A tartar in the night
(Sent by Nilda Graciela Busto Ríos, a student from Paraná, Argentina)

Taking part in a six-day sponsored walk along 90 km of the Great Wall of China with some friends was the most extraordinary experience I've ever had. It was last March when we decided to join it to help raise money for a children's hospital which was going to close. At the time we arrived there I didn't realise it would become such an amazing adventure.

At the end of the first day, we went into the forest and put up some tents to rest a bit. It happened at midnight. A guide was telling us an interesting story about tartars, wild tribes that came from Mongolia to attack Chinese people, when suddenly, we saw something moving quickly and violently through the surrounding vegetation. Although we tried hard, it was so dark that we could only see the shape of a man running away.

One of the boys in the group was really frightened and began saying it was a tartar who was there to kill us. We all laughed at him, but then, the guide's reaction was what made us believe that, too. His face had paled and he told us nervously to stay in our tents without making any noise until sunrise.

The following day, we woke up feeling very curious about the incident, so we asked the guide if the mysterious shadow we had seen could have been a tartar. To our surprise, he went pale again and remained tight-lipped about the subject.