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Rh of the Gobi, the presence of whose wastes we had already had borne in upon us by such clouds of dust and sand that the skies and the sun were at times obscured by them, giving to everything a uniform, monotonous veil of yellow colouring. In places these drifting sands worked their way across the fields that bordered the river and stretched their fingers into the stream in the form of spits and shoals.

Near a village, where we had decided to stop, the captain moored his steamer against a high bank cut out by the current. As soon as we were tied up, I sent Rusoff out with some of the Chinese to hire a number of carts to take us along the bank of the Tolo, where I had been informed there existed considerable deposits of coal. We could not, however, find any transport in this village, so that Rusoff had to go off to the nearest town, Hsin Chao, from where he brought in with him seven great lumbering, screeching Manchurian farm-carts, which gave the impression of having been bereft of oil since the day they were built.

With this transport we started for the Tolo along a road across the fields that was unimaginably rutted and in places deep with the sands borne in on the western winds from the Gobi. It was already the end of September, and at dawn cold blasts often heralded the coming winter. There behind the almost black ranges of the Great Khingans the cold northwest winds of autumn were already playing madly at their game of sowing desert sands, while here on the eastern slope of the range the winter spoke as yet only in a whisper, warning of what was to come and cautioning man and beast to prepare.

Another of the inevitable warnings of the approaching cold came to us from those wingèd messengers, honking