In the main, the deeps of his mind were undisturbed, the forces there moving often with a finer vitality than he had known before, but day after day the expectancy recurred in the same form, the sense of an imminent and radical complication. He could not quite put away thoughts of this delicate and encompassing mystery. Always he said, "This will pass when I really enter the desert," but it was not so in the journey to Turgim, though he saw no white woman throughout those majestic days—only the dark and yellow women in the shadows of the Rest Houses at evening—creatures very far from complication. Still, the gently lingering of feminine redolence in his reveries.... Always when he thought of the woman yet unknown, the penetration and one-pointedness of his mission diminished. In the colder morning hours he was able to reckon with the soft haunt of it all; but in the wondrous nights of desert moonlight (the same lady of the moon, full-throated, head tilted back) Young China of the towering present, and the sand-strewn relics of the ancient Lemurians, said to be left in the Gobi, alike lost their conspicuous magic. At Turgim, a vile and sprawling town, Romney drew a somewhat clearer idea of what he was out after, and the vague vastness of the undertaking at this time possessed the large part of his thinking in the day-light hours of travel. The main road was left at Turgim and the next point was Nadiram, six days’ journey straight west into the desert. Three Tartar merchants arranged to travel this stretch and Bamban explained that they relied upon his master’s credentials, since Nadiram was usually reached from an open spur running south from the Chinese Post Road at a point ten days’ journey ahead. Nearly two weeks was to be saved by this western cut, but the trail was commercially unsafe. The remotest of the Russian consuls was said to be stationed at Nadiram. Six days—a party of five camels. The Gobi now gave them battle, days of burning, nights of sudden chill. The three strangers proved helpful, as they knew the best switches of the trail and the halts for water and rest. Three times desert bands swept up to the little caravan—foul and furious they appeared, demanding their tariffs of money to the last copper or kopeck. It was on this journey that Romney first heard the hyenas.... The last day of the journey to Nadiram was ending. It had been an extra long stretch for the camels. He planned to rest a few days, and Nadiram was supposed to be for him, the last day on the outer and open highway of the desert. A sense of the mystery of the East came that night, as it had not since his early days in India.