Twice during the second day we made out large compact clusters of white buildings on the flank of distant ridges along the horizon—lamaseries in which scores of Mongol monks pass their days in anything but monasterial austerity. Once, when we had seen no other living thing for hours, an old Mongol came loping across the desert on a camel in the teeth of the cold, raging wind, a picturesque figure in the still almost bright-red quilted cloak reaching to his ankles, and his pagoda-shaped fur cap. When we called to him he halted and pulled sharply at the reins attached to the perforated nose of his beast, which thereupon knelt in instalments, front, back, then front again, and rose to follow his dismounted master over to us. Our Russian companions, who managed to make themselves understood in any language, though actually speaking none but their own, passed the time of day in Mongol, the one important word of which seems to be _buyna_, corresponding to the French _il y a_, but greatly outdoing it in service. The leathery face of the old man was like a boot that had lain out in the elements for years; the two teeth he showed suggested the fangs of a wolf; but his smile was as kindly as that of an Iowa farmer, and while his thankfulness for a cigarette was very briefly expressed, as becomes a nomad scorning or unaware of the formalities of a politer world, there was something distinctly manly in his every movement from the time we first saw him until he mounted his kneeling camel again and rode away into the vastness of the desert. For hours afterward there was nothing to catch the attention, unless it was the compatriot beside me. He was one of those American wanderers in the Orient who have never recrossed the Pacific since coming out to help pacify the Philippines a generation ago, and he still preferred a horse and “buggy” to these new-fangled things fed by gasolene; he had not yet heard of scores of facts and inventions which have become ancient history to us at home; and he passed his idle hours in humming the songs that were popular in our land twenty years back.
At length we ran out from under the great motionless canopy of clouds into brilliant sunshine again, though even there the racing wind was almost bitter cold. The Gobi, as I have said, is no Sahara, yet it was beautiful in its many moods as the sea, stretching away in tawny browns or cold bluish grays to infinity, or to scampering lines of antelope along the far horizon. Beyond the mud-walled compound enclosing the telegraph station of Ehr-lien the smooth, grass-tufted desert gave way to a savage country of protruding rock-heaps, peaked heaps of blackish stone outcropping everywhere, as if nature, too, built prayer-piles, like the pious Mongols, who litter their landscapes with conical piles of stones wherever they are available, as appeals to the supernatural powers.
