One meets quaint characters in this inland journeying--veteran soldiers of the Turkestan advance; “_sabbato_ sectarians,” who keep Saturday holy rather than Sunday; austere “Old Believers,” traveling peddlers, teamsters who have tramped beside their ponies over three provinces. One comes upon peripatetic Mussulman doctors, in snug-fitting black coats and small black skull-caps, who show their Arabic-worded road-maps and much-thumbed medical works bound in worn leather. Beside their plates at table the kindly hostess puts piles of leathery bread, unleavened, and made without lard in deference to their caste rules. [Illustration: PEASANT TYPES] A shop in one village is kept by a Chinaman, who, lettered like most of his race, seems a far shrewder and more intellectual person than the uneducated Russian peasants. He invites the stranger to drink tea that his special caravan brings, and presents Chinese candy with the courtesy of a grandee. When, in reciprocity, the traveler buys sugar for his _chai_, he receives it wrapped in paper covered with hieroglyphics and exhaling the faint unmistakable Chinese odor. Going always southward, one begins to meet more and more frequently the villages of the Mongol-descended Buriats. “_Bratskie_” (brotherly people), the Russians call them, for despite the forbidding aspect that flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and big squat bodies give them, no more peaceful, harmless, and hospitable people exist. They are great and fearless hunters, unexcelled riders, and though still only on the threshold of civilization, are rapidly moving to better things. All phases of the advance from the nomad to the agricultural stage may be studied among them. The pastoral Buriats, decorated like the Chinese with queues, ride around after their flocks. Their villages lie far away from the lines of convoys, unmarked on the Ministry map, which one is supposed to be following. Each family occupies a little windowless wooden hut, some fifteen feet in diameter. In front of it is planted a pole, carrying at the top a weather-faded pennant, the colors of which in Buriat heraldry indicate the tribe and name of the occupant. Behind the hut are stacks of hay and a wooden corral with sheep and horses. Beside it stands the summer tent, of felt, looking like a great inverted bowl. It is empty in winter, save for a shrine with grotesque pictured gods, fronted by offerings.