492 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES

heathens and pagans that ever I met with, the most barbarous, except
enly that they did not eat man’s flesh, as our savages of America did.
. Some instances of this we met with in the country between Arguna,
where we enter the Muscovite dominions, and a city of Tartars and
Russians together, called Nertzinskay ; in which space is a continued
- desert or forest, which cost us twenty days to travel over it. In a
village near the last of those places, I had the curiosity to go and see
their way of living, which is most brutish and insufferable: they had, -
[ suppose, a great sacrifice that day; for there stood out upon an old
stump of a tree, an idol made of wood, frightful as the devil, at least
as any thing we can think of to represent the devil that can be made.
It had a head certainly ‘not so much as resembling any creature that
the world ever saw,—ears as big as goat’s horns, and as high,—eyes
as big as a crown piece, and a nose like a crooked ram’s horn, and a
mouth extended four-cornered, like that of a lion, with horrible teeth,
hooked like a parrot’s under bill. It was dressed up in the filthiest
manner that you can suppose: its upper garment was of sheep skins,
with the wool outward; a great Tartar bonnet on the head, with two
horns growing through it: it was about eight feet high, yet had no
feet or legs, or any other proportion of parts.

This scarecrow was set up at.the outside of the village; and when
I came near to it there were sixteen or sevénteen creatures, whether
men or women I could not tell, for they make no distinction by their
habits, either of body or head; these lay all flat on the ground, round
this formidable block of shapeless wood. I saw no motion among them
any more than if they had been.logs of wood, like their idol; at first
I really thought they had been so; but when I came a little nearer,
they started up upon their feet, and raised a howling cry, as if it had
been so many deep-mouthed hounds, and walked away as if they were
displeased at our disturbing them. A little way off from this monster,
and at the door of a tent or hut, made all of sheep-skins and cow-
skins, dried, stood three butchers: I thought they were such; for when
I came nearer to them, I found they had long knives in their hands,
and in the middle of the tent. appeared three sheep killed, and one
young bullock or.steer. These, it seems, were sacrifices to that sense-
less log of an idol; and these three men priests belonging to it; and °
the seventeen prostrated wretches were the people who brought the
" offering, and were making their prayers to that stock.

I confess I was more moved at their stupidity, and this brutish wor-
ship of a hobgoblin, than ever I was at any thing in my life,—to see
God’s most glorious and best creature, to whom he had granted so
many advantages, even by creation, above the rest of the works of his