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 374 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xlii served the memory, or rather suggested the idea, of a fable, which was invented, without any mutual intercourse, by the shepherds of Latium and those of Scythia. At the equal distance of two thousand miles from the Caspian, the Icy, the Chinese, and the Bengal seas, a ridge of mountains is conspicuous, the centre and perhaps the summit of Asia ; which, in the language of different nations, has been styled Imaus, and Caf, 25 and Altai, and the Golden Mountains, and the Girdle of the Earth. The sides of the hills were productive of minerals ; and the iron forges, 26 for the purpose of war, were exercised by the Turks, tad. 439- the most despised portion of the slaves of the great khan of the Geougen. But their servitude could only last till a leader, bold and eloquent, should arise, to persuade his countrymen that the same arms which they forged for their masters might become, in their own hands, the instruments of freedom and victory. They sallied from the mountain ; 27 a sceptre was the reward of his advice ; and the annual ceremony, in which a piece of iron was heated in the fire and a smith's hammer was successively handled by the prince and his nobles, recorded for ages the humble profession and rational pride of the Turkish nation. Bertezena, 28 their first leader, signalized their valour and his own in successful combats against the neighbouring 25 From Caf to Caf ; which a more rational geography would interpret, from Imaus, perhaps, to mount Atlas. According to the religious philosophy of the Mahometans, the basis of mount Caf is an emerald, whose reflection produces the azure of the sky. The mountain is endowed with a sensitive action in its roots or nerves ; and their vibration, at the command of God, is the cause of earthquakes (D'Herbelot, p. 230, 231). 36 The Siberian iron is the best and most plentiful in the world ; and, in the southern parts, above sixty mines are now worked by the industry of the Russians (Strahlenberg, Hist, of Siberia, p. 342, 387. Voyage en Siberie, par TAbbe" Chappe de Auteroche, p. 603-608, edit, in 12mo. Amsterdam, 1770). The Turks offered iron for sale ; yet the Roman ambassadors, with strange obstinacy, per- sisted in believing that it was all a trick, and that their country produced none (Menander in Excerpt. Leg. p. 152). [According to Parker (Eng. Hist. Re- view, 43, p. 435) Chinese authors distinctly state that the iron district in which the Turks worked for the Geougen was " somewhere between what are now called Etzinai and Kokonor, on the borders of, if not actually in, the modern Chinese province of Kansuh ". It was not, as De Guignes and Gibbon say, near the river Irtish.] 27 Of Irgana-kon (Abulghazi Khan, Hist. G^nealogique de Tatars, P. ii. c. 5, p. 71-77 ; o. 15, p. 155). The tradition of the Moguls, of the 450 years which they passed in the mountains, agrees with the Chinese periods of the history of the Huns and Turks (De Guignes, torn. i. part ii. p. 376), and the twenty generations, from their restoration to Zingis. 28 [Asena, who is here confounded with Tumen, was the leader who sought the protection of the Geougen, c. 440 a.d. ; Bee Appendix 17.]