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About twelve miles from Zain we saw from a ridge a snakelike line of riders crossing the valley, which detachment we met half an hour later on the shore of a deep, swampy stream. The group consisted of Mongols, Buriats and Tibetans armed with Russian rifles.
From time to time he wets his finger and picks up on it a small bit of grain gold or a diminutive nugget and drops these into a little bag hanging under his chin. In such manner this primitive dredge wins about a quarter of an ounce or five dollars' worth of the yellow metal per day. I determined to make the whole distance to Zain Shabi in a single day.
He was drunk all the time and a great card player, always making side-splitting jokes that greatly offended the Lamas. That same evening I made the acquaintance of the second Hubilgan who called on me, the real administrator of Zain Shabi, which is an independent dominion subject directly to the Living Buddha.
When our party left Uliassutai, we traveled on leisurely, making thirty-five to fifty miles a day until we were within sixty miles of Zain Shabi, where I took leave of the others to go south to this place in order to keep my engagement with Colonel Kazagrandi.
We foreigners separated into two parties, one traveling by the old caravan route across the Gobi considerably to the south of Urga to Kuku-Hoto or Kweihuacheng and Kalgan, and mine, consisting of my friend, two Polish soldiers and myself, heading for Urga via Zain Shabi, where Colonel Kazagrandi had asked me in a recent letter to meet him.
Another small quadrangle lay a little to the east and contained Russian buildings connected with the monastery by telephone. "That is the house of the Living God of Zain," the Mongol explained, pointing to this smaller quadrangle. "He likes Russian customs and manners." To the north on a conical-shaped hill rose a tower that recalled the Babylonian zikkurat.
Thus we left the Uliassutai where we had lived through so many exciting events. On the sixth day after our departure there arrived in the town the Mongol-Buriat detachment under the command of the Buriat Vandaloff and the Russian Captain Bezrodnoff. Afterwards I met them in Zain Shabi. It was a detachment sent out from Urga by Baron Ungern to restore order in Uliassutai and to march on to Kobdo.
The following morning I set out anew from Zain Shabi, having in my pocket the laissez-passer of Bezrodnoff for his outposts. Once more we traveled along the now known places, the mountain from which I espied the detachment of Bezrodnoff, the stream into which I had thrown my weapon, and soon all this lay behind us. At the first ourton we were disappointed because we did not find horses there.
The Hutuktu also brought down one as well as a musk antelope that came unexpectedly from behind a rock hard by. The largest pair of horns weighed about thirty pounds, but they were from a young sheep. The day following our return to Zain Shabi, as I was feeling quite recovered, I decided to go on to Van Kure.
It especially denotes everything bad, false, and wrong, in any matter and in any body. On the contrary, for the opposite epithet, various terms are used, "maleah," "tayeb," and "zain," which latter term always means pretty, as well as good. The polite Ghadamseeah are very fond of zain; but it should properly apply to pretty women.
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