After seventeen or eighteen hours of such riding he stopped at the ourton for the night or what was left of it, devoured a leg of boiled mutton and slept.

Thus he ate once a day and five times a day had tea; and so he traveled for nine days! With this servant we moved out one cold winter morning in the direction of Kobdo, just over three hundred miles, because from there we had received the disquieting rumours that the Red troops had entered Ulankom and that the Chinese authorities had handed over to them all the Europeans in the town.

We crossed the River Dzaphin on the ice.

It is a terrible stream.

Its bed is full of quicksands, which in summer suck in numbers of camels, horses and men.