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20 plain, the uniform steppe and prairie, without any other undulations than the tumuli, or pre-historic tombs, or the high banks of streams, or the insignificant hills which separate the basins of the enormous, slow, aimless rivers. The chain of the Ural Mountains which separates Asiatic Russia from European Russia hardly breaks the continuity of the plain. The slopes of the Ural are a passage rather than a barrier, and between the last slopes of the Ural and the Caspian Sea there opens a gate of three hundred miles in width which has always been the highway of invaders and marauders.

And this unity of the infinite plain is still rendered more striking through the unity of climate. In summer the same Continental climate reigns all over the Empire, the same intense heat relaxes and enervates the inhabitants of Lake Ladoga in the north and the inhabitants of the Caspian shores in the south. In winter the same shroud of snow buries the whole Russian Continent from Poland to Siberia. The Sea of Azov and the northern Caspian Sea are frozen as well as the Gulf of Finland. And the traveller might drive and glide in his sledge in a straight line for six