The baggage was so arranged as to be taken through the smaller rivers of Asia without being injured or wetted. It consisted of square chests of wicker-work, with a hollow lid or cover of the same, “covered with black felt, rubbed over with tallow or sheep’s milk to keep the rain from soaking through, which they also adorn with painting or white feathers.” These were placed on carts with very high wheels, and drawn by camels instead of oxen. The encampment was like a large village, well defended by palisades formed of the carts off which the houses had been taken, and which were drawn up in two compact lines, one in front and one in the rear of the dwellings, “as it were between two walls,” says our traveller. A rich Tartar commonly had one hundred, or even two hundred, such cart-houses. Each house had several small houses belonging to it, placed behind it, serving as closets, store-rooms, and sleeping chambers, and often as many as two hundred chests and their necessary carts. This made immense numbers of camels and oxen for draught necessary; and, besides, there were the animals for food and milk, and the horses for the men. They had cow’s milk and mare’s milk, two species of food which they used very differently, and even made of social and religious importance. Only the men were allowed to milk the mares, while the women attended to the cows; and any interchange of these offices would have been deemed, in a man, unpardonable effeminacy, and in a woman indelicacy. At the door of the houses stood two tutelary deities, monsters of both sexes. The cow’s milk served for the food of women and children, while the mare’s milk was made into a fermented liquor called cosmos. This was supposed to make a heathen of the man who drank it; for the Nestorian Christians found among them, “who keep their own laws very strictly, will not drink thereof; they account themselves no Christians after they have once drunk of it; and their priests reconcile them to the church as if they had renounced the Christian faith.”