Occasionally one came back with the inglorious substitute legend upon his
wagon, "Busted"--a laconic intimation of failure. But this was the
exception. The west kept, till it had made them her own, most of those who
ventured their all for a home in the wilderness.
There were "two great commemorative monuments that arose to mark the depth
and permanence of the awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities
or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One was a "Romanang"--a
"national commemoration, with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who
departed to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of the desert"--and
the "other, more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the
calamity and to the grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of
granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the
Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads:
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many
mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions,
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon
Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Turgote
Tartars--
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial
Empire in the year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
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