So Dionysius, combining this practice with that next described, relates of the Massagetae that they have no delicious bread nor native wine: 

          “But with horse’s blood
  And white milk mingled set their banquets forth.”
      (Orbis Desc. 743-744.)

And Sidonius: 

          “Solitosque cruentum
  Lac potare Getas, et pocula tingere venis.”
      (Parag. ad Avitum.)

["The Scythian soldier drinks the blood of the first man he overthrows in battle.” (Herodotus, Rawlinson, Bk.  IV. ch. 64, p. 54.)—­H.  C.] “When in lack of food, they bleed a horse and suck the vein.  If they need something more solid, they put a sheep’s pudding full of blood under the saddle; this in time gets coagulated and cooked by the heat, and then they devour it.” (Georg.  Pachymeres, V. 4.) The last is a well-known story, but is strenuously denied and ridiculed by Bergmann. (Streifereien, etc.  I. 15.) Joinville tells the same story.  Hans Schiltberger asserts it very distinctly:  “Ich hon och gesehen wann sie in reiss ylten, das sie ein fleisch nemen, und es dunn schinden und legents unter den sattel, und riten doruff; und essents wann sie hungert” (ch. 35).  Botero had “heard from a trustworthy source that a Tartar of Perekop, travelling on the steppes, lived for some days on the blood of his horse, and then, not daring to bleed it more, cut off and ate its ears!” (Relazione Univers. p. 93.) The Turkmans speak of such practices, but Conolly says he came to regard them as hyperbolical talk (I. 45).

[Abul-Ghazi Khan, in his History of Mongols, describing a raid of Russian (Ourous) Cossacks, who were hemmed in by the Uzbeks, says:  “The Russians had in continued fighting exhausted all their water.  They began to drink blood; the fifth day they had not even blood remaining to drink.” (Transl. by Baron Des Maisons, St. Petersburg, II. 295.)]

NOTE 5.—­Rubruquis thus describes this preparation, which is called Kurut:  “The milk that remains after the butter has been made, they allow to get as sour as sour can be, and then boil it.  In boiling, it curdles, and that curd they dry in the sun; and in this way it becomes as hard as iron-slag.  And so it is stored in bags against the winter.  In the winter time, when they have no milk, they put that sour curd, which they call Griut, into a skin, and pour warm water on it, and they shake it violently till the curd dissolves in the water, to which it gives an acid flavour; that water they drink in place of milk.  But above all things they eschew drinking plain water.”  From Pallas’s account of the modern practice, which is substantially the same, these cakes are also made from the leavings of distillation in making milk-arrack.  The Kurut is frequently made of ewe-milk.  Wood speaks of it as an indispensable article in the food of the people of Badakhshan, and under the same name it is a staple food of the Afghans. (Rubr. 229; Samml. I. 136; Dahl, u.s.; Wood, 311.)