A town droshky will take one the few versts to Kiahta, where in the Geographical Society’s museum is the celebrated sketch of the Dalai Lama made at Urga by a Russian artist, when the young Tibetan monk had fled before the English expedition to Lhassa. Here, too, are ore samples and reconstructed Mongolian tents. But it is hard to look at fossil rhinoceros-heads and at stuffed sabre-toothed tigers and musk-deer when the camel-trains are passing and China is a verst away. A courier is necessary now, for resourceful Jacov and driver Ivan are strangers beyond the border. Perhaps our host knows of a man acquainted in Mongolia? He will inquire. Next day there presents himself a slight, bearded, intellectual man, Alexander Simeonovich Koratkov, usually called, for short, “Alexsimevich.” Bachelor of forty, educated in the Troitzkosavsk “Realistic” school. He speaks, as well as Russian, Mongolian, English, French, German, and some Chinese. He has translated for the English engineers who were brought in to work the Nerchinsk mines. He is deeply read in Buddhist mythology and sociology. Will he go down into Mongolia with you? Yes; and so it is arranged. Provisions are cheap and abundant in the Siberian towns. Sixty kopecks buy a pound of caravan tea, seventeen kopecks a pound of sugar, the sort that comes in a cone like a Kalmuck hat. It is a luxury by warrant of public opinion, so much that it has, of note, been served on baked potatoes. Before the Buddha pictures of the Buriats, a few lumps may be the choicest offering. Flour costs six kopecks a pound. Beef, if a great pud-weight forequarter is bought at the market, twenty kopecks. Frozen butter will cost twenty-five kopecks per pound. Eggs, of the Siberian cold-storage variety, forty-eight kopecks a dozen. For thirty kopecks one gets a piece of milk as big as one’s head. But do not try to go beyond the native produce, for canned goods, coffee, or sardines. It is bankruptcy speedier than buying bear-holes. A big magazine will sell pâté de foie gras, imported from France, at two roubles the tin; while beneath the Chinese caravansaries’ arcade, bales of tea will be sold at a few kopecks a pound. One gets cigars in a glass-covered box, with the government stamp, for a rouble and a half, and they will be worth about as much as the strings of twisted tobacco-rope which the Mongols carry off as their single cherished luxury. And now for transportation. The sledge can serve no more, for the snow goes bare in places along the caravan trail. We must have a tarantass, and in time one is produced for inspection. A cask sawed in half, lengthwise, is the image of its body, a lumber-cart the model of its clumsy wheels and framework. To the tarantass is hitched the trotter, with his big bow yoke to bring the weight of collar and shafts on his back rather than against his neck. At each side of him, with much such a rig as is used to tow canal-boats, are made fast the two galloping horses.