wretched native Tartars appeared no better socially than the pariah dogs that prowled around their tents. The Abakansk Tartars from Siberia and the Russian traders were pleasant, childlike individuals, whose views of life, its comforts, its worries, did not differ very materially from mine. But the Chinaman was something quite different. He stood apart, an isolated social mystery, but perhaps on a higher plane than any of us. As a Russian trader tersely remarked to me one evening as I was talking to him on the subject: "These Chinese! You cannot live with them; they know too much."
Some days later I decided to set out and visit some encampments of native Tartars, a branch of the Altaians, who, I heard, were spending the summer on the high Alpine meadows. Taking Alexieff, a Siberian wool trader, as a companion and guide, I set out, and passing from the cultivated millet-fields we rode across a stony desert, and came to the foot of a barren mountain mass. Following up the bed of a mountain torrent, and winding through gorges of barren rock on every side, we at last emerged into an open plateau covered with Alpine meadows, gentians and saxifrage, and scattered over with clumps of larch. A little distance beyond, nestling in a hollow, lay a beautiful mountain lake, the shores of which were surrounded by meadows and variegated with patches of forest, while dotted about the plateau lay encampments of the native Tartars, who had come there with their flocks for the summer pasturage. This was the summer camping-ground of this branch of the Altai Tartars, and hither, Alexieff told me, he repaired each summer to barter
