The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has become prosperous from the sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long camel-trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chantu-fou, drinks his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year’s card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease the tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets. It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the unchanging, shall change. Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia? When they sleep on their wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun? Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall. The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather-worn gateway of the woman-less city of Maimachen. “How much they miss!” says André, filling his pipe from the new pouch. “How much they escape!” retorts Alexsimevich. When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned gateway with plunging horses urged by the shouts of his Nubian charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same physical sensations as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains; but where Pharaoh’s robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow, and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable.