CHAPTER XIII.

A BELEAGUERED CITY.

The Scourge of Typhus--Pyæmia and Pneumonia--Terrible Cold--Outposts frozen to death--Fall of Kars--The March of the Wounded--One Hundred and Eighty Miles over the Snow--Ghastly Effects of Frostbite--The Skeleton Hands--Overcrowding in the Hospitals--Dr. Fetherstonhaugh falls Ill--A Strange Delusion--"After Long Years"--Edmund O'Donovan--A Circassian Dinner Party--Sucking-pig _à l'Irlandaise_--A Novel Target--Departure of Mr. Zohrab--We move into the Consulate--Exodus to Erzinghan--An Awful Sacrifice--Christmas in a Besieged Town--A Remarkable Plum Pudding--Illness of Pinkerton--Funerals in Erzeroum--Casting out the Dead--"The Lean Dogs beneath the Wall"--An Army Surgeon's Death--I fall Sick with Typhus--Heroic Devotion of James Denniston--Some of my Nurses--How I recovered--A Scientific Experiment--The Brain of a Comatose Person--Vachin's Discomfiture 330