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barely permitted the pass of the yaks, which we often had to discharge. In some palce of the
path, at more than 4.000 metres high, we crossed the frontier of China. At last we arrived to
Yushu, realizing that the other group of occidentals had abandoned the city ten days ago. The
new, instead to rejoice for the gained time, it desperate us, because that city was a point
included in the path Chang-Lam, whereby was canalized most part of the commerce of the
Tibet with China and whereby could be transited with great velocity.

Since the previous year, July of 1937, China endured the invasion of the Japanese, who
already dominated Corea and Formosa since the war with Russia of 1905. In those days at the
ends of 1938, Japon had conquered the Manchuria and the entire meridional coast,
threatening to extend inwards: Canton, Nanking, Shangai, Pekin and so forth, had fell under its
power; with a formidable movement of tweezers they pretended now to occupy the enormous
fringe betweem the rivers Yang Tse Kiang and Hoang-Ho, it means, between two rivers Blue
and Yellow. In the country reigned the social decomposition, and, in the regions that the
Japanese not controlled yet, the civil war had detonated with singular violence.

Yushu, situated in the occidental frontier, was far from the Japanese, but not from the
civil war. In the city existed quite agitation and in no way was convenient to stay at their sight
too much, so we remained hidden in the house of a kâulikâ family. They were who provided us
the information about the ten days of advance that the German expedition had over us.

It’d be impossible to reach them travelling in caravan as we did until then. According to
von Grossen, just one alternative left: separate us from the charge, and advance by horse; the
advance would be realized by the five Germans and eight monks, whereas two lopas would stay
to guard the five holites, the dogs daivas, the yaks with their charge, and the recently
incorporated zhos, which are the male hybrids product of the crossbreeding of the yak with the
cow. Following this variant of the plan, the kâulikâs acquired the exemplaries of larger size that
they achieved to obtain of the small Tibetan horses, and each one took the minmum victuals
for ten days, because in such path the merchants alternated often the villages and rest posts
and provisions. The heaviest height that we had to transport corresponded to the weapons, for
which we destined two horses.

That same day we went out from Yushu, after sleeping just a few hours. At the next day
we waded through the Yang Tse Kiang or Blue River and we reached with the best highway after
forty days of journey, giving to the horses, thenceforth, considerable speed.

I guess that in Yushu to an experienced officer as Karl von Grossen not escaped that we
would never reach Schaeffer before the lake Kyaring if he had ten days of adventage.
Undoubtedly he wanted to please in the best possible manner my desire to rescue Oskar Feil
alive, perhaps relying secretly in the possibility that, for some imponderable motive, our

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