148 ACROSS MONGOLIAN PLAINS 



Magazine containing an account of a flying visit which 

 I had made to Urga in September, 1918.^ There were 

 half a dozen Mongols near our tent, among whom was 

 Madame Tserin Dorchy. I explained the pictures to 

 the hunter's wife in my best Chinese while Yvette 

 "stood by" with her camera and watched results. Al- 

 though the woman had visited Urga several times she 

 had never seen a photograph or a magazine and for ten 

 minutes there was no reaction. Then she recognized 

 a Mongol headdress similar to her own. With a gasp 

 of astonishment she pointed it out to the others and 

 burst into a perfect torrent of guttural expletives. A 

 picture of the great temple at Urga, where she once 

 had gone to worship, brought forth another volume of 

 Mongolian adjectives and her friends literally fought 

 for places in the front row. 



News travels quickly in Mongolia and during the 

 next week men and women rode in from yurts forty or 

 fifty miles away to see that magazine. I will venture 

 to say that no American publication ever received more 

 appreciation or had a more picturesque audience than 

 did that copy of Harper's. 



The absent Tserin Dorchy returned one day when I 

 was riding down the valley with his wife. We saw two 

 strange figures on horseback emerging from the for- 

 est, each with a Russian rifle on his back. Their sad- 

 dles were strung about with half -dried skins — four roe- 

 buck, a musk deer, a moose, and a pair of elk antlers 

 in the "velvet." 



* Harper's Magazine, June, 191^, pp. 1-16. 



