国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

Sunit. This distinguished Mongol prince had allowed them to film freely; and they availed themselves of the opportunity to add many interesting feet of film to the film-archive.

They were soon followed by NoRIN, MARSCHALL, WALz and SÖDERBOM, who arrived from Kuei-hua with various supplies on fifty-one camels. The original arrangement had been that we should meet the latter party at the great monastery of Beli-miaol (Batu-khalagh-sume); but since we were to set off westwards on striking camp, and were already forty kilometers to the west of the monastery, we sent word to them that they should come to us instead. Camp VIII thus turned out to be a great meeting-place for three different parties of the expedition on May

28th.

The new arrivals handed in reports of the tasks with which they had been commissioned. To give here a description of their experiences and journeys would take us too far.

THE CAMP

The staff now comprised eighteen Europeans and ten Chinese. This was the only time during the whole course of the expedition that all the members were assembled in one place, and it lasted only for a few days.

The twenty-one tents of our little community now stretched from west to east on the bank of the Khujirtu-gol. At the west end stood LARsoN's tent, followed by mine, with the Swedish flag fluttering on a pole. My nearest neighbour to the east was Dr HuMMEL, who also had his own tent, as he needed room for his medicine-chests, his patients, his herbarium and his jars for collected fauna. As long as SÖDERBOM stayed in the main camp he was provisionally quartered with HUMMEL The next tent was NoRIN's and BERGMAN'S, followed in a row by those of the German members. Of the latters', MÜHLENWEG'S tent was remarkable for a regular battery of silver-filled chests; but when one has to buy many and costly camels no very high temperature is needed for silver to melt away with extraordinary rapidity. An adjacent tent was characterized by three or four stout tripods and stands for motion-picture apparatuses and ordinary cameras. Here were LrEBERENZ's quarters; his mission was to record the progress of the caravan through the deserts of Asia on plates and on twenty kilometers of film.

In the middle of the long tent-street rose the light green mess-tent, both taller

1 Beli-miao is the strictly speaking incorrect form of this temple's name. It would be more correct to write Beile-miao, i. e. The Temple of the Prince (=Darkhan Beile). Our Mongols often said Beile-sume. The Chinese use the form Pai-ling-miao, The Temple of the Larks, but this is probably the popular etymology of Beile-miao, explicable in the light of the thousands of larks found in the region.

Batu-khalagh-sume, The Temple of the Strong Gate, is the name commonly used by the Mongols for the temple-town and is naturally the most correct form. It is frequently abbreviated to Batu-

khalagh. F. B.

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