In addition to continual attack and pursuit by communist troops,
the nomads suffered intense and dreadful hardships on a journey
which took them across waterless deserts where their animals
died of thirst, into the icebound Tibetan uplands without food
or shelter, over mountain passes eighteen thousand feet above
sea level and across vast stretches of trackless, hostile land.
Two years later, less than a quarter of their original number
finally straggled, exhausted but undaunted, into East Kashmir.
Here they found shelter, but it was only a temporary respite and
more of these gallant people were to die before the rest found
sanctuary and the chance to build a new life in Turkey. The
author tells, for the first time, the story of this mass
migration which has its only parallel in the Exodus of the
Israelites. He describes in full the events which led up to it,
and the people who took part in it. The book closes with a
picture of the Kazaks beginning to rebuild their shattered way
of life after one of the most