived from wells or artificial reservoirs near their summer villages, is exhausted, they migrate to the water-holes, springs or streams in the canons. There the cattle graze out on the plains and return to the canons to drink.[1062] Every Mongol tribe and clan has its seasonal migration. In winter the heavier precipitation and fuller streams enable them to collect in considerable groups in protected valleys; but the dry summer disperses them over the widest area possible, in order to utilize every water-hole and grass spot. The hotter regions of the plains are abandoned in summer for highlands, where the short period of warmth yields temporary pastures and where alone water can be found. The Kirghis of Russian Turkestan resort in summer to the slopes and high valleys of the Altai Mountains, where their auls or tent villages may be seen surrounded by big flocks of sheep, goats, camels, horses and cattle.[1063] The Pamir in the warm months is the gathering place for the nomads of Central Asia. The naked desert of Arabia yields a rare herbage during the rainy season, when the Bedouin tribes resort to it for pasturage;[1064] but during the succeeding drought they scatter to the hills of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,[1065] or migrate to the valley of the Nile and Euphrates.[1066] The Arabs of the northern Sahara, followed by small flocks of sheep and goats, vibrate between the summer pastures on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains and the scant, wiry grass tufts found in winter on the borders of the desert.[1067] When the equatorial rains begin in June, the Arabs of the Atbara River follow them north-westward into the Nubian desert, and let their camel herds graze on the delicate grass which the moisture has conjured up from the sandy soil. The country about Cassala, which is flooded during the monsoon rains by the rivers from the Abyssinian Mountains, is reserved for the dry season.[1068] In the same way the Tartar tribes of the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers in the thirteenth century moved down these rivers in winter to the sea coast, and in summer up-stream to the hills and mountains.[1069] So for the past hundred years the Boers of the South African grasslands have migrated in their tent wagons from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year, invading even the Karroo Desert after the short summer rains.[1070]

[Sidenote: Marauding expeditions.]

This systematic movement of nomads within their accepted boundaries leads, on slight provocation, to excursions beyond their own frontiers into neighboring territories. The growing herd alone necessitates the absorption of more land, more water-holes, because the grazed pastures renew their grass slowly under the prevailing conditions of drought. An area sufficient for the support of the tribe is inadequate for the sustenance of the herd, whose increase is a perennial expansive force. Soon the pastures become filled with the feeding flocks, and then herdsmen and herds spill over into other fields. Often a season of unusual drought, reducing the existing herbage which is scarcely adequate at best, gives rise to those irregular, temporary expansions which enlarge the geographical horizon of the horde, and eventuate in widespread conquest. Such incursions, like the seasonal movements of nomads, result from the helpless dependence of shepherd tribes upon variations of rainfall.

The nomad's basis of life is at best precarious. He and want are familiar friends. A pest among his herds, diminished pasturage, failing wells, all bring him face to face with famine, and drive him to robbery and pillage.[1071] Marauding tendencies are ingrained in all dwellers of the deserts and steppes.[1072] Since the days of Job, the Bedouins of Arabia have been a race of marauders; they have reduced robbery to a system. Predatory excursions figure conspicuously in the history of all the tribes. Robber is a title of honor.[1073] Pliny said that the Arabs were equally addicted to theft and trade. They pillaged caravans and held them for ransom, or gave them safe conduct across the desert for a price. Formerly the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes levied on the bordering districts, notably the northern part of Khorasan, which belonged more to the Turkomans, Yomut and Goklan tribes of the adjoining steppe than to the resident Persians. The border districts of Herat, Khiva, Merv and Bukhara used to suffer in the same way from the raids of the Tekkes, till the Russians checked the evil.[1074] The Tekkes had depopulated whole districts, invaded Persian towns of considerable size, and carried off countless families into slavery. Both Turkomans and Kirghis tribes prior to 1873 raided caravans and carried off the travelers to the slave markets of Bukhara and Samarkand.[1075] [See map page 103.]

Among these tribes no young man commanded respect in his community till he had participated in a baranta or cattle-raising.[1076] For centuries the nomadic hordes of the Russian steppes systematically pillaged the peaceful agricultural Slavs, who were threatening to encroach upon their pasture lands. The sudden, swift descent and swift retreat of the mounted marauders with the booty into the pathless grasslands, whither pursuit was dangerous, their tendency to rob and conquer but never to colonize, involved Russia in a long struggle, which ceased only with the extension of Muscovite dominion over the steppes.[1077]

[Sidenote: Depredation and conquests of African nomads.]

All the Saharan tribes are marauders, whether Arabs, Berber Tuaregs, or Negroid Tibbus. The desert has made them so. The Tuaregs are chronic freebooters; they keep the Sahara and especially the caravan routes in constant insecurity. They stretch a cordon across these routes from Ghadames and Ghat in the east to the great oases of Insalah and Twat in the west; and from the oases and hills forming their headquarters they spread for pasturage and blackmail over the desert.[1078] They exact toll over and over again from a caravan, provide it with a military escort of their own tribesmen, and then pillage it on the way.[1079] This has been the experience of Barth[1080] and other explorers. Caravans have not been their only prey. The agricultural peoples in the Niger flood-plain, the commerce on the river, and the markets of Timbuctoo long suffered from the raids of the Tuaregs of the Sahara. They collected tribute in the form of grain, salt, garments, horses and gold, typical needs of a desert people, imposed tolls on caravans and on merchant fleets passing down the Niger to Timbuctoo. In 1770 they began to move from the desert and appropriate the fertile plains in the northern part of the Niger Valley, and in 1800 they conquered Timbuctoo; but soon they had to yield to another tribe of pastoral nomads, the Fulbes from the Senegal, who in 1813 established a short-lived but well organized empire on the ruins of the Tuareg dominion.[1081] [See map page 105.] The other agricultural states of the Sudan have had the same experience. The Tibbus, predatory nomads of the French Sahara just north of Lake Chad and the River Yo, mounted on camels and ponies, cross the shrunken river in the dry season and raid Bornu for cattle, carry off women and children to sell as slaves, pillage the weekly markets on the Yo, and plunder caravans of pilgrims moving eastward to Mecca.[1082] Nowhere can desert nomads and the civilized peoples of agricultural plains dwell side by side in peace. Raids, encroachments, reprisals, finally conquest from one side or the other is the formula for their history. [See map page 487.]

[Sidenote: Forms of defense against nomad depredations.]

The raided territory, if a modern civilized state, organizes its border communities into a native mounted police, as the English have done in Bornu, Sokoto and the Egyptian Sudan, and as the Russians did with their Cossack riders along the successive frontiers of Muscovite advance into the steppes; or it takes into its employ, as we have seen, the nearest nomad tribes to repress or punish every hostile movement beyond. Among the ancient states the method was generally different. Since the nomad invaders came with their flocks and herds, a barrier often sufficed to block their progress. For this purpose Sesostris built the long wall of 1500 stadia from Pelusium to Heliopolis as a barricade against the Arabians.[1083] Ancient Carthage constructed a ditch to check the depredations of the nomads of Numidia.[1084] The early kings of Assyria built a barrier across the plains of the Euphrates above Babylon to secure their dominion from the incursions of the desert Medes.[1085] In the fifth century of our era, the "Red Wall" was constructed near the northern frontier of Persia as a bulwark against the Huns. It stretched for a hundred and fifty miles from the Caspian Sea at the ancient port of Aboskun eastward to the mountains, and thus enclosed the populous valley of the Gurgen River.[1086] In remote ages the neck of the Crimean Peninsula was fortified by a wall against the irruptions of the Tauro-Scythians.[1087] The Russians early in their national history used the same means of defense against Tartar incursions. One wall was built from Pensa on the Sura River to Simbirsk on the Volga, just south of Kazan; another, further strengthened by a foss and palisades, extended from the fortress of Tsaritzin at the southern elbow of the Volga across the fifty-mile interval to the Don, and was still defended in 1794 by the Cossacks of the Don against the neighboring Kirghis hordes.[1088] The classic example of such fortifications against pastoral nomads, however, is the Great Wall of China.

[Sidenote: Pastoral life as a training for soldiers.]

The nomad is economically a herdsman, politically a conqueror, and chronically a fighter. Strife over pasturage and wells meets us in the typical history of Abraham, Lot and Isaac;[1089] it exists within and without the clan. The necessity of guarding the pastures, which are only intermittently occupied, involves a persistent military organization. The nation is a quiescent army, the army a mobilized nation.[1090] It carries with it a self-transporting commissariat in its flocks and herds. Constant practice in riding, scouting and the use of arms, physical endurance tested by centuries of exertion and hardship, make every nomad a soldier. Cavalry and camel corps add to the swiftness and vigor of their onslaught, make their military strategy that of sudden attack and swifter retreat, to be met only by wariness and extreme mobility. The ancient Scythians of the lower Danubian steppes were all horse archers, like the Parthians. "If the Scythians were united, there is no nation which could compare with them or would be capable of resisting them; I do not say in Europe, but even in Asia," said Thucydides.[1091] In this opinion Herodotus concurred.[1092] The nomad's whole existence breeds courage. The independent, hazardous life of the desert makes the Arab the bravest of mankind, but the settled, agricultural Arab of Egypt and Mohammedan Spain lost most of his fighting qualities.[1093]

[Sidenote: Military organization of nomads.]

The daily life of a nomad horde is a training school for military organization. In the evening the flocks and herds are distributed with system around the camp to prevent confusion. The difficult art of a well ordered march, of making and breaking camp, and of foraging is practiced almost daily in their constant migrations.[1094] The usual order of the Bedouin march could scarcely be surpassed by an army. In advance of the caravan moves a body of armed horsemen, five or seven kilometers ahead; then follows the main body of the tribesmen mounted on horses and camels, then the female camels, and after these the beasts of burden with the women and children. The encampment of tents with the places for men, arms and herds is also carefully regulated. More than this, the horde is organized into companies with their superior and subordinate leaders.[1095] John de Carpini describes Genghis Khan's military organization of his vast Tartar horde by tens, hundreds and thousands, his absolute dominion over his conquered subjects, and prompt absorption of them into his fighting force, by the compulsory enlistment of soldiers out of every freshly subjugated nation.[1096] In the same way the Hebrew tribes, when preparing for the conquest of Canaan, adopted from the desert Midianites the organization of the horde into tens, hundreds and thousands under judges, who were also military leaders in time of war.

[Sidenote: Capacity for conquest and political consolidation.]

Thus certain geographic conditions produce directly the habitual and systematic migration of the nomads, and through this indirectly that military and political organization which has given the shepherd races of the earth their great historical mission of political consolidation. Agriculture, though underlying all permanent advance in civilization, is handicapped by the lack of courage, mobility, enterprise and large political outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil. All these qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from the northern desert, Hamitic or Semitic. [See map page 487.] The Galla or Wahuma herdsmen of East Africa founded and maintained the relatively stable states of Uganda, Kittara, Karague, and Uzinza in the equatorial district; the conquerors remained herders while they lorded it over the agricultural aborigines.[1098] In prehistoric times when the various peoples of the Aryan linguistic family were spreading over Europe and southern Asia, the superiority of the shepherd races must have been especially marked, because in that era only the unobstructed surface of the steppes permitted the concentration of men on a vast scale for migration and conquest. Everywhere else regions of broken relief and dense forests harbored small, isolated peoples, to whom both the idea and the technique of combined movement were foreign.

[Sidenote: Scope of nomad conquests.]

The rapidity and wide scope of such conquests is explained largely by the fact that nomads try to displace only the ruling classes in the subjugated territory, leaving the mass of the population practically undisturbed. Thus they spread themselves thin over a wide area. How lasting are the results of such conquests depends upon the degree of social evolution attained by the herdsmen. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, after the manner of overlords, organized their conquered nations, but left them under the control of local princes,[1099] while their tribute gatherers annually swept the country like typical nomad marauders. The Turks are still only encamped in Europe. They too make taxation despoliation. And though their dominion has produced no assimilation between victor and vanquished, it has given political consolidation to a large area occupied by varied peoples. The Hyksos conquest of Egypt found the Nile Valley divided into several petty principalities under a nominal king. The nomad conquerors possessed political capacity and gave to Egypt a strong, centralized government, which laid the basis for the power and glory of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Tartars in 1279 A.D. and the Manchus in 1664 conquered China, extended its boundaries, governed the country as a ruling class, and left the established order of things undisturbed. The Saracen conquest of North Africa and Spain showed for a time organization and a permanence due to the advanced cultural status of the sedentary Arabs drawn into the movement by religious enthusiasm. The environment of Spain tended to conserve the knowledge of agriculture, industry, architecture, and science which they brought in and which might have cemented Spaniard and Moor, had it not been for the intense religious antagonism existing between the two races.

The history of nomad conquerors shows that they become weakened by the enervating climate and the effeminating luxury of the moist and fertile lowlands. They lose eventually their warlike spirit, like the Fellatah or Fulbe founders of the Sudanese states,[1100] and are either displaced from their insecure thrones by other conquerors sprung from the same nomad-breeding steppe, as the Aryan princes of India by the Mongol Emperor, and the Saracen invaders of Mesopotamia by the victorious Turkomans; or they are expelled in time by their conquered subjects, as the Tartars were from Russia, the Moors from Spain, and the Turks from the Danube Valley.

[Sidenote: Centralization versus decentralization in nomadism.]

Nomad hordes unite for concerted action to resist encroachment upon their pastures, or for marauding expeditions, or for widespread conquest; but such unions are from their nature temporary, though a career of conquest may be sustained for decades. The geographically determined mobility which facilitates such concentration favors also dispersal, decentralization. This is the paradox in nomadism. Geographic conditions in arid lands necessitate sparse distribution of population and of herds. Pastoral life requires large spaces and small social groups. When Abraham and Lot went to Canaan from Egypt, "the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great." Strife for the pasturage ensued between their respective herdsmen, so the two sheiks separated, Lot taking the plains of Jordan and Abraham the hill pastures of Hebron. Jacob and Esau separated for the same reason. The encampment of the Kirghis shepherds rarely averages over five or six tents, except on the best grazing grounds at the best season of the year. The flow of spring, well or stream also helps to regulate their size. The groups of Mongol yurts or felt tents along the piedmont margin of the Gobi vary from four tents to a large encampment, according to water and grass.[1101] Prevalsky mentions a population of 70 families or 300 souls in the Lob Nor district distributed in 11 villages, or less than 28 in each group.[1102] Barth noticed the smallness of all the oasis towns of the Sahara, even those occupying favorable locations for trade on the caravan routes.[1103]

[Sidenote: Spirit of independence among nomads.]

The nature-made necessity of scattering in small groups to seek pasturage induces in the nomad a spirit of independence. The Bedouin is personally free. The power of the sheik is only nominal,[1104] and depends much upon his personal qualities. The gift of eloquence among the ancient Arabs has been attributed to the necessity of persuading a people to whom restraint was irksome.[1105] Political organization is conspicuously lacking among the Tibbus of the Sahara[1106] and the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes. "We are a people without a head," they say. The title of sheik is an empty one. Custom and usage are their rulers.[1107] Though the temporary union of nomadic tribes forms an effective army, the union is short-lived. Groups form, dissolve and re-form, with little inner cohesion. The Boers in South African grasslands showed the same development. The government of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Colony found it difficult to control the wandering cattlemen of the interior plateau. They loved independence and isolation; their dissociative instincts, bred by the lonely life of the thin-pastured veldt, were overcome only by the necessity of defense against the Bushmen. Then they organized themselves into commandos and sallied out on punitive expeditions, like the Cossack tribes of the Don against marauding Tartars. Scattered over wide tracts of pasture land, they were exempt from the control of either Dutch or English authority; but when an energetic administration pursued them into their widespread ranches, they eluded control by trekking.[1108] Here was the independent spirit of the steppe, reinforced by the spirit of the frontier.

[Sidenote: Resistance to conquest.]

Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last parts of the earth's surface to yield to conquest from without. The untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply of their wilderness. Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous and often futile. They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat of the invading army. This is the way the Damaras have fought the German subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the strongest witness.

Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz, Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]

[Sidenote: Curtailment of nomadism.]

The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce sedentary life. The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atlas border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.[1113] The method pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the drudgery of irrigation and tillage. In this way the Yomuts and Goklans occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent agriculturists.[1114] The method of the Chinese is to push forward the frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the shepherd tribes into poorer pastures. They have thus reclaimed for grain and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic invaders. A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains of the American West. Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms in the sixties. More recently "dry farming" and scientific agriculture adapted to semi-arid conditions have "pushed the desert off the map" in Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain of natural pastures to the western border of the state.

Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000 square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the life of the Asiatic steppes.[1115] In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the Rhine. In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands, but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture. Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.

[Sidenote: Supplementary agriculture of pastoral nomads.]

Though agriculture is regarded with contempt and aversion by pastoral nomads and is resorted to for a livelihood only when they lose their herds by a pest or robbery, or find their pasture lands seriously curtailed, nevertheless nomadism yields such a precarious and monotonous subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive, shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little haphazard tillage on the alluvial hem of the steppe streams.[1116] Certain Arab tribes living east of the Atbara and Gash Rivers resort with their herds during the dry season to the fruitful region of Cassala, which is inundated by the drainage streams from Abyssinia, and there they cultivate dourra and other grains.[1117] The Bechuana tribes inhabiting the rich, streamless grassland of the so-called Kalahari Desert rear small herds of goats and cultivate melons and pumpkins; among the other Bechuana tribes on the eastern margin of the desert, the men hunt, herd the cattle and milk the cows, while the women raise dourra, maize, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers and beans.[1118] [Compare maps pages 105, 487.]

Such supplementary agriculture usually shifts with the nomad group. But where high mountains border rainless tracts, their piedmont districts regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting snows on the ranges fill the drainage streams, whose inundation often converts their alluvial banks into ready-made fields. The reliability of the water supply anchors here the winter villages of the nomads, which become centers of a limited agriculture, while the pasture lands beyond the irrigated strips support his flocks and herds. Where the piedmont of the Kuen Lun Mountains draws a zone of vegetation around the southern rim of the Takla Makan Desert, Mongol shepherds raise some wheat, maize and melons as an adjunct to their cattle and sheep; but their tillage is often rendered intermittent by the salinity of the irrigating streams.[1119] Along the base of the Tian Shan Mountains, the felt yurt of the Gobi nomad gives place to Turki houses with wheat and rice fields, and orchards of various fruits; so that the whole piedmont highway from Hami to Yarkand presents an alternation of desert and oasis settlement.[1120] Even the heart of arid Arabia shows fertile oases under cultivation where the lofty Nejd Plateau, with its rain-gathering peaks over five thousand feet high, varies its wide pastures with well tilled valleys abounding in grain fields and date-palm groves.[1121] Along the whole Saharan slope of the Atlas piedmont a series of parallel wadis and, farther out in the desert, a zone of artesian wells, sunk to the underground bed of hidden drainage streams from the same range, form oases which are the seat of permanent agriculture and more or less settled populations. The Saharan highlands of Tibesti, whose mountains rise to 8,300 feet, condense a little rain and permit the Tibbus to raise some grain and dates in the narrow valleys.[1122]

[Sidenote: Irrigation and horticulture.]

The few and limited spots where the desert or steppe affords water for cultivation require artificial irrigation, the importation of plants, and careful tillage, to make the limited area support even a small social group. Hence they could have been utilized by man only after he had made considerable progress in civilization.[1123] Oasis agriculture is predominantly intensive. Gardens and orchards tend to prevail over field tillage. The restricted soil and water must be forced to yield their utmost. While on the rainy or northern slope of the Atlas in Algiers and Tunis farms abound, on the Saharan piedmont are chiefly plantations of vegetables, orchards and palm groves.[1124] In Fezzan at the oasis of Ghat, Barth found kitchen gardens of considerable extent, large palm groves, but limited fields of grain, all raised by irrigation; and in the flat hollow basin forming the oasis of Murzuk, he found also fig and peach trees, vegetables, besides fields of wheat and barley cultivated with much labor.[1125] In northern Fezzan, where the mountains back of Tripoli provide a supply of water, saffron and olive trees are the staple articles of tillage. The slopes are terraced and irrigated, laid out in orchards of figs, pomegranates, almonds and grapes, while fields of wheat and barley border the lower courses of the wadis.[1126] In the "cup oases" or depressions of the Sahara, the village is always built on the slope, because the alluvial soil in the basin is too precious to be used for house sites.[1127]

[Sidenote: Effect of diminishing water supply.]

The water supply in deserts and steppes, on which permanent agriculture depends, is so scant that even a slight diminution causes the area of tillage to shrink. Here a fluctuation of snowfall or rainfall that in a moist region would be negligible, has conspicuous or even tragic results. English engineers who examined the utilization of the Afghan streams for irrigation reported that the natives had exploited their water supply to the last drop; that irrigation converted the Kabul River and the Heri-rud at certain seasons of the year into dry channels.[1128] In the Turkoman steppes it has been observed that expanding tillage, by the multiplication of irrigation canals, increased the loss of water by evaporation, and hence diminished the supply. Facts like these reveal the narrow margin between food and famine, which makes the uncertain basis of life for the steppe agriculturist. Even slight desiccation contracts the volume and shortens the course of interior drainage streams; therefore it narrows the piedmont zone of vegetation and the hem of tillage along the river banks. The previous frontier of field and garden is marked by abandoned hamlets and sand-buried cities, like those which border the dry beds of the shrunken Khotan rivers of the Tarim basin.[1129] The steppe regions in the New World as well as the Old show great numbers of these ruins. Barth found them in the northern Sahara, dating from Roman days.[1130] They occur in such numbers in the Syrian Desert, in the Sistan of Persia, in Baluchistan, the Gobi, Takla Makan Desert, Turfan and the Lop Nor basin, that they indicate a marked but irregular desiccation of central and western Asia during the historical period.[1131]

[Sidenote: Scant diet of nomads.]

If a scant water supply places sedentary agriculture in arid lands upon an insecure basis, it makes the nomad's sources of subsistence even more precarious. It keeps him persistently on low rations, while the drought that burns his pastures and dries up well and wadi brings him face to face with famine. The daily food of the Bedouin is meal cooked in sour camel's milk, to which bread and meat are added only when guests arrive. His moderation in eating is so great that one meal of a European would suffice for six Arabs.[1132] The daily food of the shepherd agriculturists on the Kuen Lun margin of the Takla Makan Desert is bread and milk; meat is indulged in only three or four times a month.[1133] The Tartars, even in their days of widest conquest, showed the same habitual frugality. "Their victuals are all things that may be eaten, for we saw some of them eat lice." The flesh of all animals dying a natural death is used as food; in summer it is sun-dried for winter use, because at that time the Tartars live exclusively on mare's milk which is then abundant. A cup or two of milk in the morning suffices till evening, when each man has a little meat. One ram serves as a meal for fifty or a hundred men. Bones are gnawed till they are burnished, "so that no whit of their food may come to naught." Genghis Khan enacted that neither blood nor entrails nor any other part of a beast which might be eaten should be thrown away.[1134] Scarcity of food among the Tibetan and Mongolian nomads is reflected in their habit of removing every particle of meat from the bone when eating.[1135] A thin decoction of hot tea, butter and flour is their staple food. Many Turkoman nomads, despite outward appearance of wealth, eat only dried fish, and get bread only once a month, while for the poor wheat is prohibited on account of its cost.[1136] The Saharan Tibbus, usually on a starvation diet, eat the skin and powdered bones of their dead animals.[1137]

The privations and hardships of life in the deserts and steppes discourage obesity. The Koko-Nor Mongols of the high Tibetan plateau are of slight build, never fat.[1138] The Bedouin's physical ideal of a man is spare, sinewy, energetic and vigorous, "lean-sided and thin," as the Arab poet expresses it.[1139] The nomadic tribesmen throughout the Sahara, whether of Hamitic, Semitic or Negro race, show this type, and retain it even after several generations of settlement in the river valleys of the Sudan. The Bushmen, who inhabit the Kalahari Desert, have thin wiry forms and are capable of great exertion and privations.[1140]

[Sidenote: Checks to population.]

Though the conquering propensities of nomadic tribes make large families desirable, in order to increase the military strength of the horde, and though shepherd folk acquiring new and rich pastures develop patriarchal families, as did the Jews after the conquest of Canaan, nevertheless the limited water and food supply of desert and grassland, as well as the relatively low-grade economy of pastoral life, impose an iron-bound restriction upon population, so that as a matter of fact patriarchal families are rare. When natural increase finds no vent in emigration and dispersal, marriage among nomads becomes less fruitful.[1141] Artificial limitation of population occurs frequently among desert-dwellers. In the Libyan oasis of Farafeah, the inhabitants never exceed eighty males, a limit fixed by a certain Sheik Murzuk.[1142] Poverty of food supply explains the small number of children in the typical Turkoman family. Among the Koko-Nor Tibetans, monogamy is the rule, polygamy the exception and confined to the few rich, while families never include more than two or three children.[1143] According to Burckhardt, three children constitute a large family among the Bedouins, much to the regret of the Bedouins themselves. Mohammedans though they are, few practice polygamy, while polyandry and female infanticide existed in heathen times.[1144] Desert peoples seem to be naturally monogamous.[1145]

[Sidenote: Trade of nomads.]

The prevailing poverty, monotony and unreliability of subsistence in desert and steppe, as well as the low industrial status, necessitate trade with bordering agricultural lands. The Bedouins of Arabia buy flour, barley for horse feed, coffee and clothing, paying for them largely with butter and male colts. The northern tribes resort every year to the confines of Syria, when they are visited by pedlers from Damascus and Aleppo.[1146] The tribes from Hasa and the Nejd pasture land bring horses, cattle and sheep to the city of Koweit at the head of the Persian Gulf to barter for dates, clothing and firearms; and large encampments of them are always to be seen near this town.[1147] Arabia and the Desert of Kedar sold lambs, rams and goats to the markets of ancient Tyre.[1148] The pastoral tribes of ancient Judea in times of scarcity went to Egypt for grain, which they purchased either with money or cattle. The picture of Jacob's sons returning from Egypt to Canaan with their long lines of asses laden with sacks of corn is typical for pastoral nomads; so is their ultimate settlement, owing to protracted famine, in the delta land of Goshen. The Kirghis of the Russian and Asiatic steppes barter horses and sheep for cereals, fine articles of clothing, and coarse wooden utensils in the cities of Bukhara and the border districts of Russia. Occasionally the land of the nomad yields other products than those of the flocks and herds, which enter therefore into their trade. Such is the salt of the Sahara, secured at Taudeni and Bilma, the gums of the Indus desert, and balm of Gilead from the dry plateau east of Jordan.

[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads as middlemen.]

The systematic migrations of nomads, their numerous beasts of burden, and the paucity of desert and steppe products determine pastoral tribes for the office of middlemen;[1149] and as such they appear in all parts of the world. The contrast of products in arid regions and in the bordering agricultural land, as also in the districts on opposite sides of these vast barriers, stimulates exchanges. This contrast may rest on a difference of geographic conditions, or of economic development, or both. The reindeer Chukches of Arctic Siberia take Russian manufactured wares from the fur stations on the Lena River to trade at the coast markets on Bering Sea for Alaskan pelts. The sons of Jacob, pasturing their flocks on the Judean plateau, saw "a company of Ishmaelites come from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt."[1150] This caravan of Arabian merchants purchased Joseph as a slave, a characteristic commodity in desert commerce from ancient times to the present. The predatory expeditions of nomads provide them with abundant captives, only few of which can be utilized as slaves in their pastoral economy. In the same way the Kirghis manage the caravan trade between Russia and Bukhara, sometimes adding captured travelers to their other wares. In ancient times Nubian shepherd folk acted as migrant middlemen between Egypt and Meroe near the junction of the Atbara River and the Nile, as did also the desert tribe of the Nasamones between Carthage and interior Africa.[1151] From remote ages an active caravan trade was carried on between the productive districts of Arabia Felix and the cities of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. Mohammed himself was a caravan leader; in the faith which he established religious pilgrimages and commercial ventures were inextricably united, while to the mercantile spirit it gave a fresh and vigorous impetus.[1152] The caravan trade of the Sahara was first organized by Moorish and Arab tribes who dwelt on the northern margin of the desert, rearing herds of camels. These they hired to merchants for the journey between Morocco and Timbuctoo, in return for cereals and clothing. Hence Morocco has been the chief customer of the great desert town near the Niger, and sends thither numerous caravans from Tendouf (Taredant) Morocco, Fez and Tafilet. Algiers dominates the less important route via the oasis of Twat, and Tripolis that through Ghadames to the busy towns in the Lake Chad basin.[1153]

[Sidenote: Desert markets.]

If the camel is "the ship of the desert," the market towns on the margin of the sandy wastes are the ports of the desert. Their bazaars hold everything that the nomad needs. Their suburbs are a shifting series of shepherd encampments or extensive caravanseries for merchant and pack animal, like the abaradion of Timbuctoo, which receives annually from fifty to sixty thousand camels.[1154] Their industries develop partly in response to the demand of the desert or trans-desert population. The fine blades of Damascus reflected the Bedouin's need of the best weapon. Each city has its sphere of desert influence. The province of Nejd in Central Arabia is commercially subservient to Bagdad, Busrah, Koweit and Bahrein.[1155] The bazaars of Samarkand and Tashkent exist largely for the scattered nomads of Turkestan. Ancient Gaza[1156] and Askelon fattened on the Egyptian trade across the Desert of Shur, as Petra, Bostra and Damascus on the thin but steady streams of nomad products flowing in from the Syrian Desert.

[Sidenote: Nomad industries.]

The abundant leisure of nomadic life encourages the beginning of industry, but rarely advances it beyond the household stage, owing to the thin, family-wise dispersion of population which precludes division of labor. Such industry as exists consists chiefly in working up the raw materials yielded by the herds. Among the Bedouins, blacksmiths and saddlers are the only professional artisans; these are regarded with contempt and are never of Bedouin stock.[1157] In the ancient world, industry reached its zero point in Arabia, and in modern times shows meager development there. On the other hand the Saharan Arabs developed an hereditary guild of expert well-makers, which seems to date back to remote times, and is held in universal honor.[1158]

[Sidenote: Oriental rugs.]

It is to the tent-dwellers of the world, however, that we apparently owe the oriental rug. This triumph of the weaver's art seems to have originated among pastoral nomads, who developed it in working up the wool and hair of their sheep, goats and camels; but it early became localized as a specialized industry in the towns and villages of irrigated districts on the borders of the grazing lands, where the nomads had advanced to sedentary life. Therefore in the period of the Caliphate, from 632 to 1258, we find these brilliant flowers of the loom, blooming like the Persian gardens, in Persian Farsistan, Khusistan, Kirman and Khorasan. We find them spreading the mediaeval fame of Shiraz, Tun, Meshed, Amul, Bukhara and Merv. The secret of this preeminence lay partly in the weaver's inherited aptitude and artistic sense for this textile work, derived from countless generations of shepherd ancestors; partly in their proximity to the finest raw materials, whose quality was equalled nowhere else, because it depended upon the character of the pasturage, probably also upon the climatic conditions affecting directly the flocks and herds.[1159]

A map showing the geographical distribution of Eastern rug-making reveals the relation of the industry to semi-arid or saline pastures, and makes the mind revert at once to the blankets of artistic design and color, woven by the Navajo Indians of our own rainless Southwest. Rug weaving in the Old World reached its finest development in countries like Persia, Turkestan, western Afghanistan, Baluchistan, western India and the plateau portions of Asia Minor, countries where the rainfall varies from 10 to 20 inches or even less, [See map page 484.] where nomadism claims a considerable part of the population, and where the ancestry of all traces back to some of the great shepherd races, like Turkomans and Tartars. These peoples are hereditary specialists in the care, classification, and preparation of wools.[1160] Weavers of rugs form an industrial class in the cities of Persia and Asia Minor, where they obey largely the taste of the outside world in regard to design and color;[1161] whereas the nomads, weaving for their own use, adhere strictly to native colors and designs. Their patterns are tribal property, each differing from that of the other; and though less artistic than those of the urban workers, are nevertheless interesting and consistent, while the nomad's intuitive sense of color is fine.[1162]

[Sidenote: Architecture of nomad conquerors.]

The principles of design and color which these tent-dwellers had developed in their weaving, they applied, after their conquest of agricultural lands, to stone and produced the mosaic, to architecture and produced the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal.[1163] Whether Saracens of Spain or Turkoman conquerors of India, they were ornamentists whose contribution to architecture was decoration. Working in marble, stone, metals or wood, they wrought always in the spirit of color and textile design, rather than in the spirit of form. The walls of their mosques, palaces and tombs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the doors of their felt tents. The gift of color they passed on to the West, first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian commerce. Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the Ducal Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.[1164] This has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.

Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to originate or develop them they are powerless. Between the art, philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the Central Asia plateau. Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking they have added almost nothing to the local culture.

[Sidenote: Arid lands as areas of arrested development.]

Deserts and steppes lay an arresting hand on progress. Their tribes do not develop; neither do they grow old. They are the eternal children of the world. Genuine nomadic peoples show no alteration in their manners, customs or mode of life from millennium to millennium. The interior of the Arabian desert reveals the same social and economic status,[1165] whether we take the descriptions of Moses or Mohammed or Burckhardt or more recent travelers. The Bedouins of the Nubian steppes adhere strictly to all their ancient customs, and reproduce to-day the pastoral nomadism of Abraham and Jacob.[1166] Genealogies were not more important to the biblical house of David and stem of Jesse than they are for the modern Kirghis tribesman, who as a little child learns to recite the list of his ancestors back to the seventh generation. The account which Herodotus gives of the nomads of the Russian steppes agrees in minute details with that of Strabo written five centuries later,[1167] with that of William de Rubruquis in 1253, and with modern descriptions of Kalmuck and Kirghis life. The Gauchos or Indian pastoral halfbreeds of the Argentine plains were found by Wappaeus in 1870 to accord accurately with Avara's description of them at the end of the eighteenth century.[1168] The restless tenants of the grasslands come and go, but their type never materially changes. Their culture is stationary amid persistent movement. Only when here or there in some small and favored spot they are forced to make the transition to agriculture, or when they learn by long and close association with sedentary nations the lesson of drudgery and progress, do the laws of social and economic development begin to operate in them. As a rule, they must first escape partly or wholly the environment of their pasture lands, either by emigration or by the intrusion into their midst of alien tillers of the soil.

But while the migrant shepherd originates nothing, he plays an historical role as a transmitter of civilization. Asiatic nomads have sparsely disseminated the culture of China, Persia, Egypt and Yemen over large areas of the world. The Semite shepherds of the Red Sea deserts, through their merchants and conquerors, long gave to the dark Sudan the only light of civilization which it received, Mohammed, a Bedouin of the Ishmaelite tribe, caravan leader on the desert highways between Mecca and Syria, borrowed from Jerusalem the simple tenets of a monotheistic religion, and spread them through his militant followers over a large part of Africa and Asia.

[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities of nomads.]

The deserts and grasslands breed in their sons certain qualities and characteristics-courage, hardihood, the stiff-necked pride of the freeman, vigilance, wariness, sense of locality,[1169] keen powers of observation stimulated by the monotonous, featureless environment, and the consequent capacity to grasp every detail.[1170] Though robbery abroad is honorable and marauder a term with which to crown a hero, theft at home is summarily dealt with among most nomads. The property of the unlocked tent and the far-ranging herd must be safeguarded.[1171] The Tartars maintained a high standard of honesty among themselves and punished theft with death.[1172] Wide dispersal in small groups is reflected in the diversity of dialects among desert peoples;[1173] in the practice of hospitality, whether among Bedouins of the Nejd, Kirghis of the Central Asia plateau,[1174] or semi-nomadic Boers of South Africa;[1175] in the persistence of feuds and of the duty of blood revenge, which is sanctioned by the Koran.

Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to intermixture. The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a pure ethnic stock, protected by stern inhibition of intermarriage with other tribes. Therefore, Moses enjoined upon them the duty of exterminating the peoples of Canaan whom they dispossessed.[1176] While the urban Arabs show a medley of breeds, dashed with a strain of negro blood, among the nomad Bedouins, mixture is exceptional and is regarded as a disgrace.[1177] The same thing is true among the nomad Arabs of Algeria, and there it has placed a stumbling block in the way of the French colonial administration, by preventing the appearance of half-breeds who might bridge the gap between the colonials and natives. Where pastoral Semites have settled in agricultural lands, intermixture on a wide scale has followed, as in the Sudan from Niger to Nile; but even here, when a tribe or clan has retained a strictly pastoral life in the grassland, and has held itself aloof from the agricultural districts of the Negro villages, relatively pure survivals are to be found, as among the Cow or Bush Fulani of Bornu.[1178] On the other hand, the Hausa, a migrant trading folk of mingled Arab and Negro blood, spread northward along the trans-Saharan caravan route to the oasis of Air before the fourteenth century, and there have infused into the local Berber stock a strong Negro strain.[1179] Among the nomads of Central Asia, one wave of race movement has so often followed and overtaken another, that it has produced a confused blending of breeds. The mixtures are so numerous that pure types are exceptional,[1180] and the exclusiveness of the desert Semites disappears.

[Sidenote: Religion of pastoral nomads.]

Though all these desert-born characteristics and customs have a certain interest for the sociologist, they possess only minor importance in comparison with the religious spirit of pastoral nomads, which is always fraught with far-reaching historical results. The evidence of history shows us that there is such a thing as a desert-born genius for religion. Huc and Gabin testify to the deeper religious feeling of the Buddhist nomads of the Central Asia plateaus, as compared with the lowland Chinese. The three great monotheistic religions of the world are closely connected in their origin and development with the deserts of Syria and Arabia. The area of Mohammedism embraces the steppe zone of the Old World[1181] from Senegambia and Zanzibar in Africa to the Indus, Tarim and the upper Obi, together with some well watered lands on its margins. It comprises in this territory a variety of races--Negroes, Hamites, Semites, Iranians, Indo-Aryans, and a long list of Mongoloid tribes. Here is a psychological effect of environment. The dry, pure air stimulates the faculties of the desert-dweller, but the featureless, monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind, finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow, unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate inevitably into monotheism. Their religion is in accord with their whole mental make-up; it is a growth, a natural efflorescence. Therefore it is strong. Its tenets form the warp of all their intellectual fabrics, permeate their meager science and philosophy, animate their more glorious poetry. It has moreover the fanaticism and intolerance characterizing men of few ideas and restricted outlook upon life. Therewith is bound up a spirit of propaganda. The victories of the Jews in Palestine, Syria and Philistia were the victories of Jehovah; the conquests of Saladin were the conquests of Allah; and the domain of the Caliphate was the dominion of Islam.

[Sidenote: Fanaticism as a force in nomad expansion.]

The desert everywhere, sooner or later, drives out its brood, ejects its people and their ideas, like those exploding seed-pods which at a touch cast their seed abroad. The religious fanaticism of the shepherd tribes gives that touch; herein lies its historical importance. Mohammedism, fierce and militant, conduced to those upheavals of migration and conquest which since the seventh century have so often transformed the political geography of the Old World. The vast empire of the Caliphate, from its starting point in Arabia, spread in eighty years from the Oxus River to the Atlantic Ocean.[1183] The rapid rise and spread between 1745 and 1803 of the Wahaby clan and sect, the Puritans of Islam, which resulted for a time in their political and religious domination of much of Arabia from their home in the Nejd, recalls the stormy conquests of Mohammed's followers. Islam is to-day a persistent source of ferment in Algeria, the Sahara, and the Sudan, On the other hand. Buddhism serves to cement together the diverse nomadic tribes of the Central Asia plateaus, and keep them in spiritual subjection to the Grand Lama of Lhassa. The Chinese government makes political use of this fact by dominating the Lama and employing him as a tool to secure quiet on its long frontier of contact with its restless Mongol neighbors. Moreover the religion of Buddha has restrained the warlike spirit of the nomads, and by its institution of celibacy has helped keep down population below the boiling-point. [Compare maps pages 484 and 513.]

[Sidenote: The faith of the desert.]

The faith of the desert tends to be stern, simple and austere. The indulgence which Mohammed promised his followers in Paradise was only a reflex of the deprivation under which they habitually suffered in the scant pastures of Arabia. The lavish beauty of the Heavenly City epitomized the ideals and dreams of the desert-stamped Jew. The active, simple, uncramped life of the grasslands seems essential to the preservation of the best virtues of the desert-bred. These disappear largely in sedentary life. The Bedouin rots when he takes root. City life contaminates, degrades him. His virile qualities and his religion both lose their best when he leaves the desert. Contact with the cities of Philistia and the fertile plains of the Canaanites, with their sensual agricultural gods, demoralized the Israelites.[1184] The prophets were always calling them back to the sterner code of morals and the purer faith of their days of wandering. Jeremiah in despair holds up to them as a standard of life the national injunction of the pastoral Rechabites, "Neither shall ye build house nor sow corn nor plant vineyard, but all your days ye shall dwell in tents."[1185] The ascent in civilization made havoc with Hebrew morals and religion, because ethics and religion are the finest and latest flower of each cultural stage. Transition shows the breaking down of one code before the establishment of another.

Judaism has always suffered from its narrow local base. Even when transplanted to various parts of the earth, it has remained a distinctly tribal religion. Intense conservatism in doctrine and ceremonial it still bears as the heritage of its desert birth. Islam too shows the limitations of its original environment. It embodies a powerful appeal to the peoples of arid lands, and among these it has spread and survives as an active principle. But it belongs to an arrested economic and social development, lacks the germs of moral evolution which Christianity, born in the old stronghold of Hebraic monotheism, but impregnated by all the cosmopolitan influences of the Mediterranean basin and the Imperium Romanum, amply possesses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV

[1026] Figures taken from Albrecht Penck, Morphologie der Erdoberflaeche, Vol. I, p. 151. Stuttgart, 1894.

[1027] A.P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap. IV. Boston, 1903.

[1028] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 65-69, 230, 288, 385. Boston, 1903.

[1029] Ibid., pp. 218, 221, 393.

[1030] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 127. New York, 1902.

[1031] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, pp. 126-136. New York, 1871.

[1032] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 191-192, 201. Philadelphia, 1865.

[1033] J.H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 142, 144, 261-265, 293-302, 513-517. New York, 1905.

[1034] Ibid., 6, 48, 93, 114, 119, 127, 134, 136, 163, 164, 182, 190, 191, 507.

[1035] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-343, map. New York, 1899.

[1036] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 57-60. New York, 1893.

[1037] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Maps, pp. 53 and 66. New York, 1899.

[1038] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, p. 130, map of ancient distribution of Germans and Celts. New York, 1907.

[1039] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 216-218. New York, 1899.

[1040] Ibid., 344-347, 356, 365.

[1041] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 309-310. New York, 1882.

[1042] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 107. New York, 1893.

[1043] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 220-222. New York, 1902.

[1044] Vidal-Lablache, Atlas General, Maps pp. 63, 64, 93. Paris, 1909.

[1045] H.R. Mill, International Geography, 174, 177-182. New York, 1902.

[1046] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture No. 181, p. 2, compared with Eleventh Census, Statistics of Population, map of negro distribution, p. XCVII. Washington, 1895.

[1047] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture, No. 155, p. 2. Washington, 1902.

[1048] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 353. New York, 1899.

[1049] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, p. 238. London, 1907.

[1050] Haxthausen, Studien, Vol. I, p. 309. Die laendliche Verfassung Russlands, pp. 3, 7. Leipzig, 1866.

[1051] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 79-83. London, 1896-1898. J. Wappaeus, Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des ehemaligen spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika, pp. 978-980, 1019. Leipzig, 1863-1870.

[1052] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 206-208. London, 1896-1898.

[1053] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60, 156, 452. New York, 1882. Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 291-295. London, 1899.

[1054] Ibid., pp. 83, 88-91.

[1055] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 166-167. London. 1896-1898.

[1056] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 107. New York, 1897.

[1057] Herodotus, Melpomene, 19, 46.

[1058] Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, p. 262. Oxford, 1892.

[1059] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 220. London, 1896-1898.

[1060] Genesis, XIII, 2, 5.

[1061] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 474. New York, 1897.

[1062] Eleventh Census, Indian Report, pp. 143-144. Washington, 1894.

[1063] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 18-20. London and New York, 1903.

[1064] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 32-33. London, 1831.

[1065] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 8-10. New York, 1897.

[1066] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 78-79. New York, 1858.

[1067] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 95. London, 1905.

[1068] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88, 128, 129, 135. Hartford, 1868.

[1069] Journey of John de Carpini and William de Rubruquis in 1253, pp. 8, 217. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.

[1070] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 107, 421. New York, 1897.

[1071] Wilhelm Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 44. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1072] A full discussion in Malthus, Principles of Population, Book I, chap. 7.

[1073] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 133-144, 157-160. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia, The Cradle of Islam, 155-157. New York, 1900.

[1074] Vambery, Reise in Mittelasien, pp. 285, 289-297. Leipzig, 1873.

[1075] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 127-129. New York, 1899.

[1076] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 174-175. London, 1896-1898.

[1077] Wallace, Russia, pp. 340-342. New York, 1904.

[1078] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 17, 63-66. London, 1905.

[1079] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 256, 324-325. Translated from the French, New York, 1896.

[1080] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 287-288, 293, 305. New York, 1857.

[1081] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 133-134, 203, 206-207, 229, 232, 239-245. New York, 1896.

[1082] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 1-2, 6, 16-18, 80. London, 1907.

[1083] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman. Empire, Vol. V, p. 87. New York, 1858.

[1084] Pliny, Historia Naturalis, V, 3.

[1085] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II, p. 495. New York, 1858.

[1086] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 340. Boston, 1907.

[1087] Pallas, Travels in the Southern Provinces of Russia in 1793-1794, Vol. II, p. 4. London, 1812.

[1088] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 94, 256.

[1089] Genesis, XIII, 7-8; XXI, 25-30; XXVI, 15-22.

[1090] Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 545. New York, 1887.

[1091] Thucydides, Book II, 96.

[1092] Herodotus, IV, 46.

[1093] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, Chapter on Arab Courage. New York, 1904.

[1094] Wilhelm Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 44. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1095] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 35-36. London, 1831.

[1096] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 114-117, 120-125. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.

[1097] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 28. London, 1896-1898.

[1098] J.H. Speke, Discovery of the Source of the Nile, pp. 241-244. New York, 1868.

[1099] Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 18-27, Hakluyt Society, London, 1900.

[1100] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 225-232. New York, 1907.

[1101] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 85-98. London, 1904.

[1102] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 170. London, 1896-1898.

[1103] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 148, 152, 204, 210, 303. New York, 1857.

[1104] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 115-119, 284-286, 296-300. London, 1831.

[1105] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 85-87. New York, 1857.

[1106] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 234-235. New York,1907.

[1107] Vambery, Reise in Mittel Asien, pp. 288-290. Leipzig, 1873.

[1108] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108, 128, 129, 155, 199, 452-453. New York, 1897.

[1109] For vivid description of desert defensive warfare, see Gustav Frensen, Peter Moore's Journey to Southwest Africa. Translated from the German, 1908. Based upon interviews with hundreds of returning German soldiers from the Damara campaign.

[1110] H.B. Mill, International Geography, p. 454. New York, 1902.

[1111] Henry Norman, All the Russias, p. 273. New York, 1902.

[1112] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 54-56. London, 1905.

[1113] Ibid., pp. 181-164.

[1114] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 177. London, 1896-1898.

[1115] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 29-30. New York, 1893.

[1116] Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 532-533. London, 1812.

[1117] Sir S.W. Baker, Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, p. 88. Hartford, 1868.

[1118] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 53-56, 169. New York, 1858.

[1119] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 96, 136, 359, New York and London, 1903. Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 193, 202, 212, 213. Boston, 1907.

[1120] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 103, 104, 107, 112-116, 120, 125-128, 137, 138, 143. London, 1904.

[1121] S.W. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 147, 151. New York, 1900. D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 185, 195. 265. London, 1902.

[1122] Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 214-218, 267-269. Berlin, 1879.

[1123] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 168. London, 1896-1898.

[1124] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 906, 914. New York, 1902.

[1125] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 152, 207, 210, 211. New York, 1857.

[1126] Ibid., 41-44, 52, 61-64, 67, 76, 93, 95, 99, 103, 105.

[1127] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 174. London, 1905.

[1128] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 91-93. London, 1905.

[1129] M.A. Stein, The Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, pp. 275-324, 354-408. London, 1903.

[1130] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, chap. III. New York, 1857.

[1131] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 160-190, 209, 304, 309-310, 315, 367. Boston, 1907.

[1132] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 57-64, 238-242. London, 1831.

[1133] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 137-138. Boston, 1907.

[1134] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 109-111, 120. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904. Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 191-193, 203, 224. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.

[1135] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.

[1136] Vambery, Reise in Mittel Asien, p. 295. Leipzig, 1873.

[1137] Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 257, 268. Berlin, 1879.

[1138] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 74. Boston, 1907.

[1139] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 198-201. London, 1905.

[1140] D. Livingstone, Travels and Researches in South Africa, p. 55. New York, 1859.

[1141] W. Roscher, Grundlagen der Nationaloekonomik, Book VI, chap. II, p. 244. Stuttgart, 1886.

[1142] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 170. London, 1896-98.

[1143] W.W. Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.

[1144] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 106, 187. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 162, 268. New York, 1900.

[1145] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 429, notes 2 and 5, p. 440, note 2, p. 507. London, 1891.

[1146] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 47, 48, 70, 71, 191-192, 239. London, 1831.

[1147] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 128. New York, 1900.

[1148] Ezekiel, Chap. XXVII, 21.

[1149] For economic principle, see W. Roscher, Handel und Gewerbefleiss, pp. 141-147. Stuttgart, 1899.

[1150] Genesis, Chap. XXXVII, 25-28, 36.

[1151] W. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 39, Note 11. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1152] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Vol. III, p. 616. Philadelphia, 1904.

[1153] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 251-252. New York, 1896.

[1154] Ibid., pp. 257-264.

[1155] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 151. New York, 1900.

[1156] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 182-184. New York, 1897.

[1157] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, p. 65. London, 1831.

[1158] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 130-134. London, 1903.

[1159] F.R. Martin, A History of Oriental Carpets before 1800, pp. 9, 29, 69 et seq., 101, 121. Vienna, 1908. G. LeStrange, Land of the Eastern Caliphates, pp. 37, 293-294, 353, 363, 471. Cambridge, 1905.

[1160] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, pp. 23-40, 100-111. New York, 1895.

[1161] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 197-198. London, 1902.

[1162] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, p. 61. New York, 1895.

[1163] J. Ferguson, History of Architecture, Vol. II, pp. 277-278, 499, 500. New York. J. Ferguson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II, pp. 210-214. New York, 1891.

[1164] Wilhelm Bode, Vorderasiatische Knuepfteppiche, pp. 3-4. Leipzig.

[1165] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 78. New York, 1858.

[1166] Sir S.W. Baker, Exploration of the Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 148-152. Hartford, 1868.

[1167] Strabo, Book VII, chap. III, 7, 17; chap. IV, 6. Book XI, chap. II, 1, 2, 3.

[1168] J. Wappaeus, Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des chemaligen spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika, p. 1019. Leipzig, 1863-1870.

[1169] Sir F. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 72, 74. London, 1904. Alfred Kirchoff, Man and Earth, pp. 58-71. London.

[1170] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 374-377. London, 1831. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 98-100. London, 1905.

[1171] Exodus, Chap. XXII, 1-4, 23.

[1172] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast in 1246, pp. 110, 111, 113. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.

[1173] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 89. New York, 1858. H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, p. 144. New York, 1857.

[1174] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 121-123. Boston, 1907.

[1175] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 422. New York, 1897.

[1176] Deuteronomy, VII, 1-3.

[1177] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 184. London, 1896-1898.

[1178] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 190-197. London, 1907.

[1179] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 202, 277-281. New York, 1857.

[1180] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 173. London, 1896-1898.

[1181] Ibid., Vol. III, Chapter on Islam, pp. 195-204.

[1182] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 28-30. New York, 1897. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 101-105. London, 1905.

[1183] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, pp. 114-116. London, 1882.

[1184] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 88-90. New York, 1897.

[1185] Jeremiah, Chap. XXXV, 6-14.

XV. MOUNTAIN BARRIERS AND THEIR PASSES

[Sidenote: Man as part of the mobile envelope of the earth.]

The important characteristic of plains is their power to facilitate every phase of historical movement; that of mountains is their power to retard, arrest, or deflect it. Man, as part of the mobile envelope of the earth, like air and water feels always the pull of gravity. From this he can never fully emancipate himself. By an output of energy he may climb the steepest slope, but with every upward step the ascent becomes more difficult, owing to the diminution of warmth and air and the increasing tax upon the heart.[1186] Maintenance of life in high altitudes is always a struggle. The decrease of food resources from lower to higher levels makes the passage of a mountain system an ordeal for every migrating people or marching army that has to live off the country which it traverses. Mountains therefore repel population by their inaccessibility and also by their harsh conditions of life, while the lowlands attract it, both in migration and settlement. Historical movement, when forced into the upheaved areas of the earth, avoids the ridges and peaks, seeks the valleys and passes, where communication with the lowlands is easiest.

[Sidenote: Inaccessibility of mountains.]

High massive mountain systems present the most effective barriers which man meets on the land surface of the earth. To the spread of population they offer a resistance which long serves to exclude settlers. The difficulty of making roads up steep, rocky slopes and through the forests usually covering their rain-drenched sides, is deterrent enough; but in addition to this, general infertility, paucity of arable land, harsh climatic conditions, and the practical lack of communication with the outside world offer scant basis for subsistence. Hence, as a rule, only when pressure of population in the lowlands becomes too great under prevailing economic methods, do clearings and cabins begin to creep up the slopes. Mountains are always regions of late occupation. Even in the Stone Age, we find the long-headed race of Mediterranean stock, who originally populated Europe, distributed over the continent close up to the foot of the high Alps, but not in the mountains themselves, and only scantily represented in the Auvergne Plateau of France. The inhospitable highlands of Switzerland, the German Alps, and the Auvergne received their first population later when the Alpine race began to occupy western Europe.[1187] The Mittelgebirge of Germany were not settled till the Middle Ages. In the United States, the flood of population had spread westward by 1840 to the ninety-fifth meridian and the north-south course of the Missouri River; but out of this sea of settlement the Adirondack Mountains, a few scattered spots in the Appalachians, and the Ozark Highlands rose as so many islands of uninhabited wilderness, and they remain to-day areas of sparser population. In 1800, the "bare spots" in the eastern mountains were more pronounced. [See map page 156.] Great stretches of the Rocky Mountains, of the Laurentian Highlands of Canada, like smaller patches in the Scandinavian and Swiss Alps, are practically uninhabited.

[Sidenote: Mountains as transit regions.]

Mountain regions, like deserts and seas, become mere transit districts, which man traverses as quickly as possible. Hence they often lie as great inert areas in the midst of active historical lands, and first appear upon the historical stage in minor roles, when they are wanted by the plains people as a passway to desirable regions beyond. Then, as a rule, only their transit routes are secured, while the less accessible regions are ignored. Caesar makes no mention of the Alps, except to state that he has crossed them, until some of the mountain tribes try to block the passage of Roman merchants or armies; then they become important enough to be conquered. It was not till after the Cimbri in 102 B.C. invaded Italy by the Brenner route, that the Romans realized the value of Rhaetia (Tyrol) as a thoroughfare from Italy to Germany, and began its conquest in 36 B.C. This was the same value which the Tyrol so long had for the old German Empire and later for Austria,--merely to secure connection with the Po Valley. The need of land communication with the Rhone Valley led the Romans to attack the Salyes, who inhabited the Maritime Alps, and after eighty years of war to force from them the concession of a narrow transit strip, twelve stadia or one and a half miles wide, for the purpose of making a road to Massilia.[1188] The necessity of controlling such transit lands has drawn British India into the occupation of mountain Baluchistan, Kashmir and Sikkim, just as it has caused the highlands of Afghanistan to figure actively in the expansion policy of both India and Russia. The conquest of such transit lands has always been attended by road building, from the construction of the Roman highway through the Brenner Pass to the modern Russian military road through the Pass of Dariel across the Caucasus, and the yet more recent Indian railroad to Darjeeling, with the highway extension beyond to the Tibetan frontier through Himalayan Sikkim.

Such mountain regions attain independent historical importance when their population increases enough to form the nucleus of a state, and to acquire additional territory about the highland base either by conquest or voluntary union, while they utilize their naturally protected location and their power to grant safe transit to their allies, as means to secure their political autonomy. Therefore to mountain regions so often falls the role of buffer states. Such were medieval Burgundy and modern Savoy, which occupied part of the same territory, Navarre which in the late Middle Ages controlled the important passway around the western end of the Pyrenees, and Switzerland which commands the passes of the central Alps. The position of such mountain states is, however, always fraught with danger, owing to the weakness inherent in their small area and yet smaller allowance of productive soil, to their diverse ethnic elements, and the forces working against political consolidation in their deeply dissected surface. Political solidarity has a hard, slow birth in the mountains.

[Sidenote: Transition forms of relief between highlands and lowlands.]

In view of the barrier character of mountains, a fact of immense importance to the distribution of man and his activities is the rarity of abrupt, ungraded forms of relief on the earth's surface. The physiographic cause lies in the elasticity of the earth's crust and the leveling effect of weathering and denudation. Everywhere mountains are worn down and rounded off, while valleys broaden and fill up to shallow trough outlines. Transition forms of relief abound. Human intercourse meets therefore few absolute barriers on the land; but these few reveal the obstacles to historical movement in perpendicular reliefs. The mile-high walls of the Grand Canon of the Colorado are an insuperable obstacle to intercourse for a stretch of three hundred miles. The glacier-crowned ridge of the Bernese Alps is crossed by no wagon road between the Grimsel Pass and the upper Rhone highway around their western end, a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles). The Pennine Alps have no pass between the Great St. Bernard and the Simplon, a distance of 90 kilometers (54 miles).

[Sidenote: Importance of transition slopes.]

Gentle transition slopes or terrace lands facilitate almost everywhere access to the lowest, most habitable and therefore, from the human standpoint, most important section of mountains. They combine the ease of intercourse characteristic of plains with many advantages of the mountains, and especially in warm climates they unite in a narrow zone both tropical and temperate vegetation. The human value of these transition slopes holds equally of single hills, massive mountain systems, and continental reliefs. The earth as a whole owes much of its habitability to these gently graded slopes. Continents and countries in which they are meagerly developed suffer from difficulty of intercourse, retarded development and poverty of the choicest habitable areas. This is one disadvantage of South Africa, emphasized farther by a poor coastline. The Pacific face of Australia would gain vastly in historical importance, if the drop from the highlands to the ocean were stretched out into a broad slope, like that which links our Atlantic coastal plain with the Appalachian highlands. There each river valley shows three characteristic anthropo-geographical sub-divisions--the active seaports and tide-water tillage of its lower course, the contrasted agriculture of its hilly course, the upland farms, waterpower industries and mines of its headstream valleys, each landscape giving its population distinctive characteristics. The same natural features, with the same effect upon human activities and population, appear in the long seaward slopes of France, Germany and northern Italy.

[Sidenote: Piedmont belts as boundary zones.]

At the base of the mountains themselves, where the bold relief begins, is always a piedmont zone of hilly surface but gentler grade, at whose inner or upland edge every phase of the historical movement receives a marked check. Here is a typical geographical boundary, physical and human. It shifts slightly in different periods, according to the growing density of population in the plains below and improved technique in industry and road-making. It is often both an ethnic and cultural boundary, because at the rim of the mountains the geologic and economic character of the country changes.[1189] The expanding peoples of the plains spread over the piedmont so far as it offers familiar and comparatively favorable geographic conditions, scatter their settlements along the base of the mountains, and here fix their political frontier for a time, though later they may advance it to the crest of the ridge, in order to secure a more scientific boundary. The civilized population of the broad Indus Valley spread westward up the western highlands, only so far as the shelving slopes of the clay and conglomerate foothills, which constitute the piedmont of the Suleiman and Kirthar Mountains, afforded conditions for their crops. Thus from the Arabian Sea for 600 miles north to the Gomal River, the political frontier of India was defined by the line of relief dividing the limestone mountains from the alluvial plain, the marauding Baluch and Afghan hill tribes from the patient farmers of the Sind.[1190] This line remained the border of India from pre-British days till the recent annexation of Baluchistan.

These piedmont boundaries are most clearly defined in point of race and civilization, where superior peoples from the lowlands are found expanding at the cost of retarded mountain folk. Romans and Rhaetians once met along a line skirting the foot of the eastern Alps, as Russians to-day along the base of the Caucasus adjoin the territories of the heterogeneous tribes occupying that mountain area.[1191] [See map page 225.] The plains-loving Magyars of Hungary have pushed up to the rim of mountainous Siebenburgen or Transylvania from Arad on the Maros River to Sziget on the upper Theiss, while the highland region has a predominant Roumanian population. A clearly defined linguistic and cultural boundary of Indo-Aryan speech and religion, both Hindu and Mohammedan, follows the piedmont edges of the Brahmaputra Valley, and separates the lowland inhabitants from the pagans of Tibeto-Burman speech occupying the Himalayan slope to the north and the Khasia Mountains to the south. The highland race is Mongoloid, while the Bengali of an Aryan, Dravidian and Mongoloid blend fill the river plain.[1192] Such piedmont boundary lines tend to blur into bands or zones of ethnic intermixture and cultural assimilation. The western Himalayan foothills show the blend of Mongoloid and Aryan stocks, where the vigorous Rajputs of the plains have encroached upon the mountaineer's land.[1193] Of almost every mountain folk it can be assumed that they once occupied their highlands to the outermost rim of the piedmont, and retired to the inner rim of this intermediary slope only under compulsion from without.

[Sidenote: Density of population in piedmont belts.]

The piedmont boundary also divides two areas of contrasted density of population. Mountain regions are, as a rule, more sparsely settled than plains. The piedmont is normally a transition region in this respect; but where high mountains rise as climatic islands of adequate water supply out of desert and steppes, they concentrate on their lower slopes all the sedentary population, making their piedmonts zones of greatest density. Low mountains in arid regions become centers of population; here their barrier nature vanishes. In the Sudanese state of Darfur, the Marra Mountains are the district best watered and most thickly populated. Nowhere higher than 6000 feet (1850 meters), they afford running water at 4000 feet elevation and water pools in the sandy beds of their wadis at 3200 feet. Below this, water disappears from the surface, and can be found only in wells whose depth and scarcity increase with distance from the central mountains.[1194] The neighboring kingdom of Wadai shows similar conditions and effects.[1195] In the heart of Australia, where utter desert reigns, the Macdonnell Ranges form the nucleus of the northern area occupied by the Arunta tribe of natives; farther north the Murchison Range, usually abounding in water-holes, is the center and stronghold of the Warramunga tribe.[1196]

Mineral wealth or waterpower in the mountains serves to collect an urban and industrial population along their rim, as we see it about the base of the Erz Mountains in Saxony, the Riesen range in Silesia, the coal-bearing Pennine Mountains of northwestern England, and the highlands of southern Wales, all which piedmont zones show a density of over 150 to the square kilometer (385 to the square mile). Hence the original Swiss Confederation, which included only the mountain cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, was greatly strengthened by the accession of the piedmont cantons of Lucerne, Zurich, Zug and Bern in the early fourteenth century, as later by St. Gall, Aargau and Geneva. These marginal cantons to-day show a density of population exceeding 385 to the square mile, and rising to 1356 in the canton of Geneva.

[Sidenote: Piedmont towns and roads.]

Piedmont belts tend strongly towards urban development, even where rural settlement is sparse. Sparsity of population and paucity of towns within the mountains cause main of traffic to keep outside the highlands, but close enough to their base to tap their trade at every valley outlet. On the alluvial fans or plains of these valley outlets, where mountain and piedmont road intersect, towns grow up. Some of them develop into cities, when they command transverse routes of communication quite across the highlands. The ancient Via Aemilia traced the northern base of the Apennines from Ariminum on the Adriatic to Dertona at the foot of the Ligurian range back of Genoa, and connected a long line of Roman colonies. The modern railroad follows almost exactly the course of the old Roman road,[1197] while a transverse line southward across the Apennines, following an ancient highway over the Poretta Pass to the Arno Valley, has maintained the old preeminence of Bologna. A line of towns, connected by highways or railroads, according to the economic development of the section, defines the bases of the Pyrenees, Alps, Jura, Apennines, Harz, Vosges, Elburz and numerous other ranges. Along the Elburz piedmont runs the imperial road of Persia from Tabriz through Teheran to Meshed. In arid regions these piedmont roads are an unfailing feature, but their towns shrink to rural settlements, except at the junction of transmontane routes.

[Sidenote: Piedmont termini of transmontane routes.]

Piedmont cities draw their support from plain, mountain and transmontane region, relying chiefly on the fertile soil of the level country to feed their large populations. Sometimes they hug the foot of the mountains, as Bologna, Verona, Bergamo, Zurich, Denver and Pittsburg do; sometimes, like Milan, Turin, and Munich, they drop down into the plain, but keep the mountains in sight. They flourish in proportion to their local resources, in which mineral wealth is particularly important, and to the number and practicability of their transmontane connections. Hence they often receive their stamp from the mountains behind them as well as from the bordering plain. The St. Gotthard route is flanked by Lucerne on the north and Milan on the south. The Brenner has its urban outlets at Munich and Verona. Narbonne and Barcelona form the termini of the route over the eastern Pyrenees; Toulouse commands the less used central passes, and Bayonne the western. Tiflis is situated in the great mountain trough connecting the Black Sea and the Caspian; but over the Caucasus by the Pass of Dariel come the influences which make it a Russian town. Peshawar, situated in the mountain angle of the Punjab, depends more upon the Khaibar Pass and its connections thereby with Central Asia than upon the plains of the Indus; its population, in appearance and composition nearly as much Central Asiatic as Indian, is engaged in traffic between the Punjab and the whole trans-Hindu Kush country.[1198]

Where a mountain system describes a semi-circular course, its transit routes tend to converge on the inner side, and at their foci fix the sites of busy commercial centers. Turin draws on a long series of Alpine and Apennine routes from the Pass of Giovi (1548 feet or 472 meters) leading up from Genoa on the south, to the Great St. Bernard on the north. Milan gets immense support from the St. Gotthard and Simplon railroads over the Alps, besides wagon routes over several minor passes. Kulm, Balkh and Kunduz in the piedmont of northern Afghanistan are fed by twenty or more passes over the Hindu Kush and Pamir. Bukhara is the remoter focus of all these routes, and also of the valley highways of the western Tian Shan. It therefore occupies a location which would make it one of the great emporiums of the world, were it not for the expanse of desert to the west and the scantiness of its local water supply, which is tapped farther upstream for the irrigation of Samarkand. In its bazaars are found drugs, dyes and teas from India; wool, skins and dried fruit from Afghanistan; woven goods, arms, and books from Persia; and Russian wares imported by rail and caravan. English goods, which formerly came in by the Kabul route from India, have been excluded since Russia established a protectorate over the province of Bukhara. Across the highlands to the east, the cities of Kashgar and Yarkand, situated in that piedmont zone of vegetation where mountain and desert meet, are enclosed by a vast amphitheater formed by the Tian Shan, the Pamir Highlands, and the Karakorum range. Stieler's atlas marks no less than six trade routes over the passes of these mountains from Kashgar to the headstreams of the Sir-daria and Oxus, and six from Yarkand to the Oxus and Indus. Kashgar is a meeting ground of many nationalities. To its bazaars come traders from China, India, Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Russian Turkestan.[1199] The Russian railway up the Sir-daria to Andizhan brings European goods within relatively easy reach of the Terek Davan Pass, and makes serious competition for English wares entering by the more difficult Karakorum Pass from India.[1200]

[Sidenote: Cities of coastal piedmonts.]

Where mountains drop off into a desert, as these Central Asiatic ranges do, their piedmont cities are confined to a narrow zone between mountains and arid waste. Bordering two transit regions of scant population and through travel, they become natural outfitting points, centers of exchange rather than production. Where mountains drop off into the sea and the piedmont therefore becomes a coastal belt, again it borders two transit regions; but here the ports of the desert are replaced by maritime ports, which command the world thoroughfare of the ocean. They therefore tend to concentrate population and commerce wherever a good harbor coincides with the outlet of a transmontane route, as in Genoa and Bombay.

[Sidenote: Piedmonts as colonial or backwoods frontiers.]

Since mountains are inhospitable to every phase of the historical movement, they long remain regions of retardation. Hence to their bordering plains they sustain the relation of young undeveloped lands, so that life in their piedmont belts tends to show for a long time all the characteristics of a new colonial frontier. The rim of the Southern Appalachians abundantly illustrates this principle even to-day. During the westward expansion of the American people from 1830 to 1850, the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains was dotted with trading posts like that of the Missouri Fur Company at the forks of the Missouri River, Forts Laramie and Platte on the North Fork of the Platte, Vrain's Fort and Fort Lancaster on the South Fork, Bent's Fort at the mountain exit of the Arkansas River, and Barclay's in the high Mora Valley of the upper Canadian. These posts gathered in the rich pelts which formed the one product of this highland area susceptible of bearing the cost of transportation to the far away Missouri River. Though they developed into way-stations on the overland trails, when the movement of population to California and Oregon in the forties and fifties made the Rocky Mountains a typical highland transit region, yet they long remained frontier posts.[1201] Later the abundant water supply of this piedmont district, as compared with the arid plains below, and the mineral wealth of the mountains concentrated here an agricultural and industrial population.

In Sze Chuan province of western China, the piedmont of a vast highland hinterland shows a similar development. Here the towns of Matang, Sungpan, Kuan Hsien, and even the capital Chengtu, situated in the high Min Valley at the foot of the mountains walling them in on the west, are emporiums for trade with the Tibetans, who bring hither furs, hides and wool from their plateau pastures, and musk from the musk deer on the Koko Nor plains.[1202] Just to the north, Sian (Singan), capital of the highland province of Shensi, concentrates the fur trade of a large mountain wilderness to the west. Several blocks on the main street form a great fur market for the sale of mink and other skins used to line the official robes of mandarins.[1203]

[Sidenote: Mountain carriers.]

Like seas, deserts, and other geographical transit regions, mountains too under primitive conditions develop their professional carriers. These collect in the piedmont, where highway and mule train cease, and where the steep track admits only human beasts of burden, trained by their environment to be climbers and packers. These mountain carriers are found on the Pacific face of the coast ranges of North and South America from the peninsula of Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. They are able to pack from 100 to 160 pounds up a steep grade. The Chilkoot Indians, men, women and children, did invaluable service on the White Horse and Chilkoot passes during the early days of the Klondike rush. They had devised a well-arranged harness, which enabled them better to carry their loads. Farther south in British Columbia the piedmont tribes had once a like importance; there they operated especially from the town of Hope on the lower Frazer River as a distributing center. The Mexican carrier is so efficient and so cheap that he enters into serious competition with modern schemes to improve transportation, especially as the rugged relief of this country makes those schemes expensive.[1204] The Indians of the eastern slope of the Andes pack India rubber, in loads of 150 pounds each, from the upper Purus and Madeira rivers up to the Andean plateau at a height of 15,000 feet, and there transfer their burdens to mules for transport down to the Peruvian port of Mollendo.[1205]

The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau employ the same primitive means of transportation. The roads leading from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children, laden with bales of brick tea,[1206] the strongest of them shouldering 350 pounds. The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between Darjeeling and Shigatze. Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias, who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier. Landon cites the case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).[1207] In Nepal, women and girls, less often men, have long been accustomed to carry travellers and merchandise over the Himalayan ranges.[1208] In the marginal valleys of the Himalayas, like Kashmir and Baltistan, the natives are regularly impressed for begar or carrier service on the English military roads to strategic points on the high mountain frontier of the Indian Empire.[1209] So the Igorots of the Luzon province of Benguet pack all goods and supplies from Naguilian in the lowlands up 4000 feet in a distance of 25 miles to their little capital of Baguio; for this service they are now paid one peso (46 cents in 1901) a day with food, or ten times as much as under the Spanish rule.[1210]

[Sidenote: Power of mountain barriers to block or deflect.]

If the historical movement slackens its pace at the piedmont slope, higher up the mountain it comes to a halt. Only when human invention has greatly improved communication across the barrier are its obstacles in part overcome. The great highland wall stretching across southern Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea long cut off the solid mass of the continent from the culture of the Mediterranean lands. Owing to these mountains Central Europe came late into the foreground of history, not till the Middle Ages. Even the penetrating civilization of Greece reached it only by long detours around the ends of the mountain barrier; by Massilia and the Rhone, by Istria and the Danube, Greek commerce trickled through to the interior of the continent.

Where mountains fail to check, they deflect the historical movement. The wall of the Carpathians, bulwark of Central Europe, split the westward moving Slav hordes in the 6th century, diverting one southward up the Danube Valley to the Eastern Alps, and turning one northward along the German lowlands.[1211] The northward expansion of the Romans, rebuffed by the high double wall of the Central Alps, was bent to the westward over the Maritime, Cottine and Savoy Alps, where the barrier offered the shortest and easiest transmontane routes. Hence Germany received the elements of Mediterranean culture indirectly through Gaul, second-hand and late. The ancient Helvetians, moving southward from northern Switzerland into Gaul, took a route skirting the western base of the Alps by the gap at Geneva, and thus threatened Roman Provincia. Caesar's campaigns into northern Gaul were given direction by the massive Central Plateau of France.[1212] The rugged and infertile area of the Catskills long retarded the westward movement in colonial New York and deflected it northward through the Mohawk depression, which therefore had its long thin line of settlements when the neighboring Catskills were still a "bare spot."

[Sidenote: Significance of mountain valleys.]

In their valleys, mountains lose something of their barrier nature, and approximate the level of the plains. Here they harbor oases of denser population and easier intercourse. Valleys favor human settlement through the milder climate of their lower elevation, the accumulation of soil on their floors, their sheltered environment, and their command of such routes of communication as the highlands afford. They are the avenues into and within a mountain system, and therefore radically influence its history by their direction and location. The Central Plateau of France, through the valleys of the Alliers and upper Loire, is most accessible from the north; therefore in that direction it has maintained its most important historical connections,[1213] from the days of Caesar and Vercingetorix. The massive highland region of Transylvania, which opens long accessible valleys westward toward the plains of the Theiss and Danube, has since the eleventh century received thence Hungarian immigration and political dominion.[1214] Its dominant Roumanian population, however, seems to have fled thither from the Tartar-swept plains to the southeast.

The anthropo-geography of mountain valleys depends upon the structure of the highlands themselves, whether they are fold mountains, whose ranges wall in longitudinal valleys, or dissected plateaus, whose valleys are mostly transverse river channels leading from the hydrographic center out to the rim of the highlands. Longitudinal valleys are not only long, but also broad as a rule and often show a nearly level floor.[1215] They therefore form districts of considerable size, fertility, and individuality, and play distinct historical roles in the history of their respective highlands. Such are the upper Rhone Valley with its long line of flourishing towns and villages, the Hither Rhine, the Inn of the Tyrol and the Engadine, the fertile trough of the meandering Isere above Grenoble,[1216] the broad Orontes-Leontes valley between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon where Kadesh and Baalbec were once the glory of northern Syria. Such is the central trough of the Appalachian Mountains, known as the Great Appalachian Valley, seventy-five miles wide, subdivided into constituent valleys of similar character by parallel, even-crested ridges following the trend of the mountains. These are drained by broad, leisurely rivers, bordered by fertile farms and substantial towns. Transverse valleys, on the other hand, are generally narrow, with steep slopes rising almost from the river's edge and supporting only small villages and farms. A comparison of the spacious, smooth-floored valley of Andermatt with the wild Reuss gorge, of the fertile and populous Shenandoah Valley in the Southern Appalachians with the canon of the Kanawha in the Cumberland Plateau, makes the contrast striking enough.

[Sidenote: Longitudinal valleys.]

Longitudinal valleys, by reason of their length and their branching lateral valleys, are the natural avenues of communication within the mountains themselves. They therefore give a dominant direction to such phases of the historical movement as succeed in passing the outer barrier. The series of parallel ranges which strike off from the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau southward into Farther India have directed along their valleys the main streams of Mongolian migration and expansion, heading them toward the river basins of Burma and Indo China, and away from India itself.[1217] While Tibetan elements have during the ages slowly welled over the high Himalayan brim and trickled down toward the Gangetic plain, Burma has been deluged by floods of Mongolians pouring down the runnels of the land. A carriage road follows the axis of the Central Alps from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance by means of the upper Rhone, Andermatt, and upper Rhine valleys, linked by the Furca and Oberalp passes. The Roman and Medieval routes northward across the Central Alps struck the upper Rhine Valley above Coire, (the ancient Curia Rhaetorum); this natural groove gave them a northeastward direction, and made them emerge from the mountains directly south of Ulm, which thereby gained great importance. The trade routes from Damascus and Palmyra which once entered the Orontes-Leontes trough in the Lebanon system found their Mediterranean termini south near Tyre or north near Antioch, and thus contributed to the greatness of those ancient emporiums. The Great Appalachian Valley used to be a highway for the Iroquois Indians, when they took the warpath against the Cherokee tribes of Tennessee. Later it gave a distinct southwestward trend to pioneer movements of population within the mountains, blending in its common channel the Quakers, Germans and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania, with the English and Huguenot French of the more southern colonies. In the Civil War its fertile fields were swept by marching armies, all the way from Chattanooga to Gettysburg.

[Sidenote: Passes in mountain barriers.]

The barrier nature of mountains depends upon their height and structure, whether they are massive, unbroken walls like the Scandinavian Alps and the Great Smoky range; or, like the Welsh Highlands and the Blue Ridge, are studded with low passes. The Pyrenees, Caucasus and Andes, owing to the scarcity and great height of their passes, have always been serious barriers. The Pyrenees divide Spain from France more sharply than the Alps divide Italy from France; owing to their rampart character, they form the best and most definite natural boundary in Europe.[1218] Epirus and Aetolia, fenced in by the solid Pindus range, took little part in the common life of ancient Greece; but the intermittent chains of Thessaly offered a passway between Macedon and Hellas. The Alps have an astonishing number of excellent passes, evenly distributed for the most part. These, in conjunction with the great longitudinal valleys of the system, offer transit routes from side to side in any direction. The Appalachian system is some three hundred miles broad and thirteen hundred miles long, but it has many easy gaps among its parallel ranges, so that it offered natural though circuitous highways to the early winners of the West. The long line (400 miles) of the Hindu Kush range, high as it is, forms no strong natural boundary to India, because it is riddled with passes at altitudes from 12,500 to 19,000 feet.[1219] The easternmost group of these passes lead down to Kashmir, and therefore lend this state peculiar importance as guardian of these northern entrances to India.[1220] The Suleiman Mountains along the Indo-Afghan frontier are an imperfect defence for the same reason. They are indented by 289 passes capable of being traversed by camels. The mountain border of Baluchistan contains 75 more, the most important of which focus their roads upon Kandahar. Hence the importance to British India of Kandahar and Afghanistan. Across this broken northwest barrier have come almost all the floods of invasion and immigration that have contributed their varied elements to the mixed population of India. Tradition, epic and history tell of Asiatic highlanders ever sweeping down into the warm valley of the Indus through these passes; Scythians, Aryans, Greeks, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Turks, Tartars, and Mongols have all traveled these rocky roads, to rest in the enervating valleys of the peninsula.[1221]

[Sidenote: Breadth of mountain barriers.]

Mountains folded into a succession of parallel ranges are greater obstructions than a single range like the Erz, Black Forest, and Vosges, or a narrow, compact system like the Western Alps, which can be crossed by a single pass. Owing to this simple structure the Western Alps were traversed by four established routes in the days of the Roman Empire. These were: I. The Via Aurelia between the Maritime Alps and the sea, where now runs the Cornice Road. II. The Mons Matrona (Mont Genevre Pass, 6080 feet or 1854 meters [Transcriber's Note: printer's error incorrectly printed as kilometers.]) between the headstream of the Dora Riparia and that of the Durance, which was the best highway for armies. III. The Little St. Bernard (7075 feet or 2157 meters), from Aosta on the Dora Baltea over to the Isere and down to Lugdunum (Lyons). IV. The Great St. Bernard (8109 feet or 2472 meters) route, which led northward from Aosta over the Pennine Alps to Octodurus at the elbow of the upper Rhone, where Martigny now stands. Across the broad double rampart of the Central Alps the Roman used chiefly the Brenner route, which by a low saddle unites the deep reentrant valleys of the Adige and Inn rivers, and thus surmounts the barrier by a single pass. However, a short cut northward over the Chalk Alps by the Fern Pass made closer connection with Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg). The Romans seem to have been ignorant of the St. Gotthard, which, though high, is the summit of an unbroken ascent from Lake Maggiore up the valley of the Ticino on one side, and from Lake Lucerne up the Reuss on the other.

Mountains which spread out on a broad base in a series of parallel chains, and through which no long transverse valleys offer ready transit, form serious barriers to every phase of intercourse. The lofty boundary wall of the Pyrenees, a folded mountain system of sharp ranges and difficult passes, has successfully separated Spain from continental Europe; it has given the Iberian Peninsula, in the course of a long history, closer relations with Morocco than with its land neighbor France. It thus justifies the French saying that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees." The Andalusian fold mountains stretching across southern Spain in a double wall from Trafalgar to Cape Nao, accessible only by narrow and easily defended passes, enabled the Moors of Granada to hold their own for centuries against the Spaniard Christians. The high thin ridges of the folded Jura system, poor in soil and sparsely populated, broken by occasional "cluses" or narrow water-gaps admitting the rivers from one elevated longitudinal valley to another, have always been a serious hindrance to traffic.[1222]

[Sidenote: Circuitous routes through folded mountains.]

Such mountains can be crossed only by circuitous routes from pass to pass, ascending and descending each range of the system. The Central Alps, grooved by the longitudinal valleys of the upper Rhone, Rhine and Inn, make transit travel a series of ups and downs. The northern range must be crossed by some minor pass like the Gemmi, (7553 feet) or Panixer (7907 feet) to the longitudinal valleys, and the southern range again by the Simplon (6595 feet), San Bernadino (6768 feet), Spluegen (6946 feet) or Septimer (7582 feet) to the Po basin. Across the corrugated highland of the Hindu Kush, lying between the plains of the Indus and the Oxus, the caravans of western Asia seek the market of the Punjab by a circuitous route through the Hajikhak Pass (12,188 feet) or famous Gates of Bamian over the main range of the Hindu Kush, by the Unai Pass over the Paghman Mountains to Kabul at 5740 feet, and then by gorges of the Kabul River and the Khaibar Pass (6825 feet) down to Peshawar. This road presents so many difficulties that caravans from Turkestan to India prefer another route from Merv up the valley of the Heri-Rud through the western hills of the Hindu Kush to Herat, thence diagonally southeast across Afghanistan to Kandahar, and thence by the Bolan Pass down to the Sind. The broad, low series of forested mountains consisting of the Vindhyan and Kaimur Hills, reinforced by the Satpura, Kalabet, Gawilgarh ranges, Mahadeo Hills, Maikal Range and Chutia Nagpur Plateau as a secondary ridge to the south, forms a double barrier across the base of peninsular India. It divides the Deccan from Hindustan so effectually that it has sufficed to set limits to any Aryan advance en masse southward. It kept southern India isolated, and admitted only later Aryan influences which filtered through the barrier. To people accustomed to treeless plains, these wide belts of wooded hills were barrier enough. Even a few years ago their passes were dreaded by cartmen; most of the carriage of the country was effected by pack-bullocks. Even when roads were cleared through the forests, they were likely to be rendered impassable by torrential rains.[1223]

[Sidenote: Dominant trans-montane routes.]

Where a broad, complex mountain system contracts to narrow compass, or is cut by deep reentrant valleys leading up to a single pass, the transmontane route here made by nature assumes great historical Importance. The double chain of the mighty Caucasus, from 120 to 150 miles wide and 750 miles long, stretches an almost insuperable barrier between the Black Sea and the Caspian. But nearly midway between these two seas it is constricted to only 60 miles by a geographical and geological gulf, which penetrates from the steppes of Russia almost to the heart of the system.[1224] This gulf forms the high valley of the Terek River, beyond whose headstream lies the Dariel defile (7503 feet or 2379 meters), which continues the natural depression across to the short southern slope. All the other passes of the Caucasus are 3000 meters or more high, lie above snow line and are therefore open only in summer. The Dariel Pass alone is open all the year around.[1225] Here runs the great military road from Vladicaucas to Tiflis, which the Russians have built to control their turbulent mountaineer subjects; and here are located the Ossetes, the only people among the variegated tribes of the whole Caucasus who occupy both slopes. All the other tribes and languages are confined to one side or the other.[1226] Moreover, the Ossetes, occupying an exposed location in their highway habitat, lack the courage of the other mountaineers, and yielded without resistance to the Russians. In this respect they resemble the craven-spirited Kashmiri, whose mountain-walled vale forms a passway from Central Asia down to the Punjab.

[Sidenote: Brenner route.]

The Pass of Dariel, owing to its situation in a retarded Brenner corner of Asia, has never attained the historical importance which attaches to the deep saddle of the Brenner Pass (4470 feet) in the Central Alps. Uniting the reentrant valleys of the Inn and Adige rivers only 2760 feet above the Inn's exit from the mountains upon the Bavarian plateau, it forms a low, continuous line of communication across the Central Alps. The Brenner was the route of the Cimbri invading the Po Valley, and later of the Roman forces destined for frontier posts of the Empire on the upper Danube. In the Middle Ages it was the route for the armies of the German Emperors who came to make good their claim to Italy. By this road came the artists and artisans of the whole north country to learn the arts and crafts of beauty-loving Venice. From the Roman road-makers to the modern railroad engineer, with the concomitant civilization of each, the Brenner has seen the march of human progress.

[Sidenote: Pass of Belfort.]

Farther to the west, the wall of highlands stretching across southern Europe is interrupted by a deep groove formed by the mountain-flanked Rhone Valley and the Pass of Belfort, or Burgundian Gate, which lies between the Vosges and Jura system, and connects the Rhone road with the long rift valley of the middle Rhine. This pass, broad and low (350 meters or 1148 feet) marks the insignificant summit in the great historic route of travel between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, from the days of ancient Etruscan merchants to the present. This was the route of the invading Teuton hordes which the Roman Marius defeated at Aquae Sextiae, and later, of the Germans under Ariovistus, whom Caesar defeated near the present Muehlhausen. Four centuries afterward came the Alamannians, Burgundians and other Teutonic stocks, who infused a tall blond element into the population of the Rhone Valley.[1227] The Pass of Belfort is the strategic key to Central Europe. Here Napoleon repeatedly fixed his military base for the invasion of Austria, and hither was directed one division of the German army in 1870 for the invasion of France. The gap is traversed to-day by a canal connecting the Doubs and the Rhine and by a railroad, just as formerly by the tracks of migrating barbarians.

[Sidenote: Mohawk route.]

The natural depression of the Mohawk Valley, only 445 feet (136 meters) above sea level, is the only decided break across the entire width of the long Appalachian system. This fact, together with its ready accessibility from the Hudson on the east and Lake Ontario on the west, lent it importance in the early history of the colonies, as well as in the later history of New York. It was an easy line of communication with the Great Lakes, and gave the colonists access to the fur trade of the Northwest, then in the hands of the French. So when French and English fought for supremacy in the New World, the Mohawk and Hudson valleys were their chief battleground; elsewhere the broad Appalachian barrier held them apart. Again in the Revolution, control of the Mohawk-Hudson route was the objective of the British armies mobilized on the Canadian frontier, because it alone would enable them to co-operate with the British fleet blockading the coast cities of the colonies. In the War of 1812, it was along this natural transmontane highway that supplies were forwarded to the remote frontier, to support Perry's fight for control of the Great Lakes. The war demonstrated the strategic necessity of a protected, wholly American line of water communication between the Hudson and our western frontier, while the commercial and political advantage was obvious. Hence a decade after the conclusion of the war, this depression was traced by the Erie Canal, through which passed long lines of boats to build up the commercial greatness of New York City.

[Sidenote: Height in mountain barriers.]

Other structural features being the same, mountains are barriers also in proportion to their height; for, with few exceptions, the various anthropo-geographic effects of upheaved areas are intensified with increase of elevation. Old, worn-down mountains, like the Appalachians and the Ural, broad as they are, have been less effective obstacles than the towering crests of the Alps and Caucasus. The form of the elevation also counts. Easy slopes and flat or rounded summits make readier transit regions than high, thin ridges with escarpment-like flanks. Mountains of plateau form, though reaching a great altitude, may be relatively hospitable to the historical movement and even have a regular nomadic population in summer. The central and western Tian Shan system is in reality a broad, high plateau, divided into a series of smoothly floored basins and gently rolling ridges lying at an elevation of 10,000 to 12,000 feet above the sea. Its pamirs or plains of thick grass, nourished by the relatively heavy precipitation of this high altitude, and forming in summer an island of verdure in the surrounding sea of sun-scorched waste, attract the pastoral nomads from all the bordering steppes and deserts.[1228] Thus it is a meeting place for a seasonal population, sparse and evanescent, but its uplifted mass holds asunder the few sedentary peoples fringing its piedmont. The corrugated dome of the Pamir highland, whose valley floors lie at an elevation of 11,000 to 13,000 feet, draws to its summer pastures Kirghis shepherds from north, east and west; and their flocks in turn attract the raids of the marauding mountaineers occupying the Hunza Valley to the south. The Pamir, high but accessible, was a passway in the tenth century for Chinese caravans bound from "Serica" or the "Land of Silk" to the Oxus River and the Caspian. Here Marco Polo and many travelers after him found fodder for their pack animals and food for themselves, because they could always purchase meat from the visiting shepherds. The possibilities of the Pamir as a transit region are apparent to Russia, who in 1886 annexed most of it to the government of Bukhara.

[Sidenote: Contrasted accessibility of opposite slopes.]

Mountains are seldom equally accessible from all sides. Rarely does the crest of a system divide it symmetrically. This means a steep, difficult approach to the summit from one direction, and a longer, more gradual, and hence easier ascent from the other. It means also in general a wide zone of habitation and food supply on the gentler slope, a better commissary and transport base whence to make the final ascent, whether in conquest, trade or ethnic growth. Mountain boundaries are therefore rarely by nature impartial. They do not umpire the great game of expansion fairly. They lower the bars to the advancing people on one side, and hold them relentlessly in place to the other. To the favored slope they give the strategic advantage of a swift and sudden descent beyond the summit down the opposite side. The political boundary of France along the watershed of the Vosges Mountains is backed by a long, gradual ascent from the Seine lowland and faces a sharp drop to the rift valley of the middle Rhine, Its boundary along the crest of the Alps from Mont Blanc to the Mediterranean brings over two-thirds of the upheaved area within the domain of France, and gives to that country great advantages of approach to the Alpine passes at the expense of Italy. With the exception of the ill-matched conflict between the civilized Romans and the barbarian Gauls, it is a matter of history that from the days of Hannibal to Napoleon III, the campaigns over the Alps from the north have succeeded, while those from the steep-rimmed Po Valley have miscarried. The Brenner route favored alike the Cimbri hordes in 102 B.C. and later the medieval German Emperors invading Italy from the upper Danube. The drop from the Brenner Pass to Munich is 2800 feet; to Rovereto, an equally distant point on the Italian side, the road descends 3770 feet.

[Sidenote: Its ethnic effects.]

The inequality of slope has ethnic as well as political effects, especially where a latitudinal direction also makes a sharp contrast of climate on the two sides of the mountain system. Except in the Roman period, the southern face of the Alps has been an enclosing wall to the Italians. The southern cultivator penetrated its high but sunny valleys only when forced by poverty, while the harsh climate on the long northern slope effectively repelled him. On the other hand, Switzerland has overstepped the Alpine crest in the province of Ticino and thrust its political boundary in a long wedge down to the lowland of the Po near Como; and the Alpine race, spilling everywhere over the mountain rim into the inviting Po basin, has given to this lowland population a relatively broad skull, blond coloring and tall figure, sharply contrasted with the pure Mediterranean race beyond the crest of the Apennines.[1229]

The long northward slope of the Alps in Switzerland and Tyrol, and the easy western grade toward France, have enabled Germanic and Gallic influences of various kinds to permeate the mountains. A strong element of blond, long-headed Germans mingles in the population of the Aar and Rhine valleys up to the ice-capped ridge of the Glarner and Bernese Alps,[1230] while the virile German speech has pushed yet farther south to the insuperable barrier of the Monte Rosa group. The abrupt southward slope of the Himalayas has repelled ethnic expansion from the river lowlands of northern India, except in the mountain valleys of the Punjab streams and Nepal, where the highland offered asylum to the Rajput race when dislodged by a later Aryan invasion, or when trying their energies in expansion and conquest.[1231] The Tibetan people, whose high plateaus rise almost flush with the Himalayan passes, have everywhere trickled through and given a Mongoloid mountain border to Aryan India,[1232] even though their speech has succumbed to the pervasive Aryan language of the piedmont, and thus confused the real ethnic boundary. [See map page 102.] The retarded and laborious approach of British "influence" up this steep ascent to Lhassa, as opposed to the long established suzerainty of the Chinese Emperor in Tibet, can be attributed in part to the contrasted accessibility from north and south.

[Sidenote: Persistence of barrier nature.]

Mountains influence the life of their inhabitants and their neighbors fundamentally and variously, but always reveal their barrier nature. For the occupants of one slope they provide an abundant rainfall, hold up the clouds, and rob them of their moisture; to the leeward side they admit dry winds, and only from the melting snow or the precipitation on their summits do they yield a scanty supply of water. The Himalayas are flanked by the teeming population of India and the scattered nomadic tribes of Tibet. Mountains often draw equally clear cut lines of cleavage in temperature. The Scandinavian range concentrates upon Norway the warm, soft air of the Atlantic westerlies, while just below the watershed on the eastern side Sweden feels all the rigor of a sub-Arctic climate. In history, too, mountains play the same part as barriers. They are always a challenge to the energies of man. Their beauty, the charm of the unknown beyond tempts the enterprising spirit; the hardships and dangers of their roads daunt or baffle the mediocre, but by the great ones whose strength is able to dwarf these obstacles is found beyond a prize of victory. Such were Hannibal, Napoleon, Suvaroff, Genghis Khan, and those lesser heroes of the modern work-a-day world who toiled across the Rockies and Sierras in the feverish days of '49, or who faced the snows of Chilkoot Pass for the frozen gold-fields of the Yukon.

[Sidenote: Importance of mountain passes.]

For migrating, warring and trading humanity therefore, the interest of the mountains is centered in the passes. These are only dents or depressions in the great up-lifted crest, or gaps carved out by streams, or deeper breaches in the mountain wall; but they point the easiest pathway to the ultramontane country, and for this reason focus upon themselves the travel that would cut across the grain of the earth's wrinkled crust. Their influence reaches far. The Brenner, by its medieval trade, made the commercial greatness of Augsburg, Ratisbon, Nuremberg, and Leipzig to the north, and promoted the growth of Venice to the south. The Khaibar Pass and the Gates of Herat in Afghanistan have for long periods dominated the Asiatic policy of Russia and British India. The Mohawk depression and Cumberland Gap for decades gave direction to the streams of population moving westward into the Mississippi basin in the early history of the Republic. Where Truckee Pass (7017 feet) makes a gash in the high ridge of the Sierra Nevada, the California Trail in 1844 sought the line of least resistance across the barrier mass, and deposited its desert-worn immigrants about the Sacramento Valley and San Francisco Bay. There they made a nucleus of American population in Mexican California, and in 1846 became the center of American revolt.

[Sidenote: Persistent influence of passes.]

Though modern engineering skill, especially when backed by a political policy, may cause certain passes to gain in historical importance at the cost of others, the rule holds that passes are never quite insignificant. Their influence is persistent through the ages. They are nature-made thoroughfares, traversed now by undisciplined hordes of migrating barbarians, now by organized armies, now by the woolly flocks and guardian dogs of the nomad shepherd, now by the sumpter mule of the itinerant merchant, now by the wagon-trains of over-mountain settlers, now by the steam engine panting up the steep grade. Nowhere does history repeat itself so monotonously, yet so interestingly as in these mountain gates. In the Pass of Roncesvalles, notching the western Pyrenees between Pamplona in Spain and St. Etienne in France, fell the army of Charlemagne surprised and beset by the mountain tribes in 778;[1233] through this breach the Black Prince in 1367 led his troops to the victory of Navarette; in the Peninsular War a division of Wellington's army in 1813 moved northward up this valley, driving the French before them; and by this route Soult advanced southward across the frontier for the relief of the French forces shut up in Pamplona. The history of Palestine may be read in epitome in the annals of the Vale of Jezreel, where the highlands of Palestine sink to a natural trough before rising again to the hill country of Galilee and the mountain range of high Lebanon. This was the avenue for war and trade between the Nile and Euphrates, between Africa and Asia. Here the Canaanites expanded eastward from the coast, cutting off northern Israel in Galilee from Samaria and Judea. Here Gideon turned back the incursions of the Midianites or western Arabs. Here was the open road for Assyrians, Egyptians, for Greek armies under Antiochus, and Roman armies under Pompey, Mark Antony, Vespasian and Titus. Hither came the Saracens from the east in 634 A. D. to rout the Greek army, and later the Crusaders from the west, to secure with castle and fortress this key to the Holy Land. Finally, hither came Napoleon from Egypt in 1799 on his way to the Euphrates.[1234]

[Sidenote: Geographic factors in the historical importance of passes.]

The historical importance of passes tends to increase with the depth of the depression, since the lowest gap in a range relegates the others to only occasional or local use; and with their rarity, in consequence of which intercourse between opposite slopes is concentrated upon one or two defiles. The low dips of the Central American Cordilleras to 262 feet (80 meters) at Panama, 151 feet (46 meters) in the Nicaraguan isthmus, and 689 feet (210 meters) at Tehuantepec, present a striking contrast both orographically and historically to the South American Andes, where from the equator to the Uspallata or Bermejo Pass (12,562 feet or 3842 meters) back of Valparaiso, a stretch measuring 33 degrees of latitude, the passes all reach or exceed 10,000 feet or 3000 meters. The southern or Pennine range of the Alps, stretching as a snow-wrapped barrier from Mont Blanc 90 miles to the central Alpine dome of the St. Gotthard, is notched only by the Great St. Bernard and Simplon passes, which have therefore figured conspicuously in war and trade, since very early times. The Pass of Thermopylae, as the only route southward along the flank of the Pindus system, figures in every land invasion of Greece from Xerxes to the Greek war of independence. All movements back and forth across the Caucasus wall have been confined to the Pass of Dariel and the far lower Pass of Derbent, or Pylae Albaniae; of the ancients, which lies between the Caspian and the last low spurs of the mountains as they drop down to the sea. The latter, as the easier of the two passes, has had a longer and richer history. It alone enabled the ancient Persians temporarily to force a wedge of conquest to the northern foot of the Caucasus, and it has been in all ages a highway for peoples entering Persia and Georgia from the north. It has so far been the only practicable route for a railway from the Russian steppes to the southern base of the Caucasus. While Vladicaucas and Tiflis have direct connection by the military highway over the Pass of Dariel, the railroad between these two points makes a detour of 300 miles to the east.

[Sidenote: Intermarine mountains.]

Intermarine mountains as a rule offer the easiest passways where they sink to meet the flanking seas. The Pyrenees are crossed by only two railroads, the Bayonne-Burgos line, along the shore of the Bay of Biscay, and the Narbonne-Barcelona line, overlooking the Mediterranean. Between these extremities the passes are very high and only two are practicable for carriages, the Col de la Perche (5280 feet or 1610 meters) between the valleys of the Tet and the upper Segre, and the Port de Canfranc (7502 feet or 2288 meters) on the old Roman road from Saragossa to Oloron. The coastal road around the eastern end of the Cheviot Hills has been the great intermediary between England and Scotland. It was the avenue for early Teutonic expansion into the Scotch Lowlands, the thoroughfare for all those armies which for centuries made Berwick a chronic battleground.

For purposes of trade these intermarine mountains are less serious barriers, because they can be avoided by an easier and cheaper sea route. Hence on each side of such ranges grow up active ports, like Narbonne and Barcelona, Bayonne and Bilbao with San Sebastian, on the piedmont seaboard of the Pyrenees; Petrovsk and Baku on the Caspian rim of the Caucasus, balancing the Crimean ports and Poti with Trebizond on the Black Sea. Analogous is the position of Genoa and Marseilles in relation to the Maritime Alps. Such ports are inevitably the object of attack in time of hostilities. In the Peninsular War almost the first act of the French was to seize Barcelona, San Sebastian and Bilbao; and throughout the seven years of the conflict these points were centers of battle, blockade and siege. If Russia ever tries to wrench the upper Euphrates Valley from Turkey, Trebizond will repeat the history of Barcelona in the Peninsular War.

[Sidenote: Pass roads between regions of contrasted production]

As the world's roads are used primarily for commerce, pass routes rank in importance according to the amount of trade which they forward; and this in turn is decided by the contrast in the lands which they unite. The passes of the Alps and the Pass of Belfort have been busy thoroughfares from the early Middle Ages, because they facilitate exchanges between the tropical Mediterranean and the temperate regions of Central Europe. Or the contrast may be one of economic and social development. The Mohawk depression forwards the grain of the agricultural Northwest in return for the manufactured wares of the Atlantic seaboard. The passes of the Asiatic ranges connect the industrial and agricultural lowlands of India and China with the highland pastures of Mongolia, Tibet, Afghanistan and Russian Turkestan. Hence they forward the wool, skins, felts, cloth and carpets of the wandering shepherds in exchange for the food stuffs and industrial products of the fertile, crowded lowlands. Where passes open a highway for inland countries to the sea, their sphere of influence is greatly increased. San Francisco, New York, Marseilles, Genoa, Venice, Beirut and Bombay are seaports which owe their importance in no small degree to dominant pass routes into their hinterland.

[Sidenote: Passes determine trans-montane roads.]

In plains and lowlands highways may run in any direction expediency suggests, but in mountain regions the pass points the road. In very high ranges there is no appeal from this law; but in lower systems and especially in old mountains which have been rounded and worn down by ages of denudation, economic and social considerations occasionally transcend orographical conditions in fixing the path of highways. Scarcely less important than pass or gap is the avenue of approach to the same. This is furnished by lateral or transverse valleys of erosion. The deeper their reentrant angles cut back into the heart of the highlands, the more they facilitate intercourse and lend historical importance to the pass route. The Alpine passes which are approached by a single valley from each side are those crossed by railroads to-day,--Mont Cenis, Simplon, St. Gotthard and the Brenner. The Alpine chain is trenched on its inner or southern side by a series of transverse erosion valleys, such as the Dora Baltea, Sesia, Tosa, Ticino, Adda, Adige, and Tagliamento, which carry roads up to the chief Alpine passes. The coincidence of the Roman and medieval roads over the Alps with the modern railroads is striking, except in the single point of elevation. Railroads tend to follow lower levels. Modern engineering skill enables them to tunnel the crest, to cut galleries in the perpendicular walls of gorges, and to embank mountain torrents against the spring inundation of the roadbed, where it drops to the valley floor.

[Sidenote: Navigable river approaches to passes.]

Where gaps are low and the approaching waters are navigable, at least for the small craft of early days, they combine to enhance the historical importance of their routes. The Mohawk River, navigable for the canoe of Indian and fur trader, greatly increased travel and traffic through the Mohawk depression. The Pass of Belfort is the greatest historic gateway of western Europe, chiefly because it unites the channels of the Rhone, Saone and Rhine. Lake Lucerne brings the modern tourist by boat to the foot of the railroad ascent to the St. Gotthard Pass, as the long gorge of Lake Maggiore receives him at the southern end. Lake Maggiore is the water outlet also of the Simplon Pass from the upper Rhone, the Lukmanier (6288 feet or 1917 meters) from the Hither Rhine, and the San Bernadino (6766 feet or 2063 meters) from the Hinter Rhine.[1235] This geographical fact explains the motive of Swiss expansion in the fifteenth century in embracing the Italian province of Ticino and the upper end of Lake Maggiore. A significance like that of the Swiss and Italian lakes for the Alpine passes appears emphasized in the Sogne Fiord of Norway. This carries a marine highway a hundred miles into the land; from its head, roads ascend to the only two dents in the mountain wall south of the wide snowfield of the Jotun Fjeld, and they lead thence by the valleys of Hallingdal and Valders down to the plains of Christiania.

[Sidenote: Types of settlements in the valley approaches.]

Genuine mountain passes have only emergency inhabitants--the monks and dogs of the hospice, the road-keepers in their refuge huts or cantoniere, or the garrison of a fort guarding these important thoroughfares. The flanking valleys of approach draw to themselves the human life of the mountains. Their upper settlements show a certain common physiognomy, born of their relation to the barren transit region above, except in those few mountain districts of advanced civilization where railroads have introduced through traffic over the barrier. At the foot of the final ascent to the pass, where often the carriage road ends and where mule-path or foot-trail begins, is located a settlement that lives largely by the transmontane travel. It is a place of inns, hostelries, of blacksmith shops, where in the busy season the sound of hammer and anvil is heard all night; of stables and corrals crowded with pack and draft animals; of storehouses where the traveler can provide himself with food for the journey across the barren, uninhabited heights. It is the typical outfitting point such as springs up on the margin of any pure transit region, whether mountain or desert. Such places are Andermatt and Airolo, lying at an altitude of 4000 feet or more on the St. Gotthard road, St. Moritz below the Maloja Pass, Jaca near the Pass de Canfranc over the Pyrenees, Kugiar and Shahidula[1236] at an elevation of 10,775 feet or 3285 meters on the road up to the Karakorum Pass (18,548 feet or 5655 meters), which crosses the highest range of the Himalayas between Leh in the upper Indus Valley and Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan.

[Sidenote: Lower settlements.]

Farther down the transverse valley the type of settlement changes where side valleys, leading down from other passes, converge and help build up a distributing center for a considerable highland area. Such a point is Chiavenna in northern Italy, located above the head of Lake Como at the junction of the Mera and Liro valleys, which lead respectively to the Spluegen and Maloja passes. It lies at an altitude of 1090 feet (332 meters) and has a population of 4000. Such a point is Aosta (1913 feet or 583 meters elevation) in the Dora Baltea Valley, commanding the Italian approaches to the Great St. Bernard Pass, and the less important Col de Fenetre leading to the upper Rhone, the Little St. Bernard highway to the valley of the Isere, and Col de la Seigne path around the Mont Blanc range to the valley of the Arve. Aosta was an important place in the Roman period and has to-day a population of about 8000. Kokan, in the upper Sir-Daria Valley in Russian Turkestan, commands the approach to the passes of the western Tian Shan and the northern Pamir. Its well-stocked bazaars, containing goods from Russia, Persia and India, testify to its commercial location.

[Sidenote: Pass cities and their markets.]

When the highland area is very broad and therefore necessitates long transit journeys, genuine pass cities develop at high altitudes, and become the termini of the transmontane trade. Such is the Leh (11,280 feet or 3439 meters) on the caravan route from Central Asia over the Karakorum Pass down to Kashmir, and such is Srinagar (5252 feet or 1603 meters) in Kashmir. To their markets come caravans from Chinese Turkestan, laden with carpets and brick tea, and Tibetan merchants from Lhassa, bringing wool from their highland pastures to exchange for the rice and sugar of lowland India.[1237] Leh is conveniently situated about half way between the markets of India and Central Asia. Therefore it is the terminus for caravans arriving from both regions, and exchange place for products from north and south. Seldom do caravans from either direction go farther than this point. Here the merchants rest for a month or two and barter their goods. Tents of every kind, camels, yaks, mules and horses, coolie transports of various races, men of many languages and many religions, give to this high-laid town a truly cosmopolitan stamp in the summer time when the passes are open.[1238] Kabul, which lies at an altitude of nearly 6000 feet near the head of the Kabul River, is the focus of numerous routes over the Hindu Kush, and dominates all routes converging on the northwest frontier of the Punjab.[1239] It is therefore the military and commercial key to India. Its narrow winding streets are obstructed by the picturesque kafilas of Oriental merchants, stocked with both Russian goods from the Oxus districts and British goods from India in evidence of its intermediary location.[1240]

Occasionally a very high market develops for purely local use. The Indian Himalayan province of Kumaon contains the market town of Garbyang, at an elevation of 10,300 feet or about 3000 meters, on the Kali River road leading by the Lipu Lekh Pass (16,780 feet or 5115 meters) over to Tibet. It has grown up as a trade center for the Dokpa Tibetans, who will not descend below 10,000 feet because their yak and sheep die at a lower altitude.[1241] Farther east in the Sikkim border, Darjeeling (7150 feet or 2180 meters elevation) is center of the British wool trade with Tibet.

Often the exchange point moves nearer the summit of the pass, dividing the journey more equally between the two areas of production. Here develops the temporary summer market. High up on the route between Leh and Yarkand is Sasar, a place of unroofed enclosures for the deposit of cotton, silk and other goods left there by the caravans plying back and forth between Leh and Sasar, or Sasar and Yarkand.[1242] Nearly midway on the much frequented trade route between Leh and Lhassa, at a point 15,100 feet (nearly 500 meters) above sea level, just below the Schako Pass, lies Gartok in western Tibet, in summer a busy market surrounded by a city of tents, and the summer residence of the two Chinese viceroys, who occupy the only two substantial dwellings in the place. Here at the end of August is held a great annual fair, which is attended by traders from India, Kashmir, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, China proper, and Lhassa; but by November the place is deserted. The traders disperse, and the few residents of Gartok, together with the viceroys, retire down the Indus Valley to the more sheltered village of Gargunza (14,140 feet or 4311 meters elevation), which represents the limits of permanent settlement in these altitudes.[1243] The Sutlej Valley route from the Punjab to Lhassa is capped near its summit at an altitude of about 5000 meters by the summer market, of Gyanema, whose numerous types of tents indicate the various homes of the traders from Lhassa to India.[1244]

[Sidenote: Pass peoples.]

Natural thoroughfares, whether river highways or mountain pass routes, draw to themselves migration, travel, trade and war. They therefore early assume historical importance. Hence we find that peoples controlling transmontane routes have always been able to exert an historical influence out of proportion to their size and strength; and that in consequence they early become an object of conquest to the people of the lowlands, as soon as these desire to control such transit routes. The power of these pass tribes is often due to the trade which they command and which compensates them for the unproductive character of their country. In the eastern Himalayas the Tomos of the Chumbi Valley are intermediaries of trade between Darjeeling and Tibet, In the western Himalayas, the Kumaon borderland of northern India, which commands some of the best passes, has made its native folk or Bhutias bold merchants who jealously monopolize the trade over the passes to the Tibetan markets. They stretch for a zone of thirty miles south of the boundary from Nepal to Garhwal along the approach to every pass, each sub-group having its particular trade route.[1245]

[Sidenote: Transit duties.]

It is always possible for such pass tribes to levy a toll or transit duty on merchandise, or in lieu of this to rob. Caesar made war upon the Veragri and Seduni, who commanded the northern end of the Great St. Bernard Pass, in order to open up the road over the Alps, which was traversed by Roman merchants magno cum periculo magnisque cum portoriis.[1246] The Salassi, who inhabited the upper Dora Baltea Valley and hence controlled the Little St. Bernard wagon road leading over to Lugdunum or Lyons, regularly plundered or taxed all who attempted to cross their mountains. On one occasion they levied a toll of a drachm per man on a Roman army, and on another plundered the treasure of Caesar himself. After a protracted struggle they were crushed by Augustus, who founded Aosta and garrisoned it with a body of Praetorian cohorts to police the highway.[1247] The Iapodes in the Julian Alps controlled the Mount Ocra or Peartree Pass, which carried the Roman wagon road from Aquileia over the mountains down to the valley of the Laibach and the Save. This strategic position they exploited to the utmost, till Augustus brought them to subjection as a preliminary to Roman expansion on the Danube.[1248]

Turning to another part of the world, we find that the Afghan tribes commanding the passes of the Suleiman Mountains have long been accustomed to impose transit duties upon caravans plying between Turkestan and India. The merchants have regularly organized themselves into bands of hundreds or even thousands to resist attack or exorbitant exactions. The Afghans have always enforced their right to collect tolls in the Khaibar and Kohat passes, and have thus blackmailed every Indian dynasty for centuries. In 1881 the British government came to terms with them by paying them an annual sum to keep these roads open.[1249] Just to the south the Gomal Pass, which carries the main traffic road over the border mountains between the Punjab and the Afghan city of Ghazni, is held by the brigand tribe of Waziris, and is a dangerous gauntlet to be run by every armed caravan passing to and from India.[1250] The Ossetes of the Caucasus, who occupy the Pass of Dariel and the approaching valleys, regularly preyed upon the traffic moving between Russia and Georgia, till the Muscovite government seized and policed the road.[1251]

[Sidenote: Strategic power of pass states.]

The strategic importance of pass peoples tends early to assume a political aspect. The mountain state learns to exploit this one advantage of its ill-favored geographical location. The cradle of the old Savoyard power in the late Middle Ages lay in the Alpine lands between Lake Geneva and the western tributaries of the Po River. This location controlling several great mountain routes between France and Italy gave the Savoyard princes their first importance.[1252] The autonomy of Switzerland can be traced not less to the citadel character of the country and the native independence of its people, than to their political exploitation of their strategic position. They profited, moreover, by the wish of their neighbors that such an important transit region between semi-tropical and temperate Europe should be held by a power too weak to obstruct its routes. The Amir of Kabul, backed by the rapacious Afridi tribes of the Suleiman Mountains, has been able to play off British India against Russia, and thereby to secure from both powers a degree of consideration not usually shown to inferior nations. Similarly in colonial America, the Iroquois of the Mohawk depression, who commanded the passway from the Hudson to the fur fields of the Northwest and also the avenue of attack upon the New York settlements for the French in Canada, were early conciliated by the English and used by them as allies, first in the French wars and afterward in the Revolution.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XV

[1186] For physical effects, see Angelo Mosso, Life of Man on the High Alps. Translated from the Italian. London, 1898.

[1187] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 463-465. New York, 1899.

[1188] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 3.

[1189] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 31-32. New York, 1899.

[1190] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 32-33. London, 1905.

[1191] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, Map p. 439. New York, 1899.

[1192] Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, pp. 294-295. Oxford, 1907. Sir Thomas Holdich, India, relief map on p. 171 compared with linguistic map p. 201. London, 1905.

[1193] Census of India for 1901, Risley and Gait, Vol. I, Part I, p. 2. Calcutta, 1903. B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 40, 130, 131. London, 1896.

[1194] Count Gleichen, The Egyptian Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 184, 185, 190. London, 1905.

[1195] Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. III, pp. 178, 188-192. Leipzig, 1889.

[1196] Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 6, 13. London, 1904.

[1197] W. Deecke, Italy, p. 365. London, 1904.

[1198] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 295-296. London, 1905. G.W. Steevens, In India, pp. 202-204. New York, 1899.

[1199] Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 138, 140, 145, 272-273. London, 1904.

[1200] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 87. Boston, 1907.

[1201] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 184-185. Boston, 1903.

[1202] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 70-72, 88, 91. London, 1900.

[1203] Francis H. Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 170-171. New York, 1902.

[1204] Otis T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 450-454, 474-475. Smithsonian Report, Washington, 1896.

[1205] Col. George E. Church, The Acre Territory and the Caoutchouc Regions of Southwestern Amazonia, Geog. Jour. May, 1904. London.

[1206] M. Huc, Journey through the Chinese Empire, pp. 39-40. New York, 1871.

[1207] Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet, pp. 54-55. New York, 1905.

[1208] Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India. Vol. II, p. 264. Translated from the French of 1676. London, 1889.

[1209] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 231, 274, 276, 286-289. London, 1897.

[1210] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, p. 544. Washington, 1905.

[1211] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, p. 134. London, 1903.

[1212] M.S.W. Jefferson, Caesar and the Central Plateau of France, Journal of Geog., Vol. VI, p. 113. New York, 1897.

[1213] P. Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la Geographie de la France, p. 276. Paris, 1903.

[1214] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, p. 450-453. London, 1882.

[1215] William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, p. 183. Boston, 1899.

[1216] P. Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la Geographie de la France, p. 260, map p. 261. Paris, 1903.

[1217] Indian Census for 1901, Risley and Gait, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 1, 2, Calcutta, 1905.

[1218] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. IV, p. 479. New York, 1902.

[1219] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 67, cartogram of Hindu Kush orography. London, 1905.

[1220] Ibid., pp. 102-104.

[1221] Ibid., p. 26.

[1222] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 27. London, 1903.

[1223] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 40-45, 111, 116. London, 1896.

[1224] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 394-395. New York, 1902.

[1225] Gottfried Merzbacher, Aus den Hochregionen des Kaukasus, pp. 73-78. Leipzig, 1901.

[1226] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, p. 438. New York, 1899.

[1227] Ibid., Maps pp. 143, 147, text p. 148.

[1228] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 106-109. Boston, 1907.

[1229] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 249-253. New York, 1899.

[1230] Ibid., p. 282 and cartogram, p. 284.

[1231] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 201. London, 1905. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, p. 295. Oxford, 1907.

[1232] Census of India, 1901, Ethnographic Appendices, Vol. I, p. 60, by H. H. Risley, Calcutta, 1903. C. A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 341-353. London, 1906.

[1233] B. Lavisse, Histoire de France, Vol. II, Part 1, p. 294. Paris, 1903.

[1234] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 383, 384, 391-400, 407, 409. New York, 1897.

[1235] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 20, 21. London, 1904.

[1236] Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 150, 194, 199. London, 1904.

[1237] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 12, 88, 157-159, 231. London, 1897.

[1238] Ibid., pp. 173, 177.

[1239] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, map p. 85, pp. 86, 89. London, 1905.

[1240] Vambery, Reise in Mittelasien, pp. 371-375. Leipzig, 1973.

[1241] C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, p. 136. London, 1906.

[1242] O.P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 112-116. New York, 1903.

[1243] Elisee Reclus, Asia, Vol. II, pp. 50-51. C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 146-148, 152, 157, 300-303. London, 1906.

[1244] Ibid., pp. 326-327.

[1245] Ibid., pp. 4, 61-64, 310-311.

[1246] Bella Gallico, Book III, chap. I.

[1247] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 1, 11.

[1248] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 10.

[1249] Sir Thomas Holdich, The Indian Borderland, p. 48. London, 1909.

[1250] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 467. New York, 1902.

[1251] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I, p. 431. London, 1812.

[1252] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, pp. 286-287. London, 1882.