In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one’s own kind, police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly strange environment, where the most remarkable of the world’s Asian races lives and trades, works and rules. Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting vision of the eternal Orient--these are the things for which men travel. As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses of banner-decked courtyards seen through great barred doors in the gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated Chinaman, with skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long sleeves, fur-lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open. Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper windows, look outward through the peep-hole. In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pâtés de foie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are supported by Russian inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitzkosavsk. It is amusing to watch the enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey. We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering sheepskins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where the Mongols have heaped their little bundles of provender.