92 THE QUEST FOR THE WILD HORSE 
diligence ; but to him, the man of science, the 
mathematician and astronomer, the bare discovery 
of new tribes of barbarians, new islands, and half- 
frozen seas, could have brought no such nights of 
triumph as that on which he tracked the Sun to his 
lair behind the Lapland mountain, and saw the 
brilliant creature slip again from his cavern, after his 
brief but necessary repose. Such must have been 
the triumph of Columbus when he fancied that he 
identified on the shores of America the plants and 
streams of India and Cathay ; and such, in some 
sense, the feelings of Prejvalski, the latest traveller to 
seek the Eastern limits of the Old World through 
new and untried paths, when he realized his hope of 
discovering in the deserts of Mongolia the wild camel 
and the wild horse. 
The experiences of this Russian soldier when he 
had penetrated into the regions behind the plateau of 
Tibet to the mysterious lake of Ivoko-Nor, lying 
10,000 ft. above the sea, are more in the spirit and 
setting of the journals of Columbus than any tale of 
travel of modern times. The lake, blue as a sapphire, 
lay in a setting of dull salt sand, with an encircling 
rim of snowy mountains. Outside and beyond the 
mountains lay on one side the forbidden land of 
China ; on another, Tibet, with its frozen and stereo- 
typed government of a priestly caste ; and on the 
west, the broken tribes of Eastern Turkestan. As he 
passed towards the great Desert of Gobi, which 
divides the dwindling population on one side of the 
