ere, nothing.

And so the time went on. Yet never once did we think of giving up the
quest and returning, since, before we started, we had sworn an oath that
we would achieve or die. Indeed we ought to have died a score of times,
yet always were preserved, most mysteriously preserved.

Now we were in country where, so far as I could learn, no European had
ever set a foot. In a part of the vast land called Turkestan there is a
great lake named Balhkash, of which we visited the shores. Two hundred
miles or so to the westward is a range of mighty mountains marked on the
maps as Arkarty-Tau, on which we spent a year, and five hundred or so to
the eastward are other mountains called Cherga, whither we journeyed at
last, having explored the triple ranges of the Tau.

Here it was that at last our true adventures began. On one of the spurs
of these awful Cherga mountains--it is unmarked on any map--we well-nigh
perished of starvation. The winter was coming on and we could find no
game. The last traveller we had met, hundreds of miles south, told us
that on that range was a monastery inhabited by Lamas of surpassing
holiness. He said that they dwelt in this wild land, over which no power
claimed dominion and where no tribes lived, to acquire "merit," with no
other company than that of their own pious contemplations. We did not
believe in its existence, still we were searching for that monastery,
driven onward by the blind fatalism which was our only guide through
all these endless wanderings. As we were starving and could find no
"argals," that is fuel with which to make a fire, we walked all night by
the light of the moon, driving between us a single yak--for now we had
no attendant, the last having died a year before.

He was a noble beast, that yak, and had the best constitution of any
animal I ever knew, though now, like his masters, he was near his end.
Not that he was over-laden, for a few rifle cartridges, about a hundred
and fifty, the remnant of a store which we had fortunately been able to
buy from a caravan two years before, some money in gold and silver, a
little tea and a bundle of skin rugs and sheepskin garments were his
burden. On, on we trudged across a plateau of snow, having the great
mountains on our right, till at length the yak gave a sigh and stopped.
So we stopped also, because we must, and wrapping ourselves in the skin
rugs, sat down in the snow to wait for daylight.

"We shall have to kill him and