Near _Bombatu_, where we halted, the grass was luxuriant, and our half-starved ponies enjoyed it thoroughly. But, unfortunately, when our beasts are in clover our men are fagged out. Tellig especially, who has had most of the work, is nearly done for want of sleep and from constant exposure on the back of his camel. There was no end to the ox-cart caravans that passed us on the way to China. There are between 100 and 200 carts in each, and they followed so close on one another that it seemed as if there was a continuous line of them for the whole length of a night's march. Their tinkling bells have a strange, but not unpleasant, effect as they move slowly along. On the 15th September the lama made an excuse of buying sheep for himself and us, to halt at 9 a.m. some miles south of the steppe _Guntu-gulu_. We had been but two days without meat, but the Mongols had eaten nothing for six days. We had made several ineffectual attempts to buy sheep, and that very morning we had concluded a bargain for one, but the owner in catching the sheep missed his mark as he sprang forward to clutch it, and fell sprawling on his face. Of course we laughed, in common with the Mongol spectators, and whether the fellow was angry at being the occasion of merriment to us, or whether he considered his accident as a providential intimation that he was to sell no sheep that day, I cannot tell; but he obstinately declined to have anything more to say to us on the subject of sheep-selling. The pony I had got at Tsagan-tuguruk had gone all to the bad with his feet. The roads had been very stony all the way, and his hoofs were too far gone to bear rough travelling. I bartered him, therefore, for two good sheep, and now I had only the skeleton of Dolonor left. High mountains appeared fifteen miles east of us (if one may venture to estimate distance in such a country), and we began to hope for something like scenery. It blew fresh and cold from S.-W., and in the afternoon it came round to N.-W., a regular _choinar salchin_, or north wind, a word of horrible signification to Mongols. And if dreaded in September what must it be in January? I often wondered how the wretches get through their dreary winter. They are taken very suddenly with these cold northers. The day may be fine, and almost oppressively warm. A cloud comes over, and drops as much water as you would get out of a watering-pan. Then the north wind pipes up, and in a few hours you have made the transition from a tropical summer to worse than an Arctic winter, for the biting wind cuts into the bone.