Word: gobi
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...Natural History is publishing concerning Dr. Andrews' Central Asiatic work. The other eleven are specialized & academic-geology, topography, fossils, reptiles, fishes, mammals of Mongolia and China. The New Conquest of Central Asia recounts for laymen the lively adventures of the expeditions. It describes the nomad life of the Gobi Desert, the thrill of discovering fossils, the troubles of dealing with bandits. It is a narrative for those who must do their exploring from an easy-chair. But Dr. Andrews fears few easy-chairmen will buy a book that looks & sounds as scholarly as The New Conquest of Central Asia...
...expeditions often consisted of racing desert animals. The Gobi Desert has a rock floor which in many places is smooth enough for a motor car to travel at top speed. Thus Dr. Andrews found that the Mongolian wild ass attains a speed of 40 m.p.h., the wolf 36 m.p.h., the antelope 60 m.p.h. Once from his moving car he shot a running buck, completely severing a hind leg. On three legs the maimed animal kept running at 25 m.p.h. for five miles, then escaped...
...rats which lived with dinosaurs. In 1900 Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, paleontologist, predicted the finding of great fossil beds in Central Asia. That region, argued Dr. Osborn, was the dispersal point for many species of animals. Man too must have originated there. Dr. Andrews found places among the Gobi dunes where groups of humans once lived. But he could find no traces of very ancient human bones, nor of protohuman fossils. Simple Chinese use fossil bones, which they call dragon bones, for medicine. Way to test a dragon bone is to touch it to the tongue. If the sample clings...
...Across the Himalayas, at Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan, almost in mid-Asia, the Haardt party was to be met by seven other cars which had left Peiping when the first party left Beirut. The party from Peiping, too, had encountered difficulties. Lieutenant Commander Victor Point was in charge. In the Gobi Desert two Chinese deserted the expedition, charged Commander Point had assaulted them. At Urumchi, in Chinese Turkestan, officials halted the party, held three of the cars there. With them was Vladimir Petropavlosky, Russian member of the expedition, who remained a prisoner for three months until he escaped in an automobile...
...guarded areas of the Amazon basin have escaped the eye and tread of civilized man. Only a few other regions have escaped man's mapping and surveying instruments: the vast forests and swamps of northeastern Siberia, the fastnesses of northeastern Tibet, the bandit-infested northern reaches of the Gobi Desert, the sandy centre of Australia, the eastern slopes of the unmapped Andes, the vast Patagonian icecap stretching over South America's narrow end. the snow-swept islands stretching vaguely north from Canada's "barren lands," and the American Southwest's trackless deserts...