“...for theirs was a life developed around change, and around a permanent struggle with nature. Consequently, the steppe pastoralist had a very different world-view from that of their sedentary neighbors. As William of Ruisbroek noted, in the mid-13th century, the steppe dwellers '...attach little important to the things of the world. They live on earth as if they were not living there. They do not cultivate the soil and build no houses, they are as it were only strangers in transit, and the living feeling which pervades their innermost being, expresses itself in long journeys.”