The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  As Temujin’s forces rode out to confront Jamuka’s, they employed the tactics of psychological warfare. When setting up camp at night within their enemy’s territory, Temujin instructed his men to light five fires apiece. It had the desired effect, with Jamuka’s scouts reporting that Temujin’s army had more fires than there were stars in the sky. The next morning the two armies rode against each other in battle for control of Mongolia and the rule, for the first time ever, of all its tribes under one undisputed leader. It was a battle that Temujin won, and soundly, making him Genghis Khan: the supreme leader of all. Jamuka’s fate was an appropriately grisly one. Despite having initially managed to make a run for it, he was soon betrayed by his own who handed him over. In what was supposedly an act of clemency, Jamuka was granted an honorable death—having his back broken, so as to avoid the spilling of blood.

  With the unification of the once disparate and warring Mongol tribes, a powerful nation emerged, a nation that would next head south to take on the colossus of eastern civilization: China. Not that the Chinese emperor seemed fazed when he heard of their advance: “Our empire is as vast as the sea, yours is but a handful of sand, how can we fear you?” he stated in a dispatch. It was to prove a terrible underestimation of the Mongols. Genghis Khan ordered the “total annihilation” of Beijing, and he got it. A year after the Mongol hordes had raped, pillaged, burned, and slaughtered their way through the city, visiting foreign ambassadors reported that its streets were still “slippery with human fat.”

  Following the military stampede of Beijing, Genghis Khan’s attention turned west, not for invasion’s sake but trade’s. In an effort to initiate commerce with his settler neighbors, he sent out a party of roughly four hundred and fifty merchants to Silk Road city, Otrar—part of the Khwarazmian Empire that stretched from Persia, across much of Central Asia, to the steppes of Kazakhstan—with a camel train laden down with gold, silver, Chinese silks and furs. The welcome they received from Otrar’s governor was not one that was likely to win favor with Genghis: he accused the envoys of being spies, seized their booty, and locked them up. In what, considering Genghis’ past form, can only be considered an altogether restrained response, he sent a message to the head of the Khwarazmian Empire in Persia, the Shah, demanding that the merchants be released and that Otrar’s governor be handed over to him for punishment. Things didn’t quite work out like that. The envoys were executed, and the decapitated head of Genghis Khan’s messenger sent back to him in a box. It was a casus belli that the Shah would bitterly regret.

  It was these actions by the Shah and Otrar’s governor, Inalchik, that saw the Mongol army turn west. They arrived at Otrar the following year, in the autumn of 1219. The sight that greeted the city’s inhabitants was one that quite possibly led to the greatest en masse pant-soiling in world history. Beneath Otrar’s city walls, stretching as far as the eye could see across the vast barren planes, was a two hundred thousand strong horde of mounted Mongol warriors, itching for a fight, the air thick with their collective furious roars and the scream-like neighing of their horses and iron-armored mules. Picture the scene: you’re surrounded, there is no hope of escape or place to hide across the plains, no chance of reinforcements arriving in time, no chance of your own forces repelling the attack, and no way of placating the hordes baying for blood; you may as well stick your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye; you are, in a word—fucked.

  Having once attended a rock concert in a field with 125,000 people,171 I can appreciate, at least in part, just how ridiculously big a group of people that is in one place. But a concentration of nearly twice that, and on horseback, and heavily armed, and with a reputation for barbarity, and intent on leveling your home, raping your wife, and butchering your children; it hardly bears thinking about. Otrar succumbed to the inevitable. The governor barricaded himself within the citadel with twenty thousand soldiers, but it was a futile effort. They soon ran out of arrows and in desperation began throwing roof tiles at the Mongols. It was a valiant, if hopeless, last stand that was hardly likely to intimidate an army who had faced down somewhat more effective airborne projectiles from the Chinese: a bombardment of catapulted bombs containing crude oil, chemicals, molten metal, and human faeces. For Inalchik, the governor who had so instigated the Mongol’s wrath, there awaited a brutal fate. Into his ears and fear-dilated eyes was poured molten silver.

  After their taste of blood at Otrar, the Mongols rode on in a whirlwind of brutal savagery, rampaging toward Persia, and smashing through every town and city in their path. While Mongol horses trampled the Koran under hoof, and soldiers smashed their way through the streets of Bukhara (in modern day Uzbekistan), Genghis entered the city’s pre-eminent mosque and scaled the pulpit with a message for the congregation: “I am God’s punishment for your sins!” he bellowed before razing their magnificent city to the ground. In the Mongol’s wake lay a sea of carnage and burning ruins that stretched across the region and saw over a million people slaughtered, the Khwarazmian Empire brought to an end, and the Mongols push for the first time into parts of Eastern Europe.

  Genghis died a peaceful death in 1227, and if he was remorseful for a life of slaughter then he didn’t show it on his yurt deathbed. His last words to his followers and heirs: “I have conquered for you a large empire, but my life is too short to take the whole world, that I leave to you.” For a man who believed his mission from God was to conquer the entire world, it made sense. Following his death, his sons and successors gave his last wish a pretty good stab, doubling the size of the Mongol empire, pushing as far into Europe as the borders of the Austrian capital, Vienna. What prevented them from taking Vienna, and in all likelihood the rest of Europe, was not the abilities of the Austrian army, but rather Mongol law. During the campaign the new Khan died, an eventuality that called for all chiefs to immediately return to Mongolia to elect the next ruler. They did, never returning to finish the job, with the Mongol empire eventually disintegrating a generation after Genghis Khan’s death, in part because they inadvertently passed on to those they conquered the warring tactics that had made their subjugation possible in the first place. Horse warfare was adopted and adapted by the technologically superior settler states, and soon the Mongols got a taste of their own medicine. Interestingly, some historians believe that medieval European chivalry has its origins in Mongol horseback culture, which European knights then refined and imbued with a sense of gallantry.

  Perhaps the biggest legacy that Genghis Khan forcefully stamped on the world was not the biggest land empire the world has ever known, or the tactics of mounted warfare, or serving as the inspiration for the Dothraki in Game of Thrones, but his DNA. Notorious for his multiple wives and of rape on an industrial scale, where he would have his way with the most desirable women among the vanquished, one thirteenth century Persian historian claimed that Khan was responsible for a lineage that amounted to over twenty thousand people within a century of his birth. Such a claim might sound preposterous, but recent genetic studies of Central Asian men have revealed that eight percent of the population, that is sixteen million men, have the same type of Y chromosome as Khan, and in men worldwide about 0.5 percent. This equates to roughly one in every two hundred males alive on the planet today who can trace their genetic lineage back to the mighty Mongol King.

  Passed from father to son, the Y chromosome is normally inherited unchanged except for occasional random mutations. These mutations are referred to by geneticists as markers. Such markers can then be used to trace backwards through time to the point where they first emerged, and so provide a lineage back to a common ancestor. The study in question traced back these markers to roughly three generations before Genghis Khan’s birth, so if the theory is true then this genetic marker was most likely passed onto Khan by his great-great-grandfather, before being spread far and wide across the empire by Khan’s own sexual appetite and opportunity.

  Such a hypothesis is, of course, guesswork, as no sample of Genghis’ DNA exists
today, nor is it ever likely to as he received a clandestine burial where great lengths were taken to conceal his tomb’s location—the main precaution being the wholesale slaughter of all those who witnessed the funeral possession. A befitting parting gesture if ever there was one. But what can be known, is that for such a Y chromosome to be so prevalent, then it had either to be responsible for passing on some biological advantage—apparently unlikely, as it is little more than the switch responsible for turning an embryo into a male child—or, on the other hand, its possessor had some extreme social advantage. And Khan is the only feasible candidate. Lending further weight to the hypothesis is the geographical spread of the chromosome’s possessors, which matches, almost exactly, the territory of the Mongol Empire.

  Now here’s something that I’m not particularly proud to mention, but it only seems right. I never got to visit the ruins of Otrar. I wanted to go to Otrar, I planned to go to Otrar, and what’s more, damn it, I thought I had gone to Otrar, but by some inadvertent cock-up on my behalf I ended up going to the wrong deserted Silk Road city ruins; not the one where the governor’s actions had sparked a wave of Mongol retribution that engulfed much of the ancient world, but one further down the road called Sauran Krepost, which served as the capital of the Mongol White Horde in the century following Genghis Khan’s death. And here’s the thing, this monumental blunder only became apparent to me a year after the event when writing up my experiences for this book.

  While going through my notes, I decided to have a quick aerial look at the place via Google Maps. What I saw left me scratching my head in bewilderment. The website pinpointed Otrar as being far further off the main road than I recalled, and its representation from above bore no resemblance to my memory. Having detected the occasional error on Google Maps before, especially in remote regions, I initially put the anomaly down to website error, and so began scanning the desolate landscape closer to the main road, where I was confident I would find the site. But there was still no sign of it. After much zooming in and out, and plenty of confusion, I turned to my notes where I found several photocopied pages from the Kazakhstan section of a Lonely Planet Central Asia. For some reason on these I had circled the directions to both Otrar and Sauran Krepost. I can only deduce that through a combination of fatigue, inability to converse with locals, and downright carelessness, I followed the directions to the wrong ruin. Another factor that might have led to my mistake was that both sites were described in very similar terms: Otrar as a “large dusty mound” and Sauran Krepost as a “long, low mound,” visible from the road, something I had been scanning the landscape for on approach, and disembarked on spotting.

  A bamboozled truck driver dropped me off, in what I’m sure to him seemed the middle of nowhere, with the dusty mound about a mile away across the flat and barren steppe. I hiked towards the ruins, passing through a little tunnel leading beneath a train track that ran parallel to the road. The city’s ancient walls were now a crumbling geriatric spine of crude mud-clad brick, resting on top of a vast circular grassy mound, stretching about a half mile in diameter. Looking back at my actions now I feel a bit of a plonker, for at the time I climbed high up onto the walls and gazed out across the steppe, recreating in my mind’s eye the great Mongol attack, which, unbeknown to me, had occurred fifty miles to the south.

  But no matter, I may have arrived at the wrong site and been oblivious to the fact, but it was marvellous, nonetheless. Stepping from the wall, I entered the citadel’s abandoned grassy basin where the ancient remains of sandy-colored brick buildings stood, their gaping foundations reaching deep into the earth, exposed by past excavations. Shards of pottery lay strewn across the site, some heaped in great piles as if archaeologists had collected them up to study en masse, then just abandoned them where they were. I roamed through a collection of shiny glazed fragments, decorated in swirling patterns of blues, whites, and grays.

  Every so often a soft breath of wind would stir, which along with the gentle chirping of birds created a soothing music for the soul. If there was one thing that struck me about the place it was its serenity, helped, I’m sure, by me having the entire deserted city to myself. I spent a good while ferreting about, trying to picture it in its heyday, and at one stage lay back in the center propped up against my pack, feet stretched out in front of me, soaking in the sunshine, which, for the first time in a long while, held a discernible and transferable warmth. I felt so at peace and yet so alive, as if a part of everything around me. Thoughts of people I hadn’t seen for years drifted into my consciousness. I wondered what they were doing and if their days were filled with such adventure and exploration. A smile rested on my face as I pondered the wonder and insanity of the obvious: I had hitchhiked from Tasmania into the middle of an abandoned Silk Road city on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan. It was a realization that couldn’t help but fill me with satisfaction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Environmental Apocalypse

  I rode with a Russian guy dressed in a blue-collar factory uniform, who picked me up in a comically square-formed Lada on the outskirts of once-thriving Soviet industrial city Kyzylorda, now marked with an array of rusting pylons, old decrepit factories and rice silos. His name was Feder, and together we traveled for about a hundred and fifty miles, a journey that saw what little color was left in the flat and barren landscape drain away, until the sandy desert plains turned a dull and lifeless grayish brown, lashed by localized sand storms that attacked the car’s rattling windows. We were on the eastern fringe of the mighty Kyzylkum, or red sands, desert, the eleventh largest in the world. In the middle of this apocalyptic landscape was one of the world’s remotest military installations—Baikonur, home of the Russian space program, the oldest space launch site on the planet.

  The Baikonur Cosmodrome is still leased to Russia who use it for rocket launches, as is a nearby garrison town, but as we entered the area it became apparent that neither would be visible from the road. In 1988, Baikonur was the site of the maiden launch and landing of a fascinating, and largely unknown, spacecraft—the Soviet Union’s space shuttle. Known as Buran, or Snowstorm, the shuttle’s existence had been rumored for years and was confirmed just days before its launch by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, not splashed triumphantly across the front page as you might expect but revealed somewhat discreetly on the second page—a lovely bit of understatement if ever there was one, a sort of, “Oh yeah, by the way we’ve got one of those space shuttle things ourselves.” Although it looked incredibly similar to the U.S. version, the Soviet media was at pains to point out that their version was a technologically superior craft; and by all accounts it seems that it was.

  On a cold November’s morning thick with snow clouds and the sort of erratic swirling winds that would have postponed the launch of any U.S. shuttle, Buran was powered off into space, thrust into orbit by its giant Energia rocket. For the next three hours it performed two orbits around the earth, then re-entered the atmosphere and glided, despite adverse wind conditions, with extreme precision to as perfect a landing as could be hoped—just nine feet from the center of Baikonur’s runway. And what’s more, it accomplished all this via remote control, not a single astronaut was on board—that, and it never made another flight.

  A year after its maiden voyage, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union crumbled soon after. The Buran project was shelved, and the shuttle itself put into storage in Baikonur’s hangar 112. As funds for maintenance of the hangar dried up, the building began to deteriorate, with water dripping from the roof forming into pools on the floor around the high-tech equipment. In an attempt to repair the roof, on May 12, 2002, an eight man team scaled the building. According to eyewitnesses, it began to shake violently as if struck by an earthquake. The roof collapsed, obliterating the shuttle and killing the maintenance team.

  As Fedar drove through the area, I scanned the landscape, hoping upon hope, that maybe, just maybe, I’d be lucky and we’d pass by at the exact moment the Russians launched o
ne of their conventional rockets into space. Nothing so exciting occurred, although I did spot several marmots: little prairie dog-like mammals that live in burrows and stand up on their hind legs to look around. Fedar and I parted by a side road that led further into the barren wastes where, at some point in the unseen distance, a hub of launch pads, satellite dishes, antennae and rockets was situated. I would have loved to have asked him about his role here, but it was beyond my linguistic ability. Before he drove off, Fedar handed me a brown paper bag. Inside was a mound of damp carrot shavings, some dried fish and fried bread. With thanks I wrapped it up for later and struck off, my head hunched down against the flailing sand, hoping that another vehicle would soon come by.

  It did; and it was driven by a policeman.

  He demanded my passport. I gave it to him along with one of my notes.

  “This is closed area,” he stated, burning a hole through me with a stare.

  “What about the area ahead?” I asked in as courteous and conciliatory a manner as possible.

  “Closed.”

  “And behind?”

  “Closed.”

  Great. So I was smack bang in the middle of a restricted military zone.

  “Can I continue walking?”

  He shook his head. “I will take you up road,” he stated in as emotionally flat a manner as is possible, rather Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, neither friendly nor hostile, just extreme matter-of-fact.

  By late afternoon I arrived at my final destination of the day, Aralsk. Once a thriving fishing port on the coast of the Aral Sea, it had lost that rather crucial commodity necessary to sustain a fishing industry—the sea where its fish once swam.