loneliness and desertion which seized upon their minds, caused our traveller and his companions to credit somewhat too readily the deceptive testimony of first impressions, which never strictly corresponds with truth. Travelling in those covered wagons which serve the Tartars for carriages, tents, and houses, and through immense steppes in which neither town, village, house, nor any other building, save a few antique tombs, appeared, they arrived in a few weeks at the camp of Zagatay Khan, which, from the number of those moving houses there collected, and ranged in long lines upon the edge of a lake, appeared like an immense city.
Here they remained some days in order to repose themselves, and then set forward, with guides furnished them by Zagatay, towards the camp of Sartak, the prince to whom the letters of St. Louis were addressed. The rude and rapacious manners of the Tartars, rendered somewhat more insolent than ordinary, perhaps, by the unaccommodating temper of their guests, appeared so detestable to Rubruquis, that, to use his own forcible expression, he seemed to be passing through one of the gates of hell; and his ideas were probably tinged with a more sombre hue by the hideous features of the people, whose countenances continually kept up in his mind the notion that he had fallen among a race of demons. As they approached the Tanais the land rose occasionally into lofty hills, which were succeeded by plains upon which nothing but the immense tombs of the Comans, visible at a distance of two leagues, met the eye.
Having crossed the Tanais and entered Asia, they were for several days compelled to proceed on foot, there being neither horses nor oxen to be obtained for money. Forests and rivers here diversified the prospect. The inhabitants, a fierce, uncivilized race, bending beneath the yoke of pagan superstition, and dwelling in huts scattered through the woods, were
