"I have never beheld a more beautiful landscape than the scene before me.... I am writing this on the banks of Altai Lake.... The balsam from the cone-like firs along the gorges surcharges the air with an intoxicating flavor and reflect their inverted gracefulness in the calm waters of the lake.... The mountains sloping up from either side are delineated in the mirroring surface and form an archway for the snow-capped and broken pinnacle that towers above the others like a sentinel brooding in his frosty and eternal isolation.... Far off in the distance I can see the black and white walls of the KATUN GLACIER and know that, throughout this region, gold and silver, as well as lead and copper, most certainly abound.... In our unending tramp today I have discovered many evidences of the presence of zinc and nickel and other minerals lying around.... My 'prisoner' tells me that there are mines already working in the upper part of the Talovsky River and that the copper runs very high in the vicinity of Chudak.... Alice wrote to Princess G---- today at T----.... I am NOT much impressed nor FAVORABLY by the attitude of these natives in the hills.... They seem to be a mongrel mixture of Tartar and Mongolian who are always ready, like the huge ungainly bears we have encountered in our pilgrimage, to grapple and devour one for the mere pleasure of seeing blood!... Maria seems quite interested in these notes,--today she insisted on giving me her impressions of how a NOVEL should be written.... She says that to make a story interesting it should be all movement from the opening line to the final wedding bells.... When I told her that I was writing HISTORY she pouted prettily and remarked: 'I never think of history without wondering WHO subsidized the writer of the misleading fairy tale.' "... This girl has lived close enough to the source of history to know what PROPAGANDA is.... Still, I like her uncomplaining buoyancy of spirits in the trial we are going through.... We are headed SOUTH toward Kuria and Khotan, where arrangements have been made to receive us by some people who know our secret and will respect the rights of ASYLUM in a land where oblivion may mean liberty and love!..." 40. There seems to have been quite a skip in the notations of the diary. Evidently the diarist has become MORE INTERESTED in something else: "The fact that we have been on FOREIGN SOIL during the last fifteen days has considerably relaxed our nerves.... Aside from the rumor constantly reaching us that the Mongolian mercenaries are in the employ of the Bolsheviki and offered BIG REWARDS for our capture, we have not been disturbed in mind or bodies.... Maria asked me today if I were any relation to CHARLES JAMES FOX, whose oratory she claims to greatly admire.... When I informed her that I had never met this gentleman her eyes grew very big....