|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 27
"... Lex nec justior ulla est [as _they_ think]
Quam necis artifices arte perire sua."
So perished Zebek-Dorchi, the author and originator of 20
the great Tartar Exodus. Oubacha, meantime, and his
people were gradually recovering from the effects of their
misery, and repairing their losses. Peace and prosperity,
under the gentle rule of a fatherly lord paramount,
redawned upon the tribes: their household _lares_, after so 25
harsh a translation to distant climates, found again a
happy reinstatement in what had, in fact, been their
primitive abodes: they found themselves settled in quiet
sylvan scenes, rich in all the luxuries of life, and endowed
with the perfect loveliness of Arcadian beauty. But from 30
the hills of this favored land, and even from the level
grounds as they approach its western border, they still
look out upon that fearful wilderness which once beheld
a nation in agony--the utter extirpation of nearly half a
million from amongst its numbers, and for the remainder
a storm of misery so fierce that in the end (as happened
also at Athens during the Peloponnesian war from a different 5
form of misery) very many lost their memory; all
records of their past life were wiped out as with a sponge--utterly
erased and cancelled: and many others lost
their reason; some in a gentle form of pensive melancholy,
some in a more restless form of feverish delirium
and nervous agitation, and others in the fixed forms of 10
tempestuous mania, raving frenzy, or moping idiocy.
Two great commemorative monuments arose in after
years to mark the depth and permanence of the awe--the
sacred and reverential grief, with which all persons
looked back upon the dread calamities attached to the 15
year of the tiger--all who had either personally shared
in those calamities and had themselves drunk from that
cup of sorrow, or who had effectually been made witnesses
to their results and associated with their relief: two great
monuments; one embodied in the religious solemnity, 20
enjoined by the Dalai-Lama, called in the Tartar language
a _Romanang_--that is, a national commemoration, with
music the most rich and solemn, of all the souls who
departed to the rest of Paradise from the afflictions of the
Desert (this took place about six years after the arrival 25
in China); secondly, another, more durable, and more
commensurate to the scale of the calamity and to the
grandeur of this national Exodus, in the mighty columns
of granite and brass erected by the Emperor, Kien Long,
near the banks of the Ily. These columns stand upon 30
the very margin of the steppes, and they bear a short but
emphatic inscription[10] to the following effect:--
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this point begin and stretch away,
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many mighty Nations, 5
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of KIEN LONG, God's Lieutenant upon Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Torgote Tartars-- 10
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire
in the year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd. 15
Hallowed be the spot
and
Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771!
Amen.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Singular it is, and not generally known, that Grecian women
accompanied the _anabasis_ of the younger Cyrus and the subsequent
retreat of the Ten Thousand. Xenophon affirms that there were "many"
women in the Greek army--[Greek: pollai �san etairai en t�
strateumati]; and in a late stage of that trying expedition it is
evident that women were amongst the survivors.
[6] "Trashed." This is an expressive word used by Beaumont and
Fletcher in their "Bonduca," etc., to describe the case of a person
retarded or embarrassed in flight, or in pursuit, by some encumbrance,
whether thing or person, too valuable to be left behind.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|