32 ACROSS MONGOLIAN PLAINS 



the picturesque old Shuri Palace. Only a few months 

 before I arrived, Langdon Warner had visited it on a 

 collecting trip and the natives had not yet ceased to talk 

 about the strange foreigner who gave them new baskets 

 for old ones. 



A little later Warner preceded me to Japan, and in 

 1912 I followed him to Korea. Our paths diverged 

 when I went to Alaska in 1913, but I crossed his trail 

 again in China, and in 1916, just before my wife and I 

 left for Yiin-nan, I missed him in Boston where I had 

 gone to lecture at Harvard University. It was strange 

 that after ten years we should meet for the first time in 

 the middle of the Gobi Desert! 



Warner was proceeding to Urga with two Czech offi- 

 cers who were on their way to Irkutsk. We gave them 

 the latest news of the war situation and much to their 

 disgust they realized that had they waited only two 

 weeks longer they could have gone by train, for the at- 

 tack by the Czechs on the Magyars and the Bolsheviki, 

 in the trans-Baikal region, had cleared the Siberian rail- 

 way westward as far as Omsk. After half an hour's 

 talk we drove off in opposite directions. Warner event- 

 ually reached Irkutsk, but not without some interesting 

 experiences with Bolsheviki along the way, and I did 

 not see him again until last March ( 1920) , when he came 

 to my office in the American Museum just after we had 

 returned to New York. 



When we reached Panj-kiang we felt that our motor 

 troubles were at an end, but ten miles beyond the station 

 my car refused to pull through a sand pit and we found 



