pages 75-76:
...Meanwhile the conqueror himself (Genghis Khan), taking with him his younger son Tuli and some of his grandsons, proceeded to deserve, in Khoragan and Afghanistan, that reputation of irresistable destructiveness that the terror of crushed people has attached to his name for all times.
Any town that made even a show of resistance was stormed or tricked into surrender and leveled to the ground, as Urganj had been, while its people, with the exception of the useful artisans and of the young and desirable women, were systematically killed. This mass slaughter evidently aimed at paralyzing all will to resist, all possibility of resistance. It was practical and methodical, like everything the Mongols did at Genghis Khan's orders, and it was carried out without evidence of sadistic torment. The Mongols, says Harold Lamb, "led out the people of walled towns, examining them carefully and ordering the skilled workers, who would be useful, to move apart. Then the soldiers went through the ranks of helpless human beings, killing methodically with their swords and hand axes--as harvestors would go through a field of standing wheat. They took the wailing women by the hair, bending forward their heads, to sever the spine more easily. They slaughtered with blows on the head men who resisted weakly."
It is said that about nine million people were thus put to the sword in and round the place where had once stood the prosperous city of Merv. Fear caused, no doubt, the contemporary Muslim chroniclers to exaggerate the number of the dead. Genghis Khan appeared to them as "the scourge of Allah" and wherever his army passed it was like the end of the world--the end, at least, of that world that they knew. Yet even if the figures were to be brought down to their half, still they would suggest a magnitude of slaughter unprecedented in history.
It is noticable that material signs of power, wealth, or culture--strong walls, works of irrigation, libraries--for which the conquerors had no use, were no more respected than human life;
that the destruction was as complete and as impartial as it could possibly be when wrought by man's imperfect weapons under the guidance of man's will; as similar as it could possibly be to the total, indiscriminate destruction wrought by ever-changing Nature through her storms, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, or simply through all-devouring Time, the very principle of change.
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