["The Scythian soldier drinks the blood of the first man he overthrows in
battle." (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.
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