Shortly after noon we came to a well which a Mongol woman told us was T'outaohou. Here we cooked a meal, and here Dusty, who was beginning to weary of desert hardship, would fain have stayed for the rest of the day and night. But while wandering about on the little hillocks, he caught a glimpse the monastery of Toutachou, looking like a city in itself about five li further along the trail, and was at once very keen upon getting under way. We were scarcely started before we passed a party of thirty or forty Mongols, riding along at a b young k trot, on monastery of were nearly all rifles, and a few of them carried lances. Their faces were seamed and weather-atten, and their clothes dusty and tattered with travel. They greeted us affably and I stopped to talk a few minutes with them, but Dusty looked askance at them' and hurried on, remarking afterwards that they must be a pack of villainous robbers and that this was a coun-in which an unarmed man's was very insecure. he pilgrims were scarcely their way when another Mongol came up behind us, also riding a camel, and opened a conversation. He was a lama and a Lusiness man, he announced, on the way to the shed:
now for its huge n bership of we over 1.000, monastery where he t ok orders for grain. His name, he volunteer was Tashieh, but the Chinese call him Wang Wa-tze—"Baby Wang"—and he had been to Peking, Hankow, Urga, Lhasa and many' other remote places. He gave us some very careful and accurate directions and then put a serious damper upon Dusty's spirits by informing him there were no inns at the mona-story. He asked if we had a tent, and being informed that we had one assumed, Mongol like, that we should much' prefer to live in it than to be crowded into such quai ters as the monastery might pr vide. We, therefore, said farewell to "Baby Wang" at the monastery, circled the buildings which were guarded by droves of great black dogs and rode on into the sand dunes as the sun was setting. An hour later we lost. our way in the d and were thinking of retracing our steps and looking for the trail when we saw lights and heard the barking of dogs not far from us. Then a tent flap was thrown back quite near at hand disclosing a circle of men sitting cross-legged about a blazing fire surmounted by great black pot.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.