had interned six thousand of the forces of General Bakitch, which had come over into Mongolian territory.  My friend and I with sixteen of the officers chose to carry through our old plan to strike for the shores of Lake Kosogol and thence out to the Far East.  As neither side could persuade the other to abandon its ideas, our company was divided and the next day at noon we took leave of one another.  It turned out that our own wing of eighteen had many fights and difficulties on the way, which cost us the lives of six of our comrades, but that the remainder of us came through to the goal of our journey so closely knit by the ties of devotion which fighting and struggling for our very lives entailed that we have ever preserved for one another the warmest feelings of friendship.  The other group under Colonel Jukoff perished.  He met a big detachment of Red cavalry and was defeated by them in two fights.  Only two officers escaped.  They related to me this sad news and the details of the fights when we met four months later in Urga.

Our band of eighteen riders with five packhorses moved up the valley of the Buret Hei.  We floundered in the swamps, passed innumerable miry streams, were frozen by the cold winds and were soaked through by the snow and sleet; but we persisted indefatigably toward the south end of Kosogol.  As a guide our Tartar led us confidently over these trails well marked by the feet of many cattle being run out of Urianhai to Mongolia.

CHAPTER XII

IN THE COUNTRY OF ETERNAL PEACE

The inhabitants of Urianhai, the Soyots, are proud of being the genuine Buddhists and of retaining the pure doctrine of holy Rama and the deep wisdom of Sakkia-Mouni.  They are the eternal enemies of war and of the shedding of blood.  Away back in the thirteenth century they preferred to move out from their native land and take refuge in the north rather than fight or become a part of the empire of the bloody conqueror Jenghiz Khan, who wanted to add to his forces these wonderful horsemen and skilled archers.  Three times in their history they have thus trekked northward to avoid struggle and now no one can say that on the hands of the Soyots there has ever been seen human blood.  With their love of peace they struggled against the evils of war.  Even the severe Chinese administrators could not apply here in this country of peace the full measure of their implacable laws.  In the same manner the Soyots conducted themselves when the Russian people, mad with blood and crime, brought this infection into their land.  They avoided persistently meetings and encounters with the Red troops and Partisans, trekking off with their families and cattle southward into the distant principalities of Kemchik and Soldjak.  The eastern branch of this stream of emigration passed through the valley of the Buret Hei, where we constantly outstrode groups of them with their cattle and herds.