ervant, and a Mongol camel-man. As I had no
European companion I was driven in upon myself. I had to explore a
route never before traversed by Europeans, and the distance to be
covered across the open steppes of Mongolia and over the Gobi
Desert to the first town in Turkestan was twelve hundred miles.
Beyond that was the whole length of Turkestan and the six-hundred-mile
breadth of the Himalaya to be crossed before I should reach
India. So I had a big task before me, and was stirring with the sense
of high adventure and vast distances to overcome.

To enable my eight camels to feed by daylight, I used to start at five
o'clock in the afternoon and march till one or two in the morning.
Sometimes in order to reach water we had to march all through the
night and well into the following day. Frequently there were terrific
sandstorms, but there were seldom any clouds. So the atmosphere
was clear. In the distance were sometimes hills. But for the most
part all round the desert was absolutely open. I could see for what
seemed an indefinite distance in any direction. The conditions were
ideal for observing the stars.

Seated on my camel, or trudging along apart from my little caravan,
I would watch the sun set in always varying splendour. No two
sunsets were anything like the same. Each through the ascendancy
of some one shade of colour, or through an unusual combination of
colour, had a special beauty of its own. I would watch each ripening
to the climax and then shade away into the beauty of the night. And
when the day was over the night would reveal that higher, wider life
which daylight only served to hide.

The sunset glow would fade away. Star after star would spring into
sight till the whole vault of heaven was glistening with diamond
points of light. Above me and all round me stars were shining out of
the deep sapphire sky with a brilliance only surpassed by the stars in
the high Himalayan solitudes I have already described. And a great
stillness would be over all--a silence even completer than the silence
among the mountains, for there it was often broken by creaking of
the ice, whereas here in the desert it was so profound that, when at
the end of many weeks I arrived at a patch of grass and trees, the
twittering of the birds and the whirr of insects sounded like the roar
of a London street.

In this unbroken stillness and with the eye free to rove all round with
nothing in any direction to stay its vision, and be