Indeed, the very appearance of the enemy scared them; and they shrank from him, as children before some monstrous object. It is observed of the Scythians, their ancestors, who, as I have mentioned, came down upon Asia in the Median times, that they were a frightful set of men. "The persons of the Scythians," says a living historian,[7] "naturally unsightly, were rendered hideous by indolent habits, only occasionally interrupted by violent exertions; and the same cause subjected them to disgusting diseases, in which they themselves revered the finger of Heaven." Some of these ancient tribes are said to have been cannibals, and their horrible outrage in serving up to Cyaxares human flesh for game, may be taken to confirm the account Their sensuality was unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too limited for their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths, the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical and mental deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human. They are said by a Gothic historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs, or to the misshapen figures (something like, I suppose, the grotesque forms of medieval sculpture), which were placed upon the bridges of antiquity. Their shoulders were broad, their noses flat, and their eyes black, small, and deeply buried in their head. They had little hair on their skulls, and no beard. The report was spread and believed by the Goths, that they were not mere men, but the detestable progeny of evil spirits and witches in the wilds of the East.
As the Huns were but reproductions of the ancient Scythians, so are they reproduced themselves in various Tartar races of modern times. Tavernier, the French traveller, in the seventeenth century, gives us a similar description of the Kalmuks, some of whom at present are included in the Russian Empire. "They are robust men," he says,[8] "but the most ugly and deformed under heaven; a face so flat and broad, that from one eye to the other is a space of five or six fingers. Their eyes are very small, the nose so flat that two small nostrils is the whole of it; their knees turned out, and their feet turned in."