girl call a warning of her approach and dived for our trousers and just managed to scramble into them as she appeared.
Kristina looked as though she had been scrubbing herself. Her face was shining. She had been doing something to her hair, too. The chestnut tints glinted in the sun. She had contrived to persuade it into some kind of order and had carefully plaited the long ends. Keeping a straight face and holding herself erect like a dowager at a tea-party she greeted us. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Were you expecting me?’ We all laughed at that and completed our dressing. And Mister Smith went away and picked a small posy of some pink flowers and gravely handed them to her. ‘You look beautiful, my child,’ he told her. Kristina smiled radiantly. It must have been one of her happiest days.
We were very near the border when we ran into the two Buryat Mongols. There was no avoiding the meeting. We saw one another at the same moment at a distance of not more than fifty yards and there was nothing to do but continue towards the pair. One was middle-aged, if one can judge the ages of these people, the other was definitely a young man. They could have been father and son. They stopped and waited for us to come up to them and grinned widely and nodded their heads. They bowed together as we came to a halt.
The conversation was embroidered and ornamented with politenesses and I took the pattern from them. They spoke slowly in Russian. They inquired solicitously whether our feet carried us well in our travels. I assured them our feet had carried us well and returned the inquiry. The older man was naively curious to know about us.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From the North — Yakutsk.’
‘And where do you travel to?’
‘We travel very far to the South.’
The old man looked shrewdly at me from beneath his wrinkled lids. ‘You go perhaps to Lhasa to pray.’
I thought that an excellent idea. ‘Yes,’ I replied.
But the old man hadn’t finished. He looked us over carefully. ‘Why do you have the woman with you?’
A bit of quick thinking here. ‘She has relatives who live on our way and we have promised to deliver her there.’
The two Mongols exchanged smiling glances as though approving of our protection for the girl on her journey. Then both dug their hands in their deep pockets and brought them into view clutching fistfuls of peanuts which they cheerfully handed round.
Each in turn wished us that our feet carried us well and safely to our destination. They turned away together and walked from us. We waited to see them out of sight. They had gone only a few yards when the old man turned back alone. He walked straight up to Kristina, bowed and gave her a handful of peanuts for herself. He repeated his good wishes to her and to us all and left us beaming goodwill.
When they had gone we set off at a fast pace. We were too near the frontier to take chances now.
14.
PHASE ONE of the escape ended with the crossing of the Russo-Mongolian border at the end of the second week in June. It was notable for two circumstances — the ease of the crossing and the fact that we stepped out of the Buryat Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the Eastern Siberian Region of the U.S.S.R. with nearly a hundredweight of small early potatoes pulled out of a field only a few hours from the frontier. The timing of the potato field raid — at dawn on the day in which later we were to make our exit from Siberia — was particularly gratifying. I felt that, having gone into captivity with nothing, we were leaving with a valuable parting gift, even though the donors were unconscious of their generosity.
We reached the crossing point in late afternoon when dusk was deepened to premature darkness by massing black clouds heavy with rain. Far-off thunder rumbled like the uneasy mutterings of a troubled giant. The air was still, the atmosphere hot and oppressive. As far as the eye could see nothing moved. There was nothing to challenge our progress. The dividing line was marked by a nine-feet-tall red post surmounted by a round metal sign carrying the Soviet wheatsheaf, star, hammer and sickle emblems over a strip of Cyrillic initials. To east and west one more post was visible in each direction, so spaced in accordance with the contours of the country that an observer at any one post could always see two others.
I stepped round the post to see what might be inscribed on the other side of the plaque, but the reverse was blank. There was sudden laughter as Zaro called out, ‘What’s it like in Mongolia, Slav?’ He cavorted across to me with a hop, skip and a jump. The others followed with a rush. We pranced and danced, slapped one another on the back, pulled beards and shook hands. Kristina ran round, kissed each one of us in turn and cried with happiness and excitement. Mister Smith put a stop to the noisy rejoicings by pointedly swinging his potato-filled food sack on to his back and moving off. We ran after him, still laughing.
‘Let’s get away from this place,’ he said, ‘as fast as we can go. We can’t be sure how far below this border Russian influence extends. We don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we are going.’
We walked fast after that, our sacks bumping against our backs. Behind us the frontier markers were swallowed into the distance and the darkness. The American had started a train of serious thought. I estimated we had covered 2,000 kilometres — about 1,200 miles — in not much more than sixty days. It was a feat of speed as well as endurance.
Paluchowicz broke in on my thoughts. ‘How far do we have to travel now?’
I thought about it. ‘About twice as far as we’ve travelled already,’ I guessed. Paluchowicz grunted his dismay.
Here it was that we first discussed seriously where we were going. Up to now we had thought ahead no further than the escape from Siberia. Back in the camp I had talked, without any great conviction, of making for Afghanistan. It sounded a safe, out-of-the-way small country where we might be received without too many questions asked. Now we began to turn our thoughts towards India. And the key to this, I think, lay in the talk we had a day earlier with the two Mongols. Lhasa. It was a word we could use in a country where few knew our language, a sound which could be understood and would always evoke the response of a flungout hand to indicate direction. We talked mainly of Tibet in that first hour. India then seemed too far to contemplate.
The American spoke truly when he said we did not know where we were. We had no maps and there was no one to tell us. I have tried in recent years by reference to maps to plot our probable course, but the probable could err from the actual by as much as a hundred miles. Let me say, then, that I think we entered Outer Mongolia at a point which led us straight into the Kentei Shan mountains, that in traversing the range we must have borne west of due south to pass to the west of the only big city of the area, Urga, or, as it is now known, Ulan Bator. This theory fits in with the lie of the land as we found it, the hills, the cultivated plains, and the many rivers carrying loaded sampans. It would explain where the boatmen were going: Urga is at the confluence of three rivers, each of which has tributaries.
We were climbing steadily into the mountains two hours after leaving the border. Sweat oozed from us. The thunder spoke out nearer and nearer and a warm, sighing wind blew up from nowhere, rapidly increasing in strength as we plodded on.
Around midnight the gathering storm exploded. The first overhead thunderclap came like a near-at-hand battery of long-range artillery firing a simultaneous salvo. It was an assault on the ears. Lightning streaked and blazed across the black heavens while the thunder rolled, crashed and reverberated about us. A few large raindrops urged us to look for cover but the lightning revealed only a wilderness of rocky slopes. The torrent was upon us as we groped in the tumult. The rain dropped down by sheer weight, its vertical fall unaffected by the whining wind. My clothes were soaked in a matter of minutes. Streams of water trickled down the back of my neck inside my jacket. It was the worst electrical storm I have ever experienced.
We lasted that night out, the eight of us, in a shallow crevice between two smooth rocks. Only the innermost couple enjoyed any degree of comfort. The girl, in the most favoured position, huddled unspeaking in her wet clothes throughout the unending dark hours, shivering and bewildered at the unabating fury of the storm.
It was a relief to get moving at first light. The rain sheeted down all through the day as though it would never stop. It went on teeming throughout the next night and until evening of the second day. Then the downpour
