“...  Lex nec justior ulla est [as they think]
   Quam necis artifices arte perire sua.”

So perished Zebek-Dorchi, the author and originator of 20 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, redawned upon the tribes:  their household lares, after so 25 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 30 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 5 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 10 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 15 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; one embodied in the religious solemnity, 20 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 25 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 30 the very margin of the steppes, and they bear a short but emphatic inscription[10] to the following effect:—­