r of the uplands almost carried me
along, and it was joy to feel my feet on real grass once more. Over the
open country short cuts were easy to find, and I generally kept in
advance of the others. The groups of Mongols hurrying to the town
greeted me in friendly fashion; the look of the desert was in their
faces, bold, hardy, burnt, and lined by sun and wind and biting cold.
Like and yet unlike the Tibetans I had seen in Tachienlu, they were
slighter of build and gayer and more open of expression; they attracted
me as the others had repelled me. Scrambling over the grassy slopes, I
more than once lost my way, but some Mongol always turned up to put me
straight.

Our first stops at noon and at night were at wayside inns built much
like a Turkish khan on two or three sides of an enclosure of mud and
stones, and furnished with a strong gate. At one, the small private room
off a large common hall was given to me and to a neat-looking Chinese
woman who apparently was travelling alone and on horseback. Two thirds
of the room was taken up by a "kang," or plaster furnace, raised some
three feet above the floor, and on this our beds were spread. But that
was my last sight of a house for many a day; henceforth there was
nothing but tents and "yurts."

Our stop the next night was at a small Mongol settlement of several
yurts. One of these was vacated for me. Judging from those I stayed in
later, it was unusually large and clean.

[Illustration: A POOR MONGOL FAMILY AND YURT]

Here I was in the unchanging East, if it be anywhere to-day. More than
six centuries ago an observant Venetian passed this way, and his brief
description of a Mongol abode fits as well now as it did then. "Their
huts or tents," says Marco Polo, "are formed of rods covered with felt,
and being exactly round and neatly put together, they can gather them
into one bundle." But since his description is so brief, it may be
supplemented by a more modern traveller, genial Abbe Huc, whose visit
dates back only sixty-five years:--

"The Mongol tent, for about three feet from the ground, is cylindrical
in form. It then becomes conical, like a pointed hat. The woodwork of
the tent is composed below of a trellis-work of crossed bars, which fold
up and expand at pleasure. Above these, a circle of poles, fixed in the
trellis-work, meets at the top, like the sticks of an umbrella. Over the
woodwork is stretched, once or twice, a thick covering of coarse linen,
and thus