IN THE GREAT KARAKATHIE. 685

our bold Scot that led us directed. He was indeed but a merchant,
but he behaved with that vigour and bravery on this occasion, and
yet with such a cool courage too, that I never saw any man in
action fitter for command. As soon as we came up to them we
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 at their backs. Our brave com-
mander, without asking anybody to follow him, gallops up close to
them, and with his fuzee knocks one of them off his horse, killed
the second with his pistol, and the third ran away; and thus ended
our fight. But we had this misfortune attending it, namely, that
all our mutton that we had in chase got away. We had not a man
killed or hurt; but as for the Tartars, there was about five of them
killed. Who were wounded, we knew not; but this we knew, that
the other party was so frightened with the noise of our guns that
they made off, and never made any attempt upon us.

We were all this while in the Chinese dominion, and therefore
the Tartars were not so bold as afterwards; but in ahout five days
we entered a vast great 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 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 the Great Karakathie, or Grand Tartary, but that, however, it
was all reckoned 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 world—though we were to
zo over some much larger.

In passing this wilderness, which I confess was at the first very
frightful to me, 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. °