There are many large ai ed on maps of Chinese ferrite serts, which are really very ex cellent prairies, and the greater part of that vast area labelled the only rather pebbly and lean The traveller who has crossed such country often hesitates to describe himself as one experienced in desert wayfaring, but the n who has been through the coun-between Taching, the point. at which T overtook my. Mohammedan friends, and the Kansu_ border, tied never hesitate: to say that he has been in a real desert. The deep, loose sand made travelling very slow and painful. It was impossible to do more than 40 or 501i a day and at this rate we were five days winding along the ridges of the dunes.
The Mongols mark the trail with heaps of stones and where there are no stones, the camel-drivers travel perforce by instinct and by a general sense of direction. The few water-holes were in little hollows grown with grass as tough as bamboo, which delighted the camels, and were crusted with alkali. The intense cold mad: it possible for us to carry ice in sacks for our tea and cooking and although the water was generally so salty that we could scarcely drink it, every spring and pool was frozen solid. By mutual agreement we did not attempt to wash our hands or faces during these five days and we stinted a little with our tea. Barren as the road was. it was well travelled.
One night we passed 240 camels The new lake in the Koukuza Gardens. carrying wool from Hsining to Fengchen, the terminus of the Peking-Kalgan Railway, and the next night we passed 150 more. At every such meeting our party would inquire eagerly into the transport rate that was being paid at Dan-gar, the wool market in the Tibetan horder, for they too expected to re: turn with wool. Every inquiry elicited a more favourable—rate, The first whom we met were receiving Tls. 16 for a wool-picul of 260 catties. and towards the last the figure went as high as Tls. 21 for the same unit.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.