Bulgaria | Page 9

the glittering sands. And from their tents the Tartar horsemen filed Into
the open plain; so Haman bade-- Haman, who next to Peran-Wisa ruled
The host, and still was in his lusty prime. From their black tents, long
files of horse, they stream'd; As when some grey November morn the
files, In marching order spread, of long-neck'd cranes Stream over
Casbin and the southern slopes Of Elburz, from the Aralian estuaries,
Or some frore Caspian reed-bed, southward bound For the warm
Persian sea-board--so they stream'd. The Tartars of the Oxus, the King's
guard, First, with black sheep-skin caps and with long spears; Large

men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come And Khiva, and ferment
the milk of mares. Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south,
The Tukas, and the lances of Salore, And those from Attruck and the
Caspian sands; Light men and on light steeds, who only drink The acrid
milk of camels, and their wells. And then a swarm of wandering horse,
who came From far, and a more doubtful service own'd; The Tartars of
Ferghana, from the banks Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards And
close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes Who roam o'er Kipchak
and the northern waste, Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzaks, tribes who
stray Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes, Who come on
shaggy ponies from Pamere; These all filed out from camp into the
plain.
Matthew Arnold gives to the Tartar camp tents of lattice-work,
thick-piled carpets; to the Tartar leaders woollen coats, sandals, and the
sheep-skin cap which is still the national head-dress of the Bulgarians.
More important, in proof of his idea of their civilisation, he credits
them with a high sense of chivalry and a faithful regard for facts.
Sohrab and Rustum is, of course, a flight of poetic fancy; but its "local
colour" is founded on good evidence. Probably the Huns, despite the
terrors of their name, the echoes of which still come down the corridors
of time; despite the awful titles which their leaders won (such as Attila,
"the Scourge of God"), were not on a very much lower plane of
civilisation than the Goths with whom they fought, or with the other
barbarians who tore at the prostrate body of the Roman Empire. One
may see people of very much the same type to-day on the outer edges
of Islam in some desert quarters; one may see and, if one has such taste
for the wild and the free in life as has Cunninghame Graham, one may
admire:
There in the Sahara the wild old life, the life in which man and the
animals seem to be nearer to each other than in the countries where we
have changed beasts into meat-producing engines deprived of
individuality, still takes its course, as it has done from immemorial time.
Children respect their parents, wives look at their husbands almost as
gods, and at the tent door elders administer what they imagine justice,
stroking their long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial

functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels' hair bound round
their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat on which they sit a
woolsack or a judge's bench, with a carved wooden canopy above it,
decked with the royal arms.
Thus, when the blue baft-clad, thin, wiry desert-dweller on his lean
horse or mangy camel comes into a town, the townsmen look on him as
we should look on one of Cromwell's Ironsides, or on a Highlander, of
those who marched to Derby and set King George's teeth, in pudding
time, on edge.
The Huns' movement from the north-east was the first Asiatic invasion
of Europe since the fall of the Persian Empire. Almost simultaneously
with it the Saracen first entered from the south, as the ally of the
Christian Emperor against the Goths; and another Gothic chronicler,
Ammianus, tells how the Saracen warriors inspired also a lively horror
in the Gothic mind. They came into battle almost naked, and having
sprung upon a foe "with a hoarse and melancholy howl, sucked his
life-blood from his throat." The Saracen of Ammianus was the
forerunner of the Turk, the Hun of Jordanes, the forerunner of the
Bulgarian. In neither case, of course, can the Gothic chronicler be
accepted as an unprejudiced witness. But it is interesting to note how
the first warriors from the Asiatic steppes impressed their
contemporaries!
The first effect of the invasion of the country of the Goths by the Huns
was to force the Goths to recross the Danube and trespass again on
Roman territory. They sought leave from the Emperor Valens to do this.
A contemporary historian records:
The multitude of the Scythians escaping from the murderous savagery
of the Huns, who spared not the life of woman or