The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or more hours a day for twenty coppers, about six cents in our money
Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no automobile can climb to the great Mongolian plateau unassisted
Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed endless. This one had thirty dozen loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders
But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag, sometimes the stars and stripes, flying at the head
We honked and snorted and sirened our way through the narrow, dust-deep, crowded streets of Kalgan, as automobiles must in any genuine Chinese city, now blocked completely by the deliberate foot-going traffic, now by languid trains of ox-carts, and always quickly surrounded by gaping and grinning Chinese, to whom a foreigner seems always to remain a rare bird, however many of him may be seen daily. Twice we were halted at ancient city gates by policemen with fixed bayonets. They were somewhat more deferential to us, and more easily satisfied with the credentials we chose to show, than toward our two companions with their big red huchao, large as a newspaper page, by means of which the local yamen had given them permission for their journey. Russians are subject now to Chinese law, and Americans are not, which at times makes a world of difference. Yet it was at one of these same gates that an American resident of Kalgan was killed by one of these same guards not long afterward for refusing to submit to an illegal decree of the local overlord.
For about two hours beyond the outer gate we climbed a stony river-bed, wide enough to have carried a stream with ships on its bosom, but merely crisscrossed by a narrow brook bringing down silt from the treeless mountains above. The city abandoned us with reluctance, struggling along for a way in closely crowded shops and dwellings, then straggling more and more until it dwindled to a single row of mud houses on either side, finally to little clusters of huts strung together like loose strings of beads, and breaking up at last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like into the cliffs of dry fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and beyond us. The unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of camels haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid, heavily riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and donkeys carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones, throngs of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims, mingled here and there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once been red or yellow. Whenever some of the many obstacles brought us momentarily to a halt these religious tramps came to beg the half-smoked cigarette from between our lips, to feel the car all over, as if it were some new breed of horse, and to hint that a dollar or a dime or a few coppers or even some remnants of food would be more or less gratefully accepted.
Where the waterless river tumbles down from the high plateau across which lies nearly all the route to Urga, the slope is too swift even for the sturdiest of motors, wherefore the adaptable Chinese villagers have found a new source of income. Before this steeper section was reached, Chinese along the way began to wave appeals at us, to point out their lean and hungry mules and horses, in some cases even to climb up over our baggage rampart with harnesses in their hands, begging the job of hauling us to the top. Three horses, a mule, and a donkey were at length engaged, after the bargaining indispensable to both races concerned in the transaction, hitched with long rope traces to the front axle of our now silent car, and for more than an hour they toiled upward under the discouragement of three shrieking Chinese drivers and their cracking whips, at a pace which that one of us who chose to walk easily outdistanced.