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When the Cossack officer found that he was not to have his tea he was like a child with a stick of candy just out of reach. He tried to sleep but it was no use, and in half an hour I opened my eyes to see him flat on his face blowing lustily at a piece of argul which he had persuaded to emit a faint glow.
Much to our disgust we found that the argul we had purchased from the Mongol was so mixed with dirt that it would not burn. After half an hour of fruitless work I gave up, and we divided the tin of cold sausage. It was a pretty meager dinner for four hungry men and I retired into my sleeping bag to dream of roast lamb and mint sauce.
At six o'clock we saw the first yurt and purchased a supply of argul so that we could save time in making camp. The lamps of the car were hors de combat and a watery moon did not give us sufficient light by which to drive in safety, so we stopped on a hilltop shortly after dark. In the morning when the motor was cold we could save time and strength in cranking by pushing it down the slope.
Three temples lie in a bowl-shaped hollow, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of tiny pill-box dwellings painted red and white. There must be a thousand of them and probably twice as many lamas. On the outskirts of the "city" to the south enormous piles of argul have been collected by the priests and bestowed as votive offerings by devout travelers.
At least the Mongols thought so, and we had learned that what a Mongol does not do had best "give us pause." They had accepted the river with Oriental philosophy and had made their camps accordingly. Already a score of tents dotted the hillside, and argul fires were smoking in the doorways.
There are long distances upon some of the routes to California where no other fuel is found but the dried dung of the buffalo, called by the mountaineers "chips," and by the French "bois de vache," the argul of the Tartary deserts. It burns well when perfectly dry, answers a good purpose for cooking, and some men even prefer it to wood.
It is 4 feet in length and is known to the hillmen as the Argul. During flight it may be recognised by the whitish head and nape, the pale brown lower plumage and the dark rounded tail. Usually it keeps to rocky hills and mountains, over which it beats with a steady, sailing, vulturine flight.
Long before daylight they were on the road again, and when we awoke only the smoking embers of an argul fire remained as evidence that they ever had been there. Mongolia, as we saw it in the spring, was very different from Mongolia of the early autumn.
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