lls that hem in the
narrow lanes, for Kalgan has been for many years an important trading
centre, and through here passes the traffic across the Gobi Desert. In
the dirty, open square crowded with carts are two or three incongruous
Western buildings, for the foreigner and his ways have found the town
out. Of the small European community, missionaries of different
nationalities and Russians of various callings form the largest groups.
The energetic British American Tobacco Company also has its
representatives here, who were my most courteous hosts during my two
days' stay.

Kalgan stands hard-by the Great Wall; here China and Mongolia meet, and
the two races mingle in its streets. Nothing now keeps them in or out,
but the barrier of a great gulf is there. Behind you lie the depressing
heat and the crowded places of the lowlands. Before you is the untainted
air, the emptiness of Mongolia. You have turned your back on the
walled-in Chinese world, walled houses, walled towns, walled empire; you
look out on the great spaces, the freedom of the desert.

CHAPTER XII

THE MONGOLIAN GRASSLAND

My stay in Peking was not all pleasure and sight-seeing, for it was
necessary to decide there upon the next steps. Within a few weeks I
would have to be on the Siberian railway homeward bound. Should I spend
the time left me in seeing Shantung, the Sacred Province, with all it
had of interest to offer, or should I make a hurried run through the
debatable land of Manchuria? One or the other seemed the natural thing
to do, but I had an uneasy feeling that either would mean conventional
travel, so far as that is possible in China, railways, and maybe hotels.
Then Shantung is now a much-visited country, while Manchuria, dominated
by Russia and Japan, was hardly likely to offer "an open door" to
anything more than the most cut-and-dried guidebook travel.

But Mongolia seemed to afford a way out of my doubts. Post-roads and
trade-routes crossed the country from the Great Wall, sooner or later
striking the Siberian railway near Lake Baikal. That would set me
forward some five days on the overland journey to Moscow, cutting off
just so much of railway travel, and as far as I could learn there were
no hotels, not even Chinese inns, in Mongolia, so I would not need to
fear being too comfortable. But above all, there was the charm in the
very word Mongolia. Out of that great, little known plateau, almost as
large as all of China proper,