116 THE HEAVENS 



panion I was driven in upon myself. I had to 

 explore a route never before traversed by Euro- 

 peans, and the distance to be covered across the 

 open steppes of Mongolia and over the Gobi Desert 

 to the first town in Turkestan was twelve hundred 

 miles. Beyond that was the whole length of 

 Turkestan and the six-hundred-mile breadth of the 

 Himalaya to be crossed before I should reach India. 

 So I had a big task before me, and was stirring with 

 the sense of high adventure and vast distances to 

 overcome. 



To enable my eight camels to feed by daylight, 

 I used to start at five o'clock in the afternoon and 

 march till one or two in the morning. Sometimes 

 in order to reach water we had to march all through 

 the night and well into the following day. Fre- 

 quently there were terrific sandstorms, but there 

 were seldom any clouds. So the atmosphere was 

 clear. In the distance were sometimes hills. But 

 for the most part all round the desert was abso- 

 lutely open. I could see for what seemed an in- 

 definite distance in any direction. The conditions 

 were ideal for observing the stars. 



Seated on my camel, or trudging along apart 

 from my little caravan, I would watch the sun set 

 in always varying splendour. No two sunsets 

 were anything like the same. Each through the 

 ascendancy of some one shade of colour, or through 

 an unusual combination of colour, had a special 

 beauty of its own. I would watch each ripening 

 to the climax and then shade away into the beauty 

 of the night. And when the day was over the night 

 would reveal that higher, wider life which daylight 

 only served to hide. 



