The House of the False Lama

I

FOR many days all the talk among the men had been of this crossing, the han tsan, the Four Dry Stages and the Three Dry Stages. ‘These are the Big Sand Hollows,’ they had said among the dunes that we crossed from Kuaitze Hu; ‘they can be bad enough when the wind blows and the road is covered, and evidently they are not easy walking. But still, it is the Dry Stages that are bad; there you will see men worn out and camels thrown away.’

The main Gobi is a desert running on its longer axis, east and west between Outer and Inner Mongolia; but west of the Edsin Gol it takes an incline south and west, spreading on until it reaches the limits of the Takla Makan. This region west of the Edsin Gol is the Khara Gobi, or desert of black gravel, in which the confused ranges of the Peishan stand up like barren islands in a desolate sea. We were to cross the desert in its broadest and most waterless part, following a route not only unmapped, but utterly unknown. Absolutely nothing is known of the country I crossed for two hundred miles or more between the West Edsin Gol and the route taken from north to south, between the Altai and Hsü Chou in Kansu, by Ladyghin, a member of Kozlov’s expedition of 1900.

We left the softer soil and reliquary growth of reeds about the Lu-ts’ao Ching almost immediately, ascending to the plain of the full Gobi at a higher level. The character of the desert was constant throughout, giving a weird but superb impression; it was of flat fragments of black gravel, like shattered slate in formation, laid thickly over yellow sandy clay of an unknown depth. After slugging for twelve miles at least across this plain, we dropped off the flat into a gully that ran across our front, and, as the night fell with a keen chill after the heat of the day, began winding confusedly among low hills. We continued through these hills until one in the morning, when we finished a march of well over thirty miles.

Kuai-tze Hu, the dune belt, and the Edsin Gol valleys are depressions where the average temperature, to judge not only from my own experience but also from what I heard in the descriptions of the caravan men, is much higher than in Mongolia generally. We were now, however, back in plateau country, and in October the plateaus of Mongolia are cold the moment the sun goes or a wind comes up. The cold of the next day was an abrupt contrast to the easy warmth of the low-lying countries. There was a thin leaden band of cloud across a sky that even in midmorning had a pale, enameled, lucid brilliance like the dawn, and a cutting wind blew from the northwest.

Our camp, beside a big obo, was in a wide, flat, circular black plain, walled in by smooth black hills of a suavely grim outline. The hills appeared to be of exactly the same formation as the plains — deep yellow clay covered with black gravel. The manner in which the flat stone fragments ever came to be scattered so widely and uniformly is a mystery to me. There were very few outcrops of the stone from which it came, and no loose pieces of larger size. Wherever the stone could be seen, at the sides of hills, it was thoroughly shattered, cleaving always in flat pieces. I thought it, rather hesitantly, to be of volcanic origin.

On the second day we marched again more than thirty miles, keeping our westerly direction, though turning in and out among the black hills. The growth, even of plants found in the most arid deserts, was more scarce than any I had ever seen. Scoring the flanks of the slow-curving hills were faint depressions, in which were a few tamarisks of small size. They say that little snow falls on the Khara Gobi, but what there is must run down these channels at the thaw. In the same runnels were a very few tiny, closegrowing, shrubby plants. None of them seemed alive, and none of them mitigated the profound and sombre desolation of the dominant Gobi. I remember that at the time it seemed to me more magnificent than fearful; but then I was exhilarated by the effort of the forced marches. Now, in remembering, I seem to look down at it from a height and watch the thin caravan crawling through the black scene, and to admit the deathlincss of it. Still, it is not as though that desert has an active threat, like the threat of shifting dunes, and I think that the horror of it which the Chinese have is perhaps in the main a practical dread of losing their camels, heightened by the effect on their minds of the monotony and the fatigue; for it takes a full twelve hours to cover thirty miles, and putting one foot in front of the other for twelve hours at the lagging gait of traveling camels is weariness to the body and crippling to the spirit.

Our third day in the Khara Gobi was full of happenings. Both my servant, Moses, and I had suffered from the cold the night before, so I discarded the socks I was wearing for a very heavy pair of camel hair, knitted for me on the journey by a camel puller, and, though I still wore a battered old pair of shoes while marching, I got out a pair of thigh boots of antelope skin, lined with felt, to wear while riding.

While we were marching, I suffered my first casualty in eyeglasses. I had stooped down to mend a shoe lace, and the wind blew the glass out of my eye on to the gravel, where it perished with a tinkle. I had worn it for months and months, and it had an honorable history, and more than one chip on the rim, where I had dropped it before on stone floors and bricks and a variety of things. It was the same glass I had worn in the very beginning of the year, when, on a shooting trip in the Ta Ch’ing Shan, I had had my ears frozen. That time also the wind — but a real wind, not a silly gust — had blown it out of my eye into a snowdrift, whence I had been at some pains to recover it. It was more than an ordinary eyeglass: the Eyeglass Inordinate. The assembled caravans mourned over it; they had never seen one before. But what capped all their previous amazements was my fetching out of another one the next day.

We left at half-past one, and five hours after that I saw a camel die; in fact, I killed it. There are many dead camels on the Khara Gobi. The caravan men say that they lie end to end, all across, and it is a fact that there is hardly a place on that narrow yellow track from which, if you look, like Shelley, before and after, you cannot see dead camels. The Dry Stages are in the middle section of the Winding Road, and the camels must make the biggest effort of the journey when they have worn off their pride of condition. Simple exhaustion accounts for many deaths in the cool months, but it must be worse when the weather is hot and the camels feel the lack of both food and water. The dead lie thickest at the two edges of the desert, many of them only a few hundred yards from the wells, proving that the four-march distance with almost no feeding and no water at all is just too much for laden camels that have traveled at least a month without feeding full. Over and above these, many are killed by the Khara Gobi that do not die until a week or two later — those that have been so knocked up by the crossing that their weariness is too much for their power of recuperation.

This camel, however, died of an outright sickness, which had started the day that we left the West River. The nearest account of the sickness that the Chinese could give was that a hsieh feng, which I take to be a slantwise or malicious kind of wind, had got into the animal’s throat; though some of them did admit that it might have eaten something not meant even for camels. It suffered a paralysis of the jaws and throat which must have come on suddenly, for its cheeks were puffed out with a large cud it could neither swallow nor chew nor spit out. After six days with neither food nor water it was terribly weakened. Its legs grew rigid so that it could hardly walk, and its eyes bulged as though it were choking. At last it stumbled while we were on the march; it toppled over flat on its side, and was quite unable to get up, as its legs would no longer bend at the joints.

The caravans had gone on, for no one stops in the Gobi — unless he is an Elephant’s Child of a foreigner, full of ‘’satiable curtiosity’ — for another man’s business. Then the hsien-sheng, or caravan master, of the House of Chou rode back and delivered the Funeral Oration for Camels About to Be Dead, in a very cross voice. ‘For what are you waiting?’ he shouted. ‘Do you not know that this is the Business of the Gobi? We buy camels with silver and throw them on the Gobi. There is no way out.’ Still we lingered for a moment, while I asked the owner to let me shoot his camel. It was the only time on the whole journey that I interfered with this law of the caravans and obtained a swift mercy. The owner agreed because he was a boy after all, and, in spite of his despondency, curious to know how big a bang my revolver would make and how big a hole. There was, however, a good deal of head-wagging in camp, and after that I left the camels bought with silver to be thrown on the Gobi according to the Business of the Gobi.

II

The weariness of those marches across that black gap between water and water was cumulative, and I remember that I was heartily tired and heavy-footed in the last night hours. Hills and darkness had begun to close in on us at the same time; thus far we had been rising slowly, but now we crossed a low divide. The descent was just as gradual, almost Imperceptible; but at last, at two in the morning, after slugging away for twelve and a half hours, or about thirty-one miles, we struck into a knot of hills. Then we dropped into a pit of more agglomerate gloom and camped. We had achieved the Lien Ssu Han, the Four Drys Together, in three stages. The distance is at least ninety, perhaps nearly a hundred miles. Even if four days are taken, it means four swinging marches. But the four-march division is more usually made in winter. Water can then be poured out in pools at the last well, allowed to freeze, and carried in lumps of ice, a sack or two on every camel. They say that once a caravan started on the Four Dry Stages without enough spare camels, and all of them weak. By the second march so many camels had been ‘thrown away’ that the caravan master had to abandon a lot of loads. Two men were left with the dump, and they lived there for at least two months on flour and ice given them by passing caravans before spare camels could be sent back for them.

The well, or rather pair of wells, marking the end of our last long stage was known as the Shih-pan Ching — the Stone Slab Wells. To me the place seemed much more sinister than all the desert through which we had been traveling, for we were camped in a straitened pocket among the everlasting black hills, which here, from the way they crowded about us, looked much more steep and menacing. There were also a few big pieces of black rock, which gave the place its name. At the foot of the highest hill, in the crotch of a dry watercourse, were a pair of wells ten, or at the most fifteen, feet deep, - a good deal deeper than most Mongolian wells, — giving an unlimited supply of water that was a little salt, but clear and drinkable.

Here we caught up with the Mohammedan House of Liang, which had raced away ahead of us from the West River, to be beforehand with the water at both the near and the far edge of the Khara Gobi. Our Chinese cursed this caravan heartily, there being little affection between the Great and Little Faiths, saying that they had gone ahead when it was to their advantage, but would cling to us from now on, for the sake of company through the chancy country of No Man’s Land, where there is danger of raiders.

Though the Chinese cordially extended their dislike to the whole caravan, it contained only two Mohammedans — the owner’s son, who represented the ‘house,’ and one camel puller to do the cooking that it might be ‘clean.’ Mohammedans prefer to employ a majority of Chinese, because their own people are touchy and undependable and will leave their jobs for a whim or a fancied slight. Like most foreigners, I rather warmed to the Mohammedans, and liked especially the young son of the House of Liang. He was a fine lad of twentythree or twenty-four, of one of the Mohammedan types which show traces of other than Chinese blood. This young Mohammedan employed a Chinese caravan master, but himself took far more than the usual initiative in handling the affairs of the road. He seemed to me more prompt and energetic in his measures and decisions than the Chinese. The Mohammedans are credited by the Chinese with courage and enterprise, and are said to be persuasive in talk and in blarney, but they are debited with being undependable in business. ‘Eat the food of a Mohammedan,’ they say, ‘but do not listen to his talk’ — take, that is, what he offers, but do not believe in what he promises. Indeed, they talk about the way the Mohammedans talk much as the English talk about the way the Irish talk; and there is something in it at that.

It is also recognized that a Mohammedan Chinese is cleaner than a pagan Chinese. Even with a Mohammedan Chinese, however, cleanliness has nothing to do with godliness — only with churchliness. Now this is one of the sundering differences between the Asiatic and the European. If a man says to you, ‘Of course his house [or his tent] is cleaner than mine; he is a Mohammedan,’you know that you are indisputably listening to an Asiatic. It does not matter what kind of Asiat ic he may be or what kind of European you are — the broad difference is there. Only the Asiatic is inherently unable to detect that different ways of life are admirable or imitable or attainable in different degrees. His way of life is to him something to be accepted. He may despise a man born to a different way of life, but he does not necessarily despise that way of life.

There is another well, but of inferior water, a few miles beyond the Stone Slab Wells, in a small drift of sandy country. Overpassing this, we camped in blank desert, and the next day passed through narrowing valleys choking us at last into a gorge, to Yeh-ma Ching, the Wild Horse Well. Taking up water here for ourselves, but leaving the camels still without, we camped a mile or two beyond. These marches took us through the same kind of Khara Gobi country, but with higher hills, a pasture rather better, or at least not quite so bad, and at times an outlook southward to a distant red desert. They say that on this fringe of the Khara Gobi there are wild horses (Equus prjevalskii) and wild asses.

The Wild Horse Well is on the very brink of the central plateau of the Black Gobi. From it we had descended so gently into a deep, wide valley — which declined with a gentle pitch toward the north — that only when looking back the next morning over the last part of the ground covered in the night could it be seen that we had come down from a wild table-land, with ramparts of barren hills buttressed by long sweeping slopes of detritus. On the other side of the valley or basin we ascended to another, lower plateau to undertake the Lien San Han, the Three Drys Together or Three Dry Stages, which complete the crossing of the capital desert of Mongolia. Caravans often force the crossing in two marches, though it is reckoned at three regular stages; but we took the full three, because at the end of the first stage unusual rains in the summer had formed a mere, of which a few pools and mudholes remained at which the camels could be watered.

At the very start we met a caravan traveling in the come-one, come-all fashion of the Mongols, so different from the orderly line of march of the Chinese traders. They were Torguts of the tribe who herd their famous ponies in the mountains near Karashahr. They were going in the train of a relative of the Han Wang, their Prince, on pilgrimage to Peking to adore the Pan-ch’an Lama, the great ecclesiastic and quasi divinity of Western Tibet, who was supposed to be the head of an anti-Lhasa and anti-British party and to have left Tibet for political reasons.

There was something stupendous in the march of these tribesmen from Central Asia, from one of the most outlying Mongol communities, with their women and children, their camel loads of treasure and offerings, their gowns of yellow and purple, red and green, their bold, determined faces, their assured carriage, their mixed armory of matchlocks and breech-loading rifles, swords and assorted pistols, bound across the desert for China to acquire merit by abasing themselves in the presence of the holiest of the Incarnate Divinities of Tibet — for the Pan-ch’an Lama is nearer to God than the Ta-lai Lama, though not so high above men.

In the Three Dry Stages the character of the desert changes gradually to a grittier kind of sand, overlaid not with the unbroken glossy black of the Four Dry Stages, but with what seemed to me fragments of quartz, red, brown, and white, — though the black stone was also present, — melting at a distance into a gray tinge. Nor is the desert quite so bleakly barren as the central Khara Gobi, for there is more variety, and a little more abundance of desert scrub. By the third day there were even a few wild onions, which caused almost a stampede among the camels, which for days, as the men said, had been chewing nothing but firewood. They were so difficult for the herders to control that we had to break camp much earlier than usual, in spite of a high wind. From the east the country of the Three Dry Stages can be seen as a plateau, but on the west it subsides gradually to lower levels. When, coming down from it, we struck the first well, we had left behind the greater deserts and were engaged among the oases of No Man’s Land.

One stage more to the west from this well is a half-dry mere called Kung-p’o Ch’üan, the strategic point of the region which the caravan men call the San Pu-kuan. In a depression deepest at Kung-p’o Ch’üan, and running from southeast to northwest, is a series of marshes, half dried-out at the end of October, but kept alive by unfailing springs. To the northwest is a sterile gathering of low hills, waterless and seamed with waterless gullies. On the south and running to the west is the blue main range of the Ma-tsung Shan, distant perhaps thirty or perhaps fifty miles. The whole is one of the most lightly mapped provinces in the world — a big, empty, uncrossed country full of uncertainties. In the depth of it is an unknown oasis, and there, on a knot of reddish rubbly hills, looking to Outer Mongolia over the yellow reed beds of the largest mere, are the strangest ruins I ever saw. They might in all seeming be ‘half as old as time,’ yet many who had a hand in their building are still alive. This deserted citadel is all that stands — except the confused story that is on the tongues of a few men who spend their lives tramping up and down the desert — of the works of the False Lama. It is from these ruins that the mere is called Kung-p’o Ch’üan — the Spring of the Hillside of the Duke. Already the legend of the False Lama has been elaborated beside the tent fires into many versions, but from the choice of details it is possible to throw together a picture with life in it, of an adventurer who, during those years when Mongolia echoed again for a while with the drums and tramplings of its mediæval turbulence, proved himself a valiant heir in his day to all the Asiatic soldiers of fortune, from Jenghis Khan to Yakub Beg of Kashgar.

III

I have heard men say that the False Lama was a Russian. Certainly the thing they remember most vividly about him — next to his harem — is the habit he had of changing his clothes every day or so, dressing at different times like a Russian, a Chinese, a Mongol. Others maintain that he was true Mongol, so it may have been that he was a Buriat, a Russianized Siberian Mongol. The most substantial story of all is that he was a Chinese from Manchuria who had served in Mongolia as a herder of ponies for the princely firm of Ta Sheng K’uei. In this employment he learned the language and customs of the Mongols. They say that he rose suddenly to power and notoriety during the violent period about 1920-21 when first the White and then the Red Russian ‘Partisans’ overran Mongolia. He began by proclaiming himself a lama, and a lama of high rank—a Bogdo, or Great or Holy One, taking a title that belongs only to the several degrees of Living Buddhas. While winning his early successes he got himself the repute of being immune from fire and invulnerable to bullets. It is declared positively that he was captured at Kobdo by White Russians who burned him for three days, but to no purpose. Escaping from them, he led the Mongols back to the sack of Kobdo, the massacre of the Chinese, and the eviction of the Whites.

The caravan men never seem to have counted it against the False Lama that he gave over their countrymen at Kobdo to a Mongol massacre. For one thing, the men of their calling never had much feeling of kinship with traders sitting on their hams in privileged marts like Kobdo, Uliassutai, and Urga. For another, their simple realism accepted the fact that the adventurer was playing for power. They know that buying a camel and working a camel are things that admit of different attitudes and different words.

The detail of those wars in Mongolia is a confusion of murder and riot, but their main course is plain enough. At the collapse of the Russian Empire, which had in latter years exercised a powerful indirect control over Mongolian affairs, the country was invaded by a Chinese military adventurer, whose ambition was to reassert the nominal Chinese suzerainty and to create in fact a satrapy for himself. He was defeated with great massacre by White Russians, a broken soldiery from the Imperial Armies, together with Mongol levies. The Whites, who under the leadership of the ‘Mad Baron,’ Ungern-Sternberg, had swept over a kingdom with wolfish ferocity and courage, were quite incapable of rule. They lost their ascendancy over the Mongols, who turned to the Red Russians, and the Whites in their turn were overwhelmed. The idea of Chinese domination had gone by the board, but the Mongol chiefs were not equal to their chance of fortune, and the Red Russians were not yet collected and organized enough to take over the country. An uneasy period followed in which the Living Buddha at Urga was declared the Spiritual and Temporal Sovereign of the Mongols, under tentative Soviet guidance.

This period lasted only until the death of the Khutukhtu, or Living Buddha. By a peculiar fortune, it was known in his lifetime that he was to be the last of his succession. A Living Buddha is only the vehicle, generation by generation, of a cycle of incarnations; it is decreed at the beginning of each cycle that it shall last for a stated number of generations, after which the spirit which informed it is caught up to a higher plane. The Urga cycle came to an end with this Khutukhtu, so that after his death the Mongols were left under scattered hereditary chieftains, with no central figure round which to rally. The Soviets in the meantime had confirmed their own power and were able to carry out their own designs. They took over Mongolia, working on the young men in order to discredit and disestablish the princely families; and that is how Mongolia stands to-day, except for the Inner Mongolian tribes which have remained under Chinese rule.

When the Urga Khutukhtu (Living Buddha) was acclaimed ruler of all Mongolia, he gave to the False Lama — or so it is said — large territories in Western Mongolia for a fief. The False Lama, however, afraid either of intrigues against him or of the recoil of his own intrigues against others, fled westward to these oases in what for many years had been a No Man’s Land.

This No Man’s Land is a country not adhering clearly to either Inner or Outer Mongolia. It came by its name of San Pu-kuan, or Three Don’t Cares, because none of the big Mongol groups, nor yet the Chinese provinces of HsinChiang or Kansu, had cared to push a claim to it. It was too remote and too inaccessible. When the Huns in the fifth and sixth centuries were centred about Barkul, it may have been one of their outer ranges, but there is hardly reason to think that at any time since then it has been much in use. The few Mongols of the Ma-tsung Shan are mostly Torguts, of that portion of the tribe whose proper range is in the Zungarian trough, between the Altai and the T’ien Shan, dividing Western Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan proper. Although the False Lama had been in touch with their kinsmen near Ku Ch’eng-tze, he did not attempt to lead them as a tribe or in any large numbers to the new principality he was marking out for himself in the Three Don’t Cares. His followers were a mixed lot lifted from all over Western Mongolia, some of them his own fighting retainers, the rest whole families that he had swept up on his way in order to establish a population about him. This was in the end the weakness of his position, for not only had a large number of his subjects not come with him willingly, but they did not like his high-handed way of keeping all the men at call for service under arms and of seizing women at his will for the harem that was his especial princely recreation. For a year at least he ruled boldly and successfully at Kung-p’o Ch’üan. He must have been a man of vision and energy, for the caravan men say that it was he more than anyone else who pieced together the Winding Road, linking little-used Mongol routes to the byways of the opium runners. His masterwork was in establishing the crossing of the Khara Gobi by the Three and the Four Dry Stages, thus making it possible for large caravans to travel from Ku Ch’eng-tze to Kuei-hua in a zone protected by the desert from all but the boldest marauders from Outer Mongolia, and offering, then at any rate, little temptation to tax farmers on the Chinese borders.

Whether or not he was a Chinese, and however many Chinese he may have slaughtered in his Kobdo days, he made it the forefront of his policy, from the time he set up in No Man’s Land, to encourage Chinese trade. Until his time, it is said, no regular Ku Ch’eng-tze heavy caravan had been over this road. He not only invited one, — with the approval of the Governor of Hsin-Chiang, who wanted the trade of his province to recuperate from the loss of the Great Road, — but escorted it through the Gobi. Thereafter he kept patrols out in the direction of the Two Dry Stages and the most dangerous approach from Outer Mongolia, and gave armed safe conduct free of charge across his domain.

The False Lama was more than an opener of roads. To encourage traffic, he hired and sold camels at cheap rates to caravans whose cattle were worn out by the desert stages. He drafted off some of his disgruntled Mongols to cultivate crops in the better oases to feed his own people, and planned to establish a constant supply of grain and flour for the caravans by finding touch with Hsü Chou on the other side of the Ma-tsung Shan. For the Mongol side of his enterprise, they say that he talked of founding a fair, for the full scope of his ambition was to build up a whole trading city, fed by the new road, about his fortalice.

His road, however, was not more than well founded, and his fortress well built about him, when the wrath of Urga sought him out — in the year 1923 or 1924, as I understand it. Ten men rode out of the desert to his north, saying that they were lamas of the Bogdo Khan, sent to invite him to council at Urga on matters of high policy. Three of them, as chiefs of the mission, were admitted to his chamber in the central keep, from which he could overlook almost all the frontiers of the kingdom he had brought into being as if out of a vision. When they were brought before his face, at the same moment that they saluted him they shot him with automatics, thus ending a legend with murder and with the vulgar proof that his invulnerability was not equal to his incombustibility.

Other ways of telling the story are that the emissaries from Urga came in one or two motor cars; that the False Lama was taken out and shot before his people; that he was taken to Urga and shot; that his head was cut off and his body bound down with chains to make sure of him; and that he was never captured at all, but another man in his stead, and that he is yet alive, an outlaw in hiding.

IV

We camped about five miles beyond the Chia-lama Pan’rh at the next group of springs. I walked back the next morning to see the ruins, taking with me one man, a favorite of mine from the House of Chou, because it was a bad country, no place for a man alone. I think the caravan men were as much afraid of ghosts as of men in the flesh, but they were sure that plenty of both were about.

The fortified quarter is built partly of mud bricks, partly of mud and stones, and partly of uncemented boulders and slabs of rock. On the easy hillside just under it are the foundations of a temple— for men do not build in a wilderness without making a house either for the spirit of the place or for the gods they bring with them. This temple has been utterly razed, because it would never have done to allow the ghost of so dangerous a man as the False Lama to come back to a house ready prepared and to the converse of assembled spiritual powers. The main gate of the fortress is entered sideways by a ramp, and opens into a wide lower court with stabling, or rather shelter yards, and garrison quarters. This is overlooked from one of the side walls by a tower which, with a gallery connecting it with the upper works and the keep, was designed for the central defense. The crown of the knoll is a rats’ delight of a place, a maze of passages like tunnels and stairways like wells, and rooms and cells locked and piled and nested one within another without any regularity or plan. From the look of things, the man who planned this place was a Mongol, with no idea of how to go about the making of walls and roofs.

The core of the whole is the keep, where lived the False Lama himself. This room, which was furnished with the luxury of a sleeping kang heated by flues, has been wildly knocked about, even the brick and stone kang having been pulled to pieces in the search for the tyrant’s treasure. All the buildings have been unroofed, and most of the floors in buildings of more than one story have been destroyed, partly in the search for treasure, and partly to free any spirits that might have gathered in the living places of men. The weakness of the position is that it is commanded at barely more than a stone’s throw from another hill. This is guarded by an isolated tower, but it would have been hard to keep the garrison in food and water.

From the keep one looks down on the whole mass, with the ground plan of the temple before the gate, and the mud yurt-foundations laid out in ranks in front of the fort and in groups all about the sides, and northward over the sloping marshes to the narrow trail, looking like a footpath, trodden by camels coming from Outer Mongolia. In the fortress itself there is a cramped and sinister atmosphere. I did not feel happy. Withered in the light of the noonday sun almost to the dingy color of the hill on which they stood, and lying so empty and quiet in that utter emptiness of marsh and hill, brief patches of living land, and long stretches of desolation, the rifled ruins seemed to be oppressed by something uncanny. I did not wonder that the few frequenters of the wilderness should avoid them and whatever ghost they harbor.

On our way to the ruins my camelpulling friend had seen a wild sheep. When I got my glasses on him I could see that he had a superb head. Standing nearly a mile away on the ridge of the low hills of rotten rock behind the House of the False Lama, he gazed down for a long time on the plain across which we were walking before he trotted away toward the distant mountains. I was told that it was a very dry autumn after a dry summer, which perhaps accounted for the wandering of a ram of his many years — for by the curl of his horns and his loneliness he must have been a very old and very lordly ram — so far from the higher hills, with swards of turfy grass between the rocks, which are the proper haunt of wild sheep. When we got to the ridge we looked for his spoor, somewhat idly, but did not find it among the stones. I thought nothing of this until we got back. After my friend had told of the lonely wild ram, the men began to fidget and mutter. The general finding was that we had seen the spirit of the Chia Lama, departing after a visit to the castle of his former power.

Our own camp, all night, was in an uproar of frantic dogs. To this whole series of springs there come at night antelope, wild asses, and, they say, wild camels. Their unseen presence kept the dogs awake, and later when a wolf howled here and there they went into pure frenzy. In the daytime there was not a glimpse of anything alive, except sand grouse flying furiously overhead, several hundred together. At a little distance from the trampled margins of the drinking pools one could see the narrow paths by which the desert animals approached the water. The tracks which were pointed out to me as those of wild camels were frequent. They were more than half the size of the tracks of a caravan camel, and more elliptical in shape. It seemed to me, too, that the toe-prints were not quite so deep — perhaps because the wild camel, whose gait is not affected by the carrying of loads, places his weight differently. The caravan men were positive that the tracks were not made by half-grown camels belonging to Mongols.

This camp was called T’iao Hu. When we got there we found an enterprising Barkul trader in camp. He had brought out flour for men and barley or dried peas for camels, and was prepared to hire out the camels that had carried them to caravans in need of fresh transport. We halted here for a whole day, to let our camels rest their gravel-fevered feet in the soft soil. The great quantity of soda in the soil healed them amazingly. There is also saltpetre, and large pits filled with water show where it was dug and washed for making crude gunpowder in the time of the False Lama.

The big caravans were running out of ts’ao-mi and ts’ao-mien (roasted millet and oats), so the men spent the day in baking bread, to their great joy. They made ovens by digging small pits near to steep clay banks. When the pit was dug, a boring into it from the bank would be made, in order to give a draft. Then fuel was lit in the bottom of the pit. When it had burned to red ash the draft bore was stopped, the bread put on the coals to bake and covered. By putting crude soda in the dough, the cooks raised it very creditably.

My own camel man made bread for us occasionally as a luxury. It is a simple trick, but requires the knack, and few even among the caravan cooks can do it neatly. Dough is made in the ordinary way and hung up in a damp cloth to the ridgepole of the tent, where it gets the warmth of the fire, which ferments it overnight. The knack is in judging the heat and time required for the fermentation. The next day this sour dough is rolled out into pancakes, which are baked in the bottom of a dry cooking pot. It rises very fairly, and at the same time the sourness is baked out of it. This kind of pancake bread is best eaten after being fried in mutton fat.

As usual after a day off, the men sat talking late around the fires, visitors going the round from tent to tent. In my tent the talk ran on cinemas, or ‘electric shadows.’ It was agreed that they are all about brothels, though adorned with other humorous matter. Even to the Kuei-hua camel pullers, whose women have far more freedom than most Chinese, pictures that have so many women in them going about publicly must be indecent. These pictures, by general admission, can do anything but talk, and even then, no one has any bother in supplying the talk. Thus one man had seen a cinema in which a foreigner had ridden up to a brothel on a horse — I suppose in the original he was courting a ‘pure flower of womanhood.’ There was a good-fornothing opium smoker (tramp) outside to whom he gave his horse to hold. The opium smoker, going to sleep, let the horse run away. When the man came out of the brothel after some gay business with a girl inside, he said to the opium smoker, ‘Curse you! Where is my horse?’ The opium smoker replied with appropriate profanity. Then they both went to a policeman, who said, ‘May dogs defile him! I have n’t seen him!’ And so on.

And that was the way we went to bed, five miles from the House of the False Lama, where ghosts walk.