This is a solid, memorial to an exotic place in a time long past. Cable's writing has none of the immediate charm of Isabella Bird's, but she and her two companions have distilled the experience of ten years' experience as opposed to the excitement of one journey. She shows none of the reformer's passion of Flora Tristan (and readers who are chary of a missionary's writing may be glad), but her love of God and people is implicit in the whole book. What she does give is a clear, reflective look at the landscape, people, and discipline of the whole Gobi Desert from oasis to oasis in its cultural and geological diversity. The trio left the desert in 1936, and Cable also spends some time looking at the forces of change.
To give a brief taste of her writing, here is a short paragraph from near the end of the book as she speaks of the nomads of the eastern Gobi as it merges into Mongolia. "It is a region so vast that the encampments are as widely separated by sands as islands on the face of an ocean are by water, but wherever there is steppe or grazing land, there the Mongol comes, spends a season, feeds his flocks and herds, then rolls up his tent and moves on to fresh pastures. The Gobi winds clean up the place which he has soiled, the pastures which his flocks have cropped grow greener than ever, and Nature promptly repairs all the mischief he has done to her clean orderliness." Alas for a time when Nature can no longer make repairs! ( )