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 Canvas
Pocket Reference
 Canvas
Pocket Reference

David Flanagan

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo

 Canvas Pocket Reference
by David Flanagan

Copyright © 2011 David Flanagan. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North,
Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promo-
tional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safari
booksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional
sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected].

Editors: Mike Loukides and Simon St. Laurent

Download from Wow! eBook <www.wowebook.com>

Production Editor: Teresa Elsey

Proofreader: Sada Preisch
Indexer: John Bickelhaupt
Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery
Interior Designer: David Futato
Illustrator: Robert Romano

Printing History:
December 2010: First Edition.

Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are
registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The Pocket Reference series
designation, Canvas Pocket Reference, the image of a gold weaver bird, and
related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish
their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear
in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trademark claim, the
designations have been printed in caps or initial caps.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the
publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or
for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN: 978-1-449-39680-0
[TM]
1291908640
 Contents

Preface vii

Chapter 1: Canvas Tutorial 1

Drawing Lines and Filling Polygons 5
Graphics Attributes 10
Canvas Dimensions and Coordinates 12
Coordinate System Transforms 14
Drawing and Filling Curves 20
Rectangles 23
Colors, Transparency, Gradients, and Patterns 23
Line-Drawing Attributes 28
Text 30
Clipping 32
Shadows 34
Images 36
Compositing 39
Pixel Manipulation 43
Hit Detection 45
Canvas Example: Sparklines 47

Chapter 2: Canvas Reference 51

v
Index 97

vi | Table of Contents
 Preface

This book documents the JavaScript API for drawing graphics

in an HTML <canvas> tag. It assumes that you know the Java-
Script programming language and have at least basic familiarity
with the use of JavaScript in web pages. Chapter 1 is a tutorial
that explains all Canvas features and demonstrates them with
examples. Chapter 2 is a reference to each of the Canvas-related
classes, methods, and properties.
This book is an excerpt from the much longer book JavaScript:
The Definitive Guide; my publisher and I felt that the
<canvas> tag is such an exciting feature of HTML5 that it de-
serves a timely and concise book of its own. Because the Canvas
API is relatively small, this short book can document it
definitively.
Thanks to Raffaele Cecco for a careful review of the book and
its code examples. Thanks also to my editor, Mike Loukides,
for his enthusiasm for this project and to editor Simon St. Lau-
rent for his work converting the material from “Definitive
Guide” to “Pocket Reference” format.
The examples in this book can be downloaded from the book’s
web page, which will also include errata if any errors are dis-
covered after publication:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920016045/

vii
 In general, you may use the examples in this book in your
programs and documentation. You do not need to contact
us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant por-
tion of the code. We appreciate, but do not require, an attri-
bution like this: “From Canvas Pocket Reference by David
Flanagan (O’Reilly). Copyright 2011 David Flanagan,
978-1-449-39680-0.” If you feel your use of code examples falls
outside fair use or the permission given here, feel free to contact
us at [email protected].
To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send
email to:
Download from Wow! eBook <www.wowebook.com>

[email protected]
This book is also available from the Safari Books Online serv-
ice. For full digital access to this book and others on similar
topics from O’Reilly and other publishers, sign up at http://
my.safaribooksonline.com.

viii | Preface
 CHAPTER 1

Canvas Tutorial

This book explains how to draw graphics in web pages using

JavaScript and the HTML <canvas> tag. The ability to dynam-
ically generate sophisticated graphics in the web browser
instead of downloading them from a server is revolutionary:
• The code used to produce graphics on the client side is
typically much smaller than the images themselves, cre-
ating a substantial bandwidth savings.
• Offloading drawing tasks from the server to the client
reduces the load on the server, potentially saving on hard-
ware costs.
• Generating graphics on the client is consistent with the
Ajax application architecture in which servers provide
data and clients manage the presentation of that data.
• The client can rapidly and dynamically redraw graphics,
enabling graphically intense applications (such as games
and simulations) that are simply not feasible when each
frame has to be downloaded from a server.
• Writing graphics programs is fun, and the <canvas> tag
gives web developers some relief from the drudgery of
the DOM!
The <canvas> tag has no appearance of its own but creates a
drawing surface within the document and exposes a powerful
drawing API to client-side JavaScript. The <canvas> tag is

1
standardized by HTML5 but has been around for longer than
that. It was introduced by Apple in Safari 1.3, and has been
supported by Firefox since version 1.5 and Opera since version
9. It is also supported in all versions of Chrome. The
<canvas> tag is not supported by IE before IE 9, but can be
reasonably well emulated in IE 6, 7, and 8.

Using the Canvas in IE

To use the <canvas> tag in IE 6, 7, or 8, download the open-
source ExplorerCanvas project from http://code.google.com/p/
explorercanvas/. After unpacking the project, include the
“excanvas” script in the <head> of your web pages using an
Internet Explorer conditional comment like this:
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<script src="excanvas.compiled.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

With those lines at the top of your web pages, <canvas> tags
and basic Canvas drawing commands will work in IE. Radial
gradients and clipping are not supported. Line width does not
scale correctly when the X and Y dimensions are scaled by dif-
ferent amounts, and you can expect to see other minor ren-
dering differences in IE as well.

Most of the Canvas drawing API is defined not on the

<canvas> element itself but instead on a “drawing context”
object obtained with the getContext() method of the canvas.
Call getContext() with the argument “2d” to obtain a
CanvasRenderingContext2D object that you can use to draw
two-dimensional graphics into the canvas. It is important to
understand that the canvas element and its context object are
two very different objects. Because it has such a long class
name, I do not often refer to the CanvasRenderingContext2D
object by name and instead simply call it the “context object.”
Similarly, when I write about the “Canvas API” I usually mean
“the methods of the CanvasRenderingContext2D object.”
Also, since the long class name CanvasRenderingContext2D

2 | Chapter 1: Canvas Tutorial

 does not fit well on these narrow pages, the reference section
that follows this tutorial chapter abbreviates it as CRC.

3D Graphics in a Canvas
At the time of this writing, browser vendors are starting to im-
plement a 3D graphics API for the <canvas> tag. The API is
known as WebGL, and is a JavaScript binding to the OpenGL
standard API. To obtain a context object for 3D graphics, pass
the string “webgl” to the getContext() method of the canvas.
WebGL is a large, complicated, and low-level API that is not
documented in this book: web developers are more likely to
Download from Wow! eBook <www.wowebook.com>

use utility libraries built on top of WebGL than to use the

WebGL API directly.

As a simple example of the Canvas API, the following code

draws a red square and blue circle into <canvas> tags to produce
output like that shown in Figure 1-1:
<body>
This is a red square:
<canvas id="square" width=10 height=10></canvas>.
This is a blue circle:
<canvas id="circle" width=10 height=10></canvas>.
<script>
// Get first canvas element and its context
var canvas = document.getElementById("square");
var context = canvas.getContext("2d");
// Draw something in the canvas
context.fillStyle = "#f00"; // Set color to red
context.fillRect(0,0,10,10); // Fill a small square

// Get second canvas and its context

canvas = document.getElementById("circle");
context = canvas.getContext("2d");
// Begin a path and add a circle to it
context.beginPath();
context.arc(5, 5, 5, 0, 2*Math.PI, true);
context.fillStyle = "#00f"; // Set blue fill
context.fill(); // Fill the path
</script>
</body>

Canvas Tutorial | 3
Figure 1-1. Simple canvas graphics
The Canvas API describes complex shapes as a “path” of lines
and curves that can be drawn or filled. A path is defined by a
series of method calls, such as the beginPath() and arc() in-
vocations in the preceding code. Once a path is defined, other
methods, such as fill(), operate on that path. Various prop-
erties of the context object, such as fillStyle, specify how
these operations are performed. The subsections that follow
explain:
• How to define paths, how to draw or “stroke” the outline
of a path, and how to fill the interior of a path
• How to set and query the graphics attributes of the canvas
context object, and how to save and restore the current
state of those attributes
• Canvas dimensions, the default canvas coordinate system,
and how to transform that coordinate system
• The various curve-drawing methods defined by the
Canvas API
• Some special-purpose utility methods for drawing
rectangles
• How to specify colors, work with transparency, and draw
with color gradients and repeating image patterns
• The attributes that control line width and the appearance
of line endpoints and vertices
• How to draw text in a <canvas>

4 | Chapter 1: Canvas Tutorial

 • How to “clip” graphics so that no drawing is done outside
of a region you specify
• How to add drop shadows to your graphics
• How to draw (and optionally scale) images into a canvas,
and how to extract the contents of a canvas as an image
• How to control the compositing process by which newly
drawn (translucent) pixels are combined with the existing
pixels in the canvas
• How to query and set the raw red, green, blue, and alpha
(transparency) values of the pixels in the canvas
• How to determine whether a mouse event occurred above
something you’ve drawn in a canvas
This chapter ends with a practical example that uses
<canvas> tags to render small inline charts known as spark-
lines. This tutorial chapter is followed by a reference section
that documents the Canvas API in complete detail.
Much of the <canvas> example code that follows operates
on a variable called c. This variable holds the
CanvasRenderingContext2D object of the canvas, but the code
to initialize that variable it is not typically shown. In order to
make these examples run, you would need to add HTML
markup to define a canvas with appropriate width and height
attributes, and then add code like this to initialize the
variable c:
var canvas = document.getElementById("my_canvas_id");
var c = canvas.getContext('2d');

The figures that follow were all generated by JavaScript code

drawing into a <canvas> tag—typically into a large offscreen
canvas to produce high-resolution print-quality graphics.

Drawing Lines and Filling Polygons

To draw lines on a canvas and to fill the areas enclosed by those
lines, you begin by defining a path. A path is a sequence of one
or more subpaths. A subpath is a sequence of two or more

Drawing Lines and Filling Polygons | 5

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
flooded region is thrown up in mounds and rectangular heaps which
gradually wash down from earthy brown to the white piles that are
sacred to the government salt monopoly.
The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign
concession of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an
impression of a comfortable Western community in an Oriental land,
but he will carry off very little idea of the real China, or even of the
real Tientsin, which is a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for
having had its wall reduced to a street of boulevard width as a
punishment for the Boxer uprising. To those for whom commerce
and modern efficiency are everything of importance, the Concession
at Tientsin is of more consequence than a whole province of interior
China, but I found myself more interested in any one of the ten
Mohammedan mosques within the native city, or in the former home
of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which he is worshiped by his
descendants quite like any other prominent bygone Chinese from
Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of Victoria
Road.
A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of
making life more livable and business more possible to the foreign
merchants who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for
the Chinese crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s
ex-ministers of finance or of communications, how many former
office-holders of every graft-collecting grade, have retired to the
protection of foreign jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury
on their loot of office, and how much of this might have been
recovered by the Chinese people to whom it rightfully belongs were
there no such safety-zones of easy access, is suggested by the
magnificent establishments many of these rogues maintain there. Yet
the gaunt human horses who toil past them tugging at heavy carts
piled high with imports and exports get barely six cents a day in our
money, which they wolf in scanty, unwholesome food copper by
copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount to one. As mere passers-by
we could not but be thankful that, after a brief following of the
example of other nations, the United States decided that concessions
on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our national policy. The
Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have lost theirs now, as
they have their extraterritoriality, and it would not be strange if this
recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the misdeeds of the
Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us all out before
the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of Italians can
hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their jurisdiction,
trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various factions
that are doing their best to make China a continual battle-field, and
selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is virtually the
protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to be wondered at
if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not show rapid
strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various nationalities
which still keep their holdings also make a queer story. Thus as many
police forces and fire departments are maintained as there are
concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal
foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would
make really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant
dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one
morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along
under the massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the
unprecedented length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.
 CHAPTER VII
SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI

I n September, when the kaoliang has ripened to its purple-red,

there is added beauty to the eight-hour climb from Peking, by
leisurely Chinese train, through Nankow Pass and the Great Wall, to
Kalgan. Beyond that treeless, mountain-girdled city the railway turns
sharply westward, timidly keeping within the outer spur of China’s
mammoth rampart, and the traveler to the vast open world to the
north must abandon it for a more courageous form of transportation.
Down to the very doors of to-day the camel caravan, drifting along
for six weeks or two months, was the swiftest thing from Kalgan to
Urga, capital of Outer Mongolia, seven hundred miles away, unless it
was sometimes outsped by the forced relays of the Imperial Chinese
Post. But the ratio between time and distance has of late undergone
violent changes, even in such far-off stretches of the globe. Little
more than a decade back mankind was astonished to hear that a
venturesome motor-car had fought its way from Peking to Paris; five
or six years ago men of more commercial turn of mind took to
following this pioneer of swiftness across the Gobi; and to-day it is a
rare week that does not see several automobiles, always with room
for one more passenger, climb out of Kalgan on their way to Urga.
How some of these ever reach their destination is one of the
innumerable mysteries of the Orient. Our own expedition seemed
risky enough, yet it was a mere parlor-game compared to those we
met or overtook along the way. In the first place there were but four
of us—the Russian Jewish fur-merchant from Tientsin who owned
the car, his chauffeur of similar origin, and we two wandering
Americans whom chance had momentarily thrown together in the
intricate byways of the earth. What with our necessary baggage, the
food and beds and arctic garments it would have been foolhardy to
reduce, and the cases of gasolene that completed the ramparts which
made each ascent to our seats a mountaineering feat, I at least
fancied we were heavily laden. Yet we passed on the trail cars with
eight or nine Chinese passengers, and on a memorable morning one
with eleven, besides all manner of baggage, winter garments, and
paraphernalia, somehow packed away in them. They were often old
and crippled cars, too, and no wonder, while our own was fresh from
the factory, with two gasolene-tanks, a host of reinforcements and
accessories, and the right-handed drive befitting left-handed China.
Like all those engaged in the Kalgan-to-Urga traffic, it came from
Detroit, though not of the breed one first thinks of in that
connection, but from the second most popular motor tribe of that
habitat. Those who should know say that this is the only car sturdy
and at the same time economical enough to endure life on the Gobi
Desert.
 The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil
ten or more hours a day for twenty coppers, about
six cents in our money

Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no

automobile can climb to the great Mongolian
plateau unassisted
 Some of the camel caravans we passed on the
Gobi seemed endless. This one had thirty dozen
loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders

But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing

home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag,
sometimes the stars and stripes, flying at the
head

We honked and snorted and sirened our way through the narrow,
dust-deep, crowded streets of Kalgan, as automobiles must in any
genuine Chinese city, now blocked completely by the deliberate foot-
going traffic, now by languid trains of ox-carts, and always quickly
surrounded by gaping and grinning Chinese, to whom a foreigner
seems always to remain a rare bird, however many of him may be
seen daily. Twice we were halted at ancient city gates by policemen
with fixed bayonets. They were somewhat more deferential to us, and
more easily satisfied with the credentials we chose to show, than
toward our two companions with their big red huchao, large as a
newspaper page, by means of which the local yamen had given them
permission for their journey. Russians are subject now to Chinese
law, and Americans are not, which at times makes a world of
difference. Yet it was at one of these same gates that an American
resident of Kalgan was killed by one of these same guards not long
afterward for refusing to submit to an illegal decree of the local
overlord.
For about two hours beyond the outer gate we climbed a stony
river-bed, wide enough to have carried a stream with ships on its
bosom, but merely crisscrossed by a narrow brook bringing down silt
from the treeless mountains above. The city abandoned us with
reluctance, struggling along for a way in closely crowded shops and
dwellings, then straggling more and more until it dwindled to a
single row of mud houses on either side, finally to little clusters of
huts strung together like loose strings of beads, and breaking up at
last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like into the cliffs of dry
fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and beyond us. The
unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of camels
haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid, heavily
riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and donkeys
carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones, throngs
of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims, mingled here and
there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray
soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad
shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once
been red or yellow. Whenever some of the many obstacles brought us
momentarily to a halt these religious tramps came to beg the half-
smoked cigarette from between our lips, to feel the car all over, as if
it were some new breed of horse, and to hint that a dollar or a dime
or a few coppers or even some remnants of food would be more or
less gratefully accepted.
Where the waterless river tumbles down from the high plateau
across which lies nearly all the route to Urga, the slope is too swift
even for the sturdiest of motors, wherefore the adaptable Chinese
villagers have found a new source of income. Before this steeper
section was reached, Chinese along the way began to wave appeals at
us, to point out their lean and hungry mules and horses, in some
cases even to climb up over our baggage rampart with harnesses in
their hands, begging the job of hauling us to the top. Three horses, a
mule, and a donkey were at length engaged, after the bargaining
indispensable to both races concerned in the transaction, hitched
with long rope traces to the front axle of our now silent car, and for
more than an hour they toiled upward under the discouragement of
three shrieking Chinese drivers and their cracking whips, at a pace
which that one of us who chose to walk easily outdistanced.
From the chaos of broken rocks where the animals were allowed to
abandon us stretched a tumbled brown world not unlike the upper
reaches of the Andes. Of road in the Western sense there had been
none from the start; there was even less now. Across pell-mell
hillocks with rarely a yard of level space between them, among rocks
of every jagged and broken form, we plowed for the rest of the
morning. Cattle—curiously effeminate-looking cattle, with long
ungraceful horns—flocks of sheep and goats intermingled, files of
camels under varying cargo, here and there a cluster of black pigs
rooting more or less in vain, marked a trail that might otherwise
have been less easy to follow. Men in cotton-padded clothing and
sheepskins plodded beside their animals, or tramped alone with a
worn and faded roll of bed and belongings on their backs; cheery,
amused, seldom-washed people smiled at us over the mud walls of
their compounds; for some time big ruined towers of what was, or
was to have been, another Great Wall, stood at brief intervals along
the crest of the bare, yellow-brown ridge beside us. Then came
rolling stretches of grain, principally oats, most of it already
harvested by the sickle and carry-on-the-back method, for all the
vastness of the cultivation, and lying in carefully spaced bundles in
the fields where it fell, or set up in long rows of closely crowded
shocks near the hard-earth threshing floors.
Bit by bit even this cultivation grew rare and scattered, and finally
died out entirely. By the time the speedometer registered eighty
miles from Kalgan we were spinning along, often at thirty miles an
hour, across high, brown, grass-covered plains, still somewhat
uneven, but with little more than a suggestion of hilliness remaining.
Flocks of sheep far off on the sloping sides of the horizon looked like
patches of daisies; veritable gusts of gray-blue birds of stately flight,
suggestive both of cranes and of wild geese, rose in deliberate haste
before us and floated away to the rear in a vain effort to outdistance
us. Almost frequently we passed long camel caravans, broken up into
sections of a dozen animals each, tied together by a sort of wooden
marlinespike thrust through their noses beneath the nostrils and
attached by a cord to the pack of the animal ahead, the first of each
dozen led by a well padded, skin-wrapped man who was more often
Chinese than Mongol. Some of these camel-trains seemed endless,
with dozen after dozen of the leisurely, soft-footed animals slowly
turning their heads to gaze, with a disdainful curiosity that suggested
a world-weary professor looking out from beneath his spectacles at
incorrigible mankind, upon this strange and impatiently hasty rival
that sped breathlessly past them. Now and again a beast shuffled
sidewise away from us, uttering that absurd little falsetto squeak
which is the camel’s inadequate means of protest at a cruel world;
but most of them refused to be startled into undignified activity by
any such ridiculous apparition. Once on the journey I counted a
caravan bound for Urga which stretched from horizon to horizon
across the brown undulating world; and there were thirty dozen
camels bearing cargo, and a score of outriders to keep the expedition
in order.

We spent the night in a Chinese inn, mud-built and isolated, with

the usual stone kang, heatable and mat-covered, as bed and only
furnishing. It might have been quiet and restful but for over-zealous
watch-dogs and the arrival long after dark and the departure long
before dawn of two dilapidated cars with seventeen chattering
Chinese passengers. We, too, were off well before daylight, a half-
moon lighting the way as we spun across rolling, utterly treeless
country with nothing but short, scanty grass giving a touch of life to
the brown-green landscape over which a cloudless sun at length
poured its molten gold. Even the confirmed tramp would have found
this an unendurable journey on foot; a motor-car in its prime was
scarcely swift enough to avoid monotony, to come often enough on
flashes of interest to keep the senses from sinking into slothfulness.
Pedestrians and lone travelers had long since disappeared; safety,
both from possible violence and from starvation, demanded banding
together, and some form of mount. The big shaggy black dogs of
Mongolia, filthy in diet as those of Central and South America, but
several times more savage, roamed wild across the plains. A woman
abroad at sunrise, gathering the offal left by a camping camel-train
and tossing it with a bamboo pitchfork over her shoulder into a
basket on her back, was the only sign of life for several miles. Such
fuel, like the llama droppings of the Andean highlands, is all that is to
be had in this barren region.
There were striking reminders of the aborigines of the Andes
among the scattered inhabitants of this high plateau. Mongols,
distinctive in face, dress, manner, and physique from the Chinese,
had the same broad, stolid features to be found along the spine of
South America, though they were much more bold and independent
of bearing, as if they had never been cowed by alien races. The
interiors of their rare clusters of two or three huts recalled the Andes,
too—the bare earth for floor, a dozen woolly sheepskins as beds, an
extra pair of boots, a couple of aged pots as total belongings. Instead
of heaped-up cobblestones without mortar, however, these yourts
were made of thick rugs of felt fastened about a light wooden
framework into a perfectly round dwelling perhaps ten feet in
diameter, the door, invariably facing the south, so low that a man
could barely enter upright on his knees. Inside, at least under the
wheel-like apex-support of the round and sloping roof, even we
Americans could sometimes stand erect—by peering out through the
opening for the escape of smoke and the entrance of air in pleasant
daytime weather, left by turning back the uppermost strip of felt. At
one such tent, where we halted to satisfy a thirsty radiator, only a
soil-matted old woman appeared and took to feeling along the
ground about it for the vessel that lay in plain sight. She was stone-
blind, it turned out, yet to all appearances quite satisfied with life as
she knew it, with only her miserable yourt and an uninviting water-
hole a few rods away. The Mongol is still a true nomad herdsman,
and his round, gray-white dwellings are easily transportable, so that
when one little hollow in the plain dries up he has only to pack his
house and wander along.
 The Mongol would not
be himself without his
horse, though to us this
would usually seem only
a pony

Mongol authorities examining our papers, which

Vilner is showing, at Ude. Robes blue, purple,
dull red, etc. Biggest Chinaman on left
 A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching
our arrival at the first yamen of Urga

Once every two or three hours we passed a cluster of three or four

of these low, movable homes, always at a considerable distance off
the trail. There was still no road, yet we made good speed almost
steadily. Besides the often dim traces of other travelers there was the
guidance of a line of telegraph-poles, carrying two wires but as yet no
messages. In the days before the World War word could be flashed
by this route from Paris to Peking, even from London to Shanghai, in
three minutes; but retreating armies must have fuel even in a treeless
desert. Mixed flocks of sheep and goats, slate-colored goats mingled
with those fat-tailed sheep of Asia which waddled so ludicrously as
they scampered away from us, still found sustenance here and there
under the protection of a mounted shepherd or two. It was still too
early autumn for wolves, but bands of antelopes, like big pretty
rabbits, loping gracefully yet swiftly across the rolling plains, became
more and more frequent and immense as we sped northwestward.
Before the journey ended, great lines of these, like brown-gray heat-
waves, sometimes undulated along the whole horizon, and more than
one herd of fifty to a hundred, startled by the sudden appearance of
our snorting black monster, all but ran themselves off their legs in a
mad dash to cross the trail in front of us, instead of speeding away
out of danger.
It was about noon of the second day that we gradually entered the
real Gobi Desert. Yet it was not a desert in the Sahara sense, of mere
shifting sand, but of hard sand and gravel mixed with clay, always
covered at least with the thinnest of grass, and often with tufts of a
grass-bushy sort, enough to keep even a desert from shifting and
blowing. Thus far the weather had been cool but glorious; but no
sooner had we come to the Gobi, where, as any teacher of geography
can tell you, it never rains, than the sky roofed itself over completely
with gray-black clouds and rain forced us to halt and contrive some
means of raising the top over our ramparts of baggage. Skeletons of
cattle, particularly of camels, became more than frequent, blanching
into dust closely beside the trail just where the end of their life’s
labors had overtaken them. Buzzards that looked more like eagles
vied with the wild black dogs in disposing quickly of the carcasses.
Nor were the modern rivals of the camel free from a like fate. Several
skeletons of automobiles caught our eye, and they were always
scattered piece by piece for some distance, as if they had
disintegrated at full speed, or their bones, too, had been picked clean
and dragged hither and yon by those savage dogs that roam the
Mongolian plains. Floor-flat and wide as it is, and almost as free
from the “other fellow” as from “traffic cops,” this natural speedway
of the Gobi has had a number of fatal automobile accidents.
Unlike the Sahara, it is not merely the camel that can cross the
Gobi. Mules and horses make the journey, and the miles-long camel
caravans were rivaled by endless strings of ox-carts, the crudest of
two-wheeled contrivances, plodding along across the dry, brown
world as if all sense of time or destination had long since been cast
aside as worthless paraphernalia. Often, especially in the cold early
mornings, we passed caravans camped out, perhaps for a day or two,
while their weary animals browsed the stingy hillsides. A denim-blue
tent backed by scores or hundreds of bales of hides or wool, if the
expedition was China-bound, or boxes of food, cloth, liquor, and oil
products, if Urga was its destination, with perhaps more uptilted
two-wheeled carts than could have been counted during one of our
average halts, usually completed such a picture as we came upon it.
At the sound of our unmuffled engine tent-doors became alive with
gaping, bullet-headed Mongols, lower orders of whom, or their
Chinese counterparts, came to life from beneath what had seemed to
be mere bundles of felt rags and sheepskins on the cold hard ground,
while the horses tethered about the camp with three feet hobbled
together after the Mongol fashion made frantic and often successful
efforts to escape from this new terror descending upon them. The
horses of the Gobi have not yet learned to behold the automobile
with equanimity, and our passing often sent great herds of
Mongolian ponies sweeping away in chaotic masses across the plains
in a stampede which the dozen outriders were powerless to stem.
Twice during the second day we made out large compact clusters
of white buildings on the flank of distant ridges along the horizon—
lamaseries in which scores of Mongol monks pass their days in
anything but monasterial austerity. Once, when we had seen no other
living thing for hours, an old Mongol came loping across the desert
on a camel in the teeth of the cold, raging wind, a picturesque figure
in the still almost bright-red quilted cloak reaching to his ankles, and
his pagoda-shaped fur cap. When we called to him he halted and
pulled sharply at the reins attached to the perforated nose of his
beast, which thereupon knelt in instalments, front, back, then front
again, and rose to follow his dismounted master over to us. Our
Russian companions, who managed to make themselves understood
in any language, though actually speaking none but their own,
passed the time of day in Mongol, the one important word of which
seems to be buyna, corresponding to the French il y a, but greatly
outdoing it in service. The leathery face of the old man was like a
boot that had lain out in the elements for years; the two teeth he
showed suggested the fangs of a wolf; but his smile was as kindly as
that of an Iowa farmer, and while his thankfulness for a cigarette was
very briefly expressed, as becomes a nomad scorning or unaware of
the formalities of a politer world, there was something distinctly
manly in his every movement from the time we first saw him until he
mounted his kneeling camel again and rode away into the vastness of
the desert. For hours afterward there was nothing to catch the
attention, unless it was the compatriot beside me. He was one of
those American wanderers in the Orient who have never recrossed
the Pacific since coming out to help pacify the Philippines a
generation ago, and he still preferred a horse and “buggy” to these
new-fangled things fed by gasolene; he had not yet heard of scores of
facts and inventions which have become ancient history to us at
home; and he passed his idle hours in humming the songs that were
popular in our land twenty years back.
 At length we ran out from under the great motionless canopy of
clouds into brilliant sunshine again, though even there the racing
wind was almost bitter cold. The Gobi, as I have said, is no Sahara,
yet it was beautiful in its many moods as the sea, stretching away in
tawny browns or cold bluish grays to infinity, or to scampering lines
of antelope along the far horizon. Beyond the mud-walled compound
enclosing the telegraph station of Ehr-lien the smooth, grass-tufted
desert gave way to a savage country of protruding rock-heaps,
peaked heaps of blackish stone outcropping everywhere, as if nature,
too, built prayer-piles, like the pious Mongols, who litter their
landscapes with conical piles of stones wherever they are available,
as appeals to the supernatural powers.

Nightfall found us midway between two mud-walled telegraph

stations, and shelter from the raging wind and the penetrating night
air of a more than four-thousand-foot elevation was highly desirable.
Two weather-blackened yourts broke the immensity about us, far off
to the right. One does not need to look for side-roads on the Gobi; we
made a bee-line for them across the plain. But the unsoaped
occupants were not willing to double up in one tent and rent us the
other, for which I was duly grateful when I had caught a glimpse
inside the pen that might have been assigned to us. Several miles
farther on, a larger group of nomad dwellings appeared, this time to
the left across more broken country. By the time we had struggled
near to the settlement we were surrounded by Mongols and black
dogs, several horses had broken their tethers and were already mere
specks on the horizon, and even the camels reclining about the
yourts had risen to protest in their ridiculously childish falsetto
against this unauthorized disturbance. This time there were half a
dozen tents, in much better repair and more nearly resembling
human dwellings. Moreover here there was a man of importance to
receive us. He was a lama, as his close-cropped head and a kind of
bath-robe gown, thickly quilted and still dully red for all its
unwashed age, told us; for the Mongol layman wears a cue and more
masculine garments, wore a cue in fact centuries before this girlish
head-dress was imposed upon the Chinese by their nomad
conquerors. But it required the linguistic lore of our Russian
companions to learn that he was also a princeling, a kind of tribal
ruler of a neighboring region, who had come on a visit to his friend,
the family head of this cluster of huts. He was a big brawny man,
rather handsome in his own racial style, with a wide, frank, fairly
intelligent face, pitted with smallpox. We were invited to enter his
own hut, which was round and low and made of thick gray felt, like
all those on the Gobi; but the earth floor was also carpeted with felt
mats, and about the circular walls were several small chests and
other simple articles of household use, not to mention saddles and
bridles. The lama gave orders briefly and to the point, more like a
commander than a guest. A sort of iron basket on legs was set up in
the middle of the tent, filled, by hand, with dried camel-dung, and
was soon blazing so merrily that the bitter night wind outside was
more endurable than the temperature inside the tent. I know no fuel
which outdoes that of the Gobi in quickness and intensity of heat.
The Mongols, however, seemed to be impervious to it. Though
inured for many generations to the bitter cold of their plateau, they
crowded into the hut without removing a single one of their heavy
garments, tightly closed the little low door, and squatted about the
roasting iron cage with every evidence of keen enjoyment. There is
but slight differentiation by sex in Mongol dress, and the men and
women alike wore heavy, ungraceful trousers, huge high boots of
soft, pliable, black leather with pointed turned-up toes, and a thick
quilted garment covering all else from neck to calves, not to mention
uncouth fur head-dresses. Even in these desert yourts the reddish
faces and garments of the women are often set off by elaborate and
fanciful hair-dress and other ornaments; but if these existed here
they had been laid away, and the very girls stalked about in their
oversize sock-stuffed boots like lumber-jacks in midwinter.
Mongol tea was prepared over the fire-cage and served us in brass
bowls; but as the resident of Mongolia puts his salt in his tea rather
than on his food, and has other un-Western notions of how it should
be concocted, I did not insist on having my bowl refilled. I found my
mind frequently harking back to such nights as this on the high
Andean plateaus of South America, though there the travel itself had
been quite different. Here was the same bare, vegetationless earth
round about, the same complete ignorance of, or interest in,
cleanliness, similar crowded, comfortless huts, and much the same
attitude toward life as among the Indians of the Andes. But these
plateau-dwellers were far more hospitable, cheery of manner, and
with a live human curiosity which, though it caused them to finger
monkey-like any of our possessions they could reach, had a more
agreeable effect on the spirits than the sullen dullness of their
American prototypes. Now and again, when they became over-
troublesome, the lama ordered them outside with a commanding
voice and manner which usually was effective at the third or fourth
repetition. Yet he, too, was not lacking in fingering curiosity, of a
slightly more controllable nature. While we ate we passed out
samples of our strange foreign food to the gaping, over-clad
semicircle about us. One of my canned cherries, dropped into a
gnarled Mongol palm, created a considerable commotion. What was
it; and was it safe in a Mongol stomach, even though this other kind
of man ate it without misgiving? It passed from hand to hand around
the circle, each evidently expressing his opinion of the risk involved,
and the consensus seemed to be that it was up to the original
recipient to make the venture. He licked cautiously at the fruit for
some time after it had been returned to the furrowed hollow of his
hand. At length, reassured by the two Russians and urged on by the
lama, he bit gingerly into it—and half sprang to his feet with the
shock it seemed to give his tongue. More reassurance finally induced
him to eat it, and all went well until the stone betrayed its existence,
whereupon there was an instant demand to know whether the
presence of that foreign substance was normal, or whether his evil
spirit was playing new and perhaps destructive tricks upon him.
Considering the quantity of foreign substance the average Mongol
absorbs with his meals, there seemed to be something absurdly
incongruous about this lengthy performance. But then, we of the
uninstructed West know little of the myriad methods the teeming
evil spirits of the Orient devise to trap their victims.
A bit of chocolate caused less flurry, though the semicircle around
which it disappeared unanimously pronounced it too sweet to be
agreeable. A cube of sugar was not a total stranger, and each of the
gathering asked the privilege of letting one melt on his tongue. When
it came to meat, even from tins, there was no mystery left; mutton
and beef form the almost exclusive diet of the Mongols, except for
milk and cheese in summer, and their salted tea. Not only are they
true nomads, but their pseudo-Buddhist religion teaches that it is
wicked—or shall we say dangerous?—to till the soil.
 Though there is little formality in Mongol intercourse, I
inadvertently made one faux pas during the evening. Among those
who crowded into the overheated hut was what I at first took to be a
handsome youth, but who turned out to be, under the heavy, sexless
garments of Mongolia, a girl, perhaps of seventeen. When I offered
her a tidbit of some sort, she shrank back without accepting it, while
the rest of the semicircle looked at me with an expression of mingled
wonder and resentment, and a moment later she slipped out through
the tightly closed, knee-high door into the night. I should, it seemed,
have been more indirect in my methods, handing the donation to the
old woman or to one of the men of the family, and hinting that they
might pass it on. As it was, I had evidently boldly made an advance,
and that publicly, similar to handing my door-key to a chance lady
acquaintance in the West. The girl returned, later on, and indirectly
accepted a few knick-knacks, but it was evident as long as I remained
that I was a man on whom it behooved parents and husbands to keep
a watchful eye.
The tin cans we emptied were, of course, considered great prizes,
to be quarreled over and at length allotted by the lama. The old
woman begged us to open others and somehow dispose of the food in
them, in order that she might still further increase her stock of
kitchen utensils. Her curiosity seemed to have reached almost a
morbid growth, for though we or the lama drove her several times
out of the hut, she was evidently bent on watching these curious
beings from another world disrobe. A ragged old man who proved to
be the tribal shepherd was equally hard to banish, though for a
different reason. He had been accustomed to sleep in the hut we
occupied, and he resisted as long as he dared, and quite justly, the
demand of the lama that he sleep outside. The lama won in the end,
of course, and the shepherd curled up grumblingly in a nest of
quilted rags and sheepskins along the outer wall, where his deep bark
resounded in the desert stillness all through the night. Heavy colds
seem to be quite as common among these permanent denizens of the
plateau as they were universal with the four of us. The fire-cage was
carried outside, but the thick heat remained, in spite of which the
lama called to a boy to pull the topmost layer of felt down over the
opening left in the top of yourts by day, hermetically sealing the
place. But he was right; before morning we would have resented a
pinhole in the felt walls. I had indulged in the luxury of bringing an
army cot with me, which excited not only the wonder but the
admiration of our host. The inventiveness which had produced such
a contraption seemed less surprising to him than the courage I
displayed in using it; he, said the lama, would be certain to fall off it
in the night and seriously injure himself. Instead he stripped to the
waist and lay down on a bundle of blankets and skins along the wall,
pulling a rough cover of camel’s hair over him. But this was not until
the formalities of his calling had been fulfilled. As we were turning
in, he called once more to the boy outside, who soon appeared with
two brass disks, loosely tied together. The lama squatted on his
haunches, clashed the disks once together with a resounding clang,
then mumbled for several minutes through his prayers. Then he sat
for some time staring from one to the other of us, as if wondering
what breed of men were these, who dared lie down for the night
without having propitiated the evil spirits which ride the darkness,
until at length he blew out the floating-wick lamp and lay down.

We were glad, indeed, to see the sun again next morning, when at
last it burst up like the exhaust from a puddling furnace over the low,
level horizon. Already we had bumped our way back to the
“highway,” as worthy of the name as the caminos reales, the “royal
roads,” of South America are of theirs, and had sped some distance
along it. The eyes suffered most in this glaring light and the incessant
strong head wind from which nothing short of entirely wrapping up
the head could protect them. The constant bumping and tossing
made up for any lack of exercise. Among myriad rock-heaps, natural
and prayerful, we crossed the frontier between Inner and Outer
Mongolia, marked merely by two huger stone-heaps on either side of
the there sunken trail, the summits connected by a wire from which
hung tattered bits of cloth prayers and various mementos of the
pious, culminating in a weather-beaten straw hat of Chinese make.
That was all, except the immensity of the desert, for the frontier-
station was still about fifty miles distant. Then the rock-heaps died
out, and the earth as far as we could see it was thickly covered with
millions of little mounds, like untended Chinese graves, with hints of
scanty tuft-grass on top of them. At long intervals we passed a
caravan, the dull-toned notes of the bell-camels reaching our ears
momentarily as we dashed past. The first camel of one long train
carried the American flag at his masthead, so to speak, to warn
would-be marauders that the hides and wool behind him were under
whatever protection our consuls and diplomats in the former
Chinese Empire have to offer. Otherwise the world about us was
mainly a confirmation of the fact that, while China proper estimates
the density of her population at two hundred and twenty-five to the
square mile, Mongolia’s is rated at two.
Were the world not so slow to accept geographical changes, even in
these days of the constant remaking of maps, we should long since
have ceased to distinguish between Mongolia and China “proper.”
Though the Chinese Republic claims, and to a certain extent
maintains, the loyalty of that strip of earth bordering her on the
north and known as Inner Mongolia, the vast region we call Outer
Mongolia cast off Chinese rule a decade ago. More exactly, it never
was under Chinese rule, at least in modern times, for barely had their
kindred Manchus been driven from the throne of China than the
Mongols asserted their independence from the new-formed republic.
That was why we Americans had looked forward with some
misgiving to our arrival in Ude, which occurred early on this third
day. Ude consists of half a dozen yourts and a new mud-walled
telegraph station, a desolate spot, owing its location to a near-by
water-hole. But it is the place where the merits or demerits of
persons entering Outer Mongolia from China are passed upon—
passed upon by unpolished Mongols who have little knowledge of,
and less interest in, the way such things are handled at other
boundaries between the countries of the globe. The Russians had no
misgivings; while men of their race would not willingly have traveled
to Urga eighteen months before, they were now, as it were, among
their own people. But, for reasons which will in due time be
apparent, there is just now a certain lack of welcome in Mongolia
toward Americans, in which the British and certain other important
nationalities share. Less than a month before, two Englishmen in
their own car had been halted at Ude and refused admission to the
land beyond, eventually giving up lengthy and useless negotiations to
have this decision reversed, and returning to China. We had no
“papers” calling upon Mongolia to admit us. Our legation in Peking
had only been able to tell us that, if our passports were sent to the
Chinese foreign office, they would be returned—long afterward—with
the information that, while Mongolia was still Chinese territory, it
was in the hands of rebels—they might even have called them bandits
—and since the Chinese Republic could not guarantee the safety of
foreigners in that region, they could not consent to our traveling
there, even to the extent of giving us a visé. The Mongols themselves
have no accredited representative in China, naturally, and while
certain other agents in Peking might have smoothed things over for
us if they had wished, it is their policy to pretend that they and those
they represent have no real power in Mongolia, apparently in the
hope of keeping the world ignorant as long as possible of their doings
in that region. It is customary, therefore, for those citizens of
Western nations who wish to enter Outer Mongolia to pick up their
traps and go, regardless of legal permissions.
But all our misgivings of being turned back at Ude were worry
wasted. The Mongols have a reputation for instability in the conduct
of affairs of government, of stiff-necked severity at one moment and
great leniency in quite a similar matter the next; for after all they are
little more than adult children to whom government is a new and
amusing plaything. Moreover it may be that the letter and the bottle
of vodka which the chief of our party brought for the Ude functionary
had their effect; at any rate he not only did not demand our papers
but did not even ask to see us, so that by the time we had breakfasted
on our own food and local hot water in a yourt next to the official one
we were free to continue to Urga.

Ox-carts with a single telegraph-pole diagonally across them were

crawling northwestward in great trains; new poles and rolls of wire,
both from far off, lay here and there along the way near Ude, where
we ran into the Dane who had been all summer repairing the line
which retreating armies had left a wreck behind them. Within a
week, he promised—and his word proved good—messages would
again be flashing from Paris to Peking, as they had not in more than
two years. Mongols and Chinese now well trained for the task were
replacing the last of the thousands of missing poles which forced
neglect or the demands of military camp-fires had brought down,
and their methods were worth watching. Instead of the sharp spikes
at the instep used by our pole-climbers, the Mongols wore on each
foot a semicircle of iron about two feet long, with saw-teeth on the
inside, which made their climbing suggestive of some tropical spider,
and must be taken off whenever they walked from pole to pole. The
Chinese, on the other hand, used a method characteristic of their
overcrowded, man-cheap country—each pole-climber had two coolie
assistants, who carried a ladder! Building, or even repairing, a
telegraph-line across the Gobi is no effeminate matter of nightly beds
and full hot meals. The sole national representative in Mongolia of
this Danish enterprise had been weeks at a time even without bread,
while the less said in his presence about bathing the greater the
popularity of the speaker. Stern methods are needed, too, to protect
such exotic assets as telegraph-poles in an utterly treeless and even
bushless region. By the “law of the Living Buddha,” as it is called in
Mongolia, the cutting down of a telegraph-pole is punishable with
death. The Dane and his party had come across a man so engaged
not long before, and had tied him up and sent him off to be judged by
his fellows; but so effective has the law been that the severed and
useless end of a pole will lie until it rots away close beside a trail
along which pass hundreds of caravans and groups of travelers to
whom fuel is almost a matter of life or death.
For nearly a day’s journey beyond Ude the desert is so smooth and
hard that we could maintain a speed of fifty miles an hour for long
stretches, so smooth that riding the roadless plateau was almost like
falling through space. Sain-Usu, which is Mongol for “Good Water,”
welcomed us for half an hour in one of its three huts, and not far
beyond there rose deep-blue above the horizon the flattened peak
that marks the site of Tuerin. With such splendid going as nature
furnished, it seemed visibly to move toward us; yet the sun was low
and the night cold already biting into our bones when we dragged
ourselves to the ground before the telegraph station at its foot. This
highest point on the trans-Gobi journey, five thousand feet above the
sea, is a great fantastic heap of black rocks, many of them large as
apartment-houses, piled up one above the other, here as carefully as
if by the hand of man, there tossed together in such a pell-mell chaos
as to suggest that the Builder had suddenly taken a dislike to his task
and knocked it over with a disdainful sweep of the hand. On the
further slope lies a large lamasery, where travelers may sometimes
find shelter, but not food, for all the quantities of everything which
the pious nomads roundabout bring the loafing lamas. Otherwise
there is nothing whatever except the yellow-brown plains, sloping
away to infinity in every direction.
 The last hundred and fifty miles were more like a prairie than a
desert, beautiful light-brown folds of earth, everywhere cut on a
generous pattern, rolling on and on farther than the advancing eye
could ever reach. There was a kind of prairie-dog, too, squatting on
its haunches and gazing saucily upon us, or dashing for the gravel-
banked holes with which it had dotted the plain. These were
marmots, of special interest to our Russian companions, since their
skins form one of the most important items of export for the fur-
traders of Mongolia. Mile after mile they lined the way, whole
colonies of them, some of the bluish tint much sought after by
dealers, most of them a beautiful gray-brown which flashed for a
moment in the brilliant sunshine as they dashed gopher-like for their
holes with an impertinent flip of their bushy tails.
At length women and children, and not merely men, began to
appear, riding on camels and horses; camps of hides and wool grew
almost numerous; there were more settlements along the way,
though all of them were still the round portable huts of the nomads.
Great flocks of what looked like plovers swirled up; big brown birds
that seemed a cross between hawk and vulture rode by on the wind;
wild ducks were so tame and numerous as to have tantalized a
hunter. We came out upon a rise with a magnificent view—the yellow
foreground fading to brown as the world rolled away before us, then
a purplish tint, increasing to a blue that grew ever darker, until the
broken ridge along the horizon far ahead blended into the strip of
clouds hanging motionless over it. Gradually mountains rose on
every hand, the few scrub evergreens along the crests of some of
them being the first trees or even brush we had seen since soon after
leaving Kalgan. The cold wind that had cut clear through us for days
seemed to come forth from the Siberian steppes beyond with
renewed savage intensity. Before long the crest-line of trees became a
low but dense green forest, covering all the upper portion of what we
soon learned was the sacred mountain of Urga, where all furred and
feathered creatures are under the protection of the “Living Buddha.”
We entered ever deeper into a broad valley, Mongols in their long
cloaks becoming more and more numerous, and more disagreeably
sophisticated than the simple herdsmen with their long poles and
noose-lassos out on the open plain. There the broad-cheeked nomads
had been more friendly, had more manly dignity, than the Chinese;
here the manliness remained, but there was something surly, almost
savage about them, which we were quickly to learn was no mere
matter of outward appearances. There came a small river, actually
crossed by a bridge, a queer massive wooden bridge with what
looked like piles of railway-ties as pillars; and on down the valley a
town appeared, the towers of a radio-station rose from among the
hills, a long row of barrack-like buildings of a European type grew
distinct—and just then our troubles began.
 CHAPTER VIII
IN “RED” MONGOLIA

A cross the broken valley at a gallop came two mounted men who
turned out to be Mongol soldiers, picturesque certainly, but not
otherwise particularly inviting. As they rode, they waved their rifles
wildly in the air, and were apparently bellowing to us orders which
the raging wind carried away before the sounds reached us. When
they drew near, their uniforms proved to be the usual costume of the
lower-class Mongol—heavy red knee-boots, pagoda-like fur hats, and
a faded, quilted kind of bath-robe gown covering the rest of their
iniquities; but on their chests and backs were sewed two cloth
patches a foot square on which were several upright lines of Mongol
writing, announcing their official capacity. But for these we might
easily have mistaken them for bandits, for both their manner of
riding down upon us and their air toward us when they had arrived
suggested that they had captured booty and prisoners for ransom
rather than that they had merely come to escort us to town.
One of them, it appeared from their actions, must get into the car
with us; the other would have to ride in with the horses. Like
children who very rarely have the chance of an automobile-ride, they
quarreled and argued for a long time, while the biting wind snapped
and lashed at us, as to which was entitled to the privilege, meanwhile
flourishing their aged rifles with a carelessness that made even such
time-honored weapons dangerous. At length one of them won the
point and climbed unceremoniously aboard, mopping his muddy feet
on our robes, stretching himself out at ease partly on our knees,
partly on our most breakable baggage, and poking us, perhaps
unintentionally but none the less unpleasantly, in the ribs with the
business end of his loose-triggered rifle, while the loser sourly turned
away with the horses and the expression of a six-year-old who had
been deprived of his toys and driven from the playground.
We forded half a dozen stony little streams, for the going had
become abominable in ratio as we approached Urga; we were waved
hither and yon across the valley by other rifle-shaking, vainly
shouting soldiers, and finally brought up at an ordinary little round
felt hut with a smoking stovepipe protruding from its top. It must
have been much more comfortable inside this than out in the bitter
wind, for those within showed no haste in braving the outer
temperature. Finally, however, two or three Mongols crawled
through the low door and demanded our huchao, our Chinese permit
to make the journey. There was an interminable argument over this,
mainly inside the yourt, which we had not been invited to enter.
Then two more bullying soldiers with poorly controlled rifles
tumbled into the car and ordered us to drive on.
Before a yamen that might have been mistaken either for a run-
down temple or a well kept stable we were again halted and
commanded to dismount. This place, it turned out, was not yet Urga,
but the former Chinese merchant section of Mai-Mai-Ch’eng (“Buy-
Sell-Town”) some miles away from the sacred city, in which trading
was until recently forbidden. Here a veritable mob of soldiers and
petty officials poured out upon us, led by an exceedingly insolent
youth in a rich, silky, but much soiled light-blue gown topped off by a
kind of archbishop’s miter. He demanded our weapons. We dug
them and the bit of ammunition we carried out of our baggage,
protesting in vain that as this was all to be examined at the next
yamen, and armed guards were to conduct us there, this extra labor
of disentangling our overloaded car was unnecessary. But it was
plain that there were at least two motives for putting us to this
gratuitous trouble: the insolent Mongol youth did not wish to lose an
opportunity to show his authority to the full, particularly toward men
of a race which seldom fell into his hands; and the whole posse was
eager to meddle with our belongings as much as possible. They
passed our revolvers and my companion’s rifle from hand to hand,
each trying his own method of manipulating them. Fortunately—at
the time we felt it was unfortunate—we had not loaded them, or
several tragedies might have ensued before their curiosity was
satisfied and we were allowed to conclude our journey. Then the
overbearing youth in charge decided that he must search our persons
for weapons, though we had given our word that we carried none.
The implied insult would not have mattered so much had not his
hands looked as if he had been handling Gobi fuel incessantly from
childhood without a pause even to wipe them, and had his manner
been less that of the protected bully venting an unaccountable spleen
against the whole white race. But cleanliness and common courtesy,
we soon learned, are the two qualities most foreign to the crowd now
ruling Outer Mongolia.
The quarrel as to who should have the privilege of the automobile-
ride into Urga was at length decided in favor of all who could pile
themselves into and about the car and baggage. How the machine
escaped a broken back under the burden was a mystery which even
Detroit probably could not have explained. Then there came a delay
while the blue-gowned youth found and adjusted a fanciful pair of
goggles, in all likelihood filched from the baggage of some previous
victim, and without which of course the two- or three-mile ride
ahead would have been unendurable. We groaned away at last, rifles
and our own weapons covering us on every side, first through a half-
ruined town of mud alleys between endless palisades of upright logs
of the pine family, then across a stony, barren, wind-swept space
with several axle-cracking little streams to be forded. Between
bumps we caught glimpses of the several distinctly isolated sections
of Urga, its golden temples and black dogs, its one lofty building, and
the Tibetan texts in stone on the flank of its sacred mountain across
the valley. Then we were suddenly turned into a noisome back yard
peopled with shoddy-clad and unwashed soldiers and prisoners, the
latter engaged in worse than menial tasks under the bayonet-points
of the former; the gate to the outside world was closed and barred,
and a new set of examiners fell upon us.

If a gang of young East Side New York rowdies should suddenly get
the complete upper hand in the city, I can imagine them going
through the belongings of their victims along Fifth Avenue in quite
the same way as now befell our own. At a word from a superior who
would himself scarcely have inspired a lone lady with confidence on a
dark night, there sprang forward from all sides a dozen young men
who seemed to have been specially chosen for their gangster-like
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