Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
General
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
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,
re-dawned 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 [Footnote: This inscription has been slightly altered in one
or two phrases, and particularly in adapting to the Christian era the
Emperor's expressions for the year of the original Exodus from China and
the retrogressive Exodus from Russia. With respect to the designation
adopted for the Russian Emperor, either it is built upon some confusion
between him and the Byzantine Caesars, as though the former, being
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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