The Russians were subtler than we gave them credit for. They ringed in the officers with a high fence in order to prevent escape, but they also used finer means. They told us fearful and wonderful tales of the Buriat tribes swarming between us and the Chinese frontier. These men were so fierce, they said, that they would murder you for the sake of a button, and then they would bury you somewhere in the vast desert, and no one would ever know your fate. The Chinese smugglers and bandits were still worse, for, with a refinement of cruelty denied to the less developed Buriats, they would put you to exquisite torture before killing you. These stories the Russians would pour in upon us with such a ready, unpremeditated air, such wealth of gesture, with so much humour and goodfellowship, that they inevitably carried conviction. Chinese tobacco-smugglers used to come to us and offer to convey us across the frontier for three hundred roubles; but we never dreamt of listening to them. People who know the country intimately have since told me that these stories were pure inventions, that the Buriats are a comparatively harmless race, on whose honesty one could rely, and that the smugglers would probably have kept their part of the bargain if we had kept ours. A spice of danger there would naturally have been in adventuring with them, but not more than was pleasant. The officers were eager to escape, because those who succeeded got a step in rank. It was perfectly easy to buy from a Russian soldier his uniform and equipment, but not his mastery of the Russian language. Most of the enterprises failed because the prisoners were forced sooner or later to buy food, and the moment they began to speak with the natives, their accent betrayed them. [SN: FUGITIVES]