China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

Often we saw long files of camels come marching into Peking with dignified tread. Unlike the camels of Egypt and Arabia, which have one hump, these had two. In the winter they were very shaggy with long hair. This hair is so valuable, for making blankets and similar things, that in spring the drivers tie networks of strings about the animals to keep them from shedding it along the way. In olden days these camel caravans carried all the freight between Mongolia and Peking, and even to-day they are strong competitors of the railroads in many parts of northern China.

The camels I saw so strongly lured me to the desert that I decided to follow them over one of the long caravan routes. Besides, I wanted to see Urga, the strange capital of Mongolia, far away across the Gobi Desert. If I had traveled with the camels, however, I should have been six weeks or two months reaching my destination. So I took the train from the northeastern corner of Peking and traveled all day to Kalgan, passing through the Great Wall near the ancient tombs of the Ming emperors. From Kalgan, an American automobile, belonging to a Russian who buys furs and sends them to New York, carried me 700 miles across the desert in three and a half days. Yet there was no road at all most of the way. First we had to climb a sandy and rocky river valley, some of it so steep that teams of mules helped to draw the automobile. Mongolia is a high plateau, several thousand feet above sea level. Then we sped away across the Gobi, sometimes along the tracks made by the camel and ox-cart caravans and sometimes by no track at all.