The pass is a narrow gorge between steep hills, with little cultivated corners here and there. A small stream trickles down the side, and the road is strewn with round pebbles, which gives it the appearance of the bed of a river. The ascent is very steady and regular, gaining considerably more than 2000 feet in fifteen miles. The road is tolerable all the way, until about the top of the ascent, which is very rough and rocky. Rather late in the evening we got to our halting-place well on to the table land, which is at an elevation of 5300 feet above the sea.
The Chinese are the most patient and persevering agriculturists in the world. They have pushed their aggressions through the pass at Chan-kia-kow--on the hill-sides, where-ever they can find soil enough to hold together--and into the skirts of the desert itself. They get but a poor return for their labour, however; their crops seem to struggle for bare existence, and the farmers must depend more on their live stock than their crops.
In other parts of Mongolia the Chinese have been more successful in extending their civilising influence into the prairie. In the kingdom of the Ouniots, further to the north, Huc tells us that since the Chinese, following their invariable custom, began to penetrate into the country of the Mongols, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the forests have disappeared from the hills, the prairies have been cleared by fire, and the new cultivators have exhausted the fecundity of the soil. "It is probably to _their system of devastation_ that we must attribute the extreme irregularity of the seasons which now desolate this unhappy land." A curse seems to have rested on the industrious invaders. The seasons are out of joint. Droughts are frequent, then sand-storms and hurricanes, then torrents of rain which wash away fields and crops together in a general deluge, and the land is thenceforth incapable of being ploughed. Famines follow, and the people torment themselves with presentiments of calamity.
That all this is due to the Chinese agriculturists is hard to comprehend. It is not their practice elsewhere to "exhaust the fecundity of the soil." Huc propounds the new and strange doctrine that cultivation of deserts is a system of devastation. The truth seems to be that Huc, with the strong partiality he always evinces to the Mongols, was over-credulous of their stories. The Mongols, very naturally, consider themselves aggrieved by the Chinese. The latter first bought the right of cultivating the prairie, and, as their numbers increased, the weaker race necessarily gave way, moving their tents and their sheep further and further into the desert. The poor Mongols now see, with feelings of sorrow, the plough desecrating the ground where their fathers fed their flocks; they look with hopeless regret on the past as a kind of golden age, which their fancy dresses in a halo of peace, happiness, and prosperity. The hated Kitat at once suggests himself as the cause of these changes, and the Mongols delight to feed their hatred out of the copious store of their imagination.