Around my neck of the woods, in eastern Massachusetts, on any Saturday morning except in winter, you can visit an endless number of yard sales. At malls or in specialty shops, you know what you are going to find---in fact you select a particular store to get what you need. Yard sales are different. You never know what you will find; you rummage around and maybe come up with a treasure. At least you can see what weird and wonderful items people have accumulated over a lifetime. Mildred Cable's book on the Gobi Desert reminded me of a yard sale---and I like yard sales.

After many years as missionaries in Shansi province, where they learned fluent Chinese and absorbed the majority culture, Cable and her two female companions, all three Englishwomen, received permission to venture into the deserts of northwestern Kansu and eastern Xinjiang, then still known as Chinese Turkestan. They spent around 13 years, from 1923 to 1936, wandering up and down the rutted desert tracks of this remote area, spreading Bibles and the word of God as known to Christians (and were not excessively denominational about it either). THE GOBI DESERT then, does not exactly cover the whole Gobi Desert, for most of that vast area lies in Mongolia, where the ladies never set foot. It is about the ancient civilizations and mixed ethnic groups (Chinese, Hui, Mongol, Kazakh, Uighur, Manchu, Russian) found in the territory between Suzhou and Urumchi, a breadth of country some 600 miles long, but much narrower due to the lack of water in most of it. The "yard sale" quality of the book lies in the fact that everything is mixed together, but it's all interesting. There are many photographs, but I must say that in my edition (Virago paperback), they were mostly of poor quality. From the history of Hsüan Tsang, who brought the Buddhist scriptures from India to China in the 7th century, to the art of hiring a proper carter, from the fantastic cavesful of Buddhist art at Dunhwang to a detailed description of the Muslim rebellion of 1930, it's all here. The ladies fought scorpions, heat, duststorms, thirst, and exhaustion. They met innkeepers, bandits, deserters, Muslim generals, abbots, princes, Russian refugees, nomads, lamas, and prostitutes. They visited the many fertile oases, remote valleys, mountain strongholds, and salt lakes of a region that has changed dramatically since those days. Though a committed missionary, Cable keeps preaching to a minimum in her book, which is a grab bag of impressions, adventures, and information that will keep your interest to the end. THE GOBI DESERT is the kind of travel book not often seen anymore. It is not an account of a "trip", but rather the winnowed result of thirteen years continuous travel in a particular region. Most of all it is an account of a now-vanished world, a world erased by roads, wars, Communism, and massive Chinese immigration. Read it.

A serious and very readable account of the travels of two very observant (missionary) ladies in the early part of this century in the Gobi region. This book, illustrated by some fine photos in its early 1940s editions (to which I refer), pays extraordinary and quite sensitive attention to the practices, customs, people and places of this (even now) little known region and it is most creditably written, especially as the writers are Christian missionaries. It is hard to believe that the language and style of this book is over 60 years old. As a (Buddhist) traveller in Central Asia and reader of several books on the region, I would wholeheartedly reccommend this book to anyone interested in this fascinating part of the world.