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Roy Chapman Andrews, Sc.D. From the portrait study by S. J. Woolf .
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
A NARRATIVE OF THE FIELD WORK OF THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITIONS
BY
ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS, Sc.D.
LEADER OF THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITION OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY IN COOPERATION WITH " ASIA MAGAZINE"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND A CHAPTER BY
HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
PRESIDENT, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
"With 58 Photographs by J. Shackelford
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON 1926
Copyright, 1922, 1923 and 1924 by
Asia Magazine Inc.
Copyright, 1926 by
Doubleday, Page & Co., Inc. (The World's Work)
Copyright, 1926 by
Roy Chapman Andrews
Made in the United States cf America
To My
COMRADES IN THE FIELD
WHOSE COURAGE, LOYALTY AND DEVOTION TO THE IDEALS OF SCIENCE HAVE MADE POSSIBLE THE SUCCESS OF THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITIONS, THIS ACCOUNT OF OUR EXPLORATIONS IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
STAFF OF THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITIONS OF 1922, 1923, AND 1925
Roy Chapman Andrews, Leader and Zoologist. Walter Granger, Chief Palaeontologist, 1922, '23, '25. Dr. Charles P. Berkey, Chief Geologist and Petrographer, 1922 and 1925.
Frederick K. Morris, Assistant Geologist, 1922, '23, '25. George Olsen, Assistant in Palaeontology, 1923 and '25. Peter Kaison, Assistant in Palaeontology, 1923. Albert Johnson, Assistant in Palaeontology, 1923. Ralph W. Chaney, Palaeobotanist, 1925. Nels C. Nelson, Archaeologist, 1925.
Clifford H. Pope, Assistant in Zoology, 1922, '23, and '25
(Chinese Division). L. B. Roberts, Chief Topographer, 1925. F. K. Butler, Assistant in Topography, 1925. H. 0. Robinson, Assistant in Topography, 1925. J. B. Shackelford, Photographer, 1922 and '25. S. Bayard Colgate, Chief of Motor Transport, 1922. J. McKenzie Young, Chief of Motor Transport, 1923, '25. C. Vance Johnson, Motor Transport, 1923. Norman Lovell, Motor Transport, 1925. F. A. Larsen, Interpreter, 1922.
T. Badmajapoff, Representative of the Mongolian Govern- ment, 1922.
v
FOREWORD
ASIA THE MOTHER OF CONTINENTS
IT was seldom that the Oracle of Delphi gave an * immediate response to the solicitous inquiries of those seeking Divine counsel; repeated libations and other sacrifices were offered at the shrine; the final reply of the gods was diplomatic, so that the ambi- guity of Delphic utterance has become proverbial. Not so with the American Museum quest in the arid Temple of Nature in Mongolia; almost at the very outset the invincible leader, Roy Chapman Andrews, aided by his highly trained American experts, met with the unequivocal response: Asia is the mother of the continents !
The initial discovery in the Gobi Desert of the presence of fossil quadrupeds, christened "Titan- otheres" (or beasts of titanic size) when discovered in South Dakota, in 1852, gave an answer to one of the four great questions which the Expedition under- took to solve; namely, whether ancient Asia was the mother of the life of Europe to the far west and of North America to the far east. It was a realization similar to the discovery of a palseontologic Garden of Eden — of the birthplace or Asiatic homeland
vii
FOREWORD
from which many kinds of reptiles and mammals spread westward and eastward. The existence of such a centre had long been a matter of pure theory on the part of palaeontologists, and as early as 1900 the writer of this foreword summed up his faith in the existence of such an Asiatic homeland, pub- lishing in the columns of Science (April 13, 1900, page 567) a prophecy which may be paraphrased as follows:
"We now turn to the northern hemisphere, to the Arctogaea or homeland area of animal dispersal in the dawn period of the mammalian life on the soil of the northern hemisphere. First, on opposite sides of the globe we observe two great colonies, one in Europe and one in the Rocky Mountain region of America, which are full of different degrees of kin- dred in their mammalian life ; yet they are separated by ten thousand miles of intervening land in which not a single similar form is found.
"The fact that the same kinds of mammals and reptiles appear simultaneously in Europe and in the Rocky Mountain region has long been considered strong evidence for the hypothesis that "the dis- persal centre is half-way between.' 1 In this dis- persal centre, during the close of the Age of Rep- tiles and the beginning of the Age of Mammals, there evolved the most remote ancestors of all the higher kinds of mammalian life which exist today, including, for example, the five-toed horses, which have not as yet been discovered in either Europe or America. That the very earliest horses known in either Europe or America are four-toed indicates that their ancestors may have lost their fifth toe
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FOREWORD
while still resident in the Asiatic homeland. The history of northern Asia remains unknown until the period of the Ice Age, when man first appears; yet theoretically we are certain that it was part of a broad migration and dispersal belt which at one time linked together the colonies of France and Great Britain with those of the Rocky Mountain region of Wyoming and Colorado. Though the kinds of animals which we find in these two far- distant colonies are essentially similar and every year's discovery increases the resemblance and diminishes the difference between the life of Europe and the life of the Rocky Mountain region, connect- ing links are entirely unknown. It follows that northern Asia must be the unknown migration route between these two far-distant colonies."
All this, set forth in 1900 by the writer of this Foreword, was in the nature of a palaeontologic oracle, but was written with such confidence in the results of future explorations that the various kinds of mammals were actually set down upon a chart, a duplicate of which readers will enjoy seeing as a matter of scientific record. By this chart the reader will observe that in the original oracle of 1900 the home of the anthropoid apes, the chim- panzee, the orang, the gibbon and the gorilla, was placed in southern Asia — in India — as indicated by the word Anthropoidea, but that the home of the more remote ancestors of man, Primates, was placed in northern Asia, where our Expedition went to work.
ix
FOREWORD
But we waited until the American Museum expe- dition of 1922 to verify the prediction of the palaeon- tologist as to the homeland life of northern Asia. The verification came in that year with unexpected suddenness, but the successive explorations leading up to those of 1925, in which the ancestors of man were discovered in this very region, not only com- pleted the original oracle far beyond our fondest hopes but also told another and a more ancient story of the Age of Reptiles, as set forth in this narrative volume by the leader of the Expedition.
Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most desert and lifeless regions of the earth; it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most diffi- cult and inaccessible places. It was the genius of Roy Chapman Andrews not only to conceive the whole plan of these central Asiatic expeditions, but to carry out the plan with scientific thoroughness, with unalterable determination and with unflag- ging faith — a combination of qualities which in- spired his entire party, insured his brilliant success, and aroused the enthusiastic interest of the civilized world.
Henry Fairfield Osborn.
American Museum of Natural History, February 25, 1926.
x
Osborn's Prophetic World Map of 1899-1900.
In 1 90 1 the ancestors of the Proboscidea (elephant family) were discovered by British explorers close to the point in North Africa which Osborn had indicated in 1900 by the word "Proboscidia."
Up to the year 1925 the Central Asiatic Expedition had discovered representatives of eight of the thirteen great Orders of Mammals, as prophesied by Osborn in 1900, in the Central Asiatic homeland, namely, the Insectivores, the Creodonts, the Carnivores, the Rodents, the Amblypods, the Perissodac- tyls, the Ancylopods, and the Artiodactyls. Leaving five orders still to be discovered, namely, the Cheiroptera (Bats), the Tillodontia (Tillodonts) , the Taeniodonta (Taeniodonts), the Mesodonta (early Primates), and the Condylarthra (Condylarths).
xi
PREFACE
'T'HE present book is a preliminary narrative of the A field work of the Central Asiatic Expeditions. So many requests for a collected account of the activ- ities of the expeditions during the last four years have come to us that we felt it was due the public to give the story of our experience in Mongolia up to the present time.
Since the field work has been progressing with only one interruption since 1921, and my brief visits to America have been occupied by lecture engagements and problems of finance and organization, it was impossible to find the time to prepare a book that should be considered definitive.
No attempt has been made to give the full scien- tific significance of our discoveries. Indeed, at the present time it would be impossible to do so for the study of the collections has only begun and hundreds of specimens are still encased in rock. The prepara- tion of only the most important has been rushed to make them available for scientific investigation.
Fifty-four preliminary papers have been pub-
xiii
PREFACE
lished in the Novitates and the Bulletin of the Amer- ican Museum of Natural History. These put on record very briefly some of the most outstanding discoveries. When the field expeditions have been concluded in 1928, I expect to prepare a volume giv- ing a popular account of the significance of the sci- entific work in all its branches.
Fourteen volumes of final scientific results have been projected. Volume II on the Geology of Central Asia by Professors Berkey and Morris is about to issue from the press. The maps made by Major Roberts in the 1925 expedition already have been published. The remaining volumes will be prepared as fast as the work can be concluded.
I wish to take this opportunity to express my personal indebtedness, as well as that of the Amer- ican Museum of Natural History, to the generous Americans who have made the expedition possible through their financial support. Without their as- sistance, which has been given freely for the cause of science and education, with no expectation of mate- rial returns, the work could not have been carried on. The contributors number two hundred and forty- five, representing twenty -five states, thus giving a truly all-American character to the work. There was also one each from Switzerland, Porto Rico and Hawaii.
To my comrades in the field I owe a great debt of gratitude. No matter how completely the expedi- tion had been organized and financed, it never could
xiv
PREFACE
have been a success without the whole-hearted co- operation which every member of the staff has given. This splendid loyalty and personal support will remain forever as one of my most treasured memories.
I wish to offer thanks on behalf of the expedition and of the President and Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History to the governments of China and Mongolia for permission to carry on our field work in their dominions. Particularly are we grateful to Mr. T. Badmajapoff who rendered great assistance in obtaining our Mongolian permits. President Henry Fairfield Osborn has ever been our wise friend and counselor. Without his enthusiastic and continued support the expedition never could have gone into the field. It is not possible to men- tion by name all the individuals and organizations in China who have rendered us assistance, but I wish particularly to thank the Director and members of the Chinese Geological Survey and the Geological Society of China.
Drs. Ting, Wong, Andersson and Grabau have been our loyal friends and by their fine spirit of cooperation have maintained the highest ideals of international science.
The Director and staff of the Peking Union Med- ical College and the officers of the U. S. Marine Corps Detachment in Peking has rendered us in- numerable courtesies.
To the Dodge Bros. Motor Corporation of Detroit,
XV
PREFACE
Michigan, and the Fulton Motor Corporation of Farmingdale, Long Island, New York, we are in- debted for much assistance, also to the Standard Oil Company of New York and the United States Rub- ber Company who put the facilities of their great organizations at our disposal.
I am greatly indebted personally to the editors of Asia Magazine and The World's Work for permission to use the material of the book which already has appeared in their magazines.
Roy Chapman Andrews.
998 Fifth Avenue, New York City. February 21, 1926.
xvi
CONTENTS
PAGE
Foreword ........ vii
By Henry Fairfield Osborn
Preface xiii
CHAPTER
I. — Preparations ...... 3
II. — Some Preliminary Digressions . . 24
III. — Hunting the "Golden Fleece" . . 41
IV. — Under Way 62
V. — In the City of the Living God . . 90
VI. — Tenting in Lama Land . . . .109
VII. — A Kentucky Derby in the Gobi Desert . 126
VIII. — Finding the Baluchitherium . . .146
IX. — The Discovery of the Flaming Cliffs . 164
X. — Giant Beasts of Three Million Years
Ago 190
By Henry Fairfield Osborn
XI. — New Work and Discoveries . . . 208
XII. — Where the Dinosaur Hid its Eggs . . 224
XIII. — Professor Osborn Visits the Expedition . 241
XIV. — Bigger and Better Eggs .... 248
xvii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XV. — The Dune Dwellers of Mongolia . . 268 XVI. — A Tragedy of the Gobi Desert . .289
XVII. — On the Trail of Ancient Man . . 306
XVIII. — The World's Oldest Mammals . . 324
XIX. — Snakes and Fossils ..... 341
The Central Asiatic Expedition Fund
Contributors ..... 361
Scientific Papers of the Expedition . 365
Index 371
xviii
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Roy Chapman Andrews, Sc.D. . . . Frontispiece From the portrait study by S. J. Woolf.
Sketch of the general history of animal life and mountain
formation in Central Asia, by F. K. Morris . . viii
Map prepared by F. K. Morris to show the comparative
sizes of Mongolia and the United States . . ix
Granger listening to the secrets of his pet crow. Tsagan
Nor, 1922 16
Windlass at the fossil pit in Szechuan where Granger
secured specimens . . . . . .17
Skins, collected by the expedition, drying at headquarters
in Peking ........ 26
Andrews and his Chinese guide on a hunting trip in
Shensi province . . . . . . -27
The way a camel's foot is treated for stone-holes; a neat
leather patch sewed firmly on . . .66
The fleet-footed antelope of the Mongolian plains . 67
Homelife of the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous beds of Iren Dabasu. In the background iguanodonts are being
xix
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
attacked by deinodonts. In the foreground the Ostrich dinosaurs are running away in a cretaceous panic. Restoration made in 1923 by E. M. Fulda . . 80
One of the fierce Mongolian dogs which eat the dead and
attack the living . . . . . . .81
Merin, the remarkable leader of the camel caravan, who
never promises more than he can fulfil ... 86
Merin reading his own story in camp at Shabarakh Usu,
1925 87
Motley and colorful religious procession at the Festival
of Buddha, Urga, 1922 ..... 98
A belle of Chakhan: she is wearing the southern Mon- golian head-dress ...... 99
One of the daily dozen. Pulling the big trucks through
the sand of the Gobi Desert . . . . .128
Wild ass going at top-speed ... 40 miles an hour . . .
Tsagan Nor, 1922 ...... 129
Mongolian musician at Tsagan Nor; the lake glimmering
faintly in the background . . . . 144
Camel caravan descending a big dune south of Tsagan
Nor, 1925 145
Mongols making felt for their yurts at Tsagan Nor, 1922 152
Field-Day at Tsagan Nor, 1922: Mongolian wrestlers 153
Buckshot gives the baby wild ass its breakfast. Tsagan
Nor, 1922 164
xx
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Andrews with the bighorn sheep he killed on the face of
the Altai mountains, overlooking the dinosaur beds 165
Battlement Bluffs at the Flaming Cliffs where the dino- saur eggs were first discovered . . . .180
Andrews and Merin looking for a trail through the bad- lands near the Flaming Cliffs . . . .181
Baluchi therium grangeri. Restoration by Charles R.
Knight . 192
Mounted skeleton of Triceratops in the American Mu- seum of Natural History, 20 feet long. This is the horned and gigantic relative, possibly a descendant, of the Protoceratops found at the Flaming Cliffs . 193
Protoceratops with young. Restoration by E. M. Fulda of the dinosaurs of the Djadokhta beds in Cretaceous times ........ 202
Young dinosaurs coming out of their eggs. Restoration
by E. M. Fulda 203
Granger examining a Titanothere skull exposed in the
cliff at Ulu Usu, 1923 ...... 222
President Osborn, Granger and Buckshot preparing a
Titanothere skull. Irdin Manha, 1923 . . . 223
The first dinosaur nest to be found as it looked when un- covered by George Olsen at the Flaming Cliffs in 1923 228
Dinosaur eggs partly freed from the rock in which they have been embedded for 10,000,000 years. At the Flaming Cliffs ....... 229
xxi
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Protoceratops skull outlined against the rock where it was buried. Flaming Cliffs, 1925 . . . 234
Buckshot brushing the sand from a Protoceratops skull. 235
The caravan winding down into the valley at Shabarakh
Usu 248
The caravan, with Merin walking at its head, picking a
difficult way down the Flaming Cliffs . . . 249
Mongols taking salt from a dry lake-bed north of the
Altai Mountains . . . . . . .252
Yurts of Mongolian nomads at the eastern end of Orok
Nor; Ikhe Bogdo rising in the distance, 1925 . . 253
The 1925 camp of the expedition at Shabarakh Usu with
the Flaming Cliffs in the background . . . 256
Granger and Lin excavating bones and dinosaur eggs at the base of Battlement Bluffs, overlooking Shabarakh Usu Valley, 1925 ...... 257
Contents of the most recently discovered dinosaur egg
nest. Flaming Cliffs, 1925 . . . . .260
Andrews uncovering dinosaur eggs . . . .261
Andrews and Olsen inspecting a nest that has just been
uncovered. Flaming Cliffs, 1925 .... 266
Andrews and Olsen preparing to remove the eggs.
Flaming Cliffs, 1925 267
Nelson sorting the primitive implements of the Dune
Dwellers of Shabarakh Usu, 1925 .... 276
xxii
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Nelson surrounded by his collection of flint implements of the Dune Dwellers, picked up by the thousand at Shabarakh Usu, 1925 277
Andrews with the dog, Wolf, in his tent at Kholobolchi
Nor, 1925 286
Tiger Canyon, looking southward to the peak of Boga Bogdo. The tents are pitched under cotton-wood trees ......... 287
Andrews and Nelson marking the exact spot in the cliff where the implements of the Old Stone Age men were lodged. Shabarakh Usu ..... 308
Collection of stone and flint implements made by the
Dune Dwellers of Shabarakh Usu .... 309
The topographers of the expedition with the Gurley Ali- dade. Left to right, they are Robinson, Roberts and Butler. Kholobolchi Nor, 1925 . . . 320
Members of the expedition consulting on routes westward of Kholobolchi Nor, 1925. Upper row, standing, L. to R., H. 0. Robinson, George Olsen, Ralph Chaney, F. K. Butler, Nels Nelson, Harold Loucks, Norman Lovell, J. B. Shackelford. Lower row, seated, L. to R., L. B. Roberts, Roy Chapman Andrews, Walter Granger, F. K. Morris, C. P. Berkey, J. McKenzie Young 321
Mongols studying electric flashlights in camp . . 330
Mongolian cowboys visiting the camp ; fascinated by the
strains of jazz . . . . . . . 331
xxiii
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
The caravan coming past the Flaming Cliffs on its way
to the camp in the Shabarakh Usu Valley, 1925 . 338
The caravan in the sand dune country, south of Tsagan
Nor ......... 339
Snowed in on the road to Urga, May, 1925 . . 348
Car sinking in the quicksand while fording one of the so- called dry rivers ....... 348
Andre wsarchus, a huge carnivorous creodont. Restora- tion by E. M. Fulda ...... 349
Above: skull of wolf. Below: skull of Andre wsarchus
from the Eocene beds of Irdin Manha, 1923 . . 358
xxiv
On the Trail of Ancient Man
On the Trail of Ancient Man
CHAPTER I
PREPARATIONS
TVER since 191 2, when I began land exploration in Asia, Professor Osborn's prophecy as to the Asiatic origin of mammalian life had been in my mind, and the determination to test the theory be- came stronger as my travels and experience in- creased. With that ultimate end in view in 19 15 I presented a plan to the President of the American Museum of Natural History for a series of expedi- tions which should extend over a period of ten years. They were designed to be purely zoological at first, and in the years 19 16- 17 the First Asiatic Expedition to Yunnan, Southwest China, and the borders of Tibet brought large collections to the Museum.
During 191 8 I was in service in the World War and in 19 19 spent the summer in Mongolia on the Second Asiatic Expedition.
3
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
Every year I was becoming more and more im- pressed by the relationship of the living Asiatic mammals to those of Europe and America and realized how strongly this supported the theory of an Asiatic dispersal centre. Moreover, the fact that the Primates were considered to be of Asiatic origin and that there was a possibility of throwing light on human evolution made the plan which was gradually maturing in my mind even more alluring.
In all my work as a zoologist I had felt the lack of expert knowledge in other branches of science. Often puzzling faunistic problems presented them- selves which could easily have been solved if I had been a trained botanist. In Yunnan especially, glimpses of fascinating studies of the aboriginal natives, of fossils, geology, botany and geography were presented on every hand and yet I was unable to take advantage of them because I had neither the time nor the highly specialized training. There- fore, it was apparent that an effective attack upon the problems awaiting us in Central Asia could be made only by a correlation of the different sciences : i.e., by a group of highly trained specialists all of whom were concentrating upon a single broad problem.
This was the ground plan upon which the Central Asiatic Expedition was organized, and it worked out in practice even better than it gave promise of doing in theory. Night after night as we sat in the mess tent discussing different questions
4
PREPARATIONS
which had arisen in the progress of the day's work, the stimulation and assistance given to each man by having expert knowledge in other branches of sci- ence upon which to draw was apparent. As far as I am aware the Central Asiatic Expedition is the only large expedition which has put this plan into actual practice.
Moreover I believe that this type represents the exploration of the future. Today there remain but a few small areas on the world's map unmarked by explorer's trails. Human courage and endurance have conquered the Poles; the secrets of the tropical jungles have been revealed. The highest mountains of the earth have heard the voice of man. But this does not mean that the youth of the future has no new worlds to vanquish. It means only that the explorer must change his methods.
We stand on the threshold of a new era of scientific exploration which is just as romantic, just as allur- ing, and just as adventurous as that of Peary and Amundsen, of Stanley and Hedin. In almost every country of the earth lie vast regions which poten- tially are unknown. Some of them are charted poorly if at all, and many hold undreamed of treasures in the realm of science.
To study these little known areas, to reveal the history of their making, and interpret that history to the world of today ; to learn what they can give in education, culture, and for human welfare — that is the exploration of the future. It is even more diffi-
5
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
cult than the task confronting the early explorers who brought to the world information of the broad topographic features of the countries they had traversed.
It requires even more careful organization and a wider background of scientific knowledge. Virtu- ally all of the great expeditions for geographical exploration have included scientists who gathered what knowledge they could of the flora and fauna, of the geology and meteorology of the regions to be investigated. Special studies were limited by time and opportunity. They could do little more than bring back superficial information of the regions which awaited a more intimate study.
The intensive exploration of the future demands a different approach. With a broad but very definite problem in view every branch of science which will assist in its solution should be brought to bear upon it in the field.
Puzzling conditions in geology are clarified by the palaeontologist. The palaeobotanist may be able to give them both assistance in determining climatic changes. The flora and fauna of the past and pres- ent are so closely interlaced that it is impossible to fully understand one without knowing the other. The topographer who produces accurate maps is essential to them all.
Such intensive exploration even if it be confined to pure science, inevitably produces economic results. Many of the little known regions of the world are
6
PREPARATIONS
rich in undeveloped resources which can contribute much to human welfare. The scientific explorer must lead the way, but commerce is never slow to follow in his footsteps.
To those who imagine that exploration has lost its romance, I may say that the qualities of courage and endurance, the willingness to undergo hardships and to face death, 'are just as necessary today as they were to the first man who struggled through snow towards the Pole or braved the sand-storms of the desert.
I have been asked why we chose Mongolia as the place to work. The reason was because I knew the country fairly well from two previous trips and believed it would be productive; also because I was convinced that we could use motors for rapid trans- portation. Had the same conditions existed in the remaining parts of the Central Asian plateau, — Tibet, and Chinese and Russian Turkestan — we might have begun work there with equal hope of success.
Although Mongolia had been crossed and re- crossed by excellent explorers, mostly Russian, vir- tually no part of the country had been studied by the exact methods of modern science. Four pri- mary reasons were responsible for this condition:
First, Mongolia is isolated in the heart of a vast continent and until recently a considerable journey was required even to reach its borders.
Second, the distances are great and transportation
7
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
slow. Superimposed upon a map of the United States with its easternmost tip at Washington D. C, the western end of Mongolia extends beyond the Great Salt Lake and almost touches the Nevada line. It reaches as far south as Austin, Texas, and on the north halfway across North Dakota. In all this vast area there is not a single mile of railroad. Transportation is by camels, horses and ox carts. In the Gobi Desert which extends from west to east through the heart of Mongolia camels alone can be used throughout the year. A camel caravan moves at the rate of only two miles an hour and when con- ditions are good travels fifteen or twenty miles in a day.
Third, the climate is very severe. During the winter the temperature drops to forty or fifty degrees below zero and the plateau is swept by bitter winds from the Arctic Ocean. Then, most types of sci- entific investigations are impossible, for bare exist- ence demands the strongest constitution. Effective scientific work can be conducted only from April to the end of September.
Fourth, in the Gobi Desert which occupies a large part of Mongolia food and water are scarce and the region is so inhospitable that there are very few inhabitants.
After analyzing these difficulties it was obvious that some means of rapid transportation would largely solve them and that without it an expedition of high-powered men, such as I had in mind, could
8
PREPARATIONS
not be carried out successfully. I believed that the automobile was the answer to the problem.
In 191 8, when motors were new on the road, I had driven a car from Kalgan to Urga and returned. Then, it was considered something of an adventure, but by 1920 there was a regular service conducted by Chinese and foreign companies and the trip had become commonplace to an explorer. Between Kalgan and Urga the road is fine and hard, there are no serious streams or marshes and little sand of consequence. Moreover, if an accident does hap- pen other cars pass so frequently that assistance usually can be obtained. In the far west where the Gobi is a real desert, where there are mountains and rivers, sand and rocks, it is a different story. There are no garages just around the corner — in fact there are no corners.
Nevertheless from what I knew of the country I was convinced that a properly equipped motor expe- dition supported by a camel caravan could operate successfully. And if it could, we would be able to do ten years* work in five months. I needed all the courage of my convictions, for, when it was an- nounced that we intended to explore the central and western Gobi Desert with five cars, two of them one-ton trucks, and had planned a three thousand mile journey, even those men who had driven to Urga many times said that I was a little less than a fool. They advanced dozens of reasons as to why such a project could not succeed. But in my opinion
9
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
everyone of them were answerable on the ground of preparation and organization.
As a matter of fact, the most frequent objection was that it had not been done. It was rather com- forting therefore to think of the remark made by a prominent man who said that often it is well known that a thing is impossible. Everyone is sure that it can't be done. Then one day a fool comes along who hasn't heard that it is impossible and before he finds it out he goes ahead and does it!
When it came to a choice of cars opinion was strongly in favor of several well known Italian and French makes, but since this was an all-American expedition I felt that American cars were good enough for us. After careful investigation I chose the Dodge Brothers cars of Detroit, Michigan, and the Fulton one-ton trucks made by the Fulton Motors Corporation of Farmingdale, Long Island, N. Y. It was imperative to have light motors with a high clearance, very strongly built and with sufficient power to pull through sand. Those which we used were stock cars with no especial equipment. When the fleet arrived in China I asked virtually every insurance company for protection only against total loss. We had mechanics and spare parts enough to repair any reasonable breakage but it was conceiv- able that a car might be completely wrecked by fall- ing over a cliff, by fire or some such catastrophe. I argued that the moral risk was good because we cer- tainly would not abandon a machine unless it was
10
PREPARATIONS
absolutely necessary in view of the fact that the suc- cess of the expedition, if not our actual lives, de- pended upon the motor transport.
But the insurance companies could not see it in that light. They said the risk was too great. There was no precedent, and that we were lucky to have a supporting caravan for we would return on camels if we ever got back at all. No offers of attractive premiums could induce them to change their minds. Even after the first season they said we "were lucky" and probably couldn't do it again.
The success of the motor transport is shown by the fact that we used the same Dodge Bros, cars and Fulton trucks for two successive expeditions: that we travelled more than six thousand miles with the entire fleet over a virtually unknown country and the Dodge Bros, cars did as much as ten thousand miles: that when we returned, within three days I had sold all the motors as they stood in Kalgan, with no repairs, for more than they cost in America and that the same fleet continued to do service on the Kalgan-Urga run, in the hands of a Chinese com- pany. The record speaks for itself and all the men on the expedition are as proud of the cars as though we had manufactured them. We have a new fleet of the same make for the future work of the expedition.
We were offered discouragements in our scientific programme as well as in the motor transport. It was pointed out that with the exception of a single rhinoceros tooth no fossils had been found in Mon-
ii
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
golia; that it was a waste of sand and gravel and that we might as well search in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as expect to find fossils in the Gobi Desert. Also, I was told that it was little short of criminal to take such eminent geologists as Berkey and Morris to a country where the rocks were obscured by grass or sand.
My feeling was that the men who had explored Mongolia in the past had not been able to use the modern methods which we intended to inaugurate and that, excellent as their work was in some respects it afforded no criterion as to what Mongolia would yield to our scientists.
My experience in the Orient had taught me that time and money were two of the greatest essentials for success and I made up my mind that I would not leave America unless both were assured. Five years for the work and a total of $250,000 was what I believed to be the minimum.
When I returned to New York early in 1920 and presented my plans for the expedition to Professor Osborn, he gave them the same enthusiastic endorse- ment and support that I always have had from him. Without his active cooperation nothing could have been done and it is impossible to express the gratitude which I owe him personally and on behalf of the expedition.
At his suggestion I endeavored to interest the American Asiatic Association and its official organ, Asia Magazine. The editor of Asia, Mr. Louis D.
12
PREPARATIONS
Froelick, became one of my most loyal supporters and when I look back upon the many conferences that we held in his office I realize how freely he gave his time and thought.
As every explorer knows, the effort and nerve strain involved in financing a large expedition far surpasses the difficulties of actual field work. I would say nothing about this part for, I suppose its interest is largely personal, had I not discovered that at least nine out of ten people believe that the funds for such an expedition are all provided by the institutions under whose auspices it is launched. The prevailing idea seems to be that all the leader has to do is to take command in the field. Would that it were so ! Were it true doubtless there would be many more explorers.
The Museum did what it could but most of the $250,000 had to be obtained from private individ- uals. By the time we left New York for China late in February, 1921, I felt as though ten years had been clipped off my life. I had spoken at so many dinners and luncheons, lectured before so many audiences, interviewed so many financiers, talked so much and written so much about the Central Asiatic Expedition that it had become a veritable nightmare. Nevertheless, there were many pleasurable sides to the experience which I wish there had been more time to enjoy. I learned that the average American financier is an adventurer at heart. Making his money has been an adventure
13
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
and he wants an adventure in spending it ; he likes a sporting chance and exploration if it has a worth- while object appeals to him.
Never will I forget the morning I went to see Mr. J. P. Morgan. I suppose every American who wants money for a public enterprise thinks first of either Mr. Morgan or Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Morgan received me in his magnificent library on Thirty- third Street and for fifteen minutes I told him of my plans and hopes. I had a map of Central Asia with me. It is characteristic of him that he asked only a few questions but every one was straight to the point. "How can you get there? What do you expect to find there?" and a few others.
When I had finished he swung about, his eyes bril- liant with interest.
"It's a great plan," he said. "How are you going to finance it? What do you want me to do?"
I wish Mr. Morgan could realize what his faith meant to me as well as his generous financial sup- port, for it was at the very beginning of my efforts to raise money for the expedition. In the later months there were many discouragements as well as many successes but I never will forget that beginning.
I consider it a pretty good record for the Ameri- can people that they were willing to finance an expe- dition which was based purely on a theory. I tried to make it clear to everyone that we were playing an "off chance" in the scientific race; that the dividends would be large if we won, but that the results might
PREPARATIONS
be entirely negative. In the first three years it was really a New York City expedition, for with the exception of one contribution from Wilkesbarre, Pa., every dollar came from New York.
The organization and equipment of the expedi- tion had to be carried out simultaneously with the efforts to finance it. Of course selecting the staff was the most important and most difficult single task. The general fitness of a man for the job as well as his scientific training needed to be carefully considered, for personality, character, and the abil- ity to get on with other men determine the success or failure of such an expedition as much as any other factor.
The Second in Command and Chief Palaeontolo- gist was an easy choice. Years ago I had told Walter Granger, Associate Curator of Fossil Mam- mals in the American Museum of Natural History, about my plans and he had promised to go when the time came. We had been colleagues for fifteen years; his field experience covers twice that time and as a fossil collector and a friend he is second to no man in the world.
Since we could not predict where our search would lead us in Mongolia it was necessary to have a camel caravan carrying supplies of food and gasoline. This would give us a movable base and could be shifted from place to place as conditions demanded.
It is impossible to get any food in the desert other than meat and animal products so that everything
15
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
had to be taken with us. I selected the food with a great deal of care to give a varied diet and even at the end of the summer there were very few days when we did not have sufficient dried fruit and vege- tables to keep us satisfied and in splendid health.
To carry our supplies we made boxes with sliding tops. As the food was exhausted we packed the fos- sils and other collections in these containers because there is no wood of any description to be obtained in the desert. Each camel carried four hundred pounds.
Through the courtesy of the Standard Oil Com- pany of New York we were supplied with 3,000 gallons of gasoline and 50 gallons of oil for the first expedition and when this was packed we found that it required seventy-five camels to carry our total supplies.
With the assistance of Mr. F. A. Larsen we pur- chased the camels. The caravan could only travel at the rate of 2^ miles per hour and it was necessary for them to leave considerably in advance of the motor party. I instructed the caravan to follow the Kalgan-Urga trail and await us at Tuerin, a mon- astery 550 miles from Kalgan. The caravan started five weeks before the rest of the expedition.
I knew that it would not be possible for the scien- tific staff to remain together during all the time that we were in field if they were to carry on their separate investigations to the best advantage. There- fore the motor party was divided into three units — each one complete with its cook, Mongol interpreter,
16
PREPARATIONS
tents and other equipment. Any of these units could maintain itself independently of the main party for a considerable period. Results prove that this plan was invaluable and is the only one that can be followed where scientific work of a diverse character is to be carried on without loss of time.
When the plans of the expedition were made pub- lic the world press seized upon the possibility of our finding primitive human remains as a feature of rare news value. We were somewhat appalled to find that we immediately became known as the "Missing Link" expedition and that the broad sci- entific aspect of our intended work was entirely lost.
At first I was indignant, but my protests were futile. Moreover, it did have the advantage of creating an enormous public interest which other- wise certainly would have been lacking. Also, it brought thousands of applications to join the expe- dition. These caused a vast amount of labor, for the staff already had been selected and most of the applicants wanted non-technical positions. It was impossible to explain to everyone that all camp work could be done better and cheaper by natives who know the language and customs and could live on simple food, than by white men, no matter how good they were.
The letters poured in at such a rate that I could not read them. Sometimes we had as many as a
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
hundred a day arid scores of people came in person to the Museum. My secretary, Miss Agnes Molloy, saw most of them and sorted and read all the letters. Some were amusing beyond words and I told her to save those to show me at the times when I was so tired that I had either to laugh or cry.
When the plans were first announced in the New York morning papers an artist who lived fifty miles from the city was so anxious to offer his services that he hired an aeroplane and flew to the American Museum of Natural History when he found that no train would get him there until after luncheon.
A lady in St. Louis telegraphed "Regarding search for 'Missing Link' ouija board offers assistance."
About three thousand applications were from men and boys. Ex-army men, flyers, outnumbered the rest. Most of them began "I can't settle down to office work after the war, I want to get away where I can have some excitement."
There were nearly a thousand from women. The real gem of the collection was one of the first to arrive. One day I heard my secretary exclaim under her breath, when examining the mail, "Why, the idea" Then she remarked, "I don't know whether you will consider this amusing or not, but you had better read it and here's the photograph."
The letter was from a woman who said, "I have already written two books but they haven't been accepted yet. I want to get material for a third — something occult and stirring and I think I can find
18
PREPARATIONS
it with you. I could go in a secretarial capacity for I have seen your picture in the newspapers and I am sure that you know how to treat a lady. But even if you don't need a secretary there are many other things that I can do. Perhaps I could go just as a woman friend/ I could create the 'home atmos- phere' for you in those drear wastes. I am enclos- ing my photograph, but could you not have tea with me some day when your work is done? After you have seen me I will leave it with you to judge."
The newspapers did a good deal for us in the way of publicity but I am afraid I disappointed them grievously in one particular. They hoped for some thrilling stories of the dangers and hardships that we would encounter in the Gobi Desert and when I said that we did not expect to have either they seemed to think that it could not be a real exploring expedition. An explorer must have adventures! They are what the public expects !
There are many so-called explorers who are really travellers seeking adventure. They welcome every opportunity for a hair-breadth escape or some thrill- ing experience because it is their stock in trade. When they return they write a book about their experiences. Not having a serious objective in their wanderings which gives them something definite to contribute they tell the story of their hard- ships.
My friend, Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, has a motto, which I am very fond of quoting because it
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
expresses a great deal in a single sentence. He says, "Adventures are a mark of incompetence."
If the explorer has a clear-cut problem to solve, and an honest desire to contribute something of worth to the world's knowledge, he will prepare against adven- tures. It will disappoint the newspaper but facili- tate his work. How infinitely more creditable it is to eliminate difficulties through foresight and prep- aration before they are encountered than to suffer heroically and leave the work half done.
The explorer must first assimilate everything that has been written about the region he is to visit, or surrounding areas. Thus from the experience of others he knows the general conditions to be en- countered and what is the best method of prepara- tion. He can study his problem, plan it out on paper, get the best equipment, and above all the men who are fitted physically and mentally for the job. Then so far as human foresight can go, he is prepared to meet and overcome the difficulties which he knows will be encountered. After that he must trust to his own ability to solve those problems which could not be foreseen and prepared for.
For the last fifteen years I have spent most of the time wandering into the far corners of the world. During the first eight years I was studying and col- lecting whales and was at sea a good deal on tiny whaling vessels. Then I gave up that work and began land explorations in Asia. In the fifteen years I can remember just ten times when I had
20
PREPARATIONS
really narrow escapes from death. Two were from drowning in typhoons, one was when our boat was charged by a wounded whale; once my wife and I were nearly eaten by wild dogs, once we were in great danger from fanatical lama priests; two were close calls when I fell over cliffs, once I was nearly caught by a huge python, and twice I might have been killed by bandits.
Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons think that hardships are an essential part of an explorer's existence. But I don't believe in hardships; they are a great nuisance. Eat well, dress well, sleep well, whenever it is possible is a pretty good rule for every- day use. Don't court hardships. Then you can work hard and steadily and if a bit of " hardship" does come along in the course of things, you are ready to take it in your stride and laugh while it is going on. If you ask the members of the Central Asiatic Expedition about their hardships they will laugh at you. We seldom had any, and yet we were exploring a desert where there was virtually nothing to be obtained to eat except meat. We had twenty- six men in the field for two years and no illness. Could you equal that in New York?
All the equipment for the expedition with the exception of food and tents I purchased in New York. In the eighteen tons which were sent to Peking we had every modern invention for camp comfort. Be- cause it is impossible to get vegetables of any kind in the Gobi I brought a quantity of dried onions, toma-
21
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
toes, carrots, spinach and beets from America, but all the other food was obtained from the American Legation Marine Corps Detachment through the courtesy of Colonel H. Dunlap and Lt. Colonel Seth Williams.
We used Mongol tents and fur sleeping bags. Al- most all explorers find that the natives have devised the best dwellings and the best clothes for their particular country and the conditions of life which it involves. The Mongols are no exception to this rule. They are nomads who are constantly moving as they follow their flocks or the dictates of their restless spirits. A permanent dwelling would be of little use for the grazing may be good at a certain place one year, but poor the next. Wind and cold are the most serious weather conditions to be met, they need not be worried about rain for even in the grasslands this seldom comes. Therefore, the tent which will stand against almost any Mongolian wind storm is made of double cotton cloth, light in weight, but is not particularly waterproof.
The sides sweep down to the ground from the ridge pole in long curves which present sloping surfaces to the wind at every possible angle. Thus if the tent is firmly pegged it cannot be blown down. The cloth may rip but it will still remain standing. Also, it can be erected in a gale when it would be impos- sible to pitch a wall tent. Under normal conditions a man can put up a small Mongol tent alone. First one entire side is pegged down; then the ridge and
22
PREPARATIONS
poles put in and with a rope the tent is pulled upright. It will stand in position while the other side is fas- tened.
Sheepskin sleeping bags and fur clothes are an essential for even in the summer the nights are cold and the rapid changes from winter to summer are amazing.
When we went into the field in 1922 every item of equipment and organization had been considered and we felt that we had prepared as far as it was humanly possible to do, for our Great Adventure.
23
CHAPTER II
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
\V 7E could not consider work in Mongolia during the first summer because it was necessary to make the diplomatic arrangements, and get the complicated machinery of such a large expedition under way. Therefore I sailed in advance of the main party.
Not since 1900 had there been such a storm as that which ushered us into Peking on the 14th of April, 1 92 1. The dust reached as far south as Shanghai and its yellow blanket hovered over the sea sixty- five miles beyond the coast. It came from a land parched by fourteen well-nigh rainless months which had cost a heavy toll of human life.
We could hardly see the great Tartar walls as the train came into the station and for days after our arrival the air was like a London fog. The Chinese are Very superstitious and we were told that no good could come from a summer which began with such a dusty spring. It was a bad omen — it meant famine, war, disease and death!
24
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
Curiously enough the foreign community is always more or less affected by the Chinese superstitions, and we were greeted with a flood of rumors; Peking was certain to be attacked and looted — even the day and hour had been set — it was impossible to go into the interior, smallpox was raging, it would be dan- gerous to do this and dangerous to do that!
It was the same dear old hysterical Peking! We are rather a small community here and we must have excitement. If no political bomb is ready for explo- sion, something must be manufactured to furnish conversation at the Club and on the roof garden of the new hotel. So with dust, war, and smallpox we felt that the summer was beginning rather well.
My spirits rose accordingly and I was more than ever sure that in spite of all the predictions the Central Asiatic Expedition would be able to carry on its work without great difficulty. The dust would not last forever, proper precautions could be taken against smallpox, and as for war — well, the closer one gets to trouble in the interior the less impressive it becomes!
I was fortunate in finding an ideal house for the headquarters of the Expedition. Its former tenant, my old friend Dr. G. E. Morrison, was one of the best known Britishers who has ever lived in North China. His magnificent library, his brilliant writ- ings for the London Times, his fascinating personal- ity and his interest in science and exploration made his house a Mecca for travellers of every national-
25
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
ity. I like to think that Dr. Morrison would enjoy seeing the house that he loved so well dedicated to this work.
When we arrived, the great doors which had been closed since Dr. Morrison's death were opened to admit carpenters, masons and other laborers, and to allow motor-trucks, laboratory supplies and boxes of equipment to pass into the sun-lit space of the outer court. Inside the tiled walls surrounding the compound we had the living quarters, garage, stables, equipment rooms, laboratories and motion picture studio — a small city of our own devoted to the multiple interests of the expedition.
Immediately upon arriving in Peking I visited the Geological Survey of China. I found the Director, Dr. V. K. Ting, Dr. Wong, Dr. Andersson, Dr. Grabau and all the other members of the survey, most cordial in their reception and anxious to give us the benefit of their experience in beginning our work.
The Survey had a comprehensive and well- advanced plan for their palaeontological investiga- tions embracing certain provinces in which they had already begun preliminary explorations. If we invaded these areas it meant unhealthy competition and a duplication of results which would at once be discourteous and unscientific. Asia presents such vast unexplored fields that there is room, not only for two institutions to carry on work, but for dozens of them. Therefore we arranged for a divi- sion of territory in which certain regions would be
26
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
left entirely to them and others in which we could work without competition. This arrangement has proved to be admirable and there has been mutual assistance and cooperation during all the years that the Central Asiatic Expedition has been in the Orient.
Since it was impossible for us to consider Mon- golia for the first summer, and highly desirable that our staff receive some preliminary training in the methods of work in China, the Geological Survey very kindly offered to turn over to us a locality at Wanhsien in Eastern Szechuan, which promised to yield interesting fossils. It was an excellent place in which to begin work for it was near the Yangtze River, above the gorges of Ichang in a region known to abound in caves. This great river valley had undoubtedly been a highway of travel for untold centuries and since the caverns would furnish excel- lent dwelling-places, it was not improbable that remains of primitive human beings might be found there.
Palasontological investigation in China is not easy because there is a combination of commercial and religious difficulties to be surmounted.
Fossils of all sorts have a highly commercial value to the natives. They are called "dragon bones' ' and when powdered, dissolved in acid and mixed with a liberal quantity of superstition, are of undoubted efficacy as a medicine for every kind of illness, from rheumatism to gun-shot wounds. The
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
apothecary shops carry on a considerable trade in fossils, and if a Chinese discovers a fossil-bearing locality, he guards it as if it were a gold-mine. For- eigners often find it impossible to obtain permission to examine some of the long-worked beds that for centuries have been bequeathed by one generation to another.
Belief in "feng-shui" the "spirits of the earth, wind and water," which guard all burial places in China, is another active superstition which offers a serious obstacle to scientific work. Since in many thickly settled regions it is difficult to find a spot so far away from a grave-site that feng-shui is inopera- tive, the fossil-hunter must be extremely cautious in digging without having first obtained the consent cf the nearest villages. He needs unlimited patience, great tact and a saving sense of humor.
Dr. J. G. Andersson, of the Chinese Geological Survey, who is a pioneer in palseontological collect- ing in China has had so many amusing experiences with the natives that they would fill a book. Once when he had gone through all the necessary formal- ities of obtaining the owners' permission to exca- vate, his operations were halted by the sudden appearance of an irate old lady. Angry men are bad enough, Heaven knows, but when a Chinese woman works herself into a frenzy, every one hunts cover. This particular old lady was so enraged that she seated herself squarely in the hole that the palaeontologist had dug and refused to move. Argu-
28
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
ments were useless. Andersson could not well shovel her out except at the risk of having his face scratched; so being a very tactful gentleman, he tried making her ridiculous. Since it was a hot day he borrowed an umbrella and gallantly held it over her head while the onlookers hugely enjoyed the joke. But the old lady comfortably settled herself and screamed even louder. Then Dr. Andersson bethought himself of his camera, an instrument guaranteed to make any Chinese woman 1 'step lively," for she hates to have a foreigner photograph her.
Dr. Andersson politely explained to the spec- tators that without doubt the old lady would like to have her picture taken while she was sitting in the hole. This was too much! Before the camera could be focused, she leaped out, screaming with rage. But even though she had been routed from her strategic position, she eventually won the battle ; for she continued to create such a disturbance that Andersson' s native assistants advised him to retire, leaving the enemy in possession of the field, at least until the smoke of battle had lifted.
I engaged as helper for Mr. Granger in his first palasontological adventures and as official inter- preter of the expedition, Mr. James Wong, a young Chinese student educated in an American military academy and possessed not only of extraordinary energy and ability but of a charming personality as well.
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
Though Mr. Granger and I had decided to accept the courteous offer of the Chinese Geological Sur- vey and to make the Wanhsien locality in Eastern Szechuan the first point of palaeontological investi- gation, I should have hesitated to ask a man less cool and determined than Granger to visit so dis- turbed a region as the Yangtse Valley on his first trip into the interior of China. The fact that he carried on his work without serious difficulty for two winters speaks for itself. A letter from him under date of September 27th, 192 1, tells of his initial trip to Wanhsien:
"Our journey from Ichang to Wanhsien was inter- esting and exciting. At Ichang we ran right into one of the inter-provincial wars and had a chance to watch from our decks, or from our state-room win- dows, quite a lot of fighting on the hills opposite the town. It was necessary to transship there, and I managed to get my equipment into one of the steamer godowns before the close-in firing broke out ; then managed to get it out again before the up-river boat arrived.
"The Lung Mow left Ichang at day-break, the city being still in the hands of its defenders and by breakfast time we were in the first Ichang gorge. A British American Tobacco Company's man from Nanking and I were sitting on the observation deck, admiring the really magnificent cliffs and congrat- ulating ourselves that, at least we were above the turmoil of war when, suddenly there appeared ahead of us a junk-load of Szechuanese soldiers coming down river, and bang! one of them took a pot-shot
30
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
at us. The steamboat siren blew a warning and we had to go below; four times I was chased off the deck and finally got tired of it and stayed below on the saloon-deck. Even then, later on in the day, when the firing began to get on the crew's nerves, we were several times ordered below where we had the protection of the steel hull of the ship.
"About every junk-load of soldiers we met took at least one try at us. I don't know how many hits they made, but one bullet slipped in past four of us who were sitting on the after-deck, went through the paneling into the dining-saloon and fetched up on the linoleum flooring.
"The trouble is that the river boats make such a heavy wash that junks are sometimes sunk and every load of soldiers lost in this way makes just one more black mark against the up-river boats, and there have been several such losses recently. . . .
"The steamboats in going up stream always slow down when meeting junks, but in coming down they must maintain a steering headway and it is thus that most of the sinkings occur. There are warning signals on shore at all danger points, announcing that steamers are approaching from above or below, but the junks mostly ignore these signals and trouble ensues.
"The steamboats are going to continue to go up and down wherever the stream is navigable and soldiers ought to realize this after a while. There is no sense in transporting soldiers on the river any- way. If the Szechuanese would stay where they belong everything would be serene.
"Coming up river I was reminded of a book I have seen on sale here in China — Glimpses of the Yangtze Gorges. That is what we got! We reached
3i
ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
Wanhsien at noon on the second day and I was at once welcomed by Mr. Asker, the Commissioner of Customs who asked me to make my headquarters at his place, which is a large temple on the out- skirts of the town."
Mr. Granger discovered that all the fossils came from near a small village called Yenchingkao, ten miles from Wanhsien. He made his camp in a temple at the village and for two winters carried on his work by buying specimens from the natives. His first letter under date of December 26th, 1921, describes the unusual methods of collecting.
"The fossils at Yenchingkao occur in pits which are distributed along a great limestone ridge some 30 or 40 miles in length and rising above our camp over 2,000 feet. These pits are the result of the dis- solving action of water on limestone and some of them have a depth of one hundred feet or more. They are of varying sizes — averaging say six feet in diameter — and are filled with a yellowish and reddish mud which is, I take it, disintegrated lime- stone. The fossils are found embedded in the mud at varying depths, usually below 20 feet. A crude windlass is rigged up over the pit and the mud dug out and hauled to the surface in scoop-shaped bas- kets. At fifty feet it is dark in the pit and the work is done by the light of a tiny oil wick. It is fossil collecting under the most adverse conditions imaginable.
"The excavation of the fossils has been going on for a long time — possibly some generations — and it
32
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
is a considerable business. Digging is only done in the winter months.
"One has to be let down with a rope around his waist and with two or three men at the windlass. The natives climb up and down the rope hand over hand, but it requires practice and agility to do this. You'd be shy one palaeontologist if I tried to do it!
"The excavation of the pit is opening up just now on a large scale and in the coming month will probably give us about all that we can take care of. The fauna is Stegodon (elephant), Bison, Bos (cow- like animals), Cervus (deer), Tapirus (tapirs), Sus (pigs), Rhinoceros (rhinoceros), besides many small ruminants, several carnivores, large and small, and many rodents; no horses queerly enough."
Until Dr. J. G. Andersson began his splendid work with the Chinese Geological Survey, knowledge of the palaeontology of China rested almost entirely upon Schlosser. 1
All Schlosser's material was purchased in the drug shops and consisted of teeth and fragments of bones. It was impossible to get accurate information as to the localities where it was obtained and it is amazing that his work should have proved to be so good. Thus, when Andersson began to discover fossils in situ he had a virtually untouched field before him. From his work and that of Schlosser's there was evi- dence of at least two distinct faunas in North China, probably separated by the Tsingling mountains of
1 Die fossilen Sangethiere Chinas (Munich, 1903).
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
Shensi. To the north is the so called Hipparion fauna, characterized by an abundance of horses. To the south is what we have named the Stegodon fauna, for the remains of these primitive elephants are common.
The Chinese Geological Survey has entirely con- fined their work to the Hipparion beds and we hoped that their Wanhsien locality would give us some- thing entirely different, as indeed it did.
It is disappointing that Mr. Granger has not been able to investigate the caves along the banks of the Yangtze River where we hoped the remains of primitive human beings might be found. Although he spent the two winters of 1921-1922 and 1922-23 at Wanhsien, the region which contained the caverns was so infested with bandits that it would have been extremely hazardous to attempt a survey of it.
Dr. W. D. Matthew, curator of Palaeontology in the American Museum of Natural History, who has studied Granger's Szechuan collections, has come to the conclusion that the fauna as a whole indicates forest conditions in this region during the Pleistocene or Ice Age. Granger's collection is composed partly of species identical with those still living in the sur- rounding mountains and partly of mammals whose nearest relatives are in Malaysia. It is extraordi- narily interesting because it gives an accurate pic- ture of the animal life of the region at the time of man's appearance in Central China, and before it had been depopulated by human agencies.
34
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
That Old Stone Age man was contemporaneous with these animals which had fallen into the wells and become fossilized is definitely shown by a stag antler, two tines of which had been hacked off with a stone implement. It is highly probable, there- fore, that we may discover human bones at any moment, although, because of his superior intelli- gence, Palaeolithic men would not fall into the wells as frequently as the lower animals. Nevertheless some of them must inevitably have met death in this way.
The primitive elephant, Stegodon, was the largest animal that roamed this region during the Ice Age, but it was hardly less spectacular than a giant tapir which was as big as a modern horse. That monkeys swung through the treetops, we know, because Granger has obtained both gibbon and langur skulls from the pits.
Just before we started field work Dr. J. G. Anders- son had a piece of good fortune which shows how ex- cellent are the prospects for making important dis- coveries in the realm of ancient human history.
He was to go on a short expedition to Manchuria and very kindly offered to take our interpreter, Mr. Wong, with him in order to give him some preliminary training in fossil hunting which would be of value in his work with Mr. Granger. On this trip Mr. Wong almost immediately discovered a bone deposit in the floor of a cave which contained parts of many human skeletons. Dr. Andersson had already
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
found a similar culture in Honan and recently has brought back a wealth of early human material, pottery and artifacts from Kansu and the Koko Nor region of Tibet. Although this is post-Neo- lithic, nevertheless, it indicates what a rich field eastern Asia presents to the archaeologist.
After Mr. Granger had started for Szechuan, I made a short expedition to the Eastern Tombs (Tung Ling), eighty miles from Peking. The object of the trip was to initiate Mr. Pope into the methods of reptile and fish collecting in China and to train several native assistants in the preparation of speci- mens. At the Tung Ling several of the Manchu Emperors and Empresses are buried in magnificent mausoleums which stand among some of China's most beautiful scenery.
To the north of the tombs, surrounded by a high wall, is an enormous hunting park about a hundred miles in length. This contains rugged mountains, sombre valleys, and great forests of birch, pine, spruce, and oak. It is an extraordinarily interest- ing region to the zoologist because it stands as a "forest island" isolated by miles of treeless country.
In its fauna are many species of birds, reptiles and mammals which elsewhere exist only far to the south or in the great forests of Manchuria. Thus, there is strong evidence that in past centuries a more or less continuous wooded belt extended from the Yangtze River to the frontiers of Manchuria and across an area which is now bare plains or hills.
36
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
That this beautiful, primeval forest, the last in North China, is being cleared as fast as ax and fire can do the work is one of the most disgraceful chap- ters of recent Chinese history, and I was sick at heart at the progress of destruction since my first visit in 19 19. The beautiful valley where we had camped amid one of the most splendid forests I have ever seen, is now filled with fields of corn and millet — not a tree remains. The mountain sides are scarred with patches of waving grain almost to their summits. A few more years and this glorious spot, which should have been a national park, will be as bare of trees as are the other hills of North China. I like the Chinese farmer — he is the hope of the Chinese nation — but sometimes I hate his handi- work!
Our first camp was on the outskirts of a mountain village Hsing Ling Shan, and Mr. Pope, who has been accustomed to doing his own collecting, had a real surprise at the methods we use in China. Our tents were surrounded immediately by dozens of curious men, women and children. We encouraged their interest, for they were our potential collectors.
We told them that we would pay three coppers — about one cent — for every frog, lizard and toad that they brought us, and more for every snake. At first they were inclined to doubt. Why would any- one be fool enough to pay good money for something that he could not eat? After a little one or two of the more enterprising boys disappeared and returned
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with several frogs. They presented them to us with evident embarrassment, as if expecting to be ridiculed by their friends, but when the spectators saw them promptly paid, the affair assumed a dif- ferent aspect. We might be temporarily insane — probably we were — but at least we had money, and if we wanted to squander it that was our business. It was a Heaven-sent opportunity for quick profits on easy work, and above all things a Chinese is a business man. As a result, before the day was ended, specimens were pouring in faster than we could care for them.
During the week in which we remained at that camp a hundred men, boys, and girls were scouring the hills, fields and valleys, and dozens of others were industriously fishing in the little mountain stream beside our tent. When we had a sufficient quantity of the more common species we reduced the price or ceased buying altogether and offered a special premium for the rarer forms. We collected more than a thousand specimens, and left with a confident feeling that we had a complete representa- tion of the fauna in the vicinity of Hsing Ling Shan. What those two or three hundred Chinese did not find for us must be very rare indeed !
Later in the summer Mr. Pope carried on his inves- tigations alone in Anhwei Province and spent the winter of 1921-22 at the Tung Ting Lake, Honan. In the summer of 1922, while the main expedition was in Mongolia, he worked in Shansi Province and
38
SOME PRELIMINARY DIGRESSIONS
then spent nearly a year in the little known island of Hainan, near Hong Kong.
The results of Mr. Pope's careful and enthusiastic labor already has produced by far the largest and most complete collection of reptiles, batrachians and fish that has ever been made in China. So little serious work has been done on these lower verte- brates that the field offers almost unlimited possi- bilities for original research. In every locality spe- cies new to science and interesting revelations in life histories await the investigation. Moreover, the work is of immense importance in helping solve the larger problems of zoogeography which have had a profound influence upon animal and human migrations.
Our plan is to have Mr. Pope continue his survey of the herpetology and ichthyology in every prov- ince of China. It is unfortunate that he could not participate in the Mongolian expeditions, but the reptile and fish life of the Gobi Desert is so lim- ited that it would have been a waste of time and we have been able to obtain a fairly complete collec- tion for him.
He has carried on his work at times under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. In 1922 in Shansi on the border of the Ordos Desert, he was in a city which was captured by bandits. By his tact and courage he not only saved his life and col- lections but continued his work. In the island of Hainan it was highly dangerous to go beyond nar-
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rowly circumscribed limits because the region swarmed with brigands: yet he remained there a whole year and brought out a superb collection. I regret that it is not possible to give in more detail the progress of his work but I hope that he himself will narrate his experiences in a future volume.
40
CHAPTER III
HUNTING THE " GOLDEN FLEECE M
/^\NE of the objectives of the Expedition was to obtain the rare and typical large mammals of Asia for exhibition in the new Hall of Asiatic Life of the American Museum of Natural History.
As I am a zoologist, that has been my particular work and on September 8, 1921, accompanied by Captain W. F. Collins, I left for the Tsingling mountains of Shensi Province to obtain specimens of the takin (Budorcas bedfordi). This species is the modern representative of the " golden fleece" and is one of the rarest and most interesting animals of the world. It was discovered by the late Mr. Malcolm Anderson while on the Duke of Bedford's expedition under the direction of the British Museum of Nat- ural History.
Although takin of different species are found in the mountains of northern India and western China, the Shensi form has been killed by not more than seven or eight white men. Moreover, we wished to make a reconnaissance of the Tsingling mountains
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which extend east and west through the centre of China and appear to have been a faunal divide even in geological times as they are today.
This forested range never has been carefully investigated and offers one of the most attractive fields for zoological work both from the standpoint of discovering species new to science and from that of distribution.
To the Chinese, the takin is known as "yeh niu" (wild cow), and in truth it does resemble a cow superficially a good deal more than it does its near- est relatives, the chamois, Rocky Mountain goat, serow and goral. These animals form a strange sub-family, the Rupricaprinnce or goat-antelopes, so called because they combine characters of both the goats and the true antelopes. This is an excellent example of a group that, with its origin in Asia, has sent one branch, the chamois, to Europe, and another, so called the Rocky Mountain goat, to America.
Unlike the white rhinoceros, which is not white, and the blue fox, which is not blue, the takin of the "golden fleece" really is golden — in color at least. From the end of their enormous Roman noses to the tips of their abbreviated tails the Shensi animals are a beautiful golden yellow without a patch of darker color. I shall never forget the startling impression when, for the first time I saw a group of six of the great brutes, climbing about on a rugged mountainside amid a thicket of dwarf bamboos. The
42
HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
sun was shining full on their long winter coats, which blazed like molten gold among the dull green leaves. They wore the ''golden fleece " as surely as if they had stepped out of the story-book of Greek Mythology.
On the way to the Tsingling mountains Captain Collins and I had to dodge a war which was in full operation about Sianfu, the ancient capital of China, but late in the evening, at the end of a fortnight's mule travel we stumbled into the little village of Lingtai-miao, at the foot of the Ta Pai Shan (Great White Mountain).
The village was a poor affair — only a straggling main street bordered by mud huts in which mangy dogs, pigs, chickens and goats lived on the most intimate terms with the human inhabitants. Until I saw the people themselves, I wondered how so wretched a place could exist amid those beautiful surroundings. Ordinary Shensi farmers are unpre- possessing and many of them show the ravages of opium, but these mountain folk were even lower in the human scale.
Captain Collins and I found that the temple where we were camping lay amid golden-yellow rice-fields in a beautiful valley beside a brawling mountain stream bordered by straight white poplars. A few hundred yards away the foothills rose steeply, range upon range, into the grey cloud- veil low-hung about the summits of Ta Pai Shan.
We did not have the temple to ourselves, for a dozen village soldiers had taken up their quarters
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
in the rooms on each side of the court. We spread our belongings at the foot of the altar in the main building, where a blear-eyed old priest had made himself a bed of straw in one corner. His duties consisted solely of keeping alight the tiny oil-wicks that burned at the feet of the gods, and of changing the bowls of food upon the altar. But he wore an expression of utter exhaustion and always retired at dark to sleep uninterruptedly until broad daylight.
On a beautiful morning we left the temple with eight bearers, carrying our food, collecting outfit and sleeping-bags. The way led up the main val- ley, and the rocky river bed gave us splendid pheas- ant-shooting. The birds were continually sailing down from the foothills for their morning drink. They were strong on the wing and seemed as plenti- ful as sparrows. Had we really hunted them we probably could have shot fifty in an hour. We killed nineteen pheasants, one hare and one wood- cock without going more than a hundred yards from the trail.
When the trail turned abruptly to the east and entered a side valley, which rapidly narrowed to a canyon, climbing began in earnest and we passed through an interesting series of floral zones. The lower slopes of the mountain are thickly blanketed with a dense forest of birch, oak, poplar, spruce, and larch; at about six thousand feet the dwarf bamboo begins; above this is the rhododendron belt, extend- ing to timber-line at eleven thousand feet. Above us,
44
HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
between the narrow walls of the gorge, we saw a ragged sky-line of green-clad peaks ; beneath our feet was a chaotic mass of stones and boulders on the banks of a mountain torrent. The trail so frequently crossed and re-crossed the stream that we were in the water as often as out of it, and after a half mile or so we abandoned all attempts to keep dry. I firmly believe that the rain which falls upon the Ta Pai Shan and the streams that flow down its sides are the coldest in the world! It was dark when we climbed out of the trail to a huge rock wall, which rose sheer a hundred feet above us, leaving a narrow basal ledge. The men cut bamboos for beds, and we grouped ourselves about the fire, trying to dry portions of our sodden garments.
We were on a level with the lower peaks and above their summits could see snow-capped ridges shining whitely in the starlight. It was very still up there. Not even the roar of the stream reached our ledge: not a bird-note sounded in the night. In our fur- sleeping bags Collins and I lay propped against the rock face, smoking silently. The wildness of the mountains had stirred our primitive instincts. We looked upon our lot and found it good.
A two-hour climb in the morning up a slope so steep that we were well-nigh forced to go on all fours, brought us to a beautiful meadow, thick- carpeted with long brown grass. There, in a spot that appeared to have been a wood-cutter's camp years ago, we pitched our tents and covered a skele-
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
ton of poles with grass and dwarf bamboo for the three men who were to remain as hunters.
Behind us the meadow met a rhododendron jungle, its brown grass giving place to dark green leaves, which spread up the steep slope of a ridge, over the summit and away into the peaks and chasms of far- off mountains. Harmless enough it looked, but we learned to dread the tangle of its thickly twisted branches. To the east a fearsome canyon cut us off from distant summits drifted deep with snow; to the west lay a tumbled mass of granite boulders, old and lichen-covered but some still poised, an avalanche that had fallen away from the cliffs above. It was a wild place, fit home for one of the strangest beasts of a strange land.
For two days we hunted without success in the region of the camp. Takin had been there years before but there was no fresh sign. While at break- fast on the third morning, we noticed one of the hunters, an old man, Liu by name, busily engaged beside a rock a few yards from the tent. He made himself a little shrine of grass and leaves and then produced a half dozen sticks of incense. These he lighted and with mumbled prayers and incantations kowtowed before his joss. We watched the per- formance with some amusement, but the hunters took it very seriously. At the end the old man announced that we certainly would find takin that day.
An hour later our hunters started eastward toward
46
HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
the snow peaks, skirting the upper end of the gorge, near camp and directly through the rhododendron jungle. Sinking into holes, bruising ourselves on hidden rocks, twisting, turning and crawling through the maze of ropelike branches, we followed them on what seemed to be a hopeless chase. At noon we dropped exhausted on the sun-warmed stones of a granite buttress which projected into the canyon.
We were hardly settled when Yong, one of the hunters whispered "Yeh nui" (wild cows) and pointed to a bamboo clad spur seven hundred yards away. I nearly slipped off the ridge in my excite- ment when I caught a glimpse of a yellow speck with another beside it. The glasses showed them plainly — huge golden-yellow brutes moving easily amid the bamboo jungle on a slope so steep that they seemed to be hanging by their horns.
Night after night I had had dreams of takin but they were never stranger than the animals I saw on that sun-lit peak of the Ta Pai Shan. Every- thing about them seemed unreal. They were not creatures of our world but they fitted beautifully into Greek mythology. I cannot imagine beasts apparently less adapted to live among the mountains and yet, there they were, on a peak so steep and rugged that I doubted that we could ever climb it.
We watched them for half an hour hoping they would settle themselves for the mid-day rest but they continued to browse upon the bamboo leaves always slowly moving upwards. The hunters as-
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sured us that we could not reach them and return to camp before night. We scoffed at that but for safety's sake sent two men back to the tents to bring our sleeping bags and a little food; then we began the stalk. It was necessary to circle about the upper end of the canyon into which the granite ridge projected, descend to the stream bed and climb the peak where the animals were feeding. It sounds very simple and it looked so to us, but that was the only simple thing about it.
The slopes we scrambled up and down were almost perpendicular and we had to fight our way through a bamboo jungle that was worse than the rhododen- drons. The dwarf bamboo is only ten or fifteen feet high and the stalks are not larger than one's finger but they grow so close together that it is impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. It was only by main force that we could get through at all and the whip-like stems slashed us mercilessly until our hands and faces were torn and bleeding. To add to the discomfort a drizzling rain began and in half an hour we were soaked to the skin and shiver- ing in spite of the strenuous work.
Somehow we got to the bottom of the gorge, made our way down the stream bed, half the time knee- deep in icy water, and started the long climb up the thousand foot peak where the animals had been feeding. When we reached their tracks there were no takin and we were nearly done. Yong said they had gone higher still.
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HUNTING THE " GOLDEN FLEECE "
Collins and I had drawn for the first shot and the lot had fallen to me. I cursed my luck then, for the hunter assured me that the man who went up would get the shot ; the other must remain below to inter- cept the brutes if they came down.
Collins perched himself on a rocky pinnacle and I went with Yong. We got to the summit just at dusk to find the tracks leading far back into the mountains. There was nothing for it but to de- scend and make the best of a wet night.
We could look across the canyon to our brown tents in the little meadow, less than a mile from us in a straight line but as unattainable as the stars. It had taken us nearly six hours of killing work to reach this peak where we had seen the takin from a point not more than seven hundred yards away. When we got to the bottom of the gorge it was black night and raining steadily. Fortunately the matches in my water-proof case were dry and we managed to start a feeble fire.
We were very low in our minds, not at the pros- pect of a cold wet night, but because we had nothing to eat for the morrow. We were both faint from lack of food and it seemed impossible to face another day of gruelling work without some nourishment. When we killed a takin we could feast on the meat, but the question was, could we last until the animals were found.
We had little hope that the men who had been sent back would find us, for it seemed absurd to think
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that any human being could travel in the dark where it had been well-nigh impossible to go in the day- light. Yet about ten o'clock we heard a rustling in the jungle and a moment later the two men whom we had sent back to camp appeared. I could have hugged Lao Chung (he was our own man) for they brought food and we could find the takin on the morrow. They had seen our fire and made their way down that treacherous stream-bed for more than a mile in thick blackness with only that tiny spot of light to guide them.
The sun was high the next morning before we reached the summit of the peak and picked up the takin tracks where I had left them the night before. They led up and back toward an amphitheater of higher ridges but the trail was fresh and plain. At eleven o'clock we struggled through a particularly nasty patch of jungle and sank down, utterly ex- hausted, upon the rocks in the sunlight. Both Collins and I were somewhat shaken for I had narrowly missed death a few moments earlier. While crossing a tiny ledge my shooting coat had caught on a spur and hurled me over the cliff. With one foot I landed on a projecting shelf, grasped three bamboo stalks and drew back to safety. Had they not been as tough as rawhide I should have plunged, head first, to the jagged rocks three hundred feet below.
After a short rest our men climbed out upon a granite pinnacle for a look about. Almost immedi-
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
ately they returned, trembling with excitement. The takin were there — we could shoot them from where we were. It was a dangerous piece of work to reach the spot where the men had been. When we peeped over the edge of the rock I saw nothing but the bamboo jungle shimmering in the sunlight; then there was a slight movement far below and an ani- male emerged from the cover to stand quietly, gaz- ing directly at us. It was small, I could see that, but Yong urged me to shoot and no others were in sight.
Holding well below the belly line, I fired. The beast plunged forward and pandemonium broke loose. I have no clear remembrance of just what happened for the jungle seemed full of charging forms and the wretched Yong to whom I had entrusted my second rifle started a mad fusilade almost in my ear. It was impossible for me to shoot and not until the gun was empty did he cease his futile bom- bardment. Only a sportsman can appreciate the enormity of his offense.
At the first shot the six takin that had been lying- down leaped to their feet but only now and then could we catch a glimpse of a yellow form as it passed through an open space. It was downhill shooting at long range under the worst conditions possible. Collins worked his Savage rifle coolly but we found later had failed to kill a beast.
In less than a minute it was all over and Yong and I descended to ascertain the casualty list while
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
Collins watched from above. We found my first animal, a nursing calf, with a broken back. A little below, Yong put up a full-grown beast which we thought had been wounded and I snapped at it use- lessly as it dashed down hill. A moment later a cow leaped out twenty feet ahead of me. I fired quickly breaking a hind leg, but she kept on without a pause. Finally she stopped beside a tree and I shot through the bamboo tops dropping her dead in her tracks.
Although we searched the jungle carefully we found no other animals or signs of blood and came to the conclusion that the two which I had killed were our only bag. It was hard luck for Collins because he had borne the work without a murmur, like the true sportsman that he is.
Although I had wanted to shoot a takin more than any other animal in the world, the accomplishment left me cold. I was so utterly exhausted, physically, that my brain was numb ; it could register only a feel- ing of relief that the hunt was ended. Had it not been for Yong we might have completed our Mu- seum group in those few minutes. As it was we had only a mother and her calf but I did not doubt that we should get other adults to complete the family.
At two o'clock in the afternoon we started back to camp. With the load of skins and sleeping bags we could not go by the way we had come and even though our tents were less than a mile away in a straight line it was two days before we reached them.
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
Collins and I spent the next day in selecting a spot with the proper background for the takin group, making photographs and collecting the grass, leaves, rocks and other accessory material.
We decided upon a steep cliff-side clothed with bamboo which led up to the kind of rocky ledge on which the animals love to sleep and sun themselves. The background was to be the peak where we had killed our specimens two days before. We took enough bamboo for the entire group, first brushing the stalks with weak formalin and then wrapping the bundle with burlap. Of the rocks we selected vari- ous samples with dried lichens attached and photo- graphed the characteristic fissures and formations. In a solution of water, formalin and glycerine we preserved fresh sprigs of bamboo and grass from which plaster casts will be made and wax leaves prepared. It was a labor of love, for, in the not far distant future the scene which we were now viewing would be duplicated in the Museum under my direction.
While we were gone my Chinese taxidermist had been trapping industriously, and on our return he presented us with a trayful of mice, shrews and moles. Two I recognized as known only from a single specimen of each. Three others were un- doubtedly new to science. The mountain was most surprising in its small mammalian fauna. Instead of one species that far outnumbered all the others, as is the case in most localities, here there was a
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great variety of species with no one predominant. The fauna of this region is so important and so little known that the Central Asiatic Expedition will make a careful study of the entire mountain range before we leave China.
Another day of hunting in the vicinity of camp demonstrated that it was useless to look for takin there. Collins and I decided to take three bearers with food and sleeping bags and strike into the moun- tains near the spot where we had killed the other "wild cow.'' The taxidermist was to continue work at the camp in the meadow until we sent him bearers from the village.
Halfway down the mountain we left part of our things in a cave, and with three light loads set off towards the snow-clad peaks where we were confi- dent the hunt would end. It began to rain in the afternoon and we camped early under an overhanging rock. The weather of the Ta Pai Shan was a con- stant source of surprise. The sun always rose in a cloudless sky, but at any moment grey mist, accom- panied by a drizzling rain, might steal in from above or below. Not a day passed without rain. It might be only enough to wet the bamboos, but that ensured a thorough soaking for us as we pushed through the thick bushes.
Our second hunt was a disappointment. We found fresh tracks and followed them days at a time hunting every inch of the forested peaks but never did we see an animal. Once, two of them were
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE"
within fifty yards of us but they stole away noise- lessly through bamboo so thick that we could barely move at all. How a beast nearly as large as a cow (for a full-grown takin weighs 500 pounds) could move quietly in that tangle was a mystery to us both.
At night we slept under ledges or overhanging rocks crawling into our fur sleeping-bags so tired that we could hardly cook our food; but in the morning we were always fit and ready for the day's work.
At last we awoke to a world white with new- fallen snow? and we knew that the hunt was ended. It would be utterly useless as well as very dangerous to climb those peaks while the snow remained. Our hearts were heavy as we went down the mountain toward the village for we greatly wished to finish the work we had begun.
I decided to leave my two men with instructions not to return until they had at least two more takin. We felt sure that they would have success, though it might be weeks before the snow melted suffi- ciently to make hunting possible. We had all the necessary data for the group and I was not needed; for the men were well trained and I could depend upon them to follow directions to the letter.
The hunt had been so difficult and exhausting that I doubted whether I should ever attempt to kill an- other takin. But even as I write, the charm of those rugged peaks, the great stillness and the lure of the wilderness is in my blood and I know full well that
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some day I shall return. Not, however, in the winter or summer months. Midsummer is the time to hunt Shensi takin. Then the animals are in the open on the very summits of the ridges, and it becomes merely a question of climbing high enough and preparing for lots of rain. With one exception the other white men who have killed takin have chosen the summer months and they had none of the difficulties that we encountered.
The takin has been so seldom pursued by white men that very little is known about its life history and we hunted the animals such a short time that it was not possible to obtain new information.
The natives told me that the rut begins early in August and that the calves are born the following spring in April. I feel sure that this is correct for we estimated the calf I killed (September) to be about six months old.
Takin spend the summer in the open on the highest peaks above the rhododendron forest feeding on grass, herbs, and shrubs. Were it not for the continual rain and fog they would not be particularly difficult to hunt at that time of the year, for, from what the natives told me, I do not believe they are nearly as alert as are sheep or ibex. In the fall and winter they spend the entire time in the dwarf bamboos. Like their relatives the goral and serow they like to sleep in the sun on projecting ledges where a rock wall rises at the back, and where in front there is an uninter- rupted view over the surrounding country. We
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE "
found many such places with evidence that they had been in use for years.
With his thick heavy body the animal can force his way easily through the dense bamboo thickets and the jungle is interlaced with such trails which appear to be continually travelled. I was amazed at the rapidity with which they can negotiate the roughest country when alarmed.
When in heavy cover the animals will be abso- lutely motionless until almost kicked out and the natives say that at such times they often turn and charge. I rather doubt this except in cases where they believe themselves to be cornered.
In summer they congregate into herds of 100 or more according to the Chinese, but in the winter they separate into several groups with cows, calves, and bulls together.
The Ta Pai Shan appears to be the extreme edge of their habitat in the Tsingling mountains. The hunters told me that some years there were a good many there but that at other seasons there were very few. This was confirmed by my two hunters who subsequently made their way far back into the mountains and found an abundance of takin.
The five days' trip back to Sianfu was made interesting by an abundance of game. Geese had arrived in thousands, every marsh was alive with snipe and the shooting could be varied with bus- tards, quail, hares, ducks and pheasants. We were in a sportman's paradise, and within a few hundred
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yards of the main road we could get all the birds we wanted. I had an American goose-call, which amused Collins greatly and which he refused to be- lieve had any merit.
One day while I was sitting placidly atop of a loaded mule, I saw five geese far off to the left. After a few preliminary squawks, I drew such dulcet tones from the call that the birds swung sharp about and headed straight in my direction. I managed to stop the mule but could not climb down from it be- fore the geese arrived. Risking the animal's dis- pleasure, I fired twice, killing one goose dead in the air and badly wounding another. After that, Col- lins had no more to say.
The day before our arrival at Sianfu, we travelled a road that was a mass of gluelike mud. For ten hours we sat on the loads in the pouring rain, getting off only to shoot a goose or two when we saw a flock not far away. I believe we killed eight or nine within a hundred yards of the caravan. We could not go farther afield, for it was well-nigh impossible to walk at all.
At the west gate of Sianfu we were halted for an hour, although the soldiers admitted that our pass- ports were quite in order. They must telephone the Tuchun, they said, before we could be admitted. It was only one of a thousand petty annoyances to which foreigners are subjected in the Shensi Prov- ince. After standing in the cold and wet until our patience was exhausted, we announced our inten-
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE "
tion of going into the city, regardless of officialdom. And in we went.
Three days in Sianfu were few enough, but both of us had so much to do in Peking that we could not linger. A month later our two hunters returned to Peking from Ta Pai Shan with a glorious bag including three takin. Lao Chung attributed their luck to the powers of an old man named Wang.
When I left Lingtai-miao I gave Lao Chung a rifle that had never been used. He said that after several unsuccessful days, when he had wounded animals but could not kill them, Wang told him that without doubt he had failed because the gun had killed a man. No rifle that had killed a man was good for hunting; it would have to be "treated." Wang announced that he would prove to the satisfaction of everyone that the rifle had taken human life. He produced three pieces of bamboo, round on one side, flat on the other, and each perforated with nine holes. If the gun had killed a man, the sticks would always fall with the flat sides up when he threw them into the air. Sure enough they did. The weapon had certainly killed a man. In the "treating" process old Wang traced characters on the barrel with his fingers and then stroked the rifle from muzzle to butt, mumbling incantations. In order to prove that it was now in proper condition for hunting pur- poses he said he would throw the bamboo sticks again. The first time they would fall with both flat sides up; the second with both round sides and
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the third with one flat and one round side upper- most. The sticks were thrown and fell as predicted. "Then," said Lao Chung, "I went out immediately and killed a wild boar with the first shot. I had no more trouble."
Lao Chung told us also a strange tale about our first takin hunt. He said that the man Liu who had performed a sacrifice at our camp on the Ta Pai Shan, the day we found takin, was one of a few men who had the power to "open" or "close" the moun- tain. When it had been closed all the game left at once; when it was opened all the animals came back at once.
On this last takin hunt, Lao Chung had had no success until he found Wang, the one who had "treated" his rifle. This old man, like Liu, had the power to open the mountain, and when he had been persuaded by Lao Chung to accompany him on a hunt, he gave a remarkable demonstration of his magic skill. He wrote several characters on three strips of yellow paper, rolled them up and buried them. Then, lighting sticks of incense, he chanted strange words and the mountain was open. Lao Chung never failed to find game when he was with old man Wang. After each hunt the mountain was closed by a similar ceremony. It was useless then for anyone to hunt, because the game all departed to unknown regions. Wang and the few others who had this power were unpopular with their neighbors.
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HUNTING THE "GOLDEN FLEECE "
Lao Chung firmly believed all this. Like most Chinese of the peasant class, he had a simple, super- stitious, highly imaginative mind and would tell the most astounding stories in such a way that you could not possibly accuse him of lying. I remember an instance connected with the first takin hunt. After I had killed the cow, I went down the mountain, hunting for wounded animals. While I was gone, Lao Chung suddenly came upon the dead animal and, I presume, was somewhat startled. Immediately his imaginative brain set to work, and by the time I returned he had a story ready. He announced that the takin was wounded, had charged him and chased him up a tree. "But/' I said, "I know the wild cow was dead for I killed him myself."
That made not the slightest difference and he stoutly maintained that the animal had not suc- cumbed until after it had treed him.
He has dozens of other wonderful stories which he tells to admiring friends. Neither Jason nor Tar- tarin de Tarascon could outdo Lao Chung!
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CHAPTER IV
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HPHE expedition was to leave Peking on April 17, * 1922, and for weeks beforehand the headquar- ters seethed with activity. Every man was occupied with his own individual preparations for the long summer in the desert. The courtyard in front of the laboratory was strewn with skins, boxes and equipment which were being packed to ship to New York or to go with us to Mongolia. Colgate had the main courtyard filled with automobiles and all day the whirr of motors being tested and the ring of hammers made it seem like an open air garage.
As if to bid us Godspeed the lilacs and flowering trees in the courtyard, in full bloom almost a week earlier than in any other part of the city, trans- formed the compound into a veritable Paradise.
A farewell dinner was given us by Mr. Albert B. Ruddock, First Secretary of the American Lega- tion, at which Mr. C. S. Liu, then Director of Chi- nese Railroads, became so much interested in our plans that he offered to send the motors and equip -
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ment free of charge to Kalgan and give us two pri- vate cars for the staff. His courtesy was doubly appreciated because war-clouds were gathering thickly in North China skies and continual troop movements made railroad transport most uncer- tain. There seemed to be but little doubt when we left Peking that the expected clash between Chang- Tso-lin, and Wu Pei-fu would take place within a few weeks, as, indeed, it did. We had been pro- vided by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a formidable looking document, which was sup- posed to permit our cars and equipment to leave Kalgan exempt from duty and customs inspection. When I showed it to Chang Tso-lin's soldiers who were stationed at the road to the Pass, they laughed contemptuously and said, " This is from Peking. We don't recognize Peking.' ' Therefore we had a delay of three days while another huchao was being ob- tained from the military commander at Kalgan.
At six o'clock in the morning on April 21st we left the Anderson Meyer and Company compound in Kalgan, with the three cars and two trucks. Most of our things had been sent to the village of Miao Tan, forty miles from Kalgan, so that the cars might be as light as possible during the rough travel in the Pass. Before we were out of the city gates we were joined by two other motors. One was driven by Mr. Charles L. Coltman, en route for Urga on business. (In December, 1922, Mr. Coltman was shot by Chinese soldiers a short distance out of Kal-
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gan when he was on his way to Urga. He died shortly afterwards in a Peking hospital.) In the other were Mrs. Granger, Mrs. Shackelford and Mrs. Black, who were going to the summit of the Pass to see us safely on our way. I was taking Mrs. An- drews as far as Urga in order that she might get some Paget color plates of the brilliant Mongol costumes. Dr. Davidson Black of the Peking Medical College, who had joined the expedition temporarily in order to obtain data for his anthropological studies, was to return from Urga with Mrs. Andrews.
The seven cars, finally under way, made a very imposing spectacle as they wound up the long river valley leading to the plateau. Coltman, who knew the way better than any of us, was in front, and I drove the next car, carrying Shackelford and his photographic equipment. At every picturesque spot he took a few feet of film, so that our progress was slow, even along the dry-stream bed where the road was fairly good. The Pass itself was reported to be bad and it quite lived up to our expectations. Deep ruts cut by the spike studded wheels of Chinese carts, mud holes, and huge rocks that had rolled down from the hills above, made it an "automobile nightmare." It was the first real test for the cars, and I watched them anxiously. If they nego- tiated the Pass successfully we would have nothing to fear on the way to Tuerin, for no section of the road is as bad as it is at the Pass and for seventy-five miles beyond Kalgan.
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Wonderful panoramas were unfolded as we climbed higher. When we paused to cool the engines we looked back over a shadow-flecked bad land basin, a chaos of ravines and gullies, to the purple mountains of the Shensi border. Above us loomed a rampart of basalt cliffs crowned with the Great Wall of China which stretched its serpentine length along the broken rim of the plateau. Roaring like the pre- historic monsters, the bones of which we had come to seek, our cars gained the top of the last steep slope and passed through the narrow gateway in the wall.
Before us lay Mongolia, a land of painted deserts dancing in mirage; of limitless grassy plains and nameless snow-capped peaks; of untracked forests and roaring streams! Mongolia, a land of mystery, of paradox and promise! The hills swept away in the far-flung, graceful lines of a panorama so endless that we seemed to have reached the very summit of the earth.
Never could there be a more satisfying entrance to a new country. We stopped only long enough to look about us however, for Berkey and Morris were at once convinced that the geology of the Pass would require a careful study to be properly inter- preted. Since the Pass could be easily reached from Kalgan, it was decided to postpone investigation until after our return from Mongolia.
The road that we were to follow wound through cultivated fields, green with winter wheat, passed among brown huts, and lost itself in the mud walls
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of a larger village. At Miao Tan we found our men waiting for us in the courtyard of a Chinese inn, with the gasoline, food and other supplies that had been sent on by cart. For the next hour everyone worked with feverish activity to load the cars so that we might get beyond the brigand infested cul- tivated area and camp for the night in the grass lands. A great deal of necessary equipment had arrived from New York too late to send by the caravan, and when all the things were piled upon the cars, Colgate and I were horrified. There must have been at least two tons on each of the trucks, which were designed for only half that weight. There was no alternative, for the loads were largely made up of gasoline, photographic supplies, and automobile tires that could not be left behind.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon when we left Miao Tan in a drizzling rain. There was every reason to believe that we would have several days of rain and snow, which would make it impossible for us to travel and do our work. Coltman suggested that we try to reach the Swedish Mission at Hallong Usu. This meant running after dark, but the road was so smooth and hard that, somewhat against my better judgment, I consented to go on. We were not yet out of the region of wheat and oat fields which the Chinese push forward every year into the grass lands of Inner Mongolia.
Mud villages were scattered at infrequent inter- vals and it is in this area of cultivation that the
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The fleet-footed antelope of the Mongolian plains.
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brigands concentrate for attacks upon caravans coming into Kalgan. There is little danger of ban- dits farther out in the desert for the trails are so few and far between that the traffic is not sufficiently heavy to furnish profitable "pickings" for robber bands. Ever since we had left Miao Tan I had been uneasy because the first day had gone so well. It is almost an inevitable rule in exploration that first days, when men and equipment are untried, are diffi- cult, and I have come to believe that the worse the first day the better the others will be. But before we went to sleep that night we had had trials enough to ensure a wonderfully successful Expedition.
We were driving through the inky blackness of a rainy night and still had twenty-five miles to go to reach Hallong Usu. Coltman, who was ahead, sud- denly felt himself on soft ground and a moment later his motor sunk in mud to the running boards. He hurried back in time to warn the rest of us, but in the effort to regain the trail each car became mired. Time after time we left a motor on what seemed to be firm ground, but when the others had been brought up, the first had again sunk so deep that herculean efforts were required to dig it out. It seemed an end- less business, but by midnight all the cars were huddled on a bit of high ground which we had discov- ered, except Coltman's; it was in its original posi- tion and was sinking lower. Far in the distance dogs were barking. I sent a man who could speak a little Mongol to bring oxen for Coltman's car. He
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arrived finally with three small animals and a half dozen natives. The bulls were hitched to the auto- mobile but it could not be moved an inch. There was no alternative except to rig the block and tackle, which, as luck would have it, was at the bot- tom of one of the loads.
Every man in the party was soaked to the skin, covered with mud and shivering with cold; never- theless there was not a murmur, all accepted the fortune of the road cheerfully and in intervals of chattering teeth, joked about the fact that our first experience at the edge of the Gobi Desert should be one of mud and rain. The sportsmanlike attitude of the men gave me a most encouraging view of the personnel of the expedition.
By means of the huge block and tackle we even- tually dragged Coltman's car out of the mud. I decided to camp where we were for fear that worse difficulties might be encountered if we attempted to move to a drier spot. Moreover, it was after one o'clock in the morning and we had eaten only a few sandwiches since breakfast. When I walked away to find the driest spot on which to pitch the tents I was impressed with the fantastic setting of our camp. The roaring cars as they maneuvered for position, the headlights cutting yellow paths through the inky blackness, the barking of dogs and the strange cries of the Mongols who had by this time collected in a crowd about us, gave the scene a touch of unreality that I could still appreciate, wet and tired as I was.
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When the tents were up, Black, Granger, Shackel- ford and Morris who had not been driving were unanimously elected to stand watch for what re- mained of the night. Sentinel duty was a neces- sary precaution because a suspicious looking band of natives heavily armed had ridden past us that morn- ing. They were undoubtedly brigands and, al- though we were too strong a party to be attacked on the march, there was danger that they might return.
The next morning dawned raw and cold. One by one the men straggled out of their tents to look about. We were on the far edge of a partially dry marsh, but it was almost impossible to figure out how we had managed to get through the mud in the dark. I was glad to see that the men all ap- peared to be fit and somewhat rested, after the strenuous night. Since no harm had been done I was not entirely sorry that the accident had hap- pened, for it impressed upon all of us the futility of running after dark and gave a splendid example of the behavior of the staff, Chinese and American, under trying conditions. Our cooks produced an excellent breakfast, and by the time the cars were packed and ready to leave at eleven o'clock, the sun was shining brightly.
We were in the grassy hills but Berkey and Morris had more than enough geology to occupy them. From the moment we left Kalgan they had traced a cross-section in which every mile of the structural
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and physiographic features of the country had been recorded. The geologists had a car to themselves with their complete equipment. Our rapid prog- ress made their work extremely difficult and it would have been well-nigh impossible for less experi- enced men than Berkey and Morris. They had to run off the road continually to inspect whatever rock outcrops showed above the rolling grass lands. They were always miles behind the other cars and every hour we had to stop to let them catch us. After the first few days Morris devoted his chief energies toward the physiography while Berkey recorded the geological changes.
They found that the general structure consists of a vast complex of ancient rocks in which granite predominates; upon these lie basin-like areas of those more modern sediments that often contain fossil bones. Since the Chinese Geological Survey has been investigating this region for some time, we had focussed our attention upon the less known ter- ritory of Outer Mongolia.
We camped at five o'clock in the afternoon in a beautiful amphitheatre where the low grass-covered hills rolled away in gentle yellow-green waves from the granite rocks behind the basin. It was a per- fect, windless evening — very rare in Mongolia during the spring. Coltman had shot an antelope and a bustard in the morning so we had fresh meat for dinner. The tents went up like magic and in half an hour a tiny city appeared in the grassy valley.
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The early camp gave us time to organize our forces, find necessary items of equipment and eliminate some of the accumulated mud of the previous night. Just as the stars appeared in a cloudless sky we gathered about the argul fire and had our first real meal together. Everyone was tired but happy. Long after the fire had become only a glowing heap of ashes we lay on the grass, talking of the interest- ing months before us in the desert.
Now that we were well away in the grass lands, I promised my companions a glimpse of antelope before the day was ended. They were mildly skep- tical about my stories of the sixty-miles-an-hour speed of the animals and I prayed for a herd which would give an exhibition of really high class running. My reputation for veracity was at stake, for can you imagine an animal, not equipped with wings and having no gasoline-tank, which, with only four legs, can go at the rate of sixty miles an hour — a mile a minute?
Not long after breaking camp, we discovered a score of yellow-white forms in the bottom of a broad valley east of the road. Several of us, in the touring- car, bumped down the slope over patches of short, stiff grass, while the other motors continued on their way. At first the gazelles gazed curiously at the car, ran a few feet and stopped to look again. The antelope, wild ass and some other animals invariably try to cross in front of a motor-car, even when, with the wide plain on either side of them, they could
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ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN
easily get away. Therefore, I headed diagonally toward the herd, and we were within four hundred yards of them before they finally decided that it was time to take their leave. They ran only half- heartedly, sometimes bounding into the air as if they were on rubber tires, but still we were being left rapidly behind. Shackelford shrieked with delight and implored me to "step on her," even though the car, making thirty miles an hour, bounced over the rough ground like a ship in a choppy sea. Soon the long, yellow line, fatally attracted, bent toward us. Then I shouted to Black and Granger, who were half out of the car, and threw on both brakes. Be- fore it had fully stopped, we had all leaped to the ground and begun firing. The others, new to this kind of work, had no luck, but I dropped an animal before the herd was out of range. We could not drive fast enough over the rough ground really to push the antelopes, but even this poor exhibition of speed sufficed to turn the doubters into my firm sup- porters.
Of course, gazelles cannot run a mile in a minute. I am sure no living animal can do that. But it is true that, for a short dash, perhaps a quarter of a mile, the Gobi gazelles, when thoroughly frightened, reach the speed of sixty miles an hour. Ordinarily they are curious about the car and will run only fast enough to keep well away from it. But shoot at them a few times and see what happens ! Then they all flatten out and skim the ground so lightly that
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their legs become only blurs like the wings of an electric fan.
I do not know how far they can run, but Shackel- ford and I had an illuminating experience. We found a buck on a hard plain where it seemed pos- sible to run him down and get some reliable data about his endurance. He was loping along easily at thirty-five miles an hour when we cut him out from the herd. We overhauled him rapidly, and he seemed surprised and somewhat hurt that any- thing really could make him exert himself. So he gave his accelerator a little push and shot up to forty miles. We did likewise. More surprise on the part of the gazelle, and a little more gas on our side. The car was going full out then, and the speedometer registered forty-one miles. The gaz- elle seemed to think it about time to end matters and, with a burst of speed, crossed in front of us and sprinted away so fast that we could just keep his bobbing white rump-patch in sight. But he soon slowed down, and we chugged steadily on his trail at forty-one miles an hour. The race settled into an endurance test. He kept about two hundred yards in front of us, and so we went for ten miles. Then we got a puncture but he did not. How far the animal could have gone, I would not venture to say.
With our first antelope on the running board of the car, we regained the trail just as the geologists came over the summit of a hill. I told them that
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we would await them for tiffin at Pang-kiang, the first telegraph station, which stands on the southern edge of the Gobi Desert, if the Gobi can properly be said to have an 1 'edge/' The grass lands merge so gradually into the arid regions of the Gobi that it is difficult to say just where the real desert begins. However, Pang-kiang on the south and Tuerin on the north delineates it fairly accurately in the region where the Kalgan-Urga trail crosses the Gobi.
"The City of Pang-kiang," as it is often referred to in the Chinese papers, had been the scene of impor- tant events since I last visited it in 19 19. After the Russians drove the Chinese out of Urga, they carried the war into Inner Mongolia, and for several months Pang-kiang was the first line of Chinese defense. The long hill-slope opposite the telegraph station was pitted with large, horseshoe-shaped depressions, reinforced with cement and arranged in regular lines. These were the " basements" of the quarters in which the Chinese soldiers had lived during the long winter of 1921. Pang-kiang, with its half dozen mud huts, is a desolate place at best, and the rav- ages of war made it doubly depressing.
All the morning we had been running through pleasant, rolling grass lands, yellow green with the first touches of coming spring. As we neared Pang- kiang, the country gradually changed, the grass was shorter and sparser and Gobi sage-brush was plenti- ful. But our geologists were agreeably surprised, for they realized that we were coming into a bed-
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rock desert and not one of sand. They reported that for some time we had been passing over sedi- mentary strata, and, since there were cuts and bad lands depressions, Granger felt that it would be worth while to spend the afternoon in prospecting. Therefore, we camped on the gravel plain above the telegraph station.
Shackelford and Colgate then rigged the wireless outfit for its first trial. We had made arrangements with the American Legation to have the correct time sent out at seven o'clock every evening and to give us any interesting news. The time was particularly important in order that the geologists might check the chronometers that they used in taking latitude and longitude observations. We had purchased the wireless receiving-set in Peking and had considerable doubt as to its efficiency. It looked very business- like when the aerial was erected on tent-poles bound together, but Shackelford and Colgate could not get a sound over the wire. As a matter of fact, the set never did function properly, and, after we left Urga, we were entirely without news, although the legation sent out messages frequently during the five months we were away. Fortunately, the inabil- ity to check our chronometers was not serious, for the variation was unbelievably slight : the total error to be distributed over the entire five months was only forty-five seconds. The taxidermists put out a long line of traps for small mammals and for the first time the expedition was really at work.
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The next day, just after leaving Pang-kiang, we stopped at a well beside the trail. Near by is a small temple. On my previous trips to Urga I had always looked forward to this picturesque place, with the curious, good-natured lamas, streaming across the plain on foot and horseback, their red and yellow robes flaming in the sun. I had told Shackel- ford that he would get some good pictures here, but not a human being was in sight. The white-walled temple, with its gay border of red, and the living- quarters of the lamas were deserted and partially wrecked. Scattered about the plain were dozens of soldiers' uniforms and lamas' robes, some of them containing weathered human bones. Pariah dogs — • grim evidence of the fate of the unfortunate dead — slunk in and out of the gaping walls. I suppose it was ' ' Little Hsu's" Chinese soldiers who had de- stroyed the place but it is certain that few of the harmless priests escaped alive. We left this temple of tragedy with no reluctance and gratefully turned to the sun-drenched plains and the open road.
A little later we had our first meeting with north- ern Mongols. A great caravan of them, camped beside the road, had just ended the day's march. The camels, crowded together into a compact mass, were still kneeling beside their loads. We seemed to be looking across a veritable forest of curving necks and shaggy bodies, from which the long win- ter's hair had already begun to fall away in strips and patches. Among them walked the drivers,
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pulling out the pegs that fastened the load-ropes across the back, while the animals grunted and screamed as though they were being tortured. On the outskirts of the caravan some of the Mongols were gathering argul (dried dung), the only fuel of the desert, or riding madly back and forth after a flock of fat-tailed sheep, carrying their own flesh and wool to market at Kalgan.
This was the first caravan we had seen. In the peaceful days before the Chinese invasion under "Little Hsu" in 19 19 and the subsequent years of war and terror, the Kalgan-Urga trail was a great artery of trade. Dozens of camel caravans and hundreds upon hundreds of ox- and pony-carts con- tinually streamed across the plains; at every well, dome-shaped yurts were grouped like giant bee-hives and herds of sheep drifted in snow-white masses along the sides of sheltered valleys. But the two years of war and changing politics have left their mark upon this wild, free land. Trade was paralyzed, yurts were gone and the riders of the plains avoided the travelled road. Even the telegraph-line was wrecked beyond Iren Dabasu, or Erlien, as the Chinese call it, which is just within the borders of Inner Mongolia.
We expected to camp at Erlien ; for I had instructed my caravan to leave two camel-loads of gasoline at the telegraph office, which is in the basin of a great salt marsh. Just before descending the bluff to the plain, I waited for all the motors to arrive. The geologists had told us that we had been travelling
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over sedimentary strata all afternoon, and to their practised eyes the bluff offered a possible exposure for fossil bones. I decided to go on to the telegraph office five miles away and camp, while they inves- tigated the rim of the basin. Our gasoline was wait- ing at the station, and the Chinese agent reported that the caravan had passed by two weeks earlier. We then drove over to some promising-looking ridges half a mile to the west and pitched our tents.
While my wife and I were watching a sunset, which splashed the sky with gold and red, the last two cars swung around a brown earth bank and roared into camp. We went out to meet them. I knew something unusual had happened, for no one said a word. Granger's eyes were shining and he was puffing violently at a very odious pipe. So I supposed that the " something " was good news. Silently he dug into his pocket and produced a handful of bone fragments; out of his shirt came a rhinoceros tooth, and the various folds of his upper garments yielded other fossils. Berkey and Morris were loaded in a like manner. Granger held out his hand and said: "Well, Roy, we've done it. The stuff is here. We picked up fifty pounds of bone in an hour."
Then we all laughed and shouted and shook hands and pounded one another on the back and did all the things that men do when they are very happy. No prospector ever examined the washings of a gold-pan with greater interest than we handled the
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little heap of fossil bones. Rhinoceroses we were sure of, and there were teeth that could belong only to the titanothere, a great rhinoceros-like beast that became extinct long before the Age of Man. But no titanotheres had been discovered outside Amer- ica, with the possible exception of a doubtful frag- ment from Austria! The other specimens were smaller mammals not positively identifiable, but we discussed and rediscussed the possible origin of every piece of bone. While dinner was being pre- pared, Granger wandered off along the grey-white outcrop that lay like a recumbent reptile west of camp. Even in the falling light, he discovered a half-dozen fossil bits. We realized that we had a new deposit at our very door.
We were all so eager for the next day's work that sleep came slowly and the camp was astir shortly after daylight. Before breakfast my wife and I walked out to inspect a line of traps that had been set in the sandy mounds of the basin-floor. We had caught an interesting specimen of a new sand rat (Meriones), several large hamsters (Cricetulus) , and a half-dozen kangaroo-rats (Dipus); all species new to my collection. While we were busy at the traps, we saw Dr. Berkey with head bent and hands behind his back, wandering about on the ridge near camp. Soon he came in to breakfast with both hands filled with fossils. Granger examined them with a puzzled expression.
"For the life of me," he said, "I cannot make
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that anything but reptile. It might possibly be bird, but it must have been some bird to have a leg- bone like that. It certainly isn't mammalian."
It was about two-thirds of one of the lower leg- bones which he held out. It had been found just above camp. A little later, when Dr. Black was walking to his tent, he almost stepped on the miss- ing section, which made the specimen complete. It had obviously weathered out and rolled down from the ridge above. We were confident then that it was reptilian. The geologists, with Granger and Black, went up to the ridge where Dr. Berkey found the bones. Just as my wife and I were starting out on a little shooting-trip, we met Dr. Berkey on his way into camp. "Come up with me," he said; "we've made a discovery, and a very important one."
He would give us no more information until we reached the summit of the outcrop. Then he pointed to Granger, who was on his knees, working at something with a camel's-hair brush. "Take a look at that and see what you make of it," he said.
I saw a great bone beautifully preserved and outlined in the rock. There was no doubt this time; it was reptilian and, moreover, dinosaur.
"It means," said Dr. Berkey, "that we are stand- ing on Cretaceous strata of the upper part of the Age of Reptiles — the first Cretaceous strata, and the first dinosaur ever discovered in Asia north of the Himalaya Mountains . ' '
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Unless one is a scientist, it is difficult to appre- ciate the importance of the discovery. It meant that we had added an entirely new geological period to the knowledge of the continental structure of Central Asia and had opened up a palasontological vista dazzling in its brilliance. With the rhinoceros and titanothere teeth and the other fragments of fossils that had been found the day before, the dino- saur bone was the first indication that the theory upon which we had organized the expedition might be true ; that Asia is the mother of the life of Europe and America.
While Granger was preparing to remove the bone, I returned to camp and asked Shackelford to record the discovery in motion-pictures. Berkey and Mor- ris continued their search and brought a wealth of specimens when they returned for tiffin. It was evident that fossils were abundant along the entire ridge, and the opinion was unanimous that the region must have a much more careful study than could be made in a few days.
The identification of this Cretaceous area and the subsequent determination of the younger Age of Mammals beds which lay upon it and in contigu- ous regions were not only a personal triumph for Berkey, Morris and Granger, but also for American science. Other geologists had traversed the same formations, but had failed to determine correctly the strata and recognize their vast importance. The splendid achievement of our men was also an
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excellent example of the value of correlated work, which was the principle upon which the expedition was organized. Geology and palaeontology are so intimately related that one is incomplete without the other; for the correct determination of geolog- ical horizons is largely dependent upon the fossil remains they contain.
The method of finding fossils seems to be a mys- tery to the layman. As a matter of fact, it is merely a question of scientific knowledge and training. In the first place, geological conditions must be right. Volcanic and metamorphic rocks can never con- tain fossils; for they have been subjected to heat and chance, which destroy bones instead of preserving them. Thus fossils can occur only in sedimentary strata, such as sandstone, shale and limestone. Fos- sils are being made today just as they were a million years ago. When an animal dies the skeleton may be covered with sand or other sediments. This heaps up higher and higher and eventually is con- solidated into rock. Then a very slow change begins. Cell by cell the animal substance in the bone is replaced by mineral matter and the skeleton becomes petrified, or changed to stone. Sedimen- tary strata must not be too old — that is, they must not have been laid down before vertebrate animals existed — or naturally they cannot contain the bones of such animals. Not only must a region have the proper age and geological formation for fossils; it must also be opened and cut by ravines and gullies
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or have bluffs and ridges that give a cross-section through its structure.
Long before the Iren Dabasu basin was reached, we had been driving across sedimentary strata, but because they were not dissected there was little possibility of finding fossils. As soon as Berkey, Morris and Granger saw the bluffs which we de- scended to the salt-lake flood-plain, they realized that here was what they had been seeking — a deeply- exposed cross-section of the rock and sediment on the top of which we had been running for so many miles. From that moment it was simply a question of using their eyes to find bones that had been un- covered by the action of wind and rain.
Contrary to the general impression, a palaeontol- ogist seldom digs for fossils unless he sees them. Perhaps it is only the tiniest part of a bone that catches his trained eyes, but it may give the clue to the discovery of an entire skeleton. Perhaps the fossils lie completely exposed upon the surface or have been washed by rain or streams far away from the spot where they were originally buried. Berkey found the first dinosaur bone on the summit of the outcrop above camp. Black found the remaining fragment at the base of the exposure; evidently it had been washed down by a flood of rain, possibly not many days before we arrived. The long ridge beside which our tents were pitched contained bones, teeth and claws of large and small flesh-eating and herbivorous dinosaurs.
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By the slow but resistless action of wind and weather, the hundreds of feet of rock and sediment that formerly lay upon the ridge had been worn away, leaving exposed these strata, deposited sev- eral million years ago, near the close of the Age of Reptiles. Farther to the west, toward the bluff from which the ridge takes its origin, the action of weathering has not progressed so far and the cre- taceous rock is still overlaid by sediments depos- ited during the middle Tertiary, the Age of Mammals. After I had gone, the geologists discovered other fossil-bearing beds, far older than those of the bluff and going back to the Dawn period of the Age of Mammals.
At the present time the salt-lake basin is a most God-forsaken region. Spotted by conical, sandy mounds sparsely covered with thorny bushes and Gobi sage-brush — a burning desert under the sum- mer's sun and an arctic desolation in winter — it is very different from its condition six million years ago. The basin was evidently the floor of a great lake or of several lakes and marshes; their margins clothed with a luxuriant vegetation, were the homes of the dinosaurs, turtles and crocodiles, the bones of which we found. The climate was undoubtedly warm and moist, not only here but all over the Central Asian plateau, and the cold winters and ex- treme aridity of the present day did not prevail until comparatively recent times.
It was difficult to leave this spot where such fas-
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cinating glimpses of the long-dead past were being unfolded every day, but I knew that inevitably there would be complications in Urga before per- mission could be obtained to proceed farther into Outer Mongolia, and that no time was to be lost if the entire expedition was not to be delayed. Leaving Berkey, Granger and Morris, and a taxider- mist to carry on zoological collecting, I took the rest of the party on the three hundred and fifty mile trip to Tuerin, where we hoped to find our camel caravan.
Long before reaching Tuerin, we could see the ragged mass of granite, which rises like a magnificent citadel nearly one thousand feet above the surround- ing plain. We came to the base of the " mountain' ' just before noon and saw a great caravan camped beside the road. As we drew nearer, I made out the American flag flying from one of the loads and recog- nized our boxes. It was our own caravan. Merin, the head camel man, said that they had arrived only an hour before. They started from Kalgan, March 21, and we met them April 28. This was the ren- dezvous! I had told Merin five weeks before to reach Tuerin on this day.
Merin is a remarkable native. He has led cara- vans for two other exploring expeditions in Mon- golia and loves the work. He is honest, resource- ful, thoroughly sportsman-like in his willingness to take a chance on anything under the sun, careful of his animals and reliable as a clock. I have a very
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real affection for him. Time after time he has brought his camels to the rendezvous on the ap- pointed day after traversing hundreds of miles of unknown plains. He has carried priceless collec- tions from the very heart of the Gobi Desert with- out damage to a single box. He never promises more than he can fulfil. Last summer he made a heroic march across four hundred miles of burn- ing desert and arrived with sixteen exhausted camels out of the seventy odd that started. When I told him we had been afraid he could not reach us, he resplied: "You need not have worried. I'd have got through somehow even if it was with only one camel. I told you I would come." That expressed his entire philosophy. He had told us he would come and he never thought of such a thing as not arriving.
The caravan was directed to remain where they were while we continued on a few miles to the tele- graph station, near which we intended to camp. The line had been wrecked during the recent fight- ing so that there was no communication north of Iren Dabasu, but we found a good-natured Mongol in charge. He presented me with a letter from Larsen addressed to "Roy Chapman Andrews, Esquire, Anywhere in Mongolia." The letter had been brought to Tuerin by Mr. K. P. Albertson, a very good friend of mine, who had gone to Urga to enter into negotiations for the reconstruction of the telegraph-line. Larsen reported that all was favor-
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Merin, the remarkable leader of the camel caravan, who never promises more
than he can fulfill.
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able for the expedition, but that I must come to Urga to get passports and attend to other diplo- matic matters before we could start west.
The telegraph station is just outside the rocks at Tuerin, and we ran up a narrow, sloping plain to select a camp -site. It would be difficult to imagine a wilder or more rugged spot. The "mountain" itself is the root of an ancient peak, ages ago of majestic height, but reduced by wind and weather to the present chaotic heap of granite. It made an ideal camping-place. When the tents were up, I sent Colgate in one of the cars to get the caravan. Shackelford made his arrangements for the "mov- ies" and at half past three he began singing, "The camels are coming."
My wife and I climbed to a flat-topped ledge, just as the great white leader, bearing the American flag, appeared from behind a boulder at the entrance to the plain. Majestically, in single file, the camels advanced among the rocks and strung out in a seem- ingly endless line. My blood thrilled at the sight; for it impressed upon me, as nothing else had, that the expedition was an accomplished fact. The camels swung past the tents, broke into three lines like files of soldiers and knelt to have their loads removed; then, with the usual screams and pro- tests, they scrambled to their feet and wandered down the hill-slope to the plain, nibbling at the vegetation as they went.
We had slept and eaten on the ground on the way
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to Tuerin but now obtained folding-tables, chairs and camp-cots, as well as fresh provisions, from the caravan loads, and began to live in luxury. After I had told Liu, our cook, to roast a wild goose for din- ner and had arranged for the two taxidermists to set out a hundred traps for small animals, my wife and I climbed over the rocks to a secluded amphi- theatre to enjoy the sunset. It was a beautiful evening, warm and without a breath of wind. As we stood in the little basin, looking at the magnifi- cent battlements, which rose tier upon tier above us, she said, "This should be a theatre setting; the scene for some weird tragedy like Macbeth" She had scarcely spoken when we heard a subdued roar beyond us to the north. In an instant it was louder, and a yellow cloud rose above the ragged peaks. The air became suddenly colder.
I knew that one of the terrible Mongolian storms was upon us and shouted to my wife to run for camp. We dashed over the rocks and had just rounded a huge boulder when the wind-cloud swept down upon the tents. It came like a cyclone, bringing a swirl of yellow dust and sand. We could not see twenty feet ahead, but we heard a clatter of tins, the sharp rip of cloth, and then a tumbling mass of beds, tables, chairs, bags and pails swept down the hill. Clinging to the great rock, which gave us partial shelter, we watched the yellow cloud pass down the slope and whirl across the plain with the speed of a race-horse. A heavy gale still roared over the rocks
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to the north, but as soon as it was possible to see through the smother of sand, everyone dashed to rescue some favorite article of camp equipment. The Mongols hung to the tents, trying to keep them upright, but cloth was ripping in every one.
The whole side of the cook-tent had been torn away. Poor Liu thought only of his roasting goose. When he saw his little Standard Oil tin oven jammed against a rock and half filled with sand, it was too much even for his Oriental calm.
"Eya, eya," he wailed, "the goose, the goose is spoiled.' ' It was an hour later and pitch-dark before the camp was put to rights. The tempera- ture had dropped thirty degrees, and with that first cold blast winter was back again. It did not leave us finally until June 22.
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CHAPTER V
IN THE CITY OF THE LIVING GOD
JUST to the west of the ragged core of rocks where we camped lies the Tuerin monastery. Three temples nestle in a bowl-shaped hollow, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, pill-box dwellings painted red and white. There must be nearly a thousand of them and twice as many lamas. On the north the low hills throw protecting arms around the homes of these half-wild men who have chosen to spend their lives in this lonely desert stronghold.
The day after our arrival in Tuerin, we went to the monastery, so that Shackelford might get some motion-pictures. Before the car had stopped on the rim of the great depression, hundreds of red and yellow lamas poured out from the yurts and temples, and we were surrounded and nearly suffo- cated. The Mongols are likable but they cannot be credited by even their most enthusiastic sup- porters with the virtue of cleanliness. They do not bathe. They wipe their fingers on their gar- ments and, since their food is largely mutton, they reek with the odor of rancid fat. All this may be
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disillusioning to those who visualize the Tuerin mon- astery as delicately perfumed with myrrh and frank- incense. Nevertheless the dim interior, lighted by the yellow candles and flaming with brilliant stream- ers hanging from the altar and the walls, made a fascinating picture.
The lamas, fanatics as they are, never can be trusted very far. I have learned from experience that it is wise to be careful in using a motion-picture camera about the temples. Shackelford's camera, with its battery of lenses, is a most formidable-look- ing object. But 11 Shack" himself can allay super- stitious fears with his winning smile and keen sense of humor, and he wandered about the narrow alleys between the houses of the lamas, into the temples and among the shrines, photographing wherever and whatever he wished and always followed by a laughing mob of priests.
Lamaism, the religion of Mongolia, which was introduced from Tibet, is largely responsible for the present decadence of the Mongol race. The first- born son of every family must enter the priesthood, and sometimes all the boys become lamas. In the temples, where they live, they spend their time in chanting Tibetan prayers, which they do not under- stand. They are human parasites, mentally and morally degraded, who exist by preying upon the superstitions of the lay population. If it were not that some of them spend only a few months each year in the temples, there would not be enough men
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left at home to carry on the business of living; for at least two-thirds of the male population of Mon- golia are lamas.
Although Mongols are among the dirtiest people on earth, their temples are always scrupulously clean. At the far end of the main room is a statue of the Buddha, above an altar bearing ever-lighted candles. Rows of prayer-mats facing the centre are arranged on the floor, and gay streamers of silk hang from the ceilings. The walls are adorned with paintings representing various gods and god- desses— some of them lewd in the extreme. The high priest sits at the right of the altar, with the lamas on the mats below him. The monotonous chanting of throaty voices, interrupted by the clash of cymbals and the throb of drums, makes the serv- ice in the dimly lighted room impressive in a bar- baric way.
In no country have I ever seen people more fanat- ically superstitious than the Mongols. They be- come frenzied at any interference with their religious practices, and yet, like the Chinese, they think they can fool their gods. A missionary told me that one day he found some lamas in a temple, drinking and using the vilest language. When he asked how they dared do and say such things in front of the images, they replied: "Oh, that's all right! We've covered the eyes of the gods with paper, and they can't understand what we say because we are talking Mon- golian and not Tibetan."
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A priest is supposed never to take life, but some of the lamas forget their Buddhist principles. In the Altai Mountains I had a lama guide. He had been a hunter, but during a severe illness had given the Buddha his promise to become a lama if he recov- ered. True to his vow, he shaved his head and went into the temple for a few months each year, but by the end of four years the lure of the moun- tains had grown so strong that he became once more absorbed in hunting.
Once when my wife and I were camping in a valley north of Urga, the wife of our hunter brought us her baby, which was suffering from eczema. In vain a wandering lama had been exhorting the gods to cure the child. I applied oxide of zinc and sul- phur. In two weeks the disease had disappeared. Thereupon the priest collected fifty dollars' worth of sheep and goats from my hunter.
" Do you think it was the lama's prayers or my for- eign medicine that cured your baby?" I asked the woman. She readily admitted that it was the ointment.
"Then why do you pay the priest ?"
"If I didn't, he would bring a curse upon our family," she replied. "All our sheep and goats would die, and we should have great misfortunes."
Another Mongol at the same village dislocated his shoulder. I slipped the bone in place, and the lama collected two sheep. So it was throughout the sum- mer: I made the cures and the priest got the fees.
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The lamas are supposed to be celibates, but many of them take unto themselves a woman, either tem- porarily or for life, when they do not live in a temple. The Mongols are unmoral rather than immoral. They are children of nature, with the animal instinct unchecked. The women are careful about exposing their bodies, but do not regard chastity as an espe- cial virtue. Wandering lamas or travellers often demand a woman when they stop at a yurt and they are seldom refused. As a result, venereal dis- ease is prevalent.
When we reached camp after visiting the temple at Tuerin, Merin was patching the foot of one of our camels. A most extraordinary operation it was. Ropes were first looped about the legs and, as they were tightened, three men pushed the animal over by main force. Then the hind feet were drawn between the front legs and securely tied. In one of the great flat pads was a small cut. This was sufficient to make the beast lame. Merin first scraped out all the sand and then sewed a piece of thick leather over the wound exactly as one would patch a torn garment. He used a curved needle eight inches long and a rawhide thong. The camel grunted and groaned when his legs were roped and then settled into a continuous wailing. It would have been pathetic had we not known that the groans all came from fright; for the brute was suffering no more pain than does a horse when he is being shod. But under any circumstances a camel will be sure
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to make himself ridiculous; in spite of his colossal bulk he is almost as easily frightened as a mouse.
In the intervals of repacking the caravan loads we explored the innermost recesses of the rocky peaks near camp. Everywhere the heaps of empty rifle- shells, cartridge-clips and discarded clothing gave evidence of battle. In that terrible winter of 1921 several thousand Chinese were encamped near the telegraph station. Baron Ungern sent Cossacks to attack them, but, before the Russians arrived, a Mongol general, by doing miles of hard riding across the plains, reached Tuerin at the head of three hun- dred soldiers. Without regard for the enormously superior numbers of the Chinese, they attacked at once. The general, whom I met later in Urga, told me about it. "We rode at full speed through the camp," said he, " killing everyone we saw. Then we rode back again. The Chinese ran like sheep and we butchered them by hundreds." Except for the modern weapons, the story might have been a thousand years old; for this method of warfare was a heritage from Genghis Khan: hours of hard riding, regardless of sleep and food, a sudden whirlwind attack and then relentless slaughter.
During the summer of 1922, when the expedition was in the western Gobi Desert, we continually had reports of a great band of brigands operating to the southwest of us. They were under the command of a well-known chief, who had declared war upon all Russians and adherents of the Soviet-controlled
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Mongol government. Any captured Russians — and that phrase really meant white men, since to the Mongols all white men are Russians — were tor- tured in the most inhuman way. One man was skinned alive. We ourselves did not dare to ven- ture into this region. In the winter of 1 922-1 923, the bandits were giving so much trouble that the same Mongol general who had operated at Tuerin was sent against them.
I heard the account of the raid from Mr. F. A. Lar- sen, last spring. There were more than a thousand of the robbers. The general had six hundred sol- diers. His methods were direct and characteristic. He halted his men several miles from the bandits' camp and rode in with only six men. They galloped to the door of the chief's yurt, dismounted and went inside. Three Mongols were with the chief. "How do you do?" asked the general as he drew his auto- matic pistol and shot all four men before they could move. Then, going outside, he told the bandits who he was. His name, and their knowledge of the story of a charm which the Living Buddha had given him, frightened them so that they made no attempt to kill him and no resistance when his soldiers came in. He agreed to spare their lives if they would come with him and join the Mongol army. Most of them accepted the terms, but a few refused to go. So with the remark that they had " better make it unanimous," he shot the reluctant ones.
On May 2 we left camp at Tuerin for Urga in one
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car. The city of the Living Buddha had changed in many ways since our visit in 1 9 1 9. Then, we came as freely as if we were on the open plains; now, the numerous visits to be paid to yamens, the endless questioning by agents of the Secret Police, the spy- ing and the searching of baggage made one feel as if one were entering a hostile camp. Nevertheless, Urga had not lost its bizarre charm. Colgate, Black and Shackelford were just as impressed as I hoped they would be when we finally escaped from the outlying examination stations and drove through the Russian section. For two miles the road is dis- tinctly Russian; then it debouches into a large square, which loses its individual character and becomes a mixture of Mongolia, China and Russia. Palisaded compounds, gay with fluttering prayer- flags, ornate Russian houses, felt-covered Mongol yurts and Chinese shops are bewilderingly jumbled together.
The day after our arrival I met the Mongolian Minister of Justice, Mr. Badmajapoff, who was to accompany the expedition. He is a grave, hand- some man whose charming personality made an immediate appeal to all of us. It was entirely due to the efforts of Mr. Badmajapoff and Mr. Larsen that we were able to satisfy eventually all the gov- ernment requirements and obtain our passports.
While the diplomatic negotiations were proceed- ing, we were all busy — Shackelford taking his " mov- ies,' ' Mrs. Andrews with her color-photographs and
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Dr. Black in the hospital, recording anthropological measurements and observations. We never tired of wandering with our cameras through the narrow alleys of the Mongol quarter, just behind Larsen's house. In front of the tiny native shops were Mon- gols in a half-dozen different tribal dresses, Tibetan pilgrims, Manchu Tartars, camel-drivers from Turk- estan and lamas in robes of red and gold. Here one could see all types of head-covering, from the high- peaked hat of yellow and black — through the whole strange gamut — to the helmet with streaming pea- cock plumes. Inevitably the city had lost its gay, free atmosphere. Those terrible days under Un- gern, the "Mad Baron," when the streets were red with blood and the lives of men were of less value than those of sheep, will not soon be forgotten. Nevertheless, Urga remains the most fascinating city I have found in all my wanderings into the strange corners of the world.
One day Mr. Badmajapoff and I drove over the long bridge across the Tola Gol, to one of the palaces of the Living Buddha, which lie at the base of the Bogdo Ola. I had brought a rifle as a present; for the Hutuktu still liked guns although he was blind and old and very feeble. I hoped to be able to see His Holiness, and we waited for a bitterly cold hour in a small building adjoining the palace while my gift was sent in. Hundreds upon hun- dreds of devout pilgrims were circling the house, prostrating themselves at intervals and gathering
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A belle of Chakhan: she is wearing the southern Mongolian head-dress.
IN THE CITY OF THE LIVING GOD
handfuls of sacred dust from the court within the palisades. Even though the Living Buddha had been shorn of his temporal power by recent political events he kept his former glory in the minds of the Mongol people. At last a high lama official came out and courteously said that His Holiness was too ill to receive me but that he appreciated my gift and in return wished to present me with a silk scarf and photographs of himself and his wife. The pictures evidently were taken many years ago.
May 9th had been set for the great festival of the Maidari, which takes place once a year. We were all eager to see it ; for it had never been photographed in color or in motion-film. The Maidari, or Coming Buddha, is a most sacred Bodhisattva. A gilded image of him reposes in a splendid temple in Urga. On this day, which is kept in honor of his incarna- tion, his image is placed on a huge throne, smothered in decorations and drawn about the streets as the central figure in an elaborate procession.
The festival began in the early morning, for the Maidari had a long way to go. At ten o'clock, when we reached the main square, the procession had not yet appeared, but the air was throbbing to the boom of drums and the deep notes of conch- shells. As the waves of sound beat down upon us, we could see in the east a great mass of color, advan- cing slowly. Soon groups could be distinguished; then slender lines and huge umbrellas blazing in the sunlight. Every shade of the spectrum was re-
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peated a hundred times in the gorgeous pageant of marching lamas. As the procession neared us, I recognized the Premier in a robe of spun gold with a priceless sable hat upon his head. Beside him were the four reigning khans, or kings of Mongolia, and behind them a double row of princes, dukes and lesser nobles dressed in dark blue gowns with bril- liant cuffs and streaming peacock plumes.
The great throne bearing the Maidari was shaded by a silk umbrella of rainbow colors and surrounded by the highest lamas resplendent in cloth of gold. From the throne silken ropes led off to flanking lines of red and yellow lamas bearing huge umbrellas of bright-hued silk. Behind the Maidari came other lamas, thousands of them, and women dressed in rich gowns with ropes of pearls about their necks and hair ornaments of gold studded with precious stones. Almost ten thousand lamas were with the Maidari, and two or three thousand men, women and chil- dren followed. When the procession reached an open square, overlooked by the great temple on the summit of the hill, the throne was halted and the lamas seated themselves upon prayer-mats in con- verging masses of solid color, with the Premier, the reigning khans and the lesser princes at the very centre and the highest lamas flanking the Maidari.
The seated priests were given tea and food while a red-robed lama in the Maidari's chariot energet- ically thumped the heads of the populace with a long stick padded at the end. There could not be the
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slightest doubt in the mind of a supplicant that he had been blessed after the ball at the end of the stick landed on his head; for the officiating lama took huge delight in bringing it down with force enough to rock his victim. Nevertheless, thousands of people crowded about the throne and the priest laid on lustily for an hour.
The princesses and wives of the higher nobles made one gasp for breath at their splendor. The wife of one of the great khans in particular was the most magnificently adorned creature I have ever seen. According to the custom of northern Mongol women, she had her hair plaited over a frame into two enormous flat braids, curved like the horns of a mountain-sheep and reinforced with bars of gold. Each horn ended in a gold plaque, studded with precious stones, and supporting a pendant braid like a riding-quirt ; this was enclosed in a long cylin- der of gold, heavily jeweled. On her head, between the horns, the lady wore a gold filigree cap studded with rubies, emeralds and turquoises, and surmount- ing this, a "saucer" hat of black and yellow, richly trimmed with sable. Just above her ears great ropes of pearls hung from her gold cap half-way to her waist. Her skirt and jacket were of rich silk; over all was thrown a dazzling brocade coat with prominent puffs upon the shoulders.
The princesses had a dignity that was very becom- ing to their high estate. They were accorded none of their husbands' privileges, so far as the procession
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was concerned, but, each accompanied by a servant, they moved majestically in the midst of the vast crowd. Now and then they stopped to talk quietly for a moment with a friend or to acknowledge the deep salutes from both men and women by a slight bend of the head and just the ghost of a smile.
On the day following the festival, my wife and Dr. Black left Urga for the return trip to Kalgan. They rode in a large car driven by Mr. Brandauer, and his own motor, with a German chauffeur, car- ried a party of Chinese. Two days later, early in the morning, I had a letter from my wife saying that Brandauer' s car had had a serious accident. One Chinese had been killed and among the injured was an old Mongol whom I was sending down to guide my caravan to the rendezvous outside Urga. His skull had been fractured and his collar-bone broken.
At the same time news filtered into Urga that a great battle had been fought between Chang Tso- lin and Wu Pei-fu and that Chang had been de- feated. It was most depressing to know that the return trip had begun so unfortunately for Black and my wife and that they would probably run into a full-fledged war in the vicinity of Peking. It would be impossible for me to know for months whether they had returned home safely.
At last Larsen and I were asked to meet the Mongolian Cabinet at the Foreign Office, where the final details of the Expedition permits were to be discussed. The Premier, the Minister of Foreign
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Affairs and many other officials were arranged in solemn conclave about the table. I was presented with a contract in which the Expedition pledged itself to do certain things and to refrain from doing others. After the conditions had been somewhat modified, the Foreign Minister and I signed the agreement.
Then the Premier asked that, if it were possible, I should capture for the Mongolian government a specimen of the alter gorhai-horhai. I doubt whether any of my scientific readers can identify this animal. I could, because I had heard of it often. None of those present ever had seen the creature, but they all firmly believed in its existence and described it minutely. It is shaped like a sausage about two feet long, has no head nor legs and is so poisonous that merely to touch it means instant death. It lives in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert, whither we were going. To the Mongols it seems to be what the dragon is to the Chinese. The Premier said that, although he had never seen it himself, he knew a man who had and had lived to tell the tale. Then a Cabinet Minister stated that "the cousin of his late wife's sister" had also seen it. I promised to produce the alter gorhai-horhai if we chanced to cross its path, and explained how it could be seized by means of long steel collecting forceps; moreover, I could wear dark glasses, so that the disastrous effects of even looking at so poisonous a creature would be neutralized. The meeting adjourned with the best of feeling; for we had a common interest in
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capturing the alter gorhai-horhai. I was especially happy because now the doors of Outer Mongolia were open to the expedition.
At Lar sen's house we found the old Mongol who had been injured in the motor accident on the way to Tuerin. He brought from Colgate a note that gave me great satisfaction. Colgate said that the plucky old fellow had made light of his wounds, although he was painfully smashed up, and had insisted on fufilling his duty of guiding the motors to the appointed rendezvous nineteen miles west of Urga. They had arrived several days before and all was well with the party.
Nothing ever looked better to me, when we arrived two days later, than did the blue tents of our camp pitched on the side of a gentle slope with a great snow-bank glistening in the distance. Beyond was a small temple surrounded by a half-dozen Mongol yurts; the place rejoiced in the name of Bolkuk Gol.
Not more than two hours after we reached camp, Merin came galloping in on his great white camel. He reported that the caravan was only half a mile away and that all the animals were in good condi- tion. Soon we saw the long line of camels silhou- etted on the summit of a hill with the American flag streaming above the leader. Thus for the first time the entire expedition was together. It was another instance of the remarkably close connection main- tained throughout the summer between the cara- van and the motors.
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We should not see the camels again until we reached Tsetsenwan's, a hundred and sixty miles away. So I worked until long after sunset, tak- ing food, gasoline and other equipment from the camel-loads and putting in instead all the speci- mens that thus far had been collected. We cele- brated our reunion with a huge dinner, and I went to sleep with peace and thanksgiving in my heart. The last barrier had been passed and before us lay an open trail to the Great Unknown.
Before we left I had the disagreeable duty of send- ing back to Urga a French mechanic who had come with us from Kalgan. I had engaged him because he knew cars and spoke the three most useful lan- guages, Mongol, Russian and Chinese.
He was one of those men who have succumbed to the fascination of Mongolia — a fascination as elusive as it is potent. I have known men to whom the country was forbidden under sentence of death, yet they seemed powerless to resist its spell. Our mechanic had been living in Peking for several years, he said, but the ambition of his life was to return to the plains and deserts of Mongolia. The land of freedom and great spaces! The land of opportuni- ties! He was barely five feet tall, but he swelled with emotion as he spoke the words.
Just before we left for Kalgan, he asked if he might take strychnine and other drugs to sell to the Mongols. Of course I refused; for the expedition could not be connected with trade in any way, and,
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particularly, not with drugs. He accepted the deci- sion philosophically enough, and I dismissed the matter from my mind.
He drove the geologists' car, and before many days Berkey and Morris obtained some illuminating glimpses of his diminutive soul. He volunteered the information that he was an anarchist ; he hated gov- ernments of any kind and he liked Mongolia because every man there was a law unto himself. Appar- ently he hated life in general; the sight of a skylark pouring forth its very heart in song drew forth a shot from his pistol or a stone when his cartridges were exhausted. He kept a candle burning in his tent all night, saying that the darkness depressed his spirit and filled his mind with " black thoughts." The slow progress of the geologists in their scientific work drove him mad. One day he said to Granger: "Rocks, rocks, there are plenty of rocks ahead; too many rocks, and yet they will not go! See, in one hour we travel only five miles! "
"Never mind!" said Granger. "The next hour, we'll probably make only three!"
All this I did not know until I obtained our pass- ports from the Mongol government. When I gave the small anarchist's name as a member of our party, startled looks passed between the Minister of For- eign Affairs and the Soviet Adviser. They spoke quickly in Mongolian, and the Russian left. I heard later than he had gone to despatch a telegram to Moscow. I was not long in learning our man's
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IN THE CITY OF THE LIVING GOD
record in Urga. He was reported to have been a member of a band of brigands in the west, which robbed Whites and Reds alike during the bloody days of Baron Ungern. He was a camp-follower, subsisting on the spoils of robber-bands, a human jackal. The Soviets wanted him badly, although they did not tell me so. Of course, I decided to send him back at once and I obtained a Chinese chauffeur to fill his place.
When I told our anarchist that he must return, he became as pale as wax. "They will hang me if I go to Urga," he pleaded. "You'll have my blood on your hands. It is death for me to go there."
' ' Why did you come to Mongolia with such a rec- ord?" I asked. "You knew you would be killed."
' ' I don't know. I had to come back. The plains called me. I thought the American flag would pro- tect me!" he whimpered.
Perhaps I might have been affected by his terror had I not discovered a thousand bottles of strychnine in his bed-roll. He intended to sell it to the Mon- gols for use in poisoning fur-bearing animals. That was the finishing touch ; for it would have meant the ruin of the expedition to bring this contraband into the country. I had made strong statements to the Mongol officials regarding the purely scientific char- acter of the work, and they had exempted our cara- van from customs inspection. There was only one thing to do : to send the man with his strychnine into Urga under escort, accompanied by a statement of
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the case to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I learned subsequently that he escaped from Urga just one day ahead of the hangman. Like others whose stories I could tell, he still lives in Kalgan at the entrance to Mongolia, not daring to cross the fron- tier, but unable to tear himself away.
I know a dozen men who, during the bloody days of " Little Hsu," "Mad Baron" Ungern and the Bolshevist advance guard, saw women and children butchered in the streets of Urga, or swinging by the neck from their own door-posts, and dogs gnawing at frozen bodies in every alley; men who themselves have passed through tragedies enough to shake the strongest nerves; men who have seen their business ruined by war and changing policies and yet have returned to Mongolia at the first indication of com- parative peace. If you ask them why, they answer: "I don't know. I like it. I believe in the coun- try." They never have phrased to themselves the fact that they have the frontiersman's spirit — the same spirit that won our American West, that won Alaska and that will continue to win the wasted places of the earth until all have been reclaimed. Such men feel the lure of the mountain and the des- ert, of the vast open and of the limitless sky. The wild, free life calls to their primitive human instincts ; life in the raw, stripped of artificial conventions, where strength, endurance and courage are the ulti- mate test, where the last resource is the Man Himself.
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CHAPTER VI
TENTING IN LAMA LAND
W7HEN I awoke in camp at Bolkuk Gol on the morning of May 19, I was filled with delight- ful excitement. At the end of the day's run we were in a new region.
Climbing a long slope to the ridge of a low moun- tain-chain we passed through a rocky gateway and carne into a country of rolling grass lands. From the summit of almost every hill we could see groups of grazing antelopes and sometimes herds of several hundred. Marmots popped in and out of their bor- rows like toy animals manipulated by strings, and once two wolves loped across the trail in front of us.
Twenty-five miles from Bolkuk Gol we found a well in the bottom of a beautiful valley and decided to stop. Although we were still in pre-Cambrian igneous rocks, which, because of their age and forma- tion, could not contain fossils, Berkey and Morris needed some time to study the complicated geology of the region. The tents were pitched in the centre of a great amphitheatre formed by rounded, grass
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covered hills, which gave partial shelter from the wind. We spent two days there. Granger and I set a long line of traps, which yielded an interesting variety of small mammals — hamsters, field-voles, gophers, conies and kangaroo-rats, of species not in my collection. Colgate, Larsen and Badmajapoff went after antelopes and brought in five. Berkey and Morris worked like mad in the daytime, running nearly a hundred miles over the surrounding coun- try, and sat up half the night, "shooting the stars" for our geographical position. Shackelford hunted marmots and kept the taxidermists supplied with specimens.
In the northern grass lands and on the slopes of the Altai the marmots gave us never-ending amuse- ment. They are first cousins to our American wood- chucks and are reported to be responsible for the spread of pneumonic plague. They are fur-bearers of commercial value: millions of skins are shipped to China and Russia every year and distributed to all parts of the world. The autumn fur is gray- brown, soft and very thick. When the animals emerge in the spring after their months of hiberna- tion, they have changed their garments for a dress of bright yellow, which is most conspicuous in the green grass of the plains.
Though marmots can easily be trapped, the Mon- gols always shoot them. Their curiosity and their dislike of dogs are often utilized against them by the hunter. One day I saw an old Mongol, with a
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flintlock on his back and a dog's skin thrown across his saddle, riding toward a marmot colony. He hob- bled his horse, perhaps three hundred yards away, and got down on all fours with the skin arranged on his back. He advanced toward the nearest mar- mot, now and then stopping to bark.
The little animal stood on his hind legs, whistl- ing excitedly, and then ran to the mound of dirt near his hole, which he mounted for a better view. The Mongol approached closer and closer, barking hoarsely. Then suddenly he flattened himself on the ground and pushed his old flintlock forward into position. The marmot seemed on the verge of ex- ploding. Standing on tiptoe on the very summit of his mound, whistling and chuckling, he tried to see what had become of the "dog." His fat little body silhouetted against the sky offered a first-rate target. The Mongol fired, leaped forward and seized the animal before it wriggled into the hole in its death- struggle.
The native's more usual method of hunting is to chase a marmot into its hole and then dispose him- self at full length fifteen or twenty feet away with his gun in position. Sometimes he waits for an hour before the marmot pokes his head out of the burrow; sometimes for only a few moments. But hours or minutes are all one to a Mongol. He is perfectly happy to lie there in the sun, himself half- asleep, and await developments. I have heard from both white men and natives of the dance that the
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marmots sometimes perform, but I never have seen it myself.
When the geologists reported that they had solved the structural problems that puzzled them, we went on to Tsetsenwan's, driving over beautiful grass- covered hills and into valleys fresh with streams of sweet, clear water. But there were so few inhab- itants along the trail that it was surprising suddenly to top a long slope and see below us, at the base of a rounded hill, the monastery, like a miniature city of tiny houses, temples and pinnacled shrines, walled in by enormous piles of arguL Before the lamas had time to give more than a yell of surprise, we roared past the temple and sped on to our camping- place. It was two miles beyond, in the mouth of a deep canyon completely sheltered from the wind.
It was necessary for us to wait at Tsetsenwan's for our caravan, although, from the palaeontological point of view, the region was disappointing. It continued to consist of metamorphic and igneous rocks of very great age. Berkey, Morris and Granger came to the conclusion that, since we were travelling parallel with the outcrop of strata, we should find no sedi- mentary basins until we turned sharply southward. Nevertheless, they considered the country geolog- ically interesting and they were busy every moment.
On the ridges and hill-slopes near camp were many ancient remains of great archaeological interest. In fact, the whole countryside was dotted with them. They were of two kinds: one, a large circle of small
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stones with a rock mound in the centre; the other, a rectangular space enclosed by upright granite slabs. The former were probably tribal meeting- places or monuments of a ceremonial type, and the latter were doubtless graves. The natives could tell us nothing about them except that they were very old and had been made by people who had lived long before the Mongols came. Badmajapoff said that in the country to the west, members of the Kozloff Expedition had opened many similar graves, which contained skeletons, together with iron and bronze objects. Douglas Carruthers in his Unknown Mon- golia has discussed remains from the grass lands west by north of Tsetsenwan's and has published photo- graphs of ruins almost exactly like those we found. These he calls " tumuli," or " kurgans" ; i.e. "stran- gers' graves." He concludes that southern Siberia and the territory west of the place where we were camping must have been very favorable for the rise of early races. Certainly the numbers of tumuli indicate that this was a populous region. Berkey and Morris discovered between two lakes to the north of our camp a well-preserved and very ancient dam, a half-mile long by fifteen feet high. I hope to be able some day, with the help of an archaeolog- ical staff, to explore the tumuli in this locality; for study of them will undoubtedly shed light on the history of the pre-Mongol people.
When we left Tsetsenwan's for Sain Noin Khan's residence, one hundred and fifty miles away, we
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continued westward on a trail so faint that some- times it was lost entirely. Yet this path goes for hundreds of miles from Urga to Uliassutai and has kept its identity through untold ages. The geol- ogists were well-nigh in despair; for they found so complicated a series of very old rocks, much folded and crushed, that they had great difficulty in carry- ing on their structural and topographical route-map.
Amid crashing thunder, vivid lightning and a de- luge of rain and hail, we arrived at Sain Noin Khan's and pitched our tents in a little gulch tributary to the main valley and four or five miles distant from the lamasery and the palace of the reigning Khan. Coming to the summit of a long, grass-covered hill, suddenly we saw the golden spires and upturned gables of the temples glistening in rainbow colors on the green plain below us. Just beyond, the river has cut its way through a table-land of solid rock and in the distance rises wave upon wave of moun- tains white with snow. The temples are in the centre of the "city," with the tiny wooden houses of the lamas spread out on each side like great wings. More than a thousand priests live in that lovely spot. The central temple has the squat base common to Tibetan architecture, but upon it is a typically Chinese pagoda-like superstructure. Immediately behind stands a large Tibetan building, rectangular and flat-topped, decorated in black, white and red. There are ten temples in the city, mostly Tibetan, but some pure Chinese and still others combining
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the two styles. Among the dozens of objects of religious interest in the open space in the centre of the "city" is a large shrine plated on the sides with Standard Oil tins and topped by a cupola heavily covered with gold-leaf. Tiny flags bearing sacred mottoes flutter from every compound, and near all the temples are prayer- wheels. On a hill in front of the temples is the largest obo I have ever seen. It is an enormous circular base of stones with a secondary tier and a conical centre, which is dec- orated with prayer-flags, bits of cloth and branches. This kind of religious monument is very common in Mongolia; in fact, almost every high point of land or hilltop, particularly if it be on a trail or road, has its own obo, which grows as each traveller who has reached the summit adds a stone or two.
The Khan's winter palace is in the northeast cor- ner of the lama city and, with his private temple, is surrounded by high palisades. When the Khan is in residence, very probably he occupies a yurt in the palace grounds; for a Mongol, however exalted be his station, never can be really comfortable except in his felt home.
The yurt looks like an enormous beehive, and, be- ing circular, has no flat surfaces to resist the wind. It can be erected in thirty minutes ; in the same time it can be taken down and packed upon a camel. Felt is so excellent a non-conductor that in the winter when a fire is lighted in a sheet-iron stove or in the open brazier, the yurt is warm even though the
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temperature drops to forty degrees below zero. In the summer, when the side-coverings are rolled up, the wind has a clear sweep through the house, and on the hottest days the interior is delightfully cool.
I sat one day in the yurt of a Mongol prince. In the place of honor, at the far end opposite the door, was a low dais. At the right stood a carved wood chest for clothes and personal effects; at the left was the altar, with a Buddhist painting before which two candles were burning. The floor was carpeted with skins of sheep and wolves. I noticed that the tips of the slender poles forming the pavilion roof were shaped like spear-points.
"Why do you make the roof -poles like that?" I asked the prince.
He considered for a moment. " I don't know why. My ancestors always have done it so," he remarked finally.
"Isn't it because your ancestors, who were great warriors, always carried spears and shields? And at night, when a man was on a raid, would he not stick the base of his lance into the ground with the point against his shield and then throw a skin over the framework to give him shelter? I think your yurt is only an imitation of that old custom."
"Probably that is true," he said, but he was not interested in the idea; for a Mongol does not inquire into the cause of things. He is content to do what always has been done and let the reasons take care of themselves.
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At the time of our visit, the Khan, who is only ten years old, was living a long way to the east of the city, and we did not see him. His uncle, a high lama, was at the hot spring fifteen miles from our camp. Badmajapoff, who has suffered from rheu- matism since 1920, when he was tortured by Chinese soldiers in Urga, went to this spring for the baths while we shifted camp to the north.
The tents were pitched in a beautiful patch of woodland over a mile in length, near the Arctic divide. It was like a drink of cold water to a thirsty man to see trees again. There was not a breath of wind, the sun lay warm and bright in the forest glades and the air was sweet with perfume from the larch-trees. A gorgeous carpet of flowers, orange, blue, yellow and purple, was spread over the hill- side. Every evening we gathered about a great fire of logs and talked until far into the night. We felt that we should like to remain there always. But one morning Merin rode up the hill with the news that the caravan was at the hot spring, where Bad- majapoff awaited us. We had no longer any excuse for staying; we must leave this paradise of trees and flowers to travel southward to the wastes of the Gobi Desert.
We arrived at the hot spring, which was only forty-five miles away, early in the afternoon. Bad- majapoff had information that filled us with enthu- siasm. The Mongols reported that a little more than a hundred miles to the south, just in the region
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where we had planned to go, there were fossil-beds — -bones, they said, as large as a man's body. Their description sounded like that of a great sedimentary basin.
As soon as camp was made, Granger and I went to the hot spring for a bath. The water bubbles out from the base of a hill and spreads over a rocky slope in a dozen streamlets. At various spots pools have been constructed in the rock and each is covered by a tent. The water is crystal clear with only a tinge of sulphur but it has a decided odor. A cold stream that emerges from the hill- slope near the hot spring has been cleverly directed so that each pool has a continual flow of both hot and cold water. The pool nearest the source of the hot water was reserved for the lama Prince and above it a spacious yurt had been erected for his use.
Just above the spot where the spring emerges from the hillside there is an oho in the form of a semi- circular rampart. In the centre is a stone altar bear- ing three flat, upright slabs upon which pictures of the Buddha have been erected. Scores of silken scarfs, faded and whipped to ribbons by the wind, drape the altar; these are the offerings of pilgrims who have come to bathe in the water and to drink it. There are new scarfs, too, blue as the sky above the shrine. The Prince told us that this was a very sacred place and that we must not step inside the sanctum. It was built, he said, as a thank-offering to the Buddha, for the water which he had caused
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to rush forth from the hillside, hot and pregnant with the power of divine healing. We were not surprised at this worship of the spring. Imagine a caravan in the bitter days of winter, when the wind cuts like a white-hot brand, winding over the hills and pitching its tents on the plain beside the stream. When the loads have been lifted from the tired camels, the frost-bitten nomads walk across the valley to find this spring that offers warmth and comfort gushing from the frozen earth. What won- der that the mountain behind it has been made a holy spot where man may take no form of life.
Below the stream and at one side lay a confused mass of stones. At first they appeared to have been washed there by a sudden cloud-burst, and yet the heaviest fragments gave evidence of a once orderly arrangement. Moreover, some of them were foreign to the mountain at the base of which they rested. In the dim past a massive shrine or a temple must have stood upon this spot. Certain it is that the mountain and the spring have been sacred since before the days of the Mongol Empire.
The Prince showed us, with the greatest care, a dull-brown viper coiled beneath a rock fragment at the base of the altar. Had it been found across the stream, it would have been crushed to death, for the Mongols know the deadly poison in its fangs; here it was jealously protected because it had selected this sacred spot as its home. Even the bath-tents and the yurts below the stream are often invaded by
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reptiles of this kind. Badmajapoff told me that two had paid him a visit the day before. He has a deadly fear of snakes, but he had gently persuaded these to go outside.
The Prince is one of the few lamas I have met whose acceptance of their religion seems deeply emotional rather than merely superstitious. He is a small man with delicate, tapering fingers, fine features and a skin almost white. Although he was cordial, always, I think I never saw him smile. His rather sad face has a singular gentleness of expression and his carriage and every motion are full of dignity. When seated, he unconsciously assumes a Buddha- like attitude that emphasizes the teachings of a religion in which contemplation and mental com- posure are vital tenets. He does not smoke; neither does he drink wine. He has a naturally scientific mind. He was delighted with Shackelford's car- bide lamp and, when some of the grey " pebbles' 9 were dropped into a cup of water and a lighted match was applied to the liquid, he quite understood the principle of acetylene illumination. When Berkey and Morris paid their farewell visit to him, Morris asked permission to sketch him in his yurt. After selecting the books and ceremonial objects that were to be in the picture, he assumed his characteristic Buddha-like pose and sat motionless, only inter- rupting now and then to pound the little drum that brought members of his suite to see how the draw- ing progressed.
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The time we spent at the hot spring was ''moving- week" with the Mongols. Dozens of villages were being shifted to the hills and mountains for the summer's grazing. In the autumn the people would go back again to the plains and the desert to escape the snow. All Mongolia seemed to be in motion. One morning when we looked out of our tents, the valley as far as we could see was alive with sheep, ponies and camels moving northward. By noon the sunlit slopes were deserted, but before nightfall other herds had arrived and white yurts dotted all the landscape. We had but to remain where we were to watch the pageant of Mongol life pass before us. It was wonderful material for Shackelford.
On the day we left the hot spring, he made an excellent film of the erection of a yurt. A Mongol with his wife and an old lama had just halted their camels on a beautiful, grassy hill. First the lattice framework of the yurt was opened, and all the house- hold goods, including a baby in a basket, were moved inside. With a long pole the woman held up the circular piece at the top while her husband inserted stick after stick in the framework, to form the cone- shaped roof. Then, after the door was put in, the side layers of felt were tied in place and the felt strips on the roof roped down. The yurt was com- pletely erected in a half -hour.
I was impressed by the similarity between some of the customs of the Mongols and those of the plainsmen of our own West in the early days. Hos-
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pitality is a law in Mongolia. If a traveller is near a Mongol village at night, he unsaddles his pony, turns it out to graze and goes into the nearest yurt, certain of food and shelter. Compensation is not considered; for every man will find himself often in like circumstances. One summer when one of our Mongols was out for nearly a month in search of our caravan, he spent only thirty cents for food during all that time. I have known a Mongol to ride many miles to let me know that there was no water in the direction in which I was going or to bring in my horses, which had strayed during the night. He would have expected like courtesy from me under similar circumstances.
Horse-stealing is the worst crime a Mongol can commit, and a thief is shot on sight. If a man could not turn out his poines to graze without fear of theft, travelling would be well-nigh impossible; for to be left without a horse in a country of vast dis- tances and little water is very serious. If a Mongol reports that his ponies have been stolen, soldiers take up the trail and follow it from one herd to another until they find their man, even though they may spend weeks in running him down.
Existence in Mongolia is not easy. A man cannot obtain food enough in a day to maintain himself for a week as in the forested tropics. If he is to sur- vive, he must be able to ride and shoot and to endure fatigue and hunger, cold and thirst. It was such hardihood that made the Mongol hordes the terror
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of all Europe in the days of Genghis Khan. The soldiers of the great chieftain could travel without a commissary, live upon dried mare's milk and, if there was nothing, tighten their belts and laugh at hunger. Riding for hours without rest, sleeping be- neath the stars or in the snow, striking lightning- like blows at their enemies, Mongol raiders were here today and gone tomorrow. It was not until the poison of luxury gained from conquered western peoples had begun to sap their strength that they in turn were conquered.
Berkey and Morris mapped geographically and topographically about thirty square miles of coun- try around the Hot Springs. They worked with feverish energy ; for I was anxious to reach the fossil- beds reported to be to the southwest. I had des- patched the caravan the day after our arrival at the hot spring and we expected to find it at a small river some fifty miles from the fossil locality.
All along the trail, which led up and down grassy slopes, the Mongols were on their way to the sweet grass of the hills, and great herds of antelopes were working slowly northward from the desert whither we were going. After running west for fifteen or twenty miles, we turned sharply south across coun- try. Very soon the landscape began to change. The grass was thinner and grew in clumps, and rocky outcrops appeared. From the summit of a hill we made out presently with field-glasses the blue tent of our caravan, and then we descended into desert
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country. The centre of the basin was occupied by a salt lake and an enormous field of niggerheads; to the west were wild, ragged peaks of granite, which in the haze of the late afternoon showed dim and ghostly against the sky; beneath our feet lay fine gravel, studded with clumps of sage-brush and bunches of long grass as stiff and hard as wire. Merin had said that here the camels would find particularly good grazing. There is no accounting for a camel. In bodily form he seems to be a relic of prehistoric times, a survival from the Pleistocene, and he has tastes as peculiar as his appearance. In the midst of green grass he languishes and grows thin, but surrounded by sage-brush and thorny vegetation he is thoroughly happy.
The desert swarmed with life. The traps yielded such a great variety of new mammals that the three taxidermists were busily preparing specimens every moment. The lake was full of breeding wild-fowl, and lizards of three species scuttled across the ground at almost every step. In the forests from which we had come, where conditions seemed especially favor- able for an abundance of life, it was difficult to catch more than three or four small mammals in a hundred traps, and the woods were silent except for the notes of a cuckoo or the discordant call of a jay. I have often found it so and have come to look upon the Asian deserts, and not the forests, as the real collector's paradise.
The Sair Usu trail from Kalgan to Uliassutai was
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only a hundred yards from our camp. One beauti- ful, windless evening, just as day was giving place to night, we heard the mellow notes of camel bells and saw the black mass of an enormous caravan against the sky. Silently, except for the bells, the great beasts came out of the dusk and disappeared into the twilight glow of the western sky. We all gathered at the trail, hoping for news of China, and two of the men stopped to talk. They were Mahom- medan merchants, they said, bound for Uliassutai with tea and tobacco. Five months later they would return with skins and wool. It was already ninety days since they had left Kalgan — sixteen men with two hundred camels. All their wordly goods were involved in this venture, which calls for transcendent business courage. Yet they were but following the custom of their ancestors, who had traced the great trade routes across the desert long before the travels of Marco Polo.
With the passing of that silent line of camels in the darkness I realized more fully than ever before that Central Asia still lives in the Middle Ages and that the caravan trails serve the same purpose today as they did ten centuries ago. But their years are numbered. We ourselves are the " trail-breakers' 1 of motor transportation and after that will come the railroads. Instead of thrilling with pride at the thought, I reflected sadly that we were violating the sanctity of the desert and destroying the mystery of Mongolia.
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CHAPTER VII
A KENTUCKY DERBY IN THE GOBI DESERT
TTEE Altai, the greatest mountain system of Cen- * tral Asia, extends east by south into the Gobi Desert. As it reaches toward the rising sun, it be- comes lower and less rugged and breaks up into partially isolated ranges and spurs, which gradually lose their identity and are merged in the rolling desert. The fossil-bearing region that we were seek- ing was said to lie just to the north of Baga Bogdo, one of the mountain groups of the eastern Altai. There were no trails, and the chance of being able to reach Baga Bogdo in our cars looked far from promising. But Merin reported the feed to be so good that I decided to leave the weary, sore-backed camels to revel in the sage-brush and thorns while we attempted the journey by motor.
Bayard Colgate and Badmajapoff spent a day on a fruitless hunt for a certain rich man, supposed to live fifteen or twenty miles away. From him they expected to get information and a guide to Baga Bogdo. But they found only a village of six yurts
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and were directed to the poorest man in the whole region. His yurt consisted of a few pieces of felt thrown together, and his earthly possessions totaled one wife, one horse, one sheep and one goat.
Taking enough food, gasoline and other supplies to last a fortnight, on Wednesday, June 21, we set out with our Mongol guide sitting proudly on one of the trucks. He had never seen an automobile before, but he was prepared to find life a series of delightful surprises and to "try everything once."
Just before noon a great shining lake appeared in the distance. Upon reaching the shore, we found not a salt lake, but a lake of salt. Near the eastern end were six camels and four Mongols. They had a dozen or more piles of beautiful salt, as clean and snow-white as if refined for table use, drying in the sun, and full sacks ready to be loaded on the camels. From the manner of crystallization Morris pro- nounced it practically pure sodium chloride. The entire surface of the lake consisted of a solid salt crust, more than an inch in thickness, which rested on mud.
As we looked over the country to the south, Col- gate and I wondered how on earth it would be pos- ible to cross it with the motors. It makes me shudder even to write about the places through which we took the cars and trucks during the next four hours. There were ravines, ditches, walls, rocks and washouts. Only Colgate's good driving and resourcefulness got us through without a disastrous
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smash. The Dodge Bros, cars climbed like moun- tain goats, and later, in our enthusiasm, Colgate and I agreed that we should be willing to attempt