“...  Another pair of hands reached down and caught me by the collar and I was yanked like a squirming spaniel out of my hole into a large oblong room that was only slightly lighted by a blue student lamp upon a small roll-top desk....  Against the wall was a large steel engraving of King George of England, and I could see the Union Jack displayed upon another wall....  There were papers and documents and army tents in piles here and there round the room....  BUT THE IMPRESSION THAT FLASHED UPON ME was not at all reassuring for a man who had made his way into SUCH surroundings directly from the other underground corridor in Berlin!...”

38.  Then this entry follows: 

“From that very hour I AM STRONGLY FOR THE BRITISH....  I will not attempt to describe that MEAL....  It was all a King in Exile or any of his suite could ask for; and the silent men who prepared it will always be remembered for their discretion and manly hospitality....  Neither of them appeared to KNOW me NOR ANY OF OUR PARTY....  But those gallant fellows are adepts at dissimulation....  I’m certain that the tall, slender and soldierly bearing officer will remember the day we had our STRAWBERRIES at Carlton Terrace, and the slender, willowy Duchess who forgot her fan until he picked it up and brought it to her AT MY TABLE, where she paused for a moment to say to me, ’MY FATHER IS IN LONDON AND WISHES TO SEE YOU BADLY.’...  I am certain he remembers what I told her about the Gordons and the Devons in that slaughter at the Somme,—­when so few of those brave lads returned!...  If we ever meet again I shall thank him for the robes and provisions and motor trucks he furnished to transport us safely rolled up in army tents for many rough miles across the country in the direction of CHANYI LAKE....”

39.  We find this entry of the diarist next: 

“I have never beheld a more beautiful landscape than the scene before me....  I am writing this on the banks of Altai Lake....  The balsam from the cone-like firs along the gorges surcharges the air with an intoxicating flavor and reflect their inverted gracefulness in the calm waters of the lake....  The mountains sloping up from either side are delineated in the mirroring surface and form an archway for the snow-capped and broken pinnacle that towers above the others like a sentinel brooding in his frosty and eternal isolation....  Far off in the distance I can see the black and white walls of the KATUN GLACIER and know that, throughout this region, gold and silver, as well as lead and copper, most certainly abound....  In our unending tramp today I have discovered many evidences of the presence of zinc and nickel and other minerals lying around....  My ‘prisoner’ tells me that there are mines already working in the upper part of the Talovsky River and that the copper runs very high in the vicinity of Chudak....  Alice wrote to Princess G——­ today at T——....  I am NOT much impressed nor FAVORABLY by the attitude