I looked and looked again till presently the vast loop vanished into the blue of heaven.  Then I turned and said—­“I will come with you to Central Asia, Leo.”

CHAPTER II

THE LAMASERY

Sixteen years had passed since that night vigil in the old Cumberland house, and, behold! we two, Leo and I, were still travelling, still searching for that mountain peak shaped like the Symbol of Life which never, never could be found.

Our adventures would fill volumes, but of what use is it to record them.  Many of a similar nature are already written of in books; those that we endured were more prolonged, that is all.  Five years we spent in Thibet, for the most part as guests of various monasteries, where we studied the law and traditions of the Lamas.  Here we were once sentenced to death in punishment for having visited a forbidden city, but escaped through the kindness of a Chinese official.

Leaving Thibet, we wandered east and west and north, thousands and thousands of miles, sojourning amongst many tribes in Chinese territory and elsewhere, learning many tongues, enduring much hardship.  Thus we would hear a legend of a place, say nine hundred miles away, and spend two years in reaching it, to find when we came there, nothing.

And so the time went on.  Yet never once did we think of giving up the quest and returning, since, before we started, we had sworn an oath that we would achieve or die.  Indeed we ought to have died a score of times, yet always were preserved, most mysteriously preserved.

Now we were in country where, so far as I could learn, no European had ever set a foot.  In a part of the vast land called Turkestan there is a great lake named Balhkash, of which we visited the shores.  Two hundred miles or so to the westward is a range of mighty mountains marked on the maps as Arkarty-Tau, on which we spent a year, and five hundred or so to the eastward are other mountains called Cherga, whither we journeyed at last, having explored the triple ranges of the Tau.

Here it was that at last our true adventures began.  On one of the spurs of these awful Cherga mountains—­it is unmarked on any map—­we well-nigh perished of starvation.  The winter was coming on and we could find no game.  The last traveller we had met, hundreds of miles south, told us that on that range was a monastery inhabited by Lamas of surpassing holiness.  He said that they dwelt in this wild land, over which no power claimed dominion and where no tribes lived, to acquire “merit,” with no other company than that of their own pious contemplations.  We did not believe in its existence, still we were searching for that monastery, driven onward by the blind fatalism which was our only guide through all these endless wanderings.  As we were starving and could find no “argals,” that is fuel with which to make a fire, we walked all night by the light of the moon, driving between us a single yak—­for now we had no attendant, the last having died a year before.