There are three caravan routes from the Great Wall to Urga. Along each of these wells have been dug eight to ten feet deep, and at intervals of twenty to thirty miles; but we found the water in most of them thick and brackish, in many undrinkable, and had every reason to be sorry, long before we reached Urga, that we had not laid in a larger stock of soda-water at Shanghai.
Our guides were not cheerful companions. Moses seldom spoke, Aaron never. Sylvia, however, was the life and soul of the caravan. His spirits never flagged for an instant, and whenever he could talk to no one else, he would hold long conversations in a loud tone with the camel he bestrode, occasionally bursting into song. The Mongols do not squeak when they sing, as the Chinese do, but their voices are as harsh and inharmonious as their songs, which are generally in the minor key, and very doleful and depressing.
I will not weary the reader with a daily description of the scenery passed between Kalgan and Urga. It may be described in very few words: Fourteen days of undulating grass plain, monotonous and unbroken, save by an occasional “Yourt”[[6]] or encampment, four days of deep, sandy desert interspersed with two ridges of rock, one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high, so steep as to be almost impracticable for the carts. Five more days of green plain with intervals of gravel, thickly covered with the brightly coloured transparent stones, for which Gobi is famous. Such is a brief but sufficient description of the twenty-three days we occupied in reaching Urga. But for the tract of sandy desert half-way, nothing meets the eye, day after day, week after week, but one long dreary succession of waves of plain, which reminded me of nothing so much as the ocean. Not a solitary object, animate or inanimate, broke the dull, desolate landscape save when at rare intervals we sighted a Tartar tent, gleaming white in the sunshine, and looking in the far distance like some white sea-bird asleep on the billows of this huge sea of verdure. Beyond the capital, however, the country becomes more accentuated, and there are woods, mountains, and rivers, to gladden the eye after the long, monotonous desert journey, of which we were heartily sick long before we reached the sacred city of the Kootookta.
I fondly imagined I had reached the acme of discomfort and misery in a mule-litter, but the latter is a bed of roses compared to the boxes of human suffering in which we crossed Mongolia. Imagine a kind of oblong vehicle, eight feet long by three wide, and four feet high, the body of the cart of rough unpainted wood, the roof or covering of canvas, thickly smeared with Chinese varnish, which in wet, or very hot weather, exuded the most intolerable smell. Two doors with small square holes therein, let in the air and light (also occasionally the rain), while a mattress and a couple of large feather pillows acted as a buffer, without which one’s body and head would in a very short time have been one mass of bruises. To say that these somewhat primitive vehicles shake would be incorrect. They leap and bound even on a fairly good road, beating and pounding the wretched inmate into a jelly; over stony ground it is next to impossible to remain in them for any length of time without a splitting headache, and a feeling as if every individual bone in one’s body had been torn from its socket and put back again. I do not wish my bitterest enemy a worse fate than a night of rough caravan work in Mongolia. We often walked till one in the morning, in preference to the intolerable shaking, which affected the nerves and mind almost as much as it injured the body.
With the exception of a forty-eight hours’ rest at Urga, the day’s work never varied, from the time we left Kalgan till we rode through the Russian outposts at Kiakhta. At daybreak (between five and six a.m.) Sylvia would gallop off on a pony and bring in the camels which, turned loose at the halt, had strayed away in search of pasture till, at sunrise, some of them were mere specks on the horizon. Breakfast (a cup of cocoa and a biscuit) over, the caravan was usually well under weigh by half-past six. The pace was not exhilarating, it seldom attained the rate of three miles an hour, never exceeded it. We then travelled on, riding or walking, till two o’clock p.m., when tents were pitched, and, if near a well, the water-barrels filled. The midday meal consisted of a tin of preserved meat and rice, or, if in a game district, a duck or sand-grouse sometimes enlivened this somewhat sad meal. At five o’clock we were on the move again till one or two in the morning, only halting about nine o’clock for a quarter of an hour, to unsaddle the ponies and swallow a cup of Valentine’s meat juice. I do not know what we should have done without this preparation. On a journey of this kind, where the fatigue is so great and cooking impossible, it is simply invaluable.
We thus got about four hours’ actual rest in the twenty-four, for in the carts, while in motion, sleep was out of the question. I have often since wondered how the ponies stood it. Camels are, of course, used to such long exhausting journeys, though, strangely enough, the loss of a camel was our only casualty.
We got on fairly well for two or three days, but after the first week experienced a sense of oppression and weariness very hard to shake off, and the dull, dead monotony of the eternal green steppes began to tell upon the mind and spirits. We met but once a day as a rule, and even then, like the parrot, spoke little and thought much; indeed we had nothing to talk about, for with the exception of an occasional yourt there was not one solitary object to distract the mind for a moment, or interrupt the depressing aspect of the waves of plain that extend between Kalgan and Urga. We even welcomed the region of sand in mid-desert. It was a change, at any rate, and there were rocks to look at, though, on the other hand, the work was harder and the distance accomplished each day considerably less.
Perhaps the most striking peculiarity about Gobi is the dead silence that reigns over its vast surface. At night the bright, unwavering lights of the Great Bear, and soft glimmer of Cassiopeia and the Pleiades stood out with a distinctness rarely seen in other latitudes. I often lay awake and watched them, too tired to sleep, till the lightening horizon heralded the dawn of another dreary, uneventful day, and warned one that another hour at most would see us off again on our weary journey. I had never, till I spent a night out on the waste, thoroughly realized the words of the poet:——
And round me all in utter darkness lies,
No sound, no form, no message, and no sign,