If I do not make half a dozen pars out of all this I am no newspaper man!

Meanwhile I learn from Popof the precise spot where the ceremony will take place.

Popof points it out on the map.  It is a hundred and fifty kilometres from Tcharkalyk station, in the middle of the desert, amid the plains which are traversed by a little stream which flows into the Lob Nor.  For twenty leagues there is no station, and the ceremony is not likely to be interrupted by any stoppage.

It need hardly be said that at half-past eight I and Caterna were ready for the call.

Major Noltitz and Pan-Chao had got themselves up in all due form for the solemnity.  The major looked as serious as a surgeon who was going to cut off a leg.  The Chinaman looked as gay as a Parisian at a village bridal.

Doctor Tio-King and Cornaro, one carrying the other, were to be at this little festivity.  The noble Venetian was a bachelor, if I am not mistaken, but I do not think he gives any opinion on marriage, at least I have no recollection of its being in the chapter headed “Safe and easy means of promptly remedying the different accidents that threaten life.”

“And,” added Pan-Chao, who has just quoted this Cornarian phrase, “I suppose marriage ought to be included among those accidents!”

A quarter to nine.  No one has yet seen the happy couple.  Miss Bluett is in one of the toilet cabinets in the first van, where she is probably preparing herself.  Fulk Ephrinell is perhaps struggling with his cravat and giving a last polish to his portable jewelry.  I am not anxious.  We shall see them as soon as the bell rings.

I have but one regret, and that is that Faruskiar and Ghangir should be too busy to join us.  Why do they continue to look out over the immense desert?  Before their eyes there stretches not the cultivated steppe of the Lob Nor region, but the Gobi, which is barren, desolate and gloomy, according to the reports of Grjimailo, Blanc and Martin.  It may be asked why these people are keeping such an obstinate lookout.

“If my presentiments do not deceive me,” said Major Noltitz, “there is some reason for it.”

What does he mean?  But the bell of the tender, the tender bell, begins its joyous appeal.  Nine o’clock; it is time to go into the dining car.

Caterna comes near me, and I hear him singing: 

“It is the turret bell,
Which sud-denly is sounding.”

While Madame Caterna replies to the trio of the Dame Blanche by the refrain of the Dragons de Villars: 

“And it sounds, sounds, sounds,
It sounds and resounds—­”

The passengers move in a procession, the four witnesses first, then the guests from the end of the village—­I mean of the train; Chinese, Turkomans, Tartars, men and women, all curious to assist at the ceremony.  The four Mongols remain on the last gangway near the treasure which the Chinese soldiers do not leave for an instant.