The Gobi Desert. By Mildred Calle and Francesca French. (Hodder
and Stoughton. 21s.) AFTER twenty years in the Shansi Province of China, Miss Calle and her two companions took the old trade-route past the Great Wall into the desert, and travelled from oasis to oasis as medical missionaries. They spoke, ate and dressed like Chinese—" we had no nostalgia left for Western life "—but in Kiayukwan, the fortress town from which they set out, the Chinese themselves spoke of the Gobi only in terms of warning. Women with less fortitude would certainly have turned back in the next seven years of frequent blizzard and grit, lack of water, grumbling carters, " dust-demons," noises like human cries and the antagonism of the Mohammedans (once carried to the point of stoning them). For a while they were detained at the camp of the young war-lord Ma Chung-Ying, who
summoned them to heal his wounds. But almost every oasis its own exquisite compensations—the summer palace of the K of the Gobi, the Muslim Tomb, the Cave of the Thousand Buddh and, most delightful of all, the Hall of the Crescent Moon. these there are some good photographs, and the whole book important enough to interest those who itnow their Younghusban and those who are new to this field.
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