"No very great sport," he said as he emptied his haversack. "However, they will do for breakfast, and I may have better luck to-morrow. There are some fish in the pools, but I do not see how we are to get them. I saw one spring out of the water; it must have weighed a couple of pounds." "You might shoot them, Godfrey, if you could find a place where the bank is pretty high so as to look down on the water." "So I could; I did not think of that. I must try to-morrow." "If it hadn't been for my feet," Alexis said, "we should have been down on the Selenga to-morrow, and we had calculated on being able to buy food at one of the villages there." "We shall be able to hold on here," Godfrey said, "for a few days, and I expect that one day's good tramp, when your feet are better, will take us there. After that we ought to have no great difficulty till we get down near the desert." CHAPTER VII. THE BURIAT'S CHILD. After three days' rest the Russian's feet were so much better that he said he should be able to make a start the next morning. Godfrey, however, would not listen to the proposal. "We are getting on all right," he said. "I am not much of a shot, but at any rate I am able to bag enough birds to keep us going, and though I have only succeeded in shooting one fish as yet, it was a good big one and was a real help to us. It is no use going on till your feet get really hard, for you would only be laming yourself again. It will be quite time enough to talk about making a start in three days' time." The next morning Godfrey was roughly awakened by a violent kick. Starting up he saw a group of six Buriats standing round them. Three of them had guns, which were pointed at the prisoners, the others were armed with spears. Resistance was evidently useless; their guns had been removed to a distance and the knives taken from their belts before they were roused. Godfrey held out his hands to show that he surrendered, and addressed the usual Russian salutation to them. The men were short, square-built figures, with large skulls, low foreheads, flat noses, and long eyes like those of the Chinese. Their cheek-bones were high and wide apart, the complexion a yellow-brown, and the hair jet black and worn in a platted tail down the back. They made signs to their prisoners to accompany them. Alexis pulled on his boots. Two of the men with guns stood guard over them while the others examined the stores, and were evidently highly pleased with the two brightly polished knives. "Rather an abrupt termination to our journey, Godfrey." "Painfully so. I was almost afraid everything was going on too well with us, Alexis. It began to look so easy that one could not understand why there should not be hundreds of prisoners every year make their way across." "I should not have minded so much," Alexis said, "if we had not got such a satisfactory kit together. We had everything we really wanted for a journey across Asia." "Except food and water, Alexis."