ander,
without asking anybody to follow him, gallops up close to them, and with
his fusee knocks one of them off his horse, killed the second with his
pistol, and the third ran away. Thus ended our fight; but we had this
misfortune attending it, that all our mutton we had in chase got away. We
had not a man killed or hurt; as for the Tartars, there were about five
of them killed--how many were wounded we knew not; but this we knew, that
the other party were so frightened with the noise of our guns that they
fled, and never made any attempt upon us.

We were all this while in the Chinese dominions, and therefore the
Tartars were not so bold as afterwards; but in about five days we entered
a vast wild desert, which held us three days' and nights' march; and we
were obliged to carry our water with us in great leathern bottles, and to
encamp all night, just as I have heard they do in the desert of Arabia. I
asked our guides whose dominion this was in, and they told me this was a
kind of border that might be called no man's land, being a part of Great
Karakathy, or Grand Tartary: that, however, it was all reckoned as
belonging to China, but that there was no care taken here to preserve it
from the inroads of thieves, and therefore it was reckoned the worst
desert in the whole march, though we were to go over some much larger.

In passing this frightful wilderness we saw, two or three times, little
parties of the Tartars, but they seemed to be upon their own affairs, and
to have no design upon us; and so, like the man who met the devil, if
they had nothing to say to us, we had nothing to say to them: we let them
go. Once, however, a party of them came so near as to stand and gaze at
us. Whether it was to consider if they should attack us or not, we knew
not; but when we had passed at some distance by them, we made a
rear-guard of forty men, and stood ready for them, letting the caravan
pass half a mile or thereabouts before us. After a while they marched
off, but they saluted us with five arrows at their parting, which wounded
a horse so that it disabled him, and we left him the next day, poor
creature, in great need of a good farrier. We saw no more arrows or
Tartars that time.

We travelled near a month after this, the ways not being so good as at
first, though still in the dominions of the Emperor of China, but lay for
the most part in the villages, some of which were fortified, because of
the incursions of the Ta