andages to protect himself from
the wracks and strains of such a period in the saddle. In his cap he
bore three eagle feathers as a token that he had received orders to fly
like a bird. Armed with a special document called a tzara, which gave
him the right to receive at all post stations the best horses, one
to ride and one fully saddled to lead as a change, together with two
oulatchen or guards to accompany him and bring back the horses from the
next station or ourton, he made the distance of from fifteen to thirty
miles between stations at full gallop, stopping only long enough to have
the horses and guards changed before he was off again. Ahead of him rode
one oulatchen with the best horses to enable him to announce and prepare
in advance the complement of steeds at the next station. Each oulatchen
had three horses in all, so that he could swing from one that had given
out and release him to graze until his return to pick him up and lead or
ride him back home. At every third ourton, without leaving his saddle,
he received a cup of hot green tea with salt and continued his race
southward. After seventeen or eighteen hours of such riding he stopped
at the ourton for the night or what was left of it, devoured a leg of
boiled mutton and slept. Thus he ate once a day and five times a day had
tea; and so he traveled for nine days!

With this servant we moved out one cold winter morning in the direction
of Kobdo, just over three hundred miles, because from there we had
received the disquieting rumours that the Red troops had entered
Ulankom and that the Chinese authorities had handed over to them all the
Europeans in the town. We crossed the River Dzaphin on the ice. It is a
terrible stream. Its bed is full of quicksands, which in summer suck
in numbers of camels, horses and men. We entered a long, winding valley
among the mountains covered with deep snow and here and there with
groves of the black wood of the larch. About halfway to Kobdo we came
across the yurta of a shepherd on the shore of the small Lake of Baga
Nor, where evening and a strong wind whirling gusts of snow in our faces
easily persuaded us to stop. By the yurta stood a splendid bay horse
with a saddle richly ornamerited with silver and coral. As we turned
in from the road, two Mongols left the yurta very hastily; one of them
jumped into the saddle and quickly disappeared in the plain behind the
snowy hillocks. We clearly made out the flashing folds of his y