Near boundless skies

The mainspring of envy had, of course, been their having been condemned to a tented existence in the Gobi: a flattish windswept area of poor steppe and near desert mainly lying 800 to 1,000 metres above sea level with mean monthly temperatures ranging from perhaps 20°C in July to −16°C in January. S.R. Turnbull has written of this wild land as subject to winter ‘nine months of the year’.62 If by ‘winter’ is meant a time when frost recurs more or less every 24-hour day, he is at one with the 1963 magisterial review of east Asian historical geography by Albert Kolb, then Professor of Geography at Hamburg. This has the isopleth of but 100 frost-free days a year effectively bisect Mongolia.63 The ferocious low-level dust storms are another major dimension.