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Page 4.

a little while they went on to Kalgan and we continued our jou^[[r]]ney to Urga.  When I arrived there, my friends were all excited and asked me how I had escaped the robbers at Chapsir.  It turned out afterwards, that just these two cars, which we had met, were robbed half an hour after they passed us.  We must have passed them, but they never touched us, for cars going to Urga never carry valuable goods, but cars coming from there always carry valuable skins and furs and are sometimes attacked by robbers.

This bunch of robbers were very smart.  There were about 20 men and had dug a deep hole near to the road.  One man with a red flag stood in the middle of the road and signalled to the two cars to stop.  The chauffeurs, who only saw one man thought it was a new control station for passports and stopped, if there had been a lot of people on the road, the chauffeurs would have made a detour instead of stopping, but as they saw only one man, they did not suspect anything.  As soon^[[|]]as the cars had stopped, the 20 robbers came out of [[strikethrough]] t [[/strikethrough]] their trench with their rifles, forced the chauffeurs to drive across country and took off the whole skins, worth something like $30,000.- with the result, that some insurance company had to pay.

Every year the Chinese farmers are getting nearer to the station Chapsir in Inner Mongolia.  ^[[N]]o wonder that the Mongols are not very freidnly [[pencil correction: friendly]] with the Chinese farmers, for they take away their grazing lands.  The socalled resthouse in Chapsir is run by Chinese under Mongolian protection, for which they have to pay a fixed amount every year.  Once you are in the station compound, you are safe from robbers.  These little resthouses are very wel[[strikethrough]] l [[/stirkethrough]]come in wintertime, they may be filthy and dirty but anyhow they are warm;  in summer however it's better to sleep out in the yard, but there you run the risk, that you may be run over by a belated motorcar coming into the yard, when you are asleep.  The menu in all these Mongolian resthouses is the same.  As soon as you get there, the Chinese cook makes noodles out of flour and water, which paste he rolls into a flat pancake, cuts them up into strips and you^[[r]] macaronies are ready.  These