A Trip into Mongolia On Wednesday of last week Mr. W..B Leach gave a racy account of 2 recent trip to Mongolia, Touching lightly on the sights of Peking, where he met two friends who persuaded him to join them in a trip to Kalgan, be passed on to their arrival in that busy centre of the fur trade. Fourteen foreigners, including two ladies, sat down to the evening meal in the primitive hotel, with its mud doors and walls, The landlady was Austrian, and the visitors were American, Welsh, Scottish, and English, and one of the ladies was the celebrated lady journalist, Mrs, Harrison, who is now in prison in Russia. Next morning a party of five, including the ladies, decided to make the journey unto Mongolia by motor-car and a most disreputable Ford was the conveyance.
Mr. Leach described the enormous traffic coming and going on that road leading to the great gate in the wall between China and Mongolia, strings of camels, droves of ponies, bullock carts loaded with bags of soda, and carts for passengers. The natives looked happy and contented, some withered and wrinkled as though the dust of centuries had blown on them. After passing the station and paying toll, they passed out of China, and the Ford had a hard task climbing the gorge which led up to the plains. At one part two ponies and a mule had to be hitched to the car, but the summit was safely reached at last, and they saw before them the grass lands stretching away as far as the eye could see. They had tiffin and a wash—badly needed—at a Chinese inn, and then continued their journey past intensely blue lakes, with alkali deposits round the edges, flocks of geese, and numerous circular Mongol tents, with their attendant dogs. Late in the afternoon they came to a place where there were two tents, and were told they were to stop there for the night. A Chinese welcomed them and told them they were all to sleep in one tent and he would cook chow in the other. They had quite a good meal before turning in, and finally fell asleep to the tinkle, tinkle of far-away camel bells. Mrs. Harrison being an old campaigner, soon made suitable sleeping arrangements for the party.
Next morning they were driven to a Swiss dairy farm, 30 miles away, fully equipped with modern machinery, and driven by electricity. Six similar farms were dotted about in a radius of 100 miles; the Mongol Prince of the district hoping to influence his wandering people to. settle and cultivate the soil by their example. The Chinese are settling along the border, ploughing up the land, and pushing the nomad Mongols further and further away. hile at the farm the wife of the Prince arrived to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.