Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/94

83 with it. The first good spark we could get from striking a knife against a stone lighted this unusual tinder, which continued to burn slowly until it was totally consumed. The next day our botanist, while following through a deep, heavily shaded gorge, with a cry of pleasure bent down and pulled up a plant by the roots. It had long, quite pointed serrate leaves, not unlike those of the white elm. When we had cleaned the root, we found it bore an uncanny resemblance to a human body with the head, neck, trunk, legs and arms clearly defined, and we recognized at once the fabulous root of Asia, called by the Chinese "ginseng," by the Mongolians "fatil" by the Persians "mandragora" and in the Latin "panacea genseng."

We tasted the root and found it sharp, peppery as ginger and pricking to the tongue. We searched through all the gorge and on the adjacent mountain slopes but could not discover a second specimen. After our fruitless quest we realized how difficult the search for this lonely root could be, especially with its attendant possibilities of attack by tigers. The faithful Buddhist or the follower of Lao-tze has before him, when he goes to hunt for the magic root, still one more encounter, that with the evil demon who defends the precious plant.

A few days afterward, during an excursion to the eastern slopes of the Chang-Kuan-Tsai Lan, just before sunset we were making our way along a stony road that was endeavouring to fit itself to the twists and turns of a winding stream. Suddenly a disagreeable odour, like the smell of sweating horses, struck us, growing rapidly heavier and more obnoxious. As though by magic, I was instantly transported back to a journey I had made through the Caucasus along the shores of the Black Sea, during which this same pungent odour had once