CHAPTER VIISPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI
In September, when thekaolianghas ripened to its purple-red, there is added beauty to the eight-hour climb from Peking, by leisurely Chinese train, through Nankow Pass and the Great Wall, to Kalgan. Beyond that treeless, mountain-girdled city the railway turns sharply westward, timidly keeping within the outer spur of China’s mammoth rampart, and the traveler to the vast open world to the north must abandon it for a more courageous form of transportation.
Down to the very doors of to-day the camel caravan, drifting along for six weeks or two months, was the swiftest thing from Kalgan to Urga, capital of Outer Mongolia, seven hundred miles away, unless it was sometimes outsped by the forced relays of the Imperial Chinese Post. But the ratio between time and distance has of late undergone violent changes, even in such far-off stretches of the globe. Little more than a decade back mankind was astonished to hear that a venturesome motor-car had fought its way from Peking to Paris; five or six years ago men of more commercial turn of mind took to following this pioneer of swiftness across the Gobi; and to-day it is a rare week that does not see several automobiles, always with room for one more passenger, climb out of Kalgan on their way to Urga.
How some of these ever reach their destination is one of the innumerable mysteries of the Orient. Our own expedition seemed risky enough, yet it was a mere parlor-game compared to those we met or overtook along the way. In the first place there were but four of us—the Russian Jewish fur-merchant from Tientsin who owned the car, his chauffeur of similar origin, and we two wandering Americans whom chance had momentarily thrown together in the intricate byways of the earth. What with our necessary baggage, the food and beds and arctic garments it would have been foolhardy to reduce, and the cases of gasolene that completed the ramparts which made each ascent to our seats a mountaineering feat, I at least fancied we were heavily laden. Yet we passed on the trail cars with eight or nine Chinese passengers, and on a memorable morning one with eleven, besides all manner of baggage, winter garments, and paraphernalia, somehow packed away in them. They were often old and crippled cars, too, and no wonder, while our own was fresh from the factory, with two gasolene-tanks, a host of reinforcements and accessories, and the right-handed drive befitting left-handed China. Like all those engaged in the Kalgan-to-Urga traffic, it came from Detroit, though not of the breed one first thinks of in that connection, but from the second most popular motor tribe of that habitat. Those who should know say that this is the only car sturdy and at the same time economical enough to endure life on the Gobi Desert.