Then one day, by chance—the chance that seems to rule every-moment of existence—I noticed him. I became fascinated by his story, and I promised him that together we would go to Ulan Bator. For me it would be the first time, but he had been there long ago when the city was called Urga; he would be my guide. He had passed through the city while fleeing from his enemies, struggling to reach freedom, with death always lying in ambush, and in Urga he had had the strangest experiences of his life. Afterward he had continued his journey and finally reached what he thought he desired, then spent years of fame and banality waiting to die. But isn’t life always like that? You go running after something with high hopes, and then once you get it you find it is never as good as the running and hoping. Even in my quest for fortune-tellers, it was the search that meant the most to me. Ferdinand Ossendowski, born in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, was an officer in the Russo-Japanese War and professor of industrial geography at St.
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