We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home! The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while disdained. We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness are pushing one another about across the road. Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the Chinese may pass. [Illustration: THE GREAT WALL]