om Urga.

The fourth day there was more trouble with the connecting rod on my
car and we sat for two hours at a well while the motor was
eviscerated and reassembled. It had ceased to be a joke, especially
to Coltman and Guptil, for all the work fell upon them. By this time
they were almost unrecognizable because of dirt and grease and their
hands were cut and blistered. But they stood it manfully, and at
each new accident Gup rose to greater and greater heights of
oratory.

We were halfway between Ude and Panj-kiang when we saw two
automobiles approaching from the south. Their occupants were
foreigners we were sure, and as they stopped beside us a tall young
man came up to my car. "I am Langdon Warner," he said. We shook
hands and looked at each other curiously. Warner is an archaeologist
and Director of the Pennsylvania Museum. For ten years we had played
a game of hide and seek through half the countries of the Orient and
it seemed that we were destined never to meet each other. In 1910 I
drifted into the quaint little town of Naha in the Loo-Choo Islands,
that forgotten kingdom of the East. At that time it was far off the
beaten track and very few foreigners had sought it out since 1854,
when Commodore Perry negotiated a treaty with its king in the
picturesque old Shuri Palace. Only a few months before I arrived,
Langdon Warner had visited it on a collecting trip and the natives
had not yet ceased to talk about the strange foreigner who gave them
new baskets for old ones.

A little later Warner preceded me to Japan, and in 1912 I followed
him to Korea. Our paths diverged when I went to Alaska in 1918, but
I crossed his trail again in China, and in 1916, just before my wife
and I left for Yuen-nan, I missed him in Boston where I had gone to
lecture at Harvard University. It was strange that after ten years
we should meet for the first time in the middle of the Gobi Desert!

Warner was proceeding to Urga with two Czech officers who were on
their way to Irkutsk. We gave them the latest news of the war
situation and much to their disgust they realized that had they
waited only two weeks longer they could have gone by train, for the
attack by the Czechs on the Magyars and the Bolsheviki, in the
trans-Baikal region, had cleared the Siberian railway westward as
far as Omsk. After half an hour's talk we drove off in opposite
directions. Warner eventually reached Irkutsk, but not without some
interesting experiences wit