against the compound wall. It was an
extraordinary contrast to see a modern filing-cabinet at one end and
a telephone box on the felt-covered framework of the _yurt_.

Not far beyond the Custom House is what I believe to be one of the
most horrible prisons in the world. Inside a double palisade of
unpeeled timbers is a space about ten feet square upon which open
the doors of small rooms, almost dark. In these dungeons are piled
wooden boxes, four feet long by two and one-half feet high. These
coffins are the prisoners' cells.

Some of the poor wretches have heavy chains about their necks and
both hands manacled together. They can neither sit erect nor lie at
full length. Their food, when the jailer remembers to give them any,
is pushed through a six-inch hole in the coffin's side. Some are
imprisoned here for only a few days or weeks; others for life, or
for many years. Sometimes they lose the use of their limbs, which
shrink and shrivel away. The agony of their cramped position is
beyond the power of words to describe. Even in winter, when the
temperature drops, as it sometimes does, to sixty degrees below
zero, they are given only a single sheepskin for covering. How it is
possible to live in indescribable filth, half-fed, well-nigh frozen
in winter, and suffering the tortures of the damned, is beyond my
ken--only a Mongol could live at all.

The prison is not a Mongol invention. It was built by the Manchus
and is an eloquent tribute to a knowledge of the fine arts of
cruelty that has never been surpassed.

I have given this description of the prison not to feed morbid
curiosity, but to show that Urga, even if it has a Custom House, a
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, motor cars, and telephones, is still at
heart a city of the Middle Ages.

In Urga we made a delightful and most valuable friend in the person
of Mr. F. A. Larsen. Most foreigners speak of him as "Larsen of
Mongolia" and indeed it is difficult for us to think of the country
without thinking of the man. Some thirty years ago he rode into
Mongolia and liked it. He liked it so much, in fact, that he dug a
well and built a house among the Tabool hills a hundred miles north
of Kalgan. At first he labored with his wife as a missionary, but
later he left that field to her and took up the work which he loved
best in all the world--the buying and selling of horses.

During his years of residence in Mongolia hundreds of thousands of
horses have passed under his