Chapter 23

The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or more hours a day for twenty coppers, about six cents in our money

Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no automobile can climb to the great Mongolian plateau unassisted

Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed endless. This one had thirty dozen loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders

But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag, sometimes the stars and stripes, flying at the head

We honked and snorted and sirened our way through the narrow, dust-deep, crowded streets of Kalgan, as automobiles must in any genuine Chinese city, now blocked completely by the deliberate foot-going traffic, now by languid trains of ox-carts, and always quickly surrounded by gaping and grinning Chinese, to whom a foreigner seems always to remain a rare bird, however many of him may be seen daily. Twice we were halted at ancient city gates by policemen with fixed bayonets. They were somewhat more deferential to us, and more easily satisfied with the credentials we chose to show, than toward our two companions with their big redhuchao, large as a newspaper page, by means of which the localyamenhad given them permission for their journey. Russians are subject now to Chinese law, and Americans are not, which at times makes a world of difference. Yet it was at one of these same gates that an American resident of Kalgan was killed by one of these same guards not long afterward for refusing to submit to an illegal decree of the local overlord.

For about two hours beyond the outer gate we climbed a stony river-bed, wide enough to have carried a stream with ships on its bosom, but merely crisscrossed by a narrow brook bringing down silt from the treeless mountains above. The city abandoned us with reluctance, struggling along for a way in closely crowded shops and dwellings, then straggling more and more until it dwindled to a single row of mud houses on either side, finally to little clusters of huts strung together like loose strings of beads, and breaking up at last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like into the cliffs of dry fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and beyond us. The unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of camels haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid, heavily riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and donkeys carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones, throngs of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims,mingled here and there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once been red or yellow. Whenever some of the many obstacles brought us momentarily to a halt these religious tramps came to beg the half-smoked cigarette from between our lips, to feel the car all over, as if it were some new breed of horse, and to hint that a dollar or a dime or a few coppers or even some remnants of food would be more or less gratefully accepted.

Where the waterless river tumbles down from the high plateau across which lies nearly all the route to Urga, the slope is too swift even for the sturdiest of motors, wherefore the adaptable Chinese villagers have found a new source of income. Before this steeper section was reached, Chinese along the way began to wave appeals at us, to point out their lean and hungry mules and horses, in some cases even to climb up over our baggage rampart with harnesses in their hands, begging the job of hauling us to the top. Three horses, a mule, and a donkey were at length engaged, after the bargaining indispensable to both races concerned in the transaction, hitched with long rope traces to the front axle of our now silent car, and for more than an hour they toiled upward under the discouragement of three shrieking Chinese drivers and their cracking whips, at a pace which that one of us who chose to walk easily outdistanced.

From the chaos of broken rocks where the animals were allowed to abandon us stretched a tumbled brown world not unlike the upper reaches of the Andes. Of road in the Western sense there had been none from the start; there was even less now. Across pell-mell hillocks with rarely a yard of level space between them, among rocks of every jagged and broken form, we plowed for the rest of the morning. Cattle—curiously effeminate-looking cattle, with long ungraceful horns—flocks of sheep and goats intermingled, files of camels under varying cargo, here and there a cluster of black pigs rooting more or less in vain, marked a trail that might otherwise have been less easy to follow. Men in cotton-padded clothing and sheepskins plodded beside their animals, or tramped alone with a worn and faded roll of bed and belongings on their backs; cheery, amused, seldom-washed people smiled at us over the mud walls of their compounds; for some time big ruined towers of what was, or was to have been, another Great Wall, stood at brief intervals along the crest of the bare, yellow-brown ridge beside us. Then came rolling stretches of grain, principally oats, most of it alreadyharvested by the sickle and carry-on-the-back method, for all the vastness of the cultivation, and lying in carefully spaced bundles in the fields where it fell, or set up in long rows of closely crowded shocks near the hard-earth threshing floors.

Bit by bit even this cultivation grew rare and scattered, and finally died out entirely. By the time the speedometer registered eighty miles from Kalgan we were spinning along, often at thirty miles an hour, across high, brown, grass-covered plains, still somewhat uneven, but with little more than a suggestion of hilliness remaining. Flocks of sheep far off on the sloping sides of the horizon looked like patches of daisies; veritable gusts of gray-blue birds of stately flight, suggestive both of cranes and of wild geese, rose in deliberate haste before us and floated away to the rear in a vain effort to outdistance us. Almost frequently we passed long camel caravans, broken up into sections of a dozen animals each, tied together by a sort of wooden marlinespike thrust through their noses beneath the nostrils and attached by a cord to the pack of the animal ahead, the first of each dozen led by a well padded, skin-wrapped man who was more often Chinese than Mongol. Some of these camel-trains seemed endless, with dozen after dozen of the leisurely, soft-footed animals slowly turning their heads to gaze, with a disdainful curiosity that suggested a world-weary professor looking out from beneath his spectacles at incorrigible mankind, upon this strange and impatiently hasty rival that sped breathlessly past them. Now and again a beast shuffled sidewise away from us, uttering that absurd little falsetto squeak which is the camel’s inadequate means of protest at a cruel world; but most of them refused to be startled into undignified activity by any such ridiculous apparition. Once on the journey I counted a caravan bound for Urga which stretched from horizon to horizon across the brown undulating world; and there were thirty dozen camels bearing cargo, and a score of outriders to keep the expedition in order.

We spent the night in a Chinese inn, mud-built and isolated, with the usual stonekang, heatable and mat-covered, as bed and only furnishing. It might have been quiet and restful but for over-zealous watch-dogs and the arrival long after dark and the departure long before dawn of two dilapidated cars with seventeen chattering Chinese passengers. We, too, were off well before daylight, a half-moon lighting the way as we spun across rolling, utterly treeless country with nothing but short, scanty grass giving a touch of life to the brown-greenlandscape over which a cloudless sun at length poured its molten gold. Even the confirmed tramp would have found this an unendurable journey on foot; a motor-car in its prime was scarcely swift enough to avoid monotony, to come often enough on flashes of interest to keep the senses from sinking into slothfulness. Pedestrians and lone travelers had long since disappeared; safety, both from possible violence and from starvation, demanded banding together, and some form of mount. The big shaggy black dogs of Mongolia, filthy in diet as those of Central and South America, but several times more savage, roamed wild across the plains. A woman abroad at sunrise, gathering the offal left by a camping camel-train and tossing it with a bamboo pitchfork over her shoulder into a basket on her back, was the only sign of life for several miles. Such fuel, like the llama droppings of the Andean highlands, is all that is to be had in this barren region.

There were striking reminders of the aborigines of the Andes among the scattered inhabitants of this high plateau. Mongols, distinctive in face, dress, manner, and physique from the Chinese, had the same broad, stolid features to be found along the spine of South America, though they were much more bold and independent of bearing, as if they had never been cowed by alien races. The interiors of their rare clusters of two or three huts recalled the Andes, too—the bare earth for floor, a dozen woolly sheepskins as beds, an extra pair of boots, a couple of aged pots as total belongings. Instead of heaped-up cobblestones without mortar, however, theseyourtswere made of thick rugs of felt fastened about a light wooden framework into a perfectly round dwelling perhaps ten feet in diameter, the door, invariably facing the south, so low that a man could barely enter upright on his knees. Inside, at least under the wheel-like apex-support of the round and sloping roof, even we Americans could sometimes stand erect—by peering out through the opening for the escape of smoke and the entrance of air in pleasant daytime weather, left by turning back the uppermost strip of felt. At one such tent, where we halted to satisfy a thirsty radiator, only a soil-matted old woman appeared and took to feeling along the ground about it for the vessel that lay in plain sight. She was stone-blind, it turned out, yet to all appearances quite satisfied with life as she knew it, with only her miserableyourtand an uninviting water-hole a few rods away. The Mongol is still a true nomad herdsman, and his round, gray-white dwellings are easily transportable, so that when one little hollow in the plain dries up he has only to pack his house and wander along.

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