A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming, practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position who was terribly bored--as he is today--by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be _thinking_," was glad to be out of all this as much as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and thirst, and even with hostile natives. Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.