We kept on, however, in what I judged to be the right direction, came among the foothills and after following the Great Wall for a time, discovered that we were again on & well marked trail which led into a wide ravine, marked by no less than seven sentinel towers and flanked by high walls of masonry: This T- assumed was our pass; so we entered it, passing tower after tower and wall after wall as the trail ni wed, until just at dark and in a driving storm of sleet, we came to a little spring upon which the ice was a foot thick. Here we decided to stop for the night. The camels were relieved of their burdens and turned loose to graze on the hillsides, while in the face of a terrific gale we tried to set up the tent. The turf was nowhere more than a few inches thick and underneath was the solid rock of which the hills were made. The tentpegs were of wood, the tent poles were too long and' nothing could have been more futile than the painful effort which we made for more than an hour to erect our ungainly tailor-made shelter in the face of a wind against which even the camels could make no headway. Finally the cloth split from hem to ridg pole in three places and I announced that we would sleep in the open.
Dusty was horrified and in his panic he threw a little light upon Part of the re-building scheme—-The new stables. his history, He had travelled with aunels at some time, but it had been through agricultural country in southeastern Kansu, Shensi and Honan, where _camel-drivers do not sleep on the' frozen ground, but luxuriate upon hot K'angs every night and rely upon the inn-keepers to build their fires and cook their food. After a little search, I found a narrow galley, well sheltered from the wind. This I covered with the tent by putting heavy stones upon the margins. We collected some brush and in a. few minutes had a good fire and a boiling pot. Then Dusty tried his hand at the pastry. He complained of the inconvenience of working without a table, a rolling-pin and board, but he finally had something in the pot which boiled merrily and smelled invitingly of mutton. We ate well of it too, though the strips of dough were a quarter of an inch thick and as tough as leather, and then we curled up among the bould ers in the galley and went to sleep.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.