for a while by the hot desert sands; but I let him go well
pleased with a little bottle of boracic acid solution for his sore eyes.
The Mongols, like so many Eastern peoples, suffer much from inflammation
of the eyes, the result of dirt, and even more of the acrid argol smoke
filling the yurts so that often I was compelled to take flight. I expect
the stern old Jesuit would say of them as he did of the Red Indian,
"They pass their lives in smoke, eternity in flames."

For about eight days we were crossing the desert, one day much like
another. Sometimes the track was all up and down: we topped a swell of
ground only to see before us another exactly like it. Then for many
miles together the land was as flat and as smooth as a billiard table,
no rocks, no roll; and we chased a never-ending line of telegraph poles
over a never-ending waste of sand. Another day we were traversing from
dawn till sundown an evil-looking land strewn with boulders and ribs of
rock, bleak, desolate, forbidding.

Nowhere were there signs of life, nothing growing, nothing moving. For
days together we saw no yurts, and more than one day passed without our
meeting any one. Once there appeared suddenly on the white track before
us a solitary figure, looking very pitiful in the great plain. When it
came near it fell on its face in the sand at our feet, begging for food.
It was a Chinese returning home from Urga, walking all the seven hundred
miles across the desert to Kalgan. We helped him as best we could, but
he was not the only one.

An old red lama, mounted on a camel and bound for Urga, kept near us for
two or three days, sleeping at night with my men by the cart, and
sometimes taking shelter under my tent at noon, where he sat quietly by
the hour smoking my cigarettes. He was a nice old fellow with pleasant
ways, nearly choking himself in efforts to make me understand how
wonderful I was, travelling all alone, and what splendid sights I should
behold in Urga.

And so time passed; tiring, monotonous days, refreshing, glorious
nights, and then toward the end of a long, weary afternoon I saw for a
moment, faintly outlined in the blank northern horizon, a cloud? a
mountain? a rock? I hardly dared trust my eyes, and I looked again and
again. Yes, it was a mountain, a mountain of rocks just as I was told it
would loom up in front of me for a moment, and then disappear; and it
disappeared, and I rejoiced, for at its base the desert ended; beyond
la