about r p.m., I took, or rather was guided into, a wrong road parallel to the one the arbah had taken. It was only after dark that I was able with much difficulty to find the village in which the men had stopped. After a long sojourn, however, the main thing is to slip your cable and get off, and if everything does not go according to plan, it does not matter very much.
Snow has fallen during the night and covered the ground with a thin layer. It is a dull day and the snow continues with a slight east wind.
The negotiations I have been carrying on with my Chinese interpreter through a third person have proved successful at last, to my surprise, and he is with me again, bound by a contract at any rate as far as Qulja. After all the trouble he has given I would prefer to keep him as short a time as possible, and if I come across a Chinese anywhere, who speaks some foreign language, Ljo can follow his nose wherever it takes him. I do not know what influences induced him to break his agreement with me and then to return, but I feel sure they existed. It was also curious about my passport. The Taotai, who did not know a few days ago what a »Finn» meant, has sent me an artistically decorated card in which not only the word »Finn» appears, but »the Russian subject, the Finn Baron Mannerheim, whose Chinese name is MA-DA-KHAN». Such precision and my full name correctly spelt, though in Chinese characters, is not the work of any Chinese in Kashgar. As I am unaware of the wording of the passport that has been sent from Peiping to Kucha, I thought it unwise to explain to the elderly Taotai the difference between a Russian and a Finnish subject and that Finnish subjects travelled all over the world on Finnish, not Russian passports.
My suspicion that Badsuddin Khan might try to pocket the money I gave him to pay for the »täskirs» I had bought, seems to have been justified. A few hours before leaving
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