SPORT AND SCIENCE ON THE 
hours to do the four miles to the top of the pass, 
by which time the animals needed a good rest, 
so once more we put up with a short day’s run 
and decided to spend the night at a farm-inn 
named Huang-hua-p’ing. 
On July 17 we made an early start, but heavy 
rains during the night had rendered the roads 
well nigh impassable, so that progress was very 
slow. We now headed in a northerly direction for 
a few miles, traversing low, rolling grasslands, - 
cultivated here and there by Chinese settlers, 
whose farms could be seen dotted over the land- 
scape. Several small lagoons were passed, whereon 
sheld-ducks and other water-fowl were plentiful. 
By nightfall we had done sixty li (about 25 miles), 
and put up at a small inn named Ts’a-han-k’u-luan. 
It must be stated that the li of the Mongolian 
Plateau are very much longer than those within 
the Great Wall. Sixty Mongolian li might 
be taken as the equivalent of eighty or ninety 
Chinese li. As far as we could make out the 
Mongolians themselves have no such standard 
of measurement, but measure distance by the 
time it takes a pony to do it, and reduce that to 
li. Thus in spring when the grass-fed ponies 
are lean and exhausted after the long winter, the 
distance in li between two places will be considered 
double or treble what it would be in the autumn 
when the ponies are fat and vigorous after a 
summer’s rich feeding. It was some time before 
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