Bit by bit even this cultivation grew rare and scattered, and finally died out entirely. By the time the speedometer registered eighty miles from Kalgan we were spinning along, often at thirty miles an hour, across high, brown, grass-covered plains, still somewhat uneven, but with little more than a suggestion of hilliness remaining. Flocks of sheep far off on the sloping sides of the horizon looked like patches of daisies; veritable gusts of gray-blue birds of stately flight, suggestive both of cranes and of wild geese, rose in deliberate haste before us and floated away to the rear in a vain effort to outdistance us. Almost frequently we passed long camel caravans, broken up into sections of a dozen animals each, tied together by a sort of wooden marlinespike thrust through their noses beneath the nostrils and attached by a cord to the pack of the animal ahead, the first of each dozen led by a well padded, skin-wrapped man who was more often Chinese than Mongol. Some of these camel-trains seemed endless, with dozen after dozen of the leisurely, soft-footed animals slowly turning their heads to gaze, with a disdainful curiosity that suggested a world-weary professor looking out from beneath his spectacles at incorrigible mankind, upon this strange and impatiently hasty rival that sped breathlessly past them. Now and again a beast shuffled sidewise away from us, uttering that absurd little falsetto squeak which is the camel’s inadequate means of protest at a cruel world; but most of them refused to be startled into undignified activity by any such ridiculous apparition. Once on the journey I counted a caravan bound for Urga which stretched from horizon to horizon across the brown undulating world; and there were thirty dozen camels bearing cargo, and a score of outriders to keep the expedition in order.
We spent the night in a Chinese inn, mud-built and isolated, with the usual stone _kang_, heatable and mat-covered, as bed and only furnishing. It might have been quiet and restful but for over-zealous watch-dogs and the arrival long after dark and the departure long before dawn of two dilapidated cars with seventeen chattering Chinese passengers. We, too, were off well before daylight, a half-moon lighting the way as we spun across rolling, utterly treeless country with nothing but short, scanty grass giving a touch of life to the brown-green landscape over which a cloudless sun at length poured its molten gold. Even the confirmed tramp would have found this an unendurable journey on foot; a motor-car in its prime was scarcely swift enough to avoid monotony, to come often enough on flashes of interest to keep the senses from sinking into slothfulness. Pedestrians and lone travelers had long since disappeared; safety, both from possible violence and from starvation, demanded banding together, and some form of mount. The big shaggy black dogs of Mongolia, filthy in diet as those of Central and South America, but several times more savage, roamed wild across the plains. A woman abroad at sunrise, gathering the offal left by a camping camel-train and tossing it with a bamboo pitchfork over her shoulder into a basket on her back, was the only sign of life for several miles. Such fuel, like the llama droppings of the Andean highlands, is all that is to be had in this barren region.