The Gobi Desert and the
100 pounds of gold
Sacred Heart Canossian College, Jody Chan, Fiction: Group 4
“Hie thee, Across this sand dune shall we be safe!”
“Get thee hence, Master Hallam.”
“Hark to thy master, protect the gold. Be not afeard!”
“Master, the gold hath devoured by the storm. I shall note thelocation for the sake of
thy descendent.”
Do as thy will.”
Time flies and now, after a thousand years, that worn out piece of paper is in my hand. I
inherited this from my Grandpa who also is a descendent of Hallam, the most powerful merchant
of the Mongol Empire. What I have inherited is not merely the paper but is the mission behind—to
find out the lost treasure of my ancestor!
There are words written in Old Mongolian language on the paper and the meaning is more or
less the same as follows after translation:
Across the plateau to greet the valley,
It lingers in the intangible beauty,
So large, so small
Embrace the sun, for the perilous night devours everything.
The location of the treasure was hidden in this poem. I had no idea what the poem was
implying but I felt like that I would understand the meaning when I got to the location.
“Dear passengers. We have arrived at the Mongolia Chinggis Khaan International Airport.”
I finally got here! The blistering sun gave me a ‘warm’ welcome. I reached the Gobi Desert after
hours of shaking, I was ready yet nervous.
When I stepped off the bus, a stream of hot breeze hit my face. The fiery sun was up in the
sky and the sky was so clear that not even a piece of fluffy cloud was to be found. The weather
was sweltering that I could feel the heat and the arid in the air. The Gobi stretched as far as the
eye could see, with hundreds of little yellow, brown sand dunes overlapping each other. At first
glance, it was like a large piece of golden silk lying with wrinkles on top. It was bleak but it was
still beautiful.
The first hint given by the poem was the plateau so I had decided to head for it--- the Alashan
Plateau. She covers 260,000 square miles from northern Tibet into the Gobi desert with most of it
lying in Inner Mongolia. I got on a land rover which was kindly prepared by my grandpa and set
off for the journey.
After an hour’s drive, I finally reached the boundary of the plateau. The plateau was grassless,
dry with massive sand dunes. When I got out off the car to take a good
look at the desert, a black man who wore a colorful rope approached me. I could easily
identify him as a herdsman with his stick in his hand and his scent of animals.
“You are a stranger to the desert right?” he asked
