Gobi

If seven maids with seven mops should sweep for endless years they could do little with the desert sands of Gobi. No ocean beats upon these sands; no sheiks beguile the tourist. In the heart of Mongolia in northern China the Gobi desert sprawls, 500,000 square miles of forgotten loneliness. Last week a distinguished German emerged from this loneliness and a U. S. expedition penetrated deeper into its mystery.

German. For two and a half years the German dug the brisk point of his intelligence into Gobi's secretive sand. Through the desert he trekked southward accompanied by obscure missionaries. When the sands of the desert grew cold in the mountain passes of Thibet, his feet chilled and hardened. Feet still half-frozen when he arrived at Leh, in northern India, he announced happily to the world that the scientific purpose of his wanderings (not stated) had been accomplished. He is Dr. Wilhelm Filchner.

U. S. Meanwhile the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, headed by intrepid Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews is inching its way across the northern sands. Geologists, paleontologists, topographers, zoologists, archeologists, accompanied by 125 camels, eight motor trucks, many horses and Chinese boys, seek the western wastes of Gobi hoping to uncover secrets of man's origin. This is the fourth expedition of its kind. The last one, 1923, returned with the fossilized eggs of the dinosaur, aged some ten million years. The present expedition will collect lower animal fossils when found under foot, but the main interest will centre on recent prehuman ancestors not older than three million years.

Man is believed to have originated in Asia because Asia is the oldest continuously dry land in the world; because climate and topography were ideal there for the development of the dawnman; because the glacial ice ages of Europe missed this area. Westward and eastward from Gobi probably traveled those hairy primates whose descendants are now called Smith, Karpetsky, Hop Lee, Seraphino.

Last week Paleontologist Walter Granger motored 100 miles to a telegraph post to tell civilization that Leader Andrews had been shot in the leg but that his wound was not serious. The gun was his own, accidentally discharged during an antelope hunt; the leg was his own, accidentally in the way. It is probable that Antelope-Hunter Andrews quoted Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson's famed remark, as he has done before: "Adventures are a mark of incompetence."