this great drama. The catastrophe in this respect was remarkable and
complete. Oubacha, with all his goodness and incapacity of suspecting,
had, since the mysterious affair on the banks of the Torgau, felt his
mind alienated from his cousin. He revolted from the man that would have
murdered him; and he had displayed his caution so visibly as to provoke
a reaction in the bearing of Zebek-Dorchi and a displeasure which all
his dissimulation could not hide. This had produced a feud, which, by
keeping them aloof, had probably saved the life of Oubacha; for the
friendship of Zebek-Dorchi was more fatal than his open enmity. After
the settlement on the Ily this feud continued to advance, until it came
under the notice of the emperor on occasion of a visit which all the
Tartar chieftains made to his majesty at his hunting-lodge in 1772. The
emperor informed himself accurately of all the particulars connected
with the transaction, of all the rights and claims put forward, and of
the way in which they would severally affect the interests of the
Kalmuck people. The consequence was, that he adopted the cause of
Oubacha, and repressed the pretensions of Zebek-Dorchi, who, on his
part, so deeply resented this discountenance to his ambitious projects,
that, in conjunction with other chiefs, he had the presumption even to
weave nets of treason against the emperor himself. Plots were laid, were
detected, were baffled; counterplots were constructed upon the same
basis, and with the benefit of the opportunities thus offered.
Finally Zebek-Dorchi was invited to the imperial lodge, together with
all his accomplices; and, under the skilful management of the Chinese
nobles in the emperor's establishment, the murderous artifices of these
Tartar chieftains were made to recoil upon themselves; and the whole of
them perished by assassination at a great imperial banquet; for the
Chinese morality is exactly of that kind which approves in everything
the _lex talionis_:--
"....lex nec justior ulla est (as _they_ think)
Quam necis artifices arte perire sua."
So perished Zebek-Dorchi, the author and originator of 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 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 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 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 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 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, we say; first of all, one in the religious
solemnity, 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 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
the very margin of the _steppes_, and they bear a short but emphatic
inscription 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,
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,--
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.
Hallowed be the spot forever,
and
Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771!
Amen.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Obvious punctuation errors and printer's errors were corrected.
Inconsistent hyphenation and capitalization were retained.