adopted at marriage and rarely meddled with afterwards. The dress, too,
of these northern Mongol women was striking. Over their usual loose,
unbelted garment (the Mongol for "woman" means "unbelted one") they wore
short coats of blue cotton with red sleeves, and the tops of these were
so raised and stiffened that they almost raked the wearer's ears. On
their feet they had high leather boots just like their husbands', and if
they wore a hat it was of the same tall, peaked sort. The sight of a
Mongol woman astride a galloping pony was not a thing to be forgotten;
ears of hair flapping, high hat insecurely poised on top, silver
ornaments and white teeth flashing.

It was nine o'clock before we camped that night, but we did not get off
the next day until afternoon because of the rain, and again it was nine
in the evening when we pitched our tent in a charming little dell
beautiful with great thistles, blue with the blue of heaven in the
lantern light.

The next day I was getting a little desperate, and against Tchagan Hou's
advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on
again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and
after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up
and we camped on the drenched ground, and there we stayed till the
middle of the next day--spending most of our time trying to get dry. The
argols were too wet to burn, but we made a little blaze with the wood
of my soda-water box. For two days we had tried in vain to buy a sheep,
and the men's provisions were running short. If it had not been for the
generous gift of the Kalgan Foreign Office, we should have fared badly,
but Mongols and Chinese alike seemed to be free from inconvenient
prejudices, and my men, whom I called in to share the tent with me,
feasted off tins of corned beef, bologna sausage, and smoked herring,
washed down by bowls of Pacific Coast canned peaches and plums; and then
they smoked; that comfort was always theirs, and if the fire burned at
all, it smoked, too, and occasionally a drenched traveller stopped in to
be cheered with a handful of cigarettes. And then all curled up in their
sheepskins and slept away long hours, and I also slept on my little
camp-bed, and outside the rain fell steadily.

But at last a morning broke clear and brilliant; the rain was really
over. The ponies looked full and fit after the good rest, and if all
went well we should be in Urga before