But the Prince did not understand this.  In his simple directness a man who knows how to treat disease is a doctor.

“My wife has had constant trouble for two months with her eyes,” he announced.  “Help her.”

I asked the Princess to show me her eyes and I found the typical conjunctivitis from the continual smoke of the yurta and the general uncleanliness.  The Tartar brought me my medicine case.  I washed her eyes with boric acid and dropped a little cocaine and a feeble solution of sulphurate of zinc into them.

“I beg you to cure me,” pleaded the Princess.  “Do not go away until you have cured me.  We shall give you sheep, milk and flour for all your company.  I weep now very often because I had very nice eyes and my husband used to tell me they shone like the stars and now they are red.  I cannot bear it, I cannot!”

She very capriciously stamped her foot and, coquettishly smiling at me, asked: 

“Do you want to cure me?  Yes?”

The character and manners of lovely woman are the same everywhere:  on bright Broadway, along the stately Thames, on the vivacious boulevards of gay Paris and in the silk-draped yurta of the Soyot Princess behind the larch covered Tannu Ola.

“I shall certainly try,” assuringly answered the new oculist.

We spent here ten days, surrounded by the kindness and friendship of the whole family of the Prince.  The eyes of the Princess, which eight years ago had seduced the already old Prince Lama, were now recovered.  She was beside herself with joy and seldom left her looking-glass.

The Prince gave me five fairly good horses, ten sheep and a bag of flour, which was immediately transformed into dry bread.  My friend presented him with a Romanoff five-hundred-rouble note with a picture of Peter the Great upon it, while I gave to him a small nugget of gold which I had picked up in the bed of a stream.  The Prince ordered one of the Soyots to guide us to the Kosogol.  The whole family of the Prince conducted us to the monastery ten kilometres from the “capital.”  We did not visit the monastery but we stopped at the “Dugun,” a Chinese trading establishment.  The Chinese merchants looked at us in a very hostile manner though they simultaneously offered us all sorts of goods, thinking especially to catch us with their round bottles (lanhon) of maygolo or sweet brandy made from aniseed.  As we had neither lump silver nor Chinese dollars, we could only look with longing at these attractive bottles, till the Prince came to the rescue and ordered the Chinese to put five of them in our saddle bags.

CHAPTER XIII

MYSTERIES, MIRACLES AND A NEW FIGHT