Camels and Camel Pullers

I

WHEN camels come in from the long journey they are always much worn down, and are seldom fit to start again until they have been rested on good pasture for at least two months. There is only one period in which they can really recuperate. This is in June and July, when they shed their hair. It is always held by Mongols, and usually by Chinese, that when a camel has cast his hair — which he does so completely that he is bald all over for a time — he is weak and unfit for work. This is not quite true. No Delilah ever ruined a caravan owner by pulling all the hair out of his camels. It is true, however, that a camel is then obnoxious to chills, and must be treated carefully when hot at the end of a march. It is also true that a camel kept in work over the summer will not grow a good coat, and will be less fit for work in the winter; but caravans do travel in the summer when freights are unusually high.

The seasons when caravans are dispatched from Kuei-hua in the greatest number are in February, when there is time for them to reach the West before the grazing season, and in August, just after the grazing. A caravan sent out in August, when the camels are at their very best, can sometimes make the round trip before the next grazing season. They reach Ku Ch’eng-tze in the winter; the weaker camels are left to keep alive as best they can on the winter grazing, and the stronger camels, after being fortified for a few weeks by a grain diet, are sent back to Kuei-hua, a very high percentage of them carrying grain for feed. It is, however, much more common for a caravan to start in August, make the journey in anything from three to eight months, wait for the grazing season, and start back again the following August, so that the owner in Kuei-hua cannot settle his profits and losses for about a year and a half. The best venture of all is that starting in the spring, grazing the camels at the other end, and returning in the autumn of the same year.

On the summer pastures the camel men look for the warmest hollows as well as the richest grass, dose their camels with salt, and water them daily, instead of restricting the amount of water given, as is done on a journey. This makes them feel the heat more and shed their hair more quickly. After getting rid of the hair, they begin to put on flesh rapidly; their humps get fat and firm, and by the time the weather begins to turn, in August, there is a close thick new coat which grows closer and thicker and longer as the winter sets in. Only during this period do camels naturally get in first-class condition; indeed, they get so fat that before being taken on a journey they are often tied up and starved for a week or more, as a preliminary ’hardening.'

This happy eating for between two and three months will practically carry a camel through the rest of the year. Mongol-owned camels, which are lightly and irregularly worked, do not graze eagerly after the grass dries in the autumn, and, though they feed for only two or three hours a day, remain in splendid condition. Indeed, December is the rutting season. The colder the weather, the more rampageous the bull camels become. They are then very dangerous, eating nothing at all, impatient to roam in search of a harem, and showing fight toward anyone, whether man or camel, who interferes with them. Only an experienced man can handle a bull camel in the rutting season, and that gently, for if struck he is likely to become savage, turning on the herder with teeth and hoofs, throwing him and kneeling or trampling on him. If a bull camel attacks a man it is hard to beat him off, as he is insensible to pain or fear. Bull camels are therefore rarely put to caravan work; if they are, at the approach of the rutting season they are starved and crushed with heavy loads to keep them in subjection.

The calves are carried for thirteen months, being dropped in the following January. A cow in calf is fit for work up to the very day she casts the calf. After that she becomes thin and weak if she suckles the calf, which remains with her about a year and a half. She calves only about once in three years.

The hard marches and poor feeding in the Khara Gobi, followed of necessity by a big drink at the first well, cause miscarriages among the cow camels in calf. Yet even so the camel will be delayed only a few moments before resuming the march, still carrying her full load. Kuei-hua men, indeed, unless they are near the end of a journey or at pasture between journeys, will rarely try to save even a normally born calf. With a calf at suck the camel would become too thin for work, but if the calf is abandoned at once she will remain as fit as ever. Only she must never be allowed to see the calf, or she will moan and pine for it. If she never sees it the poor brute thinks she has suffered only one more mischance of ‘the business of the Gobi,’ to use that phrase of the caravan men which stands for so much suffering callously seen or stoically borne.

It was during our crossing of the Gobi that all the camels were reviewed for sore hoof pads. The gravel surface of the Four Dry Stages had done more damage than any rocky going; for, being tired by the long marches and made lazy by the level trail, the camels would not lift their feet properly, as they do when they are among stones, but dragged them at every step, causing blood blisters and fevered pads. The treatment is to keep the camels at least one day without water. (Cold water is said to make horses lame, as well as inducing blisters in men and camels, and caravan men will rarely drink anything but hot tea, especially just before or after the march.) They are then set on the road long enough to start the circulation working well through their hoof pads. After this the sore pads are attacked with a small flat lancet. The blisters are not opened and drained from the surface, but the lancet is thrust in at the side of the pad to a depth of two or three inches, the object being not to deal with the immediate blister, for fear of making the pad tender, but to ease and cool the whole foot by bloodletting. Water blisters are let alone, only blood blisters being held serious. The result is blood all over the trail, as the camels stamp wildly, squirting blood each time. When a camel has a pad that hurts him he does not go tenderly on it, as any other animal would, but stamps impatiently on it every few steps, with disastrous effects if he has picked up a nail or a thorn. Sometimes the fore hoofs, never the hind, are bled from a vein in the joint just above the hoof.

Another type of doctoring I have witnessed — the famous operation, to wit, of cobbling a camel’s hoof. A tiny but deep hole had eaten into the pad after a badly healed blister, and grit, working into it, was setting up an irritation. The camel was made to squat in the loading position, in which the forelegs are doubled up with most of the weight of the fore part of the body over them. A rope was then lashed round the neck and one of the forelegs, making it quite impossible for the camel to get up or even struggle with its forelegs. The hind legs are also gathered well under the camel in the lying or squatting position; but another rope was made fast just above the near hind hoof, the one to be treated, and two men, hauling mightily and swearing not a little, got the leg stretched straight out behind — a thing which looked as if it would lame the beast, but possible with a universally jointed and almost indestructible brute like a camel. A good strong man kept a steady strain on the rope, holding the leg stretched out while the hsien sheng of the House of Chou, a toothless old devil with a face like a hymn-singing Roundhead and a profound command of worse language than ever came out of Flanders, did the cobbling, being well skilled in these matters. First he picked the hole clean with a sailmaker’s needle such as is used for sewing tents and felts, and then he clouted the pad with a piece of hide stripped from a dead camel a day or two before (which was not against any tabu or law of the craft), sewing it with camel’s-hair twine into the edges of the pad, where it is most callous. When the job was done all holds were cast off, and the camel stood up, a bit sore in the temper because, having had a miscarriage a few days before, she was in no mood for chiropody. By the time the stitching of the rawhide clout had worn through, her pad was healed.

A more northerly road, presenting an alternative to the Four Dry Stages, is said to pass through the chief country of the wild camels. I was told this by several caravan masters, and one young Mohammedan camel puller told me that he had seen one which was shot by a Turki caravan master. It was of a grayish color, of about the same height as an ordinary caravan camel, but slender in build and with very small humps.

Wild camels are also found nearer the Edsin Gol. I was told that a Mongol, the year before, had caught a very young one, but when I passed it had already escaped to the desert again. They say that on the Two Dry Stages the wild camels sometimes come out of the hills to look at the caravan herds at pasture, but that they seldom come at all near, and are shy and almost impossible to shoot. There are men who say that, even when caught extremely young, these wild camels can never be tamed; but a Hami man told me he had known an Edsin Gol Mongol who used one for riding, and that the wild camel is considered a very fast and a most distinguished mount for a Mongol who fancies himself. Reliable information about wild camels collected by modern travelers remains incomplete, but there seems to be a general agreement that they can be tamed for riding, though never for carrying loads; and everybody who has been told that they can be ridden has been told fantastic tales of the distances they can cover. It seems to be evident that it is a rare and startling thing even for a Mongol to catch and tame one.

The idle weeks of the ‘herding camp,’ as it is called, are the best for the men as well as for the camels. The men are given leave in turn to go to their homes; even in camp extra men are taken on to help with the herding, and the regular men do only one day’s herding and one night on watch, followed by from five to seven days ‘easy.’ During this time they are busy with the curious pastime of knitting. The trade in camel’s wool or hair, as it is indifferently called, is new, and has been developed entirely by the encouragement of foreign merchants. Younghusband in 1887 observed that the trade was just beginning. A picul of camel’s hair was then worth about taels 5 in Tientsin. It is now worth as much as taels 70 for a picul of 133 pounds. Before the foreign demand, the hair shed by camels used to be left to blow about the desert, sometimes rolling into huge balls. A camel sheds on the average about six pounds of hair, with another pound and a half or two pounds of coarser, less valuable hair from the mane and the bunches of hair above the knees, on the forelegs.

Knitting is a newer thing still. The caravan men say that they learned it from White Russian soldiers deported from Chinese Turkestan. Some hundreds of these men were sent down to the coast, divided into small parties traveling with different caravans, and their way of knitting and crocheting socks was eagerly learned by the camel men. All of the hair from the camel herd belongs, of course, prescriptively to the owner, but in fact he loses a great deal of this because it has become a perquisite of the men to use as much as they like for making socks for themselves. They never steal the hair to sell in town, but they make a lot of extra things on the quiet, which they sell. Long scarves knitted or crocheted by camel men were all the fashion among the richer Chinese at Kuei-hua when I was there. When we first started, many of the camels had not finished shedding, and it was an amazing thing to see men knitting on the march; if they ran out of yarn they would reach back to the first camel of the file they were leading, pluck a handful of hair from the neck, and roll it in their palms into the beginning of a length of yarn; a weight was attached to this and given a twist to start it spinning, and the man went on feeding wool into the thread until he had spun enough yarn to continue his knitting.

II

A mob of dogs accompanies each caravan, and I noticed an outstanding brute in the train of one expedition, which they told me was a stray. A dog is often lost from his own caravan, either because he has stopped too long by a dead camel to feed or because he is footsore. If he can fight his way among the dogs of the next caravan that passes, he is taken on the strength; if not, he starves. This fellow, though he had won to the feeding basket with his teeth, was not yet on friendly terms with the pack. He was only two or three years old, by the whiteness and sharpness of his teeth, stood as high as a Saint Bernard, and was black in color with white forefeet and a splash of white on his chest. The most usual coloring is black, with tan points and tan spots over the eyes. When I fed him from my hand, he at once moved over to my tent, and the caravan men, seeing that ‘my heart loved him,’ said I might keep him. That very night he savaged a man who came to my tent, and the man, snatching up the stave of a camel pack, laid open his foreleg to the bone with a blow that would have broken the leg of any weaker dog.

I called him Suji, after the name of the camp. I learned afterward that suji is the Mongol word for the pelvis of a sheep, and that the camp came by its name because the shape of the little hollow where the well lay was like the shape of the bone. There was something fitting in the name for my dog, too, since he had been given to me and the suji bone is a piece of honor which the Mongols offer to their guests. To have called a dog after the name of the place where I got him was, however, thought very comical by the men of every caravan with which I fell in company along the road. Everything goes by convention among simple people, and they have a conventional list of dog names of their own. Tiger, Lion, Black Ox, Red Ox, and Bastard are among their favorites, while the bitches are most often called by flower names, like Chinese girls. Suji was always called Leng-t’ou by one of the caravans with which I traveled later. A leng-t’ou is the kind of obstinate man who, if you tell him that a piece of iron is hot, will at once touch it to see if it really is; or who, if told that it is time to go softly and peacefully, will at once fight. They called him this because he broke the first rule of all dogs, that where a dog feeds, there he is on guard. Suji would take food heartily from any man, but he would savage the same man if he came to my tent; and, though he pirated his food wherever food could be found, he returned always to guard my tent.

Caravan dogs enter the calling even younger than caravan men, for they are often born in camp. December and January pups are the best. When they are newly born the mother is allowed a place in the tent, but often the puppies are exposed for several hours in the snow, to kill off the weak ones. On the march, each puppy is carried in the breast of a man’s coat, from which he is taken for his mother to give him a quick lunch during the short halts. When he gets a little stronger, he and the rest of his family are hung in a nose bag from a camel’s load, and when they can run about they get their training from the other dogs of the pack.

The chief use of the dogs is to watch the camp at night. The place of the two men on watch is at the door of the tent, and the place of the dogs at the back, on the blind side. On the march they run always in advance. The man leading the first file of camels is the chief cook, whose voice they know because he has charge of their feeding, and as the caravan starts he calls them together with a long, lilting cry-Lai, lai-lai-lai-lai-i-i! They sometimes fight short battles when they meet the dogs of a caravan bound the other way, but more often each pack hangs together and goes warily by the other with hackles up. Even when two caravans are traveling in company it is a long time before the men can visit each others’ tents without being attacked, for the dogs are slow to acknowledge anyone whose food they do not eat. Dogs belong nominally to the caravan owner, but because they help the men on night watch it is the men who cherish them and regard them as their own. If anything goes wrong with them it is the men who make trouble, and it is the men who steal good-looking puppies from other caravans.

‘Small places for quarrelsome dogs,’ the Chinese say, ‘and big places for quarrelsome men.’ This is because the Chinese villager, with no knowledge of any world bigger than his few fields, or any civilization beyond the village temple, the village pawnshop, and the village teashop, is easily taken aback and put upon by yamen runners, underling officials, or any stranger who can bluster and swagger. His dog, used to few people and kept to guard the house, is more valiant than he. This is not the way in cities, where men must of necessity hold their own against all kinds of roguery and learn to evade every sort of imposition; the dog in a Chinese city becomes a cur, wanted by no one and kicked by everyone, whose principal business with men is the avoidance of their wrath.

The very best kinds of caravan dogs are said to come from the small Chinese border villages near Kalgan; big in bone, used to very hot summers and rigorous winters, and savage to the heart. Those mountains are never free from petty banditry, and the dogs, because they are the best defense of the villagers, are carefully tended and fed, so that they stand out from the general race of Mongol dogs to which they belong. Men who have been down toward Kalgan are proud if they can boast a dog stolen from one of these villages — for even the best of dogs is rarely bought or sold.

Above even these fine brutes, apart from all competition, is rated the strain of Ta Sheng K’uei. Because a herd of ponies belonging to Ta Sheng K’uei had gone by a day or two before Suji fought his way into the caravan from which I took him, and because of his build and size and style, all the caravan men I met put him down for a Ta Sheng K’uei dog. Now the firm of Ta Sheng K’uei has been established in Kuei-hua for more than two hundred years; it has a history that would stand well beside that of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and its dogs have a unique breeding.

The firm never worked for others at the mere carrying of freight; it traded on its own, buying produce in Mongolia and carrying it back to Kuei-hua on its own camels. It had posts at all the important places, like Urga, Uliassutai, and Kobdo; it controlled ranches and bought live stock as well as raw produce, and its interests were so wide that it directed the affairs of Mongol princes and was the business agent of great lamaseries. Its caravan leaders were the picked men of their craft, its camels and dogs and ponies the best on the road, its agents the best business men, with the highest prestige. Only when the Chinese rule in Outer Mongolia was replaced by Russian influence was the weakness of its position made apparent. Its credits were secured on tribal lands and princely revenues, and many rich Mongols were deeply in its debt. When, under Soviet tutelage, the Mongols followed up their revolt from Chinese rule with a policy of hostility to Chinese traders, all these debts and obligations were canceled. The result was disastrous to the Chinese, and Ta Sheng K’uei at the present time, like all the firms in the group of great houses once dominating the Mongolian trade, has only a remnant of its former wealth.

In the old days, before there was a telegraph in Mongolia, the dogs of Ta Sheng K’uei were trained to carry messages. Each dog had a home station; he would be taken out with a caravan, but as soon as released he would run back to his home. In this way Ta Sheng K’uei kept in touch with the buying and selling markets as no other firm could do. Traveling from one district to another, the caravans sent back word of prices and supplies, tied to a dog’s collar. The dog would run amazing distances, without stopping except to drink a little water or eat the flesh of a dead camel. When he reached his home station, the message would be relayed on to the head office at Kueihua. To keep up such a service Ta Sheng K’uei had to breed dogs in far greater numbers and of better strength and intelligence than any other firm or caravan company, and to cover the extra expense it adopted a practice that must be unique in the history of trade. It kept a special ‘dog account’ in its books, to which was credited 10 per cent of the profit on every deal in which the dogs were engaged, and the money was spent in maintaining the number and improving the quality. When the telegraph made the service obsolete, the old strain was preserved in its caravan dogs.

Ta Sheng K’uei is also said to have had a regular mounted courier service in the buying season, apart from the more erratic use of the dogs. The couriers rode ponies carefully trained into lean, hard condition — since a pony taken, as the Mongols take him, straight from the herd, with a big ‘grass belly’ on him and no grain in it, is good only for one long stage. Each man had two ponies, which he rode turn about, the led pony carrying a little dried bread for the man, a little grain for the ponies, and a little water when necessary. The man rode until he could no longer keep awake, then hobbled his ponies and slept for a few hours. The traveling gait was a trot. For comfort and show the Chinese, even more than the Mongol, Kazak, and Turki, prefers an ambler, but when it comes to endurance and steady going he admits that the trotting pony holds up better.

Now it takes about two months for a caravan from Kuei-hua, going stage by stage, as the Chinese say, — that is, without long halts, — to reach Uliassutai, so the distance may be anywhere between six and nine hundred miles. As I heard the yarn, the courier, with only two mounts to change about, made it in six days. I think I should call this a legend. It is hardly kind, after sitting as a guest by the tent fire in the ‘ungirt hour,’ when men tell stories, to go back and note them down in one’s diary as liars; but a legend this is, without doubt. I think it likely that over long desert stretches men rode something in this way; but once into the pasture lands of Outer Mongolia, the message would be more swiftly carried on by Mongols on relays of fresh ponies. However that may be, the Mongol pony, who is at his best on a long ride, can do gallant things. Were I an emperor, of the kind they used to have, I should summon the English Arab Horse Society to hold one of its endurance trials over the same course, with Mongol ponies in the running.

III

Immediately the men wake, before dawn, when the camels must be started off to pasture, it is the duty of the first cook to make tea. Brick tea, unlike any other China tea, ought to be stewed to get all the juices out of it. The Chinese say that the virtues of this tea are that it is ‘warming,’ and that therefore it can be drunk in harmony with meat. It is made of mid-Yangtze leaf, and the inferior kinds include tea dust, twigs, and the refuse of the warehouses pressed into bricks at Hankow. The Southern teas, more delicate in aroma, are ‘cooling’ and upset Chinese stomachs if taken before meat, causing diarrhœa. The barbarian foreigner never seems to have heard of this, much less to have noticed it for himself. In the morning, then, the camel pullers drink a few bowls of tea. Then they take a few more bowls, mixing in their parched cereals, which are the tsamba of Tibetan travelers, though the grains used vary according to the region; after which they send down a few more bowls of clear tea.

About noon the second cook comes on duty and prepares the one really distending meal of the day, that made with white flour. At this meal each camel puller eats the equivalent of at least a pound of dry flour. The colder the weather, the faster they eat, bringing out a profuse sweat as their stomachs strain at the task. Thereafter they make more tea for themselves, one canister after another. At last the caravan master, seated on his felt at the head of the tent, knocks out his pipe and says in a chatty way, ‘ Let us drink tea.’ This, by convention, is the order to break camp. All the men take up the long howling cry, ‘Dri-i-i-ink te-e-e-e-e-ea! ’ The hsien sheng has already been out to turn the camel herd toward camp; each man rushes out, collects his own camels, and leads them to their places, where they kneel between the loads. The weaker camels are then given their ration of dried peas in a nose bag, while the men, as fast as they can work, sling on the loads. They get so hot at this that even in the coldest weather they often strip to the waist; for with each half load a man has to swing about a hundred and seventy pounds on to his knee and steady it there against the side of the camel, while he slips a peg through the loops that hold it to the other half load on the off side, where his partner is working.

Caravan men will grouse and quarrel over all the little things that go wrong, but it seems to be a point of honor with them to take lightly the loss of a camel. Were they to show how gravely the loss affected them, some vague power would jealously do a hurt to all their camels. It brings bad luck to talk about that kind of bad luck.

Part of our herd on one occasion stampeded for a few hundred yards, in the silly way that camels do. Scrambling across a dry watercourse, one of them either stumbled or was jostled off its feet and came down, breaking a leg. It was one of our two very best camels, a cow. I went with my camel man to look at her. The near foreleg had been broken so badly just below the shoulder that the bone stuck out of the flesh. There was nothing to be done. The man laughed, turning his back. ‘She was good value for no money,’ he said; ‘the bandits gave her to me and I have worked her for six or seven years.’

Mongolia-going caravan men never slaughter a camel dying of injury or starvation. They seem to think that taking the life of the animal prevents it from being saved by a possible miracle. To kill it might make its troubled soul follow the other camels of the caravan, bringing them ill luck. The Chinese are capable of a callousness toward suffering that seems terrible to many Westerners. The truth is that they have the deep aversion of the East from the deliberate taking of life, which has become perverted until they would rather see an animal under torture than take the burden of its soul on themselves. Unless excited, they even prefer to use roundabout words for ‘dying’and ‘ killing.’ ‘Our camels suffer for us all their lives,’ a man said to me. ‘Is it not enough? If we did a violent thing at the end, would not the guilt be on our bodies?’

Now almost all camel pullers are wild, if they are not bad. It is a favorite saying in their own mouths that there are no good camel pullers. They will fight at a look or a word, and they make it a matter of pride to do no service, even for a tip, for any ‘passenger’ traveling with the caravans. They say they are servants to camels, not to men. They cheat and harry any man who is not strong enough to stand up for himself, but they will do no outright stealing except of food. Men who have had a turn at the bandit life are not uncommon among them, but they are all forthright rogues. Indeed, I always found that the worse a man’s character, the better I got on with him. The most lawless men liked the idea of a young foreigner with no experience traveling alone among them. They took me in at once as a fellow adventurer, and a man could not have had better friends.

All of these men had a tan as dark as old wood, and wrinkles about the eyes from peering through wind and dust, the glare of the sun, the dark nights, and the smoke of fires in the tent. Yet some of them had the dull faces of men bound all their lives to plod in front of a string of camels, while others, the sort of men to become, after their hard apprenticeship, masters of caravans and owners of camels, had strong, resolute, enterprising faces, and sometimes heroically modeled skulls. Among no other class of men have I seen so many heads of such magnificent contour. For one thing, their life of exposure wears down the flesh of head and face, showing up the bony formation, and the effect is heightened by the way they shave their heads. Some shave the whole head, others only the forehead, leaving either one long queue or, more often, two pigtails at the back.

The queue is supposed to have been a mark of the Manchu conquest, and has at different times been proscribed under the Republic. When the ‘Christian Army’ occupied the Northwest it started a campaign against queues. Many of the caravan men had been captured and had their pigtails cut off by the official ‘executioner,’ who patrolled the streets of Kuei-hua with an armed guard. They always grew them again. The peculiar fashion of wearing, not the formal queue, but two short pigtails reaching to the shoulder, — a fashion which prevails from Kalgan through the Northwest and has survived so much persecution, — seems to me to have nothing to do with the Manchus. It may be much older, a relic of some different racial inheritance.

IV

The men who lead camels through the Hou-shan, the Country Behind the Mountains, never call themselves anything but la lo-t’o-ti, which is to say, ‘camel pullers.’ They speak of much of the routine of their lives in terms not of men, but of camels. ‘ Chin-t’ien ta-ta-ti la (To-day we pull big and big),’ they say, when there is a long march ahead. They are first of all men of a common experience, for they are bound together by the training of a great and hard school. Often they come of families that have been for generations in the caravan trade. Always, even if their families are well-to-do, they serve an exacting apprenticeship. Because no man can make money out of caravans unless he understands camels, they learn to know their camels on the march and in camp, herding and drinking and resting, by day and by night, fullhumped and quarrelsome, or worn-out and staggering after scores of days on the road. They learn to know how a camel is standing up under his burden by loading and unloading thirty-six camels a day in all weathers. A camel is the most foolish of all the beasts that do tasks for men, and, because there is no good doctoring known for him when he is sick, they must learn how to keep him well; how to find the best grazing, how much water to allow when he is road-weary, and how little when he is fat and likely to sweat. They learn where to park the camels, lying huddled in close rows so that they get all the shelter possible through midwinter nights when the wind is driving the snow, how to bleed blistered hoof pads, how to clean festered pack sores and pad them to take off the weight of the load.

When they have mastered their trade they can tell a camel with good solid flesh on him from one that has been fattened up to get him sold, just by plucking out a few hairs and looking at the roots. They know how to coax a few more marches out of beasts that have worked beyond their strength, when there is no grazing and the ration of feed is running out; when to make the pace fast and when slow, and when a short march in the morning and another at night are better than one long stage.

While they master all these things, they have also to become versed in the personal mysteries of their craft and the jealously guarded privileges of the camel puller, with all the laws of the road, the tent, and the camp. Each thing in their knowledge must be got by experience, because the strictest of all the unwritten laws is that no man may expect help or advice from another. What he cannot learn by doing himself, he must find out by watching others. There is no mercy.

Each man is in charge of a file of camels called a lien. The full number of a lien is eighteen camels; nor can any man be asked to look after more. If he does not speak of his work as pulling camels, the phrase he uses is ting lien-tze; and ting means more or less to hold down, or stop, or be equal to, as we speak of holding down a job. Every camel has his own place in the file, and on the march is always in that place, carrying the same load; unless, after consideration, a change is made, for some camels when they are tired go better at the tail of the file than up in front. Two lien make a pa, and in camp these two lien lie either side by side or end-on. The two men, working on either side of the camels as they lie in a row between their packs, help each other to off-load and on-load. Except for this partnership, they have nothing to do with each other, for in camp when one of them is on duty herding camels or standing watch the other must by custom be off duty.

The Chinese of all trades are fond of their jargon, their hang-hua, or talk of the craft. Camel pullers never talk of the exact number of camels a man Owns. It is always a lien and a half, or two pa, or the nearest equivalent. Nor do they speak of ‘losing’ a camel when it dies or is abandoned on the march; it is always ‘thrown away.’ In the same way they have their own phrases for the journeys they make. The outward road to Mongolia or Chinese Turkestan is always ‘up,’ while the homeward journey is ‘down.’ On the road up a man must walk the whole distance (unless he rides a camel of his own), no matter how footsore or sick he may be, even if he is leading several unladen camels. The only test of sickness is the inability to eat. If a man cannot eat, he is put on a camel and tied there if necessary, until either he can eat or he dies. On the other hand, when the caravan is going down, the employer is bound to let each man ride a camel, even if the camels are heavily loaded or weak from exposure and hunger.

Once a veteran said the last word: ‘I put all my money into land in the newly opened Country Behind the Hills, and my nephew farms it for me. My old woman is there, so two years ago, when they had the troubles on the Great Road and my legs hurt, I thought I would finish with it all — defile its mother! I thought I would sleep on a warm kang and gossip with the neighbors and maybe smoke a little opium, and not work hard any more. But I am not far from the road in my place, and after a while in the day and the night when I heard the bells of the lien-tze go by, ting-lang, tang-lang, there was a pain in my heart — hsin-li nan-kuo. So I said, “Dogs defile it! I will go back on the Gobi one more time and pull camels.”'

These were the men who made me free of their tents and their talk, and whom I remember with a peculiar and intimate warmth. They are men of all nations, who feel the fascination of a life unequally divided between months of hardship and short days of riot and spending; but in the end it is the hardship that holds them. The Chinese, taking them as they come, are not like this. They frankly detest hard work. A large belly among them is an honorable thing, because it means that the owner of it does not swink for his living. I never met a Chinese outside of the caravans who was what we should call sentimental about his work. Camel pullers alone have a different spirit, a queer spirit.