answering
back "San!" I touch my horse and we are off. Oh, the joy of those
gallops with the horsemen of the desert! For the moment you are mad.
Your nomad ancestors--we all have them--awake in you, and it is touch
and go but you turn your back forever on duties and dining, on all the
bonds and frills that we have entangled ourselves in--and then you
remember, and go sadly to bed.

The weather was delightful; whatever there might be in store for me, the
present was perfect. A glorious dawn, no severe heat but for a short
time in the middle of the day, which cooled off rapidly in the late
afternoon, the short twilight ending in cold, starlit nights. The wonder
of those Mongolian nights! My tent was always pitched a little apart
from the confusion of the camp, and lying wrapped in rugs in my narrow
camp-bed before the doors open to the night wind, I fell asleep in the
silence of the limitless space of the desert, and woke only as the stars
were fading in the sky.

[Illustration: JACK AND HIS LAMA FRIEND]

[Illustration: MY CARAVAN ACROSS MONGOLIA]

At first we were still in the grassland; the rolling country was covered
with a thick mat of grass dotted with bright flowers, and yurts and men
and herds abounded. Happenings along the road were few. The dogs always
rushed out from the yurts to greet us. They looked big and savage, and
at first, mindful of warnings, I kept close guard over Jack; but he
heeded them as little as he had the Chinese curs, and hardly deigned a
glance as he trotted gaily along by the horses who had captured his
Irish heart. Once we stopped to buy a pony, and secured a fine "calico"
one, unusually large and strong. Again a chance offered to get a sheep,
not always possible even though thousands are grazing on the prairie,
for a Mongol will sell only when he has some immediate use for money.
The trade once made, it took only a short time to do the rest,--to kill,
to cut up, to boil in a big pot brought for the purpose, to eat.

Two hundred miles from Kalgan we passed the telegraph station of
Pongkiong manned by two Chinese. It is nothing but a little wooden
building with a bit of a garden. The Chinese has his garden as surely as
the Englishman, only he spends his energy in growing things to eat. At
long intervals, two hundred miles, these stations are found all the way
to Urga and always in the charge of Chinese, serviceable, alien,
homesick. It must be a dreary life set down in the desert withou