They soon overtook their mother and father and the servants. In front of the party rode guards, for the country was full of robber bands. Then came six mule drivers driving the twenty-five mules that were loaded with tents, baggage, and food. Following the mule drivers Mrs. Shelton rode in a sedan chair fastened to two poles which rested on the shoulders of four carriers who wore fine, bright-red turbans and long robes of grey pulu or wool, which were tied about the waist. In the party were Andru, Drashi, and Shen-si, the three servants who had helped to care for Doris and Dorothy since they were babies.
Last of all, on a mule strong enough to carry his two hundred and thirty pounds, rode Dr. Albert Shelton. Everyone in Batang knew "Big Doctor Shelton," and everyone loved him.
Seventeen years before this time, when he left the medical school in Kansas, he looked over a map of the world to find the place that needed a doctor most. There was not a town in Kansas that did not have a doctor in it or near to it, and in some of the towns there were many doctors.
"I should like to go to a place where there are no other doctors," he said.
"Well, then," said a friend, "go to Tibet. That is the place for you, because in all Tibet there is no doctor. But you may not get there alive. The Dalai Lama, who is the head of everything in Tibet, government and Buddhist Church, lives in Lhasa, the capital, and he will not let any Christian missionary or doctor come within the walls of his city. Some have tried to go, but most of them were killed."
The more Albert Shelton thought about the land without a doctor, the more he wished to go there. He talked to his young wife, and she wanted to go, too, so one day they took a steamer from San Francisco and crossed the Pacific Ocean to China where a boat carried them a thousand miles up the Yangtze River. Then they went still farther on a little Chinese house-boat pulled by thirty men who walked along the bank. After the house-boat had gone up the river for nearly two months, they stepped off on shore and rode on the backs of mules for seven hundred miles.
More than a year after they left Kansas, they reached the town of Tatsienlu on the border of Tibet. If they could have stuck a pin eight thousand miles long right through the earth, it would have come out not far from where they started. The nearest doctor was seven hundred miles away, so Dr. Shelton decided to live in Tatsienlu until he could find a way to get farther into the closed land of Tibet.
Doris and Dorothy were born at Tatsienlu, among mountains that rose more than twenty thousand feet above the level of the ocean, so high that they were covered with snow in July and August. They were used to the strange little "yaks,"—houses covered with goat's hair. They watched their father make brick and saw lumber and teach the men how to build houses like the one he had built for himself.
After five years Dr. Shelton was permitted to go farther inland to Batang to start a hospital. When the people heard of the "good doctor" who had come so far across the ocean, and who could do such wonderful things to make sick people well, they came from all over the country to see him. At first he had to use for his operating table a door laid across two tables. Then he and his friends sawed lumber and baked brick and built a hospital. For ten years he lived at Batang, and many thousands of people came there to be helped.