lf the detachment were awake and half were asleep.

About one o'clock in the morning I visited Kinko, and handed him over
my purchases at Nia. The young Roumanian was in high spirits. He
anticipated no further obstacles, he would reach port safely, after all.

"I am getting quite fat in this box," he told me.

I told him about the Ephrinell-Bluett marriage, and how the union was
to be celebrated next morning with great pomp.

"Ah!" said he, with a sigh. "They are not obliged to wait until they
reach Pekin!"

"Quite so, Kinko; but it seems to me that a marriage under such
conditions is not likely to be lasting! But after all, that is the
couple's lookout."

At three o'clock in the morning we stopped forty minutes at Tchertchen,
almost at the foot of the ramifications of the Kuen Lun. None of us had
seen this miserable, desolate country, treeless and verdureless, which
the railway was now crossing on its road to the northeast.

Day came; our train ran the four hundred kilometres between Tchertchen
and Tcharkalyk, while the sun caressed with its rays the immense plain,
glittering in its saline efflorescences.

CHAPTER XIX.

When I awoke I seemed to have had an unpleasant dream. A dream in no
way like those we interpret by the _Clef d'Or_. No! Nothing could be
clearer. The bandit chief Ki Tsang had prepared a scheme for the
seizure of the Chinese treasure; he had attacked the train in the
plains of Gobi; the car is assaulted, pillaged, ransacked; the gold and
precious stones, to the value of fifteen millions, are torn from the
grasp of the Celestials, who yield after a courageous defence. As to
the passengers, another two minutes of sleep would have settled their
fate--and mine.

But all that disappeared with the vapors of the night. Dreams are not
fixed photographs; they fade in the sun, and end by effacing themselves.

In taking my stroll through the train as a good townsman takes his
stroll through the town, I am joined by Major Noltitz. After shaking
hands, he showed me a Mongol in the second-class car, and said to me,
"That is not one of those we picked up at Douchak when we picked up
Faruskiar and Ghangir."

"That is so," said I; "I never saw that face in the train before."

Popof, to whom I applied for information, told me that the Mongol had
got in at Tchertchen. "When he arrived," he said, "the manager spoke to
him for a minute, from which I concluded that he also was one of the
staff of the