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Updated: June 15, 2025
On the other side the road leads straight away to the Mongolian uplands where the winds blow, and to the wide, empty spaces of the desert. So you turn your back upon Peking, and the railway takes you to Kalgan on the edge of the great plateau. It is only one hundred and twenty-five miles away, but you spend nearly a whole day in the train, for you are climbing all the way.
To see the places and things I have seen Liverpool, Wales, Rock of Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, Port Said, Canal, Suez, Red Sea, Cape Gardafui, Indian Ocean, Penang, Straits of Malacca, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin, Peking, Kalgan, Desert, Urga, Kiachta, Russia, Baikal, Irkutsk only even to see these, men will make long journeys.
We wished often for fruit but that is nonexistent in Mongolia except a few, hard, watery pears, which merchants import from China. Mr. Larsen was in Kalgan for the summer but Mr. Olufsen turned over his house and compound for our work.
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.
I could go from Kalgan to Urga in eighteen days; I must allow twenty-four or thirty; it usually took thirty days to the railway; I must not expect to do it under forty-five. I must buy ponies to cross from Kalgan; camels were the only thing to use; no camels could be had in summer.
If it had not been for the generous gift of the Kalgan Foreign Office, we should have fared badly, but Mongols and Chinese alike seemed to be free from inconvenient prejudices, and my men, whom I called in to share the tent with me, feasted off tins of corned beef, bologna sausage, and smoked herring, washed down by bowls of Pacific Coast canned peaches and plums; and then they smoked; that comfort was always theirs, and if the fire burned at all, it smoked, too, and occasionally a drenched traveller stopped in to be cheered with a handful of cigarettes.
After another but briefer sojourn at Olau Bourgass he set out on his return journey, visited Urga, then crossed the great plain on horseback in the course of fourteen days, and reached Kalgan on June 11.
It was always possible to tell at once if an antelope had a fawn upon the plain, for she would run in a wide circle around the spot and refuse to be driven away. We encountered only two species of antelope between Kalgan and Urga.
Thus far the trail had not been bad, as roads go in the Gobi, but I was assured that the next hundred miles would be a different story, for we were about to enter the most arid part of the desert between Kalgan and Urga. We were prepared for the only real work of the trip, however, by a taste of the exciting shooting which Coltman had promised me.
And thus early began the long series of seeming fatalities that prevented him from ever receiving this joy and strength. Partly from the needs of the Peking Mission, and partly from respect to a notion which the American Board of Foreign Missions had that their occupancy of Kalgan, on the extreme southern limit, constituted all Mongolia into one of their fields of work, the Rev. S. E. Meech, Mr.
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