“Oh, yes,” replied the functionary, “he will see you; but it is not yet ten o’clock.”
However, to come back to our own affairs; we made our way across the stony, dusty, wind-howling open space between the business and the official sections of the holy city in time to avoid any risk of being charged with tardiness. The _yamen_ of justice was a two-story frame building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese when they held the suzerainty over Outer Mongolia, as the flaring roofs, sky-blue façade, dragon-decorated brick screen against evil spirits, palings of crossed sticks to the number of outriders due the prince who once occupied it, and the like, told us without any necessity of inquiring. Two typical Mongol soldiers, resembling Oriental rag dolls that had lain out in the garden for weeks and then been lost for a few days in the coal-bin, lumbered to their booted feet from a fantastic sentry-box in order, as is the habit of their class nowadays, to impress us with their equality and authority by gratuitously delaying us for a few moments, and at last we reached our destination. This was one of the barn-like rooms of the unpretentious building. Near the door rose to the ceiling a big cylindrical Russian brick stove. Around the other three sides of the room ran a raised platform, knee-high and a man’s height in breadth. The reed matting and cushions covering it recalled Japan, but there was nothing Japanese in the way in which the dozen officials stepped upon it from the unswept floor in their heavy boots, all more or less covered with the filth of the streets, and calmly tramped about it or squatted on their haunches. All these functionaries were dressed in Mongol fashion; that is, in long robes of dull red, blue, green, purple, violet, or similar conspicuous color, half obliterated with grease and dirt, topped off with some one of their many fantastic national head-dresses. The latter were never removed, nor were we foreigners expected to take off our hats. In fact there seem to be no social politenesses among this rude nomad people. They neither shake hands, unless they are meeting or aping foreigners, nor bow, like the Chinese, nor use any other gestures of greeting or parting; they stalk into foreigners’ houses in hats and boots; their whole conduct is as if none of the little courtesies and formalities of more highly civilized communities had ever occurred to them, which is probably the case.