Tens of thousands continued
moving off the ground at every half-hour's interval. Women and
children, to the amount of two hundred thousand and upwards, were
placed upon wagons, or upon camels, and drew off by masses of twenty
thousand at once--placed under suitable escorts, and continually
swelled in numbers by other outlying bodies of the horde who kept
falling in at various distances upon the first and second day's march.
From sixty to eighty thousand of those who were the best mounted stayed
behind the rest of the tribes, with purposes of devastation and plunder
more violent than prudence justified, or the amiable character of the
Khan could be supposed to approve. But in this, as in other instances,
he was completely overruled by the malignant counsels of Zebek-Dorchi.
The first tempest of the desolating fury of the Tartars discharged
itself upon their own habitations. But this, as cutting off all infirm
looking backward from the hardships of their march, had been thought so
necessary a measure by all the chieftains, that even Oubacha himself
was the first to authorize the act by his own example. He seized a
torch previously prepared with materials the most durable as well as
combustible, and steadily applied it to the timbers of his own palace.
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