They are flying people, and therefore cannot be caught.

As they have neither towns nor villages, they must be hunted like wild beasts, and can be fitly compared only to griffins, which beneficent Nature has banished to uninhabited regions." As a Persian distich, quoted by Vambery, has it-- "They came, conquered, burned, pillaged, murdered, and went." Their raids are thus described by an old Russian chronicler: "They burn the villages, the farmyards, and the churches.

The land is turned by them into a desert, and the overgrown fields become the lair of wild beasts.

Many people are led away into slavery; others are tortured and killed, or die from hunger and thirst.

Sad, weary, stiff from cold, with faces wan from woe, barefoot or naked, and torn by the thistles, the Russian prisoners trudge along through an unknown country, and, weeping, say to one another, 'I am from such a town, and I from such a village.'" And in harmony with the monastic chroniclers we hear the nameless Slavonic Ossian wailing for the fallen sons of Rus: "In the Russian land is rarely heard the voice of the husbandman, but often the cry of the vultures, fighting with each other over the bodies of the slain; and the ravens scream as they fly to the spoil." In spite of the stubborn resistance of the nomads the wave of colonisation moved steadily onwards until the first years of the thirteenth century, when it was suddenly checked and thrown back.