As we approached the camp, we heard from a distance the frantic beating of drums, the mournful sounds of the flute and shrill, mad shouting.  Our Mongol went forward to investigate for us and reported that several Mongolian families had come here to the monastery to seek aid from the Hutuktu Jahansti who was famed for his miracles of healing.  The people were stricken with leprosy and black smallpox and had come from long distances only to find that the Hutuktu was not at the monastery but had gone to the Living Buddha in Urga.  Consequently they had been forced to invite the witch doctors.  The people were dying one after another.  Just the day before they had cast on the plain the twenty-seventh man.

Meanwhile, as we talked, the witch doctor came out of one of the yurtas.  He was an old man with a cataract on one eye and with a face deeply scarred by smallpox.  He was dressed in tatters with various colored bits of cloth hanging down from his waist.  He carried a drum and a flute.  We could see froth on his blue lips and madness in his eyes.  Suddenly he began to whirl round and dance with a thousand prancings of his long legs and writhings of his arms and shoulders, still beating the drum and playing the flute or crying and raging at intervals, ever accelerating his movements until at last with pallid face and bloodshot eyes he fell on the snow, where he continued to writhe and give out his incoherent cries.  In this manner the doctor treated his patients, frightening with his madness the bad devils that carry disease.  Another witch doctor gave his patients dirty, muddy water, which I learned was the water from the bath of the very person of the Living Buddha who had washed in it his “divine” body born from the sacred flower of the lotus.

“Om!  Om!” both witches continuously screamed.

While the doctors fought with the devils, the ill people were left to themselves.  They lay in high fever under the heaps of sheepskins and overcoats, were delirious, raved and threw themselves about.  By the braziers squatted adults and children who were still well, indifferently chatting, drinking tea and smoking.  In all the yurtas I saw the diseased and the dead and such misery and physical horrors as cannot be described.

And I thought:  “Oh, Great Jenghiz Khan!  Why did you with your keen understanding of the whole situation of Asia and Europe, you who devoted all your life to the glory of the name of the Mongols, why did you not give to your own people, who preserve their old morality, honesty and peaceful customs, the enlightenment that would have saved them from such death?  Your bones in the mausoleum at Karakorum being destroyed by the centuries that pass over them must cry out against the rapid disappearance of your formerly great people, who were feared by half the civilized world!”

Such thoughts filled my brain when I saw this camp of the dead tomorrow and when I heard the groans, shoutings and raving of dying men, women and children.  Somewhere in the distance the dogs were howling mournfully, and monotonously the drum of the tired witch rolled.