. It
seemed that he had slipped and fallen to the bottom of a shallow ravine,
while the bags which were slung across his back without straps had
caught on a rock and stopped with myself there in the snow. This time
the demon of Jagasstai only played a joke but one that did not satisfy
him. He began to show more and more anger. With furious gusts of wind he
almost dragged us and our bags from the camels and nearly knocked over
our humped steeds, blinded us with frozen snow and prevented us from
breathing. Through long hours we dragged slowly on in the deep snow,
often falling over the edge of the rocks. At last we entered a small
valley where the wind whistled and roared with a thousand voices. It
had grown dark. The Mongol wandered around searching for the trail and
finally came back to us, flourishing his arms and saying:

"We have lost the road. We must spend the night here. It is very bad
because we shall have no wood for our stove and the cold will grow
worse."

With great difficulties and with frozen hands we managed to set up our
tent in the wind, placing in it the now useless stove. We covered the
tent with snow, dug deep, long ditches in the drifts and forced our
camels to lie down in them by shouting the "Dzuk! Dzuk!" command to
kneel. Then we brought our packs into the tent.

My companion rebelled against the thought of spending a cold night with
a stove hard by.

"I am going out to look for firewood," said he very decisively; and at
that took up the ax and started. He returned after an hour with a big
section of a telegraph pole.

"You, Jenghiz Khans," said he, rubbing his frozen hands, "take your
axes and go up there to the left on the mountain and you will find the
telegraph poles that have been cut down. I made acquaintance with the
old Jagasstai and he showed me the poles."

Just a little way from us the line of the Russian telegraphs passed,
that which had connected Irkutsk with Uliassutai before the days of the
Bolsheviki and which the Chinese had commanded the Mongols to cut
down and take the wire. These poles are now the salvation of travelers
crossing the pass. Thus we spent the night in a warm tent, supped
well from hot meat soup with vermicelli, all in the very center of the
dominion of the angered Jagasstai. Early the next morning we found
the road not more than two or three hundred paces from our tent and
continued our hard trip over the ridge of Tarbagatai. At the head of
the Adair River