by a very winding and difficult road, for an hour and a half; and during the whole of this descent they were compelled to be inactive spectators of the fiendish spectacle below.  The Kalmucks, reduced by this time from about six hundred thousand souls to two hundred and 10 sixty thousand, and after enduring for two months and a half the miseries we have previously described—­outrageous heat, famine, and the destroying scimiter of the Kirghises and the Bashkirs—­had for the last ten days been traversing a hideous desert, where no vestiges were 15 seen of vegetation, and no drop of water could be found.  Camels and men were already so overladen that it was a mere impossibility that they should carry a tolerable sufficiency for the passage of this frightful wilderness.  On the eighth day the wretched daily allowance, which had 20 been continually diminishing, failed entirely; and thus, for two days of insupportable fatigue, the horrors of thirst had been carried to the fiercest extremity.  Upon this last morning, at the sight of the hills and the forest scenery, which announced to those who acted as guides 25 the neighborhood of the Lake of Tengis, all the people rushed along with maddening eagerness to the anticipated solace.  The day grew hotter and hotter, the people more and more exhausted; and gradually, in the general rush forward to the lake, all discipline and command were lost—­all 30 attempts to preserve a rear guard were neglected—­the wild Bashkirs rode on amongst the encumbered people and slaughtered them by wholesale, and almost without resistance.  Screams and tumultuous shouts proclaimed the progress of the massacre; but none heeded—­none halted; all alike, pauper or noble, continued to rush on with maniacal haste to the waters—­all with faces blackened by the heat preying upon the liver and with tongue drooping from the mouth.  The cruel Bashkir was 5 affected by the same misery, and manifested the same symptoms of his misery, as the wretched Kalmuck; the murderer was oftentimes in the same frantic misery as his murdered victim—­many, indeed (an ordinary effect of thirst), in both nations had become lunatic, and in this 10 state, whilst mere multitude and condensation of bodies alone opposed any check to the destroying scimiter and the trampling hoof, the lake was reached; and to that the whole vast body of enemies rushed, and together continued to rush, forgetful of all things at that moment 15 but of one almighty instinct.  This absorption of the thoughts in one maddening appetite lasted for a single half hour; but in the next arose the final scene of parting vengeance.  Far and wide the waters of the solitary lake were instantly dyed red with blood and gore:  here rode a 20 party of savage Bashkirs, hewing off heads as fast as the swaths fall before the mower’s scythe; there stood unarmed Kalmucks in a death grapple with their detested foes, both up to the middle in water,