402 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



Friedrichs, visited the place some fourteen days after the town had 

 been stormed, the clouds of smoke had cleared from the charred 

 ruins. Wolves and dogs, with bellies swollen from eating human 

 flesh, slunk away sated, or refused to be disturbed in their horrible 

 festival, and continued to gnaw at the bones of their old foes or 

 masters. Eagles, kites, ravens, and crows shared the spoil. In 

 places where the insurgents had made space for themselves, the 

 corpses were thrown together in heaps, dozens and hundreds to- 

 gether; in other parts of the town, in the streets, courts, and houses, 

 corpses lay singly, in couples, in tens, — husband and wife, great- 

 grandparents, grandmothers, mothers, and children, whole families 

 and neighbours who had sought refuge with them. Their fore- 

 heads were gashed with sword-cuts, their features decayed and 

 burned, their limbs gnawed and torn by the teeth of dogs and 

 wolves, their bodies headless and handless. Whatever horror the 

 maddest imagination ever pictured was here realized. 



At the present day there are at most a thousand inhabitants in 

 Tchukutchak, and the newly-erected battlemented fort is actually 

 under the protection of the small Eussian picket of Bakti. That 

 the Dungani have not yet laid down their arms nor been subdued, 

 was suflBciently proved by the recent march of a Chinese army into 

 the valley of the Emil, where insurrection is again threatened. 



Under the escort of Major Tichanoff and his thirty Cossacks we 

 traversed this valley without seeing a single Dungani, indeed with- 

 out meeting a human being for days. The Emil, arising from the 

 Zaur, flows between the Tarabagatai and Semistan — two mountain 

 ranges which meet at an acute angle — and receives numberless small 

 tributaries on either side. The genius which the Chinese have for 

 irrigation had utilized all the streams, and made a fruitful garden 

 of the whole valley till the Dungani broke into and devastated the 

 fertile land, and surrendered it once more to the steppe-land from 

 which it had been won. In the neighbourhood of the town we 

 passed through several small villages, and we came across a Kalmuck 

 aul, but apart from these we saw only the ruin of former possession, 

 comfort, and industry. Over the fields Nature herself had drawn 

 a, veil with gentle hand, but the ruined villages, not yet destroyed 



