“We have lost the road. We must spend the night here. It is very bad because we shall have no wood for our stove and the cold will grow worse.”
With great difficulties and with frozen hands we managed to set up our tent in the wind, placing in it the now useless stove. We covered the tent with snow, dug deep, long ditches in the drifts and forced our camels to lie down in them by shouting the “Dzuk! Dzuk!” command to kneel. Then we brought our packs into the tent.
My companion rebelled against the thought of spending a cold night with a stove hard by.
“I am going out to look for firewood,” said he very decisively; and at that took up the ax and started. He returned after an hour with a big section of a telegraph pole.
“You, Jenghiz Khans,” said he, rubbing his frozen hands, “take your axes and go up there to the left on the mountain and you will find the telegraph poles that have been cut down. I made acquaintance with the old Jagasstai and he showed me the poles.”
Just a little way from us the line of the Russian telegraphs passed, that which had connected Irkutsk with Uliassutai before the days of the Bolsheviki and which the Chinese had commanded the Mongols to cut down and take the wire. These poles are now the salvation of travelers crossing the pass. Thus we spent the night in a warm tent, supped well from hot meat soup with vermicelli, all in the very center of the dominion of the angered Jagasstai. Early the next morning we found the road not more than two or three hundred paces from our tent and continued our hard trip over the ridge of Tarbagatai. At the head of the Adair River valley we noticed a flock of the Mongolian crows with carmine beaks circling among the rocks. We approached the place and discovered the recently fallen bodies of a horse and rider. What had happened to them was difficult to guess. They lay close together; the bridle was wound around the right wrist of the man; no trace of knife or bullet was found. It was impossible to make out the features of the man. His overcoat was Mongolian but his trousers and under jacket were not of the Mongolian pattern. We asked ourselves what had happened to him.
Our Mongol bowed his head in anxiety and said in hushed but assured tones: “It is the vengeance of Jagasstai. The rider did not make sacrifice at the southern obo and the demon has strangled him and his horse.”