88 THE PULSE OF ASIA
impulse as the disorder created by the struggle of the competing nations of Russia and Japan for the coast of the Pacific has outbalanced the influence of the Central Asian railroad, and has turned considerable traffic to Karakorum. When we were at Ladakh, the price of horses and grain showed symptoms of rising, because it became known that about fifteen hundred Mohammedan pilgrims returning from Mecca to their homes in Chinese Turkestan were corning up through India to Leh. Many would have gone by way of Russia; but the examination of passports and the exactions of petty officials, always much dreaded by the pilgrims, were so much worse during the war, that they dared not go that way. One of the pilgrims who overtook us had been to Mecca twice. On his first journey he had traversed Russia, so he told me. There he had been obliged to pay twenty-two and a half dollars duty on nineteen dollars' worth of cherished dates and other presents for his family from the holy city of Mecca ; and had been asked for his passport whenever he left the train. Fearing that matters might be worse in time of war, he had this time traveled through India, and, like many others, was loud in his praise of that country and its freedom from espionage. He could not praise Bombay enough — its wide streets and fine buildings, its freedom from prying police, its railroad station where you knew that you were paying only the right price for your ticket, and above all its economical bazaar, where, under the strict rule of the Sahibs, an official list of the prices of all articles is posted at frequent intervals, and there is little or no bargaining.
The simple pilgrim's tale of his two journeys to Mecca,
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