The bus was still idling and more passengers were squeezing aboard: schoolchildren, nomads, businessmen, businesswomen, and locals carrying more crates of eggs. Sandwiched tightly between Eminem and the horse seller on my left and a steamy window on my right, I unlatched the lock and pushed on the window until I began to sweat, but it was sealed tight. Finally, bursting at its seams with passengers, our bus departed.
“This is the part of the trip we can look forward to forgetting,” I heard Evan mutter from the seat behind me.
Settling in for the long ride ahead, I read about Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan was born in a pretty unremarkable period in world history. The Holy Roman Empire was bearing the weight of squabbles between its government and the clergy. A man named Albert the Bear inherited from a royal friend a little village that is now the city of Berlin. A new London Bridge was under construction, after the first one had fallen down, and the one after that, and the one after that. Japan was in the height of the samurai era, and the Chinese were busy peddling Zen Buddhism to anyone who might listen. The Khmer Empire in Cambodia was thriving at Angkor, not yet the site of the extraordinary and bewitching ruins that it is today. In other words, little could anyone have imagined back then the fate that was about to befall them, brought on by a most unlikely and incredible success story.
Born to a mother who’d been kidnapped by a nomad hunter, Genghis Khan grew up a destitute vagrant. He and his brothers hunted rats and marmots for food, the latter a smarmy little animal that carries the bubonic plague and is still occasionally eaten in Mongolia today. Named Temuujin after an important enemy his father had captured, Genghis Khan’s father took him shopping for a wife of his own when he was just thirteen years old. Genghis took a liking to a ten-year-old girl at a nearby village, and the young couple’s marriage was agreed upon and arranged by the children’s fathers. But before they could marry, Genghis’s own father was poisoned to death by enemies he’d foolishly sat down to dinner with, which would put those pending wedding plans on hold for a very long time and, in the end, would change world history.
Suddenly, Genghis Khan’s mother became a single parent of five young children. Her own relatives were of no help to her; they’d cut her off the minute her husband died. Without a support network, the entire family struggled. They lived in squalor, and her sons constantly squabbled, competing with each other for attention—and lunch.
One afternoon, Genghis Khan went fishing at a nearby river, and he caught a trout. No sooner than he had, his half brother took it from him. Rushing home to tell on him, Genghis made a strong case to his mother, Hoelun, adding that this was not the first time his lunch had been taken by the same half brother.
But Hoelun had no patience for the endless squabbling, and she scolded Genghis for starting trouble, which would end up being something of a pivotal moment for the boy. According to Jeremiah Curtin in his The Mongols: A History, she demanded to know why the brothers were fighting with each other, when they’d already been deserted by their entire extended family. “We have no friends,” she said, according to Curtin, “why not agree and gain strength against enemies?”
His mother had a point, but young Genghis didn’t think so. Dissatisfied with the fact she hadn’t sided with him, Genghis found his bow and arrow, hunted down his half brother, and executed him.
Now the family was in a real pickle.
As told in his account of The Secret History of the Mongols, author Jack Weatherford describes the epic fit that Genghis’s mother threw when she found out Genghis had murdered his half brother. “She compares her sons to animals,” Weatherford writes, quoting the original text, that Genghis in particular was “like an attacking panther, like a lion without control, like a monster swallowing its prey alive.” Worse still, her rant goes on to say something no mother should say to her own child: “Now, you have no companion other than your own shadow.”
I shudder to think. It must be the only thing worse to hear from your mother than the dreaded, “I’m disappointed in you.”
Because Genghis had killed a family member, he was regarded as a traitor. In the Mongolian steppe, where neighbors have nothing to rely upon but each other, disloyalty is as loathed and feared as a plague. Ostracized, the family was forced to flee their home to a place where they could start fresh. Unfortunately though, the neighboring clans weren’t finished with Genghis Khan. They wanted justice for the murder committed on their land. Finally, they captured him, put him in prison, and enslaved him. Despised and alone, the family was worse off than they’d ever been, which is hard to imagine when you know they’d been eating rats.
Then one day, years later, Genghis escaped.
By now, he was well into his teens and had little hope of finding his long-lost bride, the girl his father had arranged for him to marry, but he made that his first order of business anyway. A single teenager herself, she would have been considered an old maid if she hadn’t already found someone else to marry.
Despite the odds, Genghis found Borte, who was still single, and he married her. Together, they set up a home and had several children. But they didn’t live happily ever after, because Borte was about to be kidnapped by the very same clan that had lost Genghis’s mother to kidnapping years before! The clan wanted revenge, and stealing Borte would settle the old score, once and for all.
Because it was so common in Mongolia to claim a bride by kidnapping her, losing your daughter, sister, or even wife in this manner hardly would have upset the figurative oxcart. A husband would simply find a replacement, probably by kidnapping her, too. Rarely would anybody go to war over what amounted to a minute detail in a family’s genealogy. But Genghis Khan was different. And once again, his unusual response to usual events would be the making of him. As author and historian Jack Weatherford put it, Genghis Khan “had to choose his own destiny.”
And that’s just what he was about to do.
Now, suddenly, somewhere between Ulaanbaatar and our destination, the driver stopped the bus and made everyone get off. We’d reached a small bridge that was too small for the bus to cross. Taking our cue from the other passengers, we gathered our belongings, disembarked, and crossed the bridge. With that, the driver put the bus into reverse and drove off. With nothing to do but wait until the situation righted itself, we all rested in the warm summer sun in a meadow of petite yellow flowers. While Jason and Evan chatted, I read on.
Unusually, Genghis decided to hunt his wife’s hunters. Rather than simply kidnap another bride to act as mother to his children, which would have been customary, he searched for long-lost Borte, just as he’d done as a young boy. This was a risky endeavor, one that could’ve ended badly, in an altercation or even war with neighboring clans.
But it didn’t end badly. In fact, depending on whose account you read of their reunion, it was either the moonlight during the search party’s raid, or Borte’s anguished cries that clued in Genghis that he’d finally found her. More than just a fabulously romantic love story, the rescue mission would be a game-changer for Genghis Khan, his clan, all their neighbors, and, eventually, the world itself.
Because Genghis Khan’s brazen courage gave him something of a reputation, he began to quickly amass power, as well as loyalty, from other clans. With his enemies, he went to war. Time and again, he won. He wasn’t even thirty years old when he was proclaimed Chinggis Khan, or “universal king.” With the help of well-placed gifts, savvy women, a blood brother, and loyal relatives, Genghis Khan had managed to unite all of Mongolia’s disparate clans and factions, forming the powerful Mongol Empire. For the next several centuries, he and his sons and their descendants would conquer and rule lands as far-flung as Asia, Europe, Siberia, and the Middle East.
Genghis Khan’s legacy has been written by many historians, with tales of rape, slaughter, cruelty, terror, destruction, and bloodlust—exact words I’ve taken just from the dust jackets of several history books. For centuries, he was regarded as a “Mongol warlord who ravaged Asi
a and led his barbaric hordes” (Genghis Khan: The Conqueror, Emperor of All Men by Harold Lamb). Of course, that was true, but only in part. The other side of the story, told in fascinating detail, has been written by Jack Weatherford, who gave us a New York Times best-selling glimpse into what Genghis gave back to society.
And that list is long.
According to Weatherford, after employing an army that could fit into a football stadium (American football or rest-of-the-world soccer, take your pick) to conquer more than twice what any other leader has ever conquered in all of history, Genghis Khan offered his new subjects lower taxes and religious freedom, and he abolished torture, refused to hold hostages, and liberally redistributed the booty he and his army had earned during their conquests.
Frankly, he sounded like a visionary to me, a cross between the best of Barack Obama and Winston Churchill, minus, of course, the parts about pouring molten silver into his enemies’ eyes or boiling them alive and using their empty skulls as drinking goblets.
Genghis Khan also even established free trade zones along the Silk Route, created an international postal system, and offered diplomatic immunity to emissaries from regions he was warring with. For someone who loves adventure travel, it’s these last three things that really get to me.
Just imagine—it’s the year 1175 or so, and you’re dreaming of a vacation. Well, you’re not dreaming for long, because there’s nowhere to go, not that you’ve heard of anyway. As Weatherford puts it, when Genghis Khan was born in 1162, “no one in China had heard of Europe, and no one in Europe had heard of China.” And to think, just a single generation later, millions of people were learning about new continents and creating diplomatic links. And actually getting mail!
In 1227, when he was in his sixties, Genghis Khan died. And his story doesn’t stop there. Whether he died after falling off a horse (the most widely accepted theory) or during sex (the salacious, but not implausible rumor, given his fecundity), it’s his funeral that may be most memorable. In order to keep Genghis Khan’s death a secret from his devout followers, his heirs murdered anyone who witnessed the funeral procession. Then, they buried him in such a secret location that, to this day, no one knows where it is.
With a life, and even a death, this fascinating, I found myself in awe of this titillating eight-centuries-old legend of a poor boy turned world conqueror. Once again, I thought about the nature of determination itself, especially in a country that seemed to be defined by just that. Closing my book, I joined Evan and Jason at a nearby stream, and we nibbled on the sausages and chocolates we’d packed while we waited for something to happen. The first bus had dropped us off over an hour ago, and we weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next.
Not long after, a second bus arrived, appearing out of nowhere, and we followed our fellow passengers back onboard.
“Is this the bus to Terelj?” I asked an old nomad, just to make sure.
Dressed traditionally in a deel, his colorful silken robe was tied with a sash and he wore a pair of pointy leather boots and a fedora. The nomad offered me a wide single-toothed smile, his face rearranging itself into ancient creases.
“Teem, teem,” he said gently. “Yes, yes.” Looking at me for a long time, he tilted his head in that curious way that old people do, wordlessly reassuring me that everything was going to be just fine.
A few hours later, the bus stopped again. This time, everyone got out and dispersed. Turning off the ignition, the bus driver looked at me and then at Evan and Jason, shrugged his shoulders, and walked off. We were the only ones left. Although we seemed to have arrived, we weren’t sure of it—it wasn’t as if the driver had parked at a destination or in a lot. He’d simply gotten out of his vehicle at the end of a dirt road and walked away.
“Any idea where we are?” I asked my companions.
“Maybe we’ve reached Terelj?” Jason said.
Gathering our overnight packs, we sat down on the edge of the path and tried to drum up a solution. The village around us was quiet, ribbons of smoke rising from the afternoon cooking fires inside the gers and tiny cement cabins. After waiting just long enough to start worrying, we heard thunder. And it wasn’t from a brewing rainstorm.
“Saiiiiin baiiiin uuuuuuu!” a man called out from the distance as the thunder grew louder. “Helloooooooo!” A small stampede of five horses stopped at our feet in a cloud of dust. The Ger-to-Ger tour company had arranged a guide for us, and the man and his entourage had just arrived.
“Sain bain uu,” he repeated, hopping off his horse in a single sweeping motion. He wore a conical purple felt cap that looked more like a crown, and it bobbed on his head as he lifted our packs onto the horses’ backs.
“You can ride,” he announced to me, more a statement than a question. He pointed at the horse.
“Well, not really,” I protested as he ignored my objections and lifted me onto one of the horses. There’s an old Mongolian saying that “The way you mount the horse determines the ride,” and I was about to find out just what this meant. After Evan and Jason followed suit, the man in the purple hat briefly pranced on his horse in front of us, demonstrating how to best handle our transportation. And just like that, our horseback adventure into the Mongolian steppe began.
“Choo, choo,” the man shouted at my horse. (Choo means “go”; there isn’t exactly a word for “stop.”)
Kicking his own horse’s side and shouting some more choos, our guide galloped forward. Then, circling back, he waited for us to follow his lead.
A recommendation from adventurer and author Graham Taylor in the 2005 edition of The Lonely Planet guidebook warns that, “Mongolian horses come in two varieties—quiet and terrible.” Taylor goes on to strongly suggest avoiding sitting in a Mongolian saddle for long periods of time: “Only a masochist on a short horse-trip should consider using a Mongolian wooden saddle.”
Now, on a long horse trip, Evan and Jason and I were about to appreciate precisely what Graham Taylor meant, and then some.
Adjusting myself to get comfortable in my wood-hard seat, I rearranged the two halves of my bottom to cushion my tailbone. Leaning forward into what looked like a tiny tree trunk at the nose of the saddle, I whispered another choo as softly as I could. I didn’t want to appear too encouraging. Suddenly, my horse took off, and Evan’s and Jason’s horses followed suit. We were headed to the guide’s home, where we’d spend the night camping in the steppe alongside his family’s ger compound.
At a stream, the guide stopped in front of us and held up his hand. Tugging on my mare’s reins, I brought her to a quick stop, although not a controlled one. She bucked as if she’d run into an imaginary wall and turned her head halfway to glare at me for halting her. Pointing at me, the stream, and the other side, the guide encouraged me to begin crossing. It was hard work. The water was deep, fast, and cold.
Tucking my knees to my chest, I tried to balance on the ridge of my horse’s back, rather than sit on her, so I could avoid getting wet. It wasn’t long before I shifted gears, committing instead to simply hanging on to her bridle.
Carefully negotiating the stream’s rocky bed, my horse inched forward until she’d gained purchase on the muddy banks, then took off again. Drinking in the dense smell of impending rain, I bent over on her, jockeystyle, and dared her to go just a little faster. Suddenly, I’d hit my stride.
“Choo!” I screamed into the panorama of endless fields of green, kicking my horse as hard as I could. Obeying me, she bolted. And then, suddenly, she stumbled into a marmot hole, catching her front hoof in the shallow recess in the rocky steppe. Bending her front legs, she pitched forward until she was on her knees and had begun to roll, headfirst.
Time slows down when things go wrong, and as the seconds leisurely ticked and tocked, I had a good, hard look at our predicament and tried to figure out what to do. I could either hop off of her and hope for the best or stick with her and hope for the best. I decided to stay put, gluing myself once again to her back.
&n
bsp; Just in time, before she would have doubled over on top of me, she suddenly righted herself, hoisting up to a standing position. Shaking off the tumble like a pro, the mare performed a little trotting dance. Sucking air through my teeth, I steeled myself as she sped off once again. I didn’t wonder for long why she appeared so eager to return home; once we got there we were introduced to a well-endowed stallion awaiting her return.
Finally, we arrived. Our guide pointed to his family’s ger and then to the open steppe, miming that we must set up our tent before nightfall, which was quickly approaching. A gentle, fragrant rain was falling, and beneath the slate sky, we quickly erected our accommodation.
“My family,” the man in the conical purple hat called out from across the steppe. It wasn’t clear what his name was, and I’m not sure if it was because I’d forgotten it, it was hopelessly complicated, or he’d never told us. Anyway, he was beckoning us toward himself and the gathering clan who’d set up a picnic site outside the ger. We’d been invited to dinner.
Set in the middle of the open prairie, with no neighbors as far as the eye could see, the family’s ger looked just like the one Evan and I had stayed in weeks earlier at Khustain. In fact, gers all over Mongolia look much the same: round, white structures with slightly pointed domes and soft felt exteriors, held together and constructed with wooden latticework. If it weren’t for the painted wooden front doors, they’d look like caps belonging to giant bottles of contact lens solution.
Just outside the ger, under a darkening and suddenly clear evening sky, thick rugs had been laid in the damp grass. A dozen or so of our guide’s family were sitting on the rugs, slurping bowls of noodle soup. Watching us, they grinned politely. An old woman ladled hot, salted milk into three bowls and passed one to each of us. In return, Evan offered the family bars of chocolate. After cooking packets of ramen over their open fire, we sat beneath a canopy of starlight that twinkled across the deep indigo of the night sky. The steppe’s utter silence and its vast beauty were mesmerizing. After awhile, and without a common language between us, not even Russian, we all turned in for bed.
Live From Mongolia Page 17