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 appearance. In their shoddy uniforms of some nondescript dark color, they looked like a cross between low-class Russians and the scum of the Mongolian plains—which is about what they were, in other words Buriats. The pleasure they took both in putting us to annoyance and in prying minutely into our affairs quite evidently purged their task of any stigma of labor. I have passed many frontiers in my day, but never have I beheld an examination in the slightest degree approaching in thoroughness this one. Every single article, large or small, in our valises, bedding-bags, even our lunch-sacks, was picked out one by one, carefully, not to say stupidly, scrutinized, taken apart if that was physically possible, and finally tossed into a heap on the filthy bare ground of the yard. Clean linen must be completely unfolded, stared at minutely on both sides, and crumpled up into a mess from which only a laundryman could rescue it. We were not surprised that such articles aroused the suspicion of the examiners; anything resembling clean linen was quite evidently strange to them. Nor was there any intentional offense meant, perhaps, in mixing our bread and our tooth-brushes with the offal in the yard, for no conscious line of demarcation between these seemed as yet to have been drawn in the minds of the examiners. They did consciously resent our own higher plane of cleanliness, however, when it was called to their attention. I was attempting to rescue my dismembered sleeping-bag from a worse fate by picking it up from the ground where it had been thrown after examination, when one of the rowdies snatched it out of my hand and deliberately tossed it into an especially choice source of contamination.