I was informed that quite recently a Tartar horseman had met his death while carrying the post across this pass. He was overtaken and overwhelmed by a tipe or blizzard before he could reach the shelter of the valleys on either side. Indeed the loss of life to beasts of burden is considerable along this road. No more eloquent evidence could be furnished of the want of humanity in the natives than the callous indifference to the sufferings of dumb animals which day by day is displayed upon these passes. Such a habit of cruelty at once argues a lapse into barbarism, and explains the perpetration of the nameless horrors which so often shock the conscience of the West. We kept passing strings of heavily-laden quadrupeds, which with their dull eyes, drooping heads, and fleshless bodies, covered with sores, had lost the distinctive qualities of the horse. None of them had any thighs to enable them to breast the ascents, and most were incurably lame. Their hocks were bent with curbs or swollen by spavins; one poor beast was dragging his hind legs behind him, and another had one of his forelegs bent almost double. Neither--it could not be doubted--were destined to reach Trebizond. So they crawl over the ground, from year's end to year's end, until they close their miserable existence by sinking exhausted on a pass. Even at the moment of liberation they are doomed to a prolonged agony; and, having been martyred all their life by the barbarity of the human animal, they become victims of his perverse humanity in their death. You will see them prone upon the road, where their drivers have abandoned them to kick out their life in the snow. Religious scruples prevent these misguided monsters from giving them the despatch. We were sickened on one occasion by the spectacle of a wretched horse which, with glazed eyes, continued to paw in a convulsive manner a space of ground which in his agony he had cleared of ice. At the end of my revolver I compelled one of the drivers to sever his jugular vein.