In 1227 the great conqueror died. The confused records tell of his body’s being taken northward to a mountain which was the heart of his empire, from whose slopes sprang the sources of the three great Mongol rivers,--the Tola, the Onon, and the Kerulon. Beside its sacred lake the Manchu Amban of Urga sacrifices annually to the Nature-spirits. It is both a survival and a memorial to the bloody sacrifice of every living being on the road to the grave,--a tribute which tradition says the guards of Genghis Khan’s funeral cortège offered to their departed chief. Huts are far apart in these highlands now, and the whistling winds pierce the very marrow. The tired horses can hardly crawl forward on the doubtful trail. Far up in the heights, beside an old caravan-route, superseded by a newly-cut artery of travel, we come very late upon an ancient wooden shrine. The worshipers have gone. They lived their time in a village near by, but with the exhaustion of pasturage for the flocks, under nomad necessity they moved. A new camel-road was tramped out by drivers, who must find shelter amid habitations. So in the shrine, long unpainted, the smiling Buddha presides now over his famished altar. Very, very old, very, very poor, is Archir the warden, who welcomes you. For forty years he has watched in his _gir_ by the dragon-gargoyled gate. The spear with which he stood to his post of old is blackened, and its red tassel is dulled and faded. A tattered fringe is along the edge of the felt door to his _yurta_, and holes are under its walls close to the ground. His pile of wood is pitifully small, and few are his sandal-sole biscuits. His _shuba_, sheepskin-lined, is blackened with the soot of years. Archir refuses courteously what he knows is a rare foreign delicacy, a Russian cigarette. “A lama,” he says, “may not smoke.” But his own hospitality is of the thoughtful kind which comes from the heart. He hands you a sheepskin softened by long massaging between his trembling old hands, that his own covering, not your coat, be burned by the sparks from the brazier. He notices that your tea-bowl is awkwardly held, and he brings a little table to put before you. He sees your driver fumbling for a match to light his pipe, and reaches him a coal with the fire-tongs. He clears his couch that you may sit in comfort. He offers you the first use of his fire for cooking.