Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 2 (1876).djvu/239

Rh we made preparations for the march, by taking the yurta to pieces and packing it with the other baggage on the camels. All this occupied a good hour and a half, so that by the time we were ready to start we already felt tired. Sometimes it was so cold, and the wind was so keen, that we could not sit on horseback, yet the exertion of walking, encumbered as we were with some eighteen pounds' weight in the shape of gun and ammunition, was often too much for our strength at that terrible elevation, where every additional pound told, and we constantly suffered from those distressing symptoms caused by the extreme rarefaction of the atmosphere.

Our warm clothing, too, was so worn out by two years' use as to be a most ineffectual protection against the cold; our fur coats and trowsers being in tatters. As for boots we had none, and were reduced to sewing bits of yak-hide to old leggings, as a covering for our feet in the coldest weather.

Frequently, towards midday, the wind would increase to the violence of a hurricane, filling the air with sand and dust, and making further progress impossible while it lasted; and we would be compelled to halt, although we had gone only six or seven miles. But even in the finest weather a march of twelve miles on those lofty plains is more exhausting to the strength than double that distance at a lower elevation.

On arriving at the halting place our first duty was to unload the camels and set up the yurta, which took us another hour; the next was to collect