not uncommon, and while they continue the air is full of dust, so fine that no form of covering can possibly exclude it. But as it happened, or rather as I had arranged, my journey was at the end of the Mongolian rainy season, which begins early in June and ends by the middle of August. It was about the first of September that I entered Gobi, and as a consequence the wet weather was over, and the dusty weather had scarcely had time to begin. The season was, in fact, the best. If I had been a little later in the year there would have been intense cold, and in a region of wind-storms cold must not be measured merely by the thermometer. As it was, we had hoar-frost on the ground in the mornings of early September. In the depths of winter I understand that the cold of Mongolia varies from 20° below zero in the southern regions to 50° below zero in the north. Yet, notwithstanding that intense cold, snow does not lie deep on the Desert of Gobi. It seldom lies more than a few inches deep, and the sheep and ponies can get to the grass by scratching the snow away. If it were not so, the cattle would die, for the Mongols have practically no arrangements for stall-feeding.

The Desert of Gobi, in a word, contains many varying conditions of life. It is all flat and it is all sandy, and some of it is so secluded and arid that tradition has fixed it as the original habitat of the wild camel. But some part of Gobi is a fairly

pastoral country, and very little of it is quite so bad as it is supposed to be, provided always that you take it at a proper season of the year. After traversing Gobi, as I shall explain later, you enter a hilly and a wooded country, in which, though it is mainly pastoral, there are possibilities of cereal cultivation, as there are also in the districts near the Great Wall of China.. The Mongols, however, do not engage in cereal cultivation; and just as the Chinese are encroaching as cultivators on the eastern frontier of Mongolia, so it is probable that the Siberian Buriats will encroach on the western frontier.

The people of Mongolia first became known to the world early in the thirteenth century, nor did they take long to become well known; for within. half a century, or a good deal less, they overran a very large part of the world, and threatened much of the remainder. The Mongol Empire may be said to have been founded by the father of the famous Jenghis Khan, and when the former died he left to his son an empire that included all China, most of Central Asia, and parts of India, and had threatened to absorb Western Europe. The son of Jenghis Khan, having completed the conquest of China, and having consolidated his power in Central Asia, swept as a conqueror through what is now called Central Russia, continuing his career by devastating Hungary and Poland. A little later the grandson of Jenghis Khan conquered Persia, seized Bagdad,

and killed the Caliph. This conqueror, by the way, extended his patronage to the Christian faith, the Mongols at the time seeming to have no particular religion of their own.

The Mongols by this time had found their empire so vast that their rulers divided themselves into several reigning families, and while one Mongol monarch was conquering Persia, another the famous Kubla Khan- consolidated the Mongol power in China, and extended it into Thibet.

These wonderful conquests-probably the most wonderful in all the world-did not endure. By the middle of the fourteenth century a Buddhist priest, who became the first founder of the Ming dynasty, had defeated the Mongols in China, from which country they fell back into Mongolia. But, although driven out of China, the Mongol strength in that part of the world was by no means destroyed, since in the sixteenth century we find them conquering Thibet, and adopting Buddhism as their religion. In the seventeenth century, however, the Mongols were finally subdued from the Chinese side by the Manchu dynasty, while in other parts of the world they were suffering defeat on all hands. Now, the existence of the Mongols as a separate people is restricted to Mongolia proper, where it is probable that they do not exceed two and a half millions in number, and it is even doubtful whether there be so many.

Among this sadly fallen people I travelled and lived for several weeks. These descendants of the men who only a few centuries ago were the terror of the world have become a peaceful, orderly, and quiet race of harmless and unarmed shepherds. All their old ferocity is gone, and so is their warlike spirit. China dominates Mongolia so easily that she maintains there not even the semblance of an armed force, unless we count the two or three hundred Manchu soldiers who are retained in Ourga as an ornamental body-guard to the Chinese Governor. The Mongols themselves are quite without weapons. Although they live in a country where a considerable amount of game exists, guns of any kind are exceedingly rare, and those guns that are to be found are old matchlocks of no real value.

Further, such gunpowder as the Mongols have is made by themselves, and is made so badly that it would be of little use, even with a good gun. The one quality of their ancestors that these Mongols possess is the quality of horsemanship. They live in the saddle, and better horsemen could not be desired. Possibly, if they were trained and led, it might be found that there still remains a possibility of reviving in the Mongols the spirit of their ancestors. They have a tradition that there will some day arise among them another great leader, who will lead them on the paths of conquest. In the meantime, however, they have absolutely lost all fighting

instinct, and would not face any armed force, however small.

The Mongols are called nomads, but that name also conveys a misapprehension. They are without permanently built habitations, and they live in tents, which at certain changing seasons they move from one pasturage ground to another. But they do not wander habitually, and they do not move far, and they move within such well-defined limits that to find a Mongol encampment is said to be as easy as to find a village in an agricultural country. Their food consists chiefly of milk and millet, with only a little mutton now and then, for their flock of sheep is their wealth, and they do not kill mutton for culinary purposes save on festivals and holidays. We bought a sheep, and had it killed for our party, at nearly every encampment at which we spent the night, and from the interest which the Mongols displayed in the remains of that sheep, one could see that mutton as food was not too plentiful with them.

Although converted to Buddhism so recently as the sixteenth century, the Mongols seem to be almost the most zealous Buddhists, except the Thibetans, with whom I have come into contact. The proportion of priests or lamas to the population is probably greater than anywhere, except Thibet, just as the Mongol devotion to mechanical religious ceremonies is not equalled save in Thibet.