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.
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