fired our pistols in their faces and then drew; but they fled in
the greatest confusion imaginable. The only stand any of them made
was on our right, where three of them stood, and, by signs, called
the rest to come back to them, having a kind of scimitar in their
hands, and their bows hanging to their backs. Our brave commander,
without asking anybody to follow him, gallops up close to them, and
with his fusee knocks one of them off his horse, killed the second
with his pistol, and the third ran away. Thus ended our fight; but
we had this misfortune attending it, that all our mutton we had in
chase got away. We had not a man killed or hurt; as for the
Tartars, there were about five of them killed – how many were
wounded we knew not; but this we knew, that the other party were so
frightened with the noise of our guns that they fled, and never
made any attempt upon us.
We were all this while in the Chinese dominions, and therefore the
Tartars were not so bold as afterwards; but in about five days we
entered a vast wild desert, which held us three days’ and nights’
march; and we were obliged to carry our water with us in great
leathern bottles, and to encamp all night, just as I have heard
they do in the desert of Arabia. I asked our guides whose dominion
this was in, and they told me this was a kind of border that might
be called no man’s land, being a part of Great Karakathy, or Grand
Tartary: that, however, it was all reckoned as belonging to China,
but that there was no care taken here to preserve it from the
inroads of thieves, and therefore it was reckoned the worst desert
in the whole march, though we were to go over some much larger.
In passing this frightful wilderness we saw, two or three times,
little parties of the Tartars, but they seemed to be upon their own
affairs, and to have no design upon us; and so, like the man who
met the devil, if they had nothing to say to us, we had nothing to
say to them: we let them go. Once, however, a party of them came
so near as to stand and gaze at us. Whether it was to consider if
they should attack us or not, we knew not; but when we had passed
at some distance by them, we made a rear-guard of forty men, and
stood ready for them, letting the caravan pass half a mile or
thereabouts before us. After a while they marched off, but they
saluted us with five arrows at their parting, which wounded a horse
so that it disabled him, and we left him the next day, poor
creature, in great need of a good farrier. We saw no more arrows
or Tartars that time.
We travelled near a month after this, the ways not being so good as
at first, though still in the dominions of the Emperor of China,
but lay for the most part in the villages, some of which were
fortified, because of the incursions of the Tartars. When we were
come to one of these towns (about two days and a half’s journey
before we came to the city of Naum), I wanted to buy a camel, of
which there are plenty to be sold all the way upon that road, and
horses also, such as they are, because, so many caravans coming
that way, they are often wanted. The person that I spoke to to get
me a camel would have gone and fetched one for me; but I, like a
fool, must be officious, and go myself along with him; the place
was about two miles out of the village, where it seems they kept
the camels and horses feeding under a guard.
I walked it on foot, with my old pilot and a Chinese, being very
desirous of a little variety. When we came to the place it was a
low, marshy ground, walled round with stones, piled up dry, without
mortar or earth among them, like a park, with a little guard of