A Tour in Mongolia by Beatrix Manico Gull

"A great army may be robbed of its leader, but nothing can rob one poor man of his will"

-- _Chinese proverb_

I shall always associate Kalgan with waiting for things to happen. Rumours of war were constantly coming to one's ears, news of camel caravans on the point of starting for Mongolia reached one periodically. Nothing ever seemed to culminate. The missionaries, of whom there were some half a dozen, were very much opposed to my making an expedition alone into Mongolia, and with my limited knowledge of Chinese it was impossible without their help to make any plans for doing so. My hostess, a delicate little thing, very much younger than her colleagues, stood my friend throughout and did what she could to make enjoyable my stay within the somewhat circumscribed area of the compound. Deeply interested in English manners and customs her conversation had an almost childish _naïveté_, and circled around our royalties and other great English names that had come to her ears. She was, she told me "tickled to death" at the idea of entertaining an English lady, but was frankly disappointed that I bore no title. As a small girl, she said, she had longed to be English, and loved reading about lords and ladies (we now know the market for a certain class of light fiction), and persuaded her mother to call her "Lady Ermyntrude". "Is it true," she would ask me, "that if English girls don't marry the first man that asks them, they never get another chance?"

Life in a mission compound can never fail to interest the speculative mind, and although waiting about for plans to resolve themselves is a severe tax on one's patience, my days at Kalgan are recalled with considerable pleasure notwithstanding. What I wanted was an excuse for taking a camel cart (which appealed to me as being exceedingly comfortable as well as a great novelty), and I watched a couple in course of preparation for the ill-fated expedition of Messrs. Grant and Henningsen who were to journey across the Gobi to Urga on telegraph service, which for the former was to end so disastrously. Camel carts bear a certain amount of similarity to the Peking cart, with the following differences: they are higher from the ground, having larger wheels; they are covered in entirely, having a window and door on the near side; they are of such ample dimensions that one may stretch oneself at full length and live in them in considerable comfort. In fact, I have in North Mongolia seen a man, woman, and two children camping very comfortably in one cart.

One might well be asked what there was to prevent me from hiring a camel cart -- a very natural question when one lives in Europe and where money will compass most of one's desires. Not so in the East. A solitary camel cart was held to be unsuitable for my purpose, for a solitary camel cart wandering about Mongolia without escort would undoubtedly attract an undue amount of attention. Camel carts usually form part of a caravan.

Kalgan, with its population of some seventy or eighty thousand souls, grown out of all proportion to the picturesque little walled-in city in its midst, the unusual temples, among which a couple of Mohammedan mosques came as a surprise to me, its many theatres, and little shops containing much that was interesting and novel, would under ordinary conditions have satisfied me for weeks; but the nearness to the goal of my desire to some extent spoiled it for me, rendering it tantalising and me restless. Not once, but many times, did I find my way on foot through the thick dust of the narrow streets to the wide road leading out to the north gate, the Mongol quarter of the city. There one met hundreds of camels padding softly along in the thick dust laden with immense bales of wool from Urga, picking their way over boulders polished by the traffic of 1200 years. The camels are in their most disreputable condition in April; their wool, being in process of shedding, left big bare patches, and made them look singularly naked in places. I loved to see their stately walk, and the stolid Mongols sitting, pipe in mouth, on their backs. Fine beasts. Fine men. To see, too, the Mongols themselves at their journey's end, galloping recklessly along this terrific road, raising clouds of dust in their wake, stirrupless as often as not, their ponies slithering and stumbling over the concealed stones, recovering themselves in a manner perfectly marvellous. They are wonderful horsemen. A Russian post plies between Kalgan and Urga, suspended now, however, on account of the unrest in the country, and the Mongols cover the 800 miles in eight days, relays of ponies waiting for them every twenty miles or so. They ride at full speed during the entire journey, which averages ordinarily from thirty to thirty-two days.