ROBINSON CRUSOE. 439
to come back to them, having a kind of cimeter 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 ; and thus ended
our fight : but we had thi. misfortune attending it, that all our
mutton we had in chase got away. We had not a man killed
or hurt ; but 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 made off, and never made any attempt
upon us.

We were all this while in the Chinese dominions, and there-
fore the Tartars were not so bold as afterwards ; but in about
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 al]
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 Karakathay, or Grand Tar-
tary ; 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 wilderness, which was at 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. 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 maé@ % rear-guard of forty men,
and stood ready for them, letting the caravan pass half a mile,
or thereabouts, before us: but after a while they marched off;
only we found 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:
they might shoot more arrows, which might fall short of us, but
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