ce where is seen the
present village of Usseninovo; but, frightened by a discharge of
artillery, he forthwith took flight. Iermak caused the town to be
destroyed, of which the name alone remains, for the residents still give
to Turinsk the name "Town of Yepantcha." The camps and villages situated
along the Tura were devastated.

The Cossack leaders having taken, at the mouth of the Tavda, an officer
of Kutchum's, named Tausak, he, desirous of saving his life,
communicated to them important information regarding the country. As the
price of his frankness, his liberty was given him, and he hastened to
announce to his master that the predictions of the soothsayers of
Siberia were being realized, for according to some accounts these
pretended sorcerers had for a long time proclaimed the near and
inevitable downfall of this state by an invasion of Christians. Tausak
spoke of the Cossacks as wonderful men and invincible heroes, lancing
fire and thunder which penetrate through the cuirasses. Nevertheless,
Kutchum, although deprived of sight, had a strong soul. He made ready to
defend his country and his faith with courage. He at once gathered all
his subjects, made his nephew Mahmetkul enter the campaign at the head
of a large force of cavalry, and he himself threw up fortifications on
the bank of the Irtisch, at the foot of the Tchuvache mountain, thus
closing to the Cossacks the road to Isker.

The conquest of Siberia resembles, in more than one regard, that of
Mexico and Peru. Here, also, it was a handful of men who, by means of
fire-arms, put to flight thousands of soldiers armed with arrows or
javelins. For the Moguls, like the Tartars of the North, were ignorant
of the use of gunpowder, and toward the end of the sixteenth century
they still used the arms employed in the time of Genghis. Each one of
Iermak's warriors faced a crowd of the enemy. If his bullet only killed
one of them, the frightful detonation of his gun put to flight twenty or
thirty. In the first combat, held on the bank of the Tobol, at a place
called Babassan, Iermak, under shelter of intrenchments, checked by some
discharges of musketry the impetuosity of ten thousand men of
Mahmetkul's cavalry, who rushed forward to crush him. He at once attacks
them himself, carries off a complete victory, and, opened, as far as the
mouth of the Tobol, a route whose perils were not yet all dissipated.
Indeed, from the height of the steep banks of the river called
Do