tle." (_Herodotus_, _Rawlinson_, Bk. IV. ch. 64, p. 54.)--H. C.] "When
in lack of food, they bleed a horse and suck the vein. If they need
something more solid, they put a sheep's pudding full of blood under the
saddle; this in time gets coagulated and cooked by the heat, and then they
devour it." (_Georg. Pachymeres_, V. 4.) The last is a well-known story,
but is strenuously denied and ridiculed by Bergmann. (_Streifereien_, etc.
I. 15.) Joinville tells the same story. Hans Schiltberger asserts it very
distinctly: "Ich hon och gesehen wann sie in reiss ylten, das sie ein
fleisch nemen, und es dunn schinden und legents unter den sattel, und
riten doruff; und essents wann sie hungert" (ch. 35). Botero had "heard
from a trustworthy source that a Tartar of Perekop, travelling on the
steppes, lived for some days on the blood of his horse, and then, not
daring to bleed it more, cut off and ate its _ears_!" (_Relazione
Univers._ p. 93.) The Turkmans speak of such practices, but Conolly says
he came to regard them as hyperbolical talk (I. 45).

[Abul-Ghazi Khan, in his History of Mongols, describing a raid of Russian
(_Ourous_) Cossacks, who were hemmed in by the Uzbeks, says: "The Russians
had in continued fighting exhausted all their water. They began to drink
blood; the fifth day they had not even blood remaining to drink."
(_Transl. by Baron Des Maisons_, St. Petersburg, II. 295.)]

NOTE 5.--Rubruquis thus describes this preparation, which is called
_Kurut_: "The milk that remains after the butter has been made, they allow
to get as sour as sour can be, and then boil it. In boiling, it curdles,
and that curd they dry in the sun; and in this way it becomes as hard as
iron-slag. And so it is stored in bags against the winter. In the winter
time, when they have no milk, they put that sour curd, which they call
_Griut_, into a skin, and pour warm water on it, and they shake it
violently till the curd dissolves in the water, to which it gives an acid
flavour; that water they drink in place of milk. But above all things they
eschew drinking plain water." From Pallas's account of the modern
practice, which is substantially the same, these cakes are also made from
the leavings of distillation in making milk-arrack. The Kurut is
frequently made of ewe-milk. Wood speaks of it as an indispensable article
in the food of the people of Badakhshan, and under the same name it is a
staple food of the Afghans. (_Rubr._ 229; _Samml._ I. 136;