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Puck would put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. From China to California, more than half the circuit of the globe, we can flash a signal in a second of time, and gain by the hands of the clock more than fourteen hours. From the point of divergence the road to Kiachta ascends the valley of the Selenga, while that to Irkutsk descends the left bank of the stream.
In Kiachta, after some delay, I got a teacher, but not to my satisfaction. After I had been with him a time Grant remarked one day that I did not seem to be making much progress in the language. This stung me to the quick, and made me go down into Mongolia. Here I was directed to the tent of Grant's contractor, and with him I made arrangements to live.
Art. 18. The Chinese postal institutions at Urga and Mongolian Kiachta remain in force on the old basis. Art. 19.
A kind of highway for the considerable commercial traffic between China and Russia runs through the eastern central part of Mongolia, leaving China at the frontier town of Kalgan, and touching Russia at the frontier town of Kiachta. Along this route during all but the winter months, caravans of camel-carts and ox-carts attended by companies of Mongols and Chinese are constantly passing.
There is now a good percentage of profit, but the competition by way of Canton and the Baltic has destroyed the best of it. Under the old monopoly the merchants arranged high prices and did not oppose each other with quick and low sales. The Kiachta teas are far superior to those from Canton and Shanghae. They come from the best districts of China and are picked and cured with great care.
There is a system of relays arranged by the Chinese so that one can travel very speedily if he has proper authority. Couriers have passed from Kiachta to Pekin in ten or twelve days; but the rough road and abominable carts make them feel at their journey's end about as if rolled through a patent clotheswringer. A mail is carried twice a month each way by the Russians.
A large crack was visible in the wall of a newer church, and repairs were in progress. In its earlier days the town had an important commerce, which has been taken away by Irkutsk and Kiachta. It has a few wealthy merchants, who have built fine houses on the principal street. I walked through the gastinni-dvor but found nothing I desired to purchase.
This will subject the unfortunate object of revenge to all sorts of legal vexations, and not unfrequently to execution. Suicide for revenge would be absurd in America, but is far from unknown at the antipodes. It was my original intention to make a journey from Kiachta to Pekin and back again, but the lateness of the season prevented me. I did not wish to be caught in the desert of Gobi in winter.
'By-and-by a Russian merchant turned up; he was going to Kiachta, so I started with him. I could not go sooner, as it was not safe to travel in the country before the Imperial edict was issued; to wait longer was to run the risk of not going at all.
Two sides of the large room were entirely bordered with horticultural productions, some of them six or eight feet high. Troitskosavsk and Kiachta have a sort of husband and wife singleness and duality. They are about two miles apart, the former having five or six thousand inhabitants and the latter about twelve hundred.
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