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Updated: May 9, 2025
But here was a new way, and if comfort in Gobi is obtainable it is in an American buggy; and with a pony for change, no wonder I faced the desert without dismay. The combined caravans looked very imposing as we moved off. Three of the Mongols were lamas, the rest were laymen, or "black men," so called from their unshorn black hair worn in a queue.
In some the water is never-failing, in others it quickly runs dry. Occasionally it is slightly brackish, but usually it is clear and cold. Without these wells the three hundred miles of Gobi would impose an almost impassable barrier between North and South Mongolia.
The soil is mainly sandy, but the Gobi sagebrush and short bunch grass, although sparse and dry, still give a covering of vegetation, so that in the distance the plain appears like a rolling meadowland. When we saw our first northern Mongol I was delighted. Every one is a study for an artist.
But these objects were few and far between. The deadly monotony of the scene the trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of Gobi when the snow lies on it all these tell the same grim truth to all who look on them: the old truth that man is but a small thing and his life but as the flower of the grass.
A huddle of palaces, temples, banks lies concealed behind the mud walls that hem in the narrow lanes, for Kalgan has been for many years an important trading centre, and through here passes the traffic across the Gobi Desert. In the dirty, open square crowded with carts are two or three incongruous Western buildings, for the foreigner and his ways have found the town out.
It was already dusk on the evening of August 10 when we drew up to the hamlet of Shang-loo-shwee at the end of the Hami oasis. The Great Gobi, in its awful loneliness, stretched out before us, like a vast ocean of endless space. The growing darkness threw its mantle on the scene, and left imagination to picture for us the nightmare of our boyhood days.
The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the present that the creature brought Rodman in his prayer-carpet. They wanted to know where the Oriental got it, and that's how his story came out. He was something searcher, seems our nearest English word to it in the great Shan Monastery on the southeastern plateau of the Gobi.
The Mongolian gazelle, on the other hand, is most abundant in the grasslands both north and south of the Gobi, but nevertheless has a continuous distribution across the plateau between Kalgan and Urga.
And so it was Ki-Tsang who had just attacked the Grand Transasiatic on the plains of Gobi. The pirate of Vunnan had learned that a van containing gold and precious stones of enormous value had formed part of this train! And was there anything astonishing in that, considering that the newspapers, even those of Paris, had published the fact many days before?
A flaming sword moving at the entrance to the Gobi could not have barred him out!" The big Oriental made a vague gesture as of one removing something clinging to his face. "Wherefore this blindness?" he said. The girl had turned away in an effort to control the emotion that possessed her.
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