in late August, 1918, to cross the Gobi Desert
in Mongolia, I knew that I was to go by motor car. But somehow the
very names "Mongolia" and "Gobi Desert" brought such a vivid picture
of the days of Kublai Khan and ancient Cathay that my clouded mind
refused to admit the thought of automobiles. It was enough that I
was going to the land of which I had so often dreamed.

Not even in the railway, when I was being borne toward Kalgan and
saw lines of laden camels plodding silently along the paved road
beside the train, or when we puffed slowly through the famous Nankou
Pass and I saw that wonder of the world, the Great Wall, winding
like a gray serpent over ridge after ridge of the mountains, was my
dream-picture of mysterious Mongolia dispelled. I had seen all this
before, and had accepted it as one accepts the motor cars beside the
splendid walls of old Peking. It was too near, and the railroad had
made it commonplace.

But Mongolia! That was different. One could not go there in a
roaring train. I had beside me the same old rifle and sleeping bag
that had been carried across the mountains of far Yuen-nan, along the
Tibetan frontier, and through the fever-stricken jungles of Burma.
Somehow, these companions of forest and mountain trails, and my
reception at Kalgan by two khaki-clad young men, each with a belt of
cartridges and a six-shooter strapped about his waist, did much to
keep me in a blissful state of unpreparedness for the destruction of
my dream-castles.

That night as we sat in Mr. Charles Coltman's home, with his
charming wife, a real woman of the great outdoors, presiding at the
dinner table, the talk was all of shooting, horses, and the vast,
lone spaces of the Gobi Desert--but not much of motor cars. Perhaps
they vaguely realized that I was still asleep in an unreal world and
knew that the awakening would come all too soon.

Yet I was dining that night with one of the men who had destroyed
the mystery of Mongolia. In 1916, Coltman and his former partner,
Oscar Mamen, had driven across the plains to Urga, the historic
capital of Mongolia. But most unromantic and incongruous, most
disheartening to a dreamer of Oriental dreams, was what I learned a
few days later when the awakening had really come--that among the
first cars ever to cross the desert was one purchased by the
Hutukhtu, the Living Buddha, the God of all the Mongols.

When the Hutukhtu learned of the first motor car in Mongolia he
forthwith d