by Tim Cope
The dim interior of the ger hummed with a dung-fired stove, and a cauldron of salty tea breathed moisture into the air. The walls and ceiling were hung with antique rifles, a fresh wolf skin, rows of drying goat meat, and ornate horse tack. Dashnyam pulled out his stone snuff bottle and offered it with both hands to the elderly man of the family, Davaa. In return, Davaa, who had a long, narrow sun-blackened face and a white goatee, produced his. The two men sniffed each other’s in a sign of respect, then sat back to drink tea and smoke from long pipes. Back down on the plains beyond the gorge, Dashnyam was a poor man, but here he could partake as an equal in the broader traditions of nomad life. It moved me to see how he was treated with a sense of high dignity.
Dinner was freshly boiled goat head and a cup of bouillon to wash it down. When our bellies were taut as drums, a silver bowl of nermel arkhi was passed around. Then we lay down our bedding—me my sleeping bag, Dashnyam an old winter deel—and passed out to the muffled sounds of settling sheep, goats, and yaks.
I slept heavily, and in the morning rode away feeling as sharp and crisp as the frozen needles of alpine grass that crunched under my horse’s hooves. The sky was clear and the horses, alert from a good night of grazing, twitched this way and that, drawing attention to marmots and foxes that darted away from our path, and a kite that dove to earth in pursuit of a ground squirrel. Unlike on other journeys, when my own body had been on the front line, on this trip it was the horses that were in that position, and it was through their needs, senses, and toils I experienced the landscape. They had become my conduit with the land, and perhaps it was more accurate to suggest I was riding to Hungary learning to view the world through their eyes rather than those of a nomad.
Within an hour we reached a great sweeping corner of the valley where the river swung around in a right-angle turn to the northwest and split in two. The drama of 4,037 m Kharkhiraa slid into view. Gentle spurs climbed skyward to a craggy, indomitable peak entombed in a sarcophagus of glaciers. From the summit a cloud of wind-driven snow plumed into the sky, and, as I watched, it cascaded down the northern face past giant chunks of glacial ice that clung to the cliff midway down. Where the plume settled at the bottom, the main glacier slalomed through black rocky spurs, disappearing into the bowels of the mountain, then reappearing as a slender, cascading stream forming the headwaters of the Kharkhiraa River.
A little farther on Turgen emerged. Capped with a helmet of ice, its sheer northern face of dark rock looked more like the cross section of a mountain.
After pausing for lunch, we began climbing high above the respective valleys to the 3,000 m pass between the twin peaks. I leaned forward, gripping Rusty’s mane, following Dashnyam along a zigzag of narrow ledges. The camel cried every time its soft, wide feet became wedged between rocks. Only the pain from the nose peg Dashnyam pulled was enough to egg her on.
The climb eased off abruptly when we reached an ovoo and rode out onto the broad grassy pass. Directly ahead, a series of hazy blue mountains aglitter with ice rose from the horizon. They were peaks of the Sayan range, on the distant border with the republics of Altai and Tuva in Russian Siberia.
We had made good time, so when we crested the highest point, we resolved to spend the next day and night camped just below the pass. The clear, stable weather provided an opportunity to explore the higher mountains on foot. Leaving Dashnyam with the animals, I trekked to a razorback ridgeline at around 3,700 m, where I spent a couple of glorious hours gazing down upon snaking glaciers, and a series of turquoise lakes at their tail ends. Up so high, it was as if life in the thinner air had been distilled. The sweat and difficulties of the last few months fell away.
On the second morning in the pass we woke to cluttered skies. Clouds like floating battleships had gathered, and wind tugged and pulled at our tents. Curved columns of snow raked across the slopes. We rode through scattered snow showers, passing hills pockmarked with hundreds of lakes, and in the evening maneuvered down a gully to arrive in camp ravenous and cold. As would become a ritual for me as far as Hungary, we sat with our eyes glued on the stove, waiting impatiently for the water to boil.
In the morning snow came thick and hard. Dashnyam was worried. “The camel’s pads will slip on this snow, and we will have a very bad accident if we continue. Better wait till tomorrow, when the snow might have melted,” he explained.
I was more than happy to spend the day in the tent, using the undisturbed time to catch up on my diary entries, although it soon became clear we were not as alone as we thought.
After breakfast there came the standard Mongolian door knock—the clearing of the throat and a loud spit—before three men carrying rifles and bearing frozen, chapped cheeks clambered into Dashnyam’s tent.
“How is your journey going? Good?” they asked.
“How is yours?” asked Dashnyam, offering them tea.
I sat squeezed up against the tent wall watching the tea breathe life back into the men. Like the snowflakes in their hair and eyelashes, which soon liquefied, sending rivulets of water running down their faces, their rigid expressions melted and the tent became abuzz with chatter.
The men—one in middle age, the others in their twenties—were marmot hunters who had been living for a week in a rock shelter not far from our camp. Their aim was to collect as many marmot pelts as possible, which they would sell to traders on the plains. All was going well, so they planned to stay another week.
In the late afternoon when the weather cleared we joined the hunters as they checked their marmot traps. With little emotion they hauled out their victims and methodically snapped their necks. When this was done we returned to the cave, where the limp carcasses were skinned and tossed into a pot of boiling water, and vodka was passed around. Before drinking, each man flicked a drop to the sky and one to the earth, then rubbed a little on his forehead. Dashnyam shared his snuff bottle and tobacco, talking with the men in the measured cadence I had become used to.
As the vodka set in I leaned up against the rock wall and studied my hosts. Their deels were shredded and impregnated with oil, dung, and soil. They had nothing to sleep on, and no food bar the marmots they caught and a few morsels of stale boortsog. The older man’s face was a landscape to behold. His nose rose in a broad plateau from the steppe of his cheeks, below which a mustache as frayed as his deel grew unchecked. His life had clearly been hard, yet there was no hint of complaint. When he laughed, the features of his face parted elastically, giving vent to a happy soul.
When the meat was done, a single knife was produced, and fatty chunks carved out and brought to mouth. The older hunter chewed ungraciously on a jawbone. He then picked pieces up and slurped on them before licking his fingers and hands clean of the rich marmot oil. It was a scene that had played out through the ages. The same oil had once widely been used by warriors who would rub it over their skin to prevent frostbite during marches in the winter. Today the oil is still valued as a treatment for burns, wounds, and rheumatism, although eating marmots, as these men were doing, is frowned upon. A ground rodent, the marmot had been one of the first known carriers of the Black Death, which went on to contribute to the fall of the Mongol Empire and threaten entire civilizations from China to Africa. Marmots are still carriers of the disease, outbreaks of which occur annually in Mongolia.
“What about the Black Death? Are you scared?” I asked them through Dashnyam.
Their laughter said it all. Ignoring the taboo about eating marmot meat, I bent forward and accepted a piece of the fatty meat. As it slipped down my throat, I had no doubt these were the hardest men I had ever met—not in the aggressive, macho sense, but in their gracious acceptance of the difficulties and privations of their lives. On the steppe when the grass was rich and thick, herds flourished, and the people rejoiced and gave thanks to tengri. When the land was in drought, or stung by a bitter winter, their herds shrunk and the people accepted it. Life and death were at the whim of the earth and the sky, and there was nothing inherently wrong
with that.
Their world fostered an uncomplaining attitude I would have liked to think I could adopt and carry forth to Hungary—but which I knew was probably beyond me.
Two days from the hunters’ cave, we paused by an ovoo from which the mountains dropped away to a vast crater-shaped valley. Through the middle of this, a single wrinkle of a stream flowed its way to the west, funneled out by the mountains onto a distant desert-like plain where it spilled into a wide shallow lake. We were about to drop down to a rugged landscape of sand and rock where alpine grasses gave way to little more than hardy desert bushes.
On the horizon, beyond this immediate landscape there were too many layers of mountains to count, each riddled with thousands of shadowy crevices, gullies, and peaks that would absorb a lifetime of exploring. For now, though, my mind was sated by the journey that had just passed.
I rode behind Dashnyam, admiring the way he held the camel’s lead rope with one hand and smoked with the other, still managing to tap gently at his horse’s rear when necessary. “Aha aha,” he called every time the camel threatened to slow or panic. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that for days he had been wearing my backpack upside down.
In the evening we reached the abandoned summer community of Khovd Brigad, where a few old shoes and round circles of yellow grass indicated that the community had recently packed up and gone. We were still a good day’s ride from where I could expect to find people again, but it was here that our journey together would come to an end. Dashnyam needed to return before the winter snows blocked the pass, and with only one serving of porridge, a handful of pasta, and some dried strips of meat remaining of our food stocks, one more day together meant that we would run out completely.
In light of our humble prospects for dinner, my heart sank when two men on motorbikes came to us at dusk. They were hunters, had been riding all day, and had no food or shelter. Dashnyam offered them half our meal, and we went to bed ravenous. The hunters lay down on the earth and pulled their deels over their heads. In the morning they stood up, dusted off the frost, and climbed back on their bikes.
Over breakfast, I took the time to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of Dashnyam’s character one last time. As always, he ate his share of semolina by dunking his head into the buckled old pot and licking until it was shiny clean, his hooked Khoton nose needing a wipe afterward. I still couldn’t work out whether he had forgotten to bring a spoon and was too proud to borrow mine or simply thought it unnecessary. Afterward he rolled a cigarette along the edge of his worn soldier’s boots, and then, while he smoked it, took supreme care to fold up his tattered but treasured tent. When he was ready to pack, he ambled bowlegged to his camel and brought her over to his gear, tugging gently on the lead rope to make her sit.
Without my cumbersome equipment, the packing that had taken us over an hour required but ten minutes. I looked on with envy as he swung his tent, pot, brick tea, and tobacco up between the camel’s humps. The distance that had taken seven days for us to cover together, he said, he could manage on the return in two and a half—and judging by his light load, I could partly understand how. In the end, I was a westerner and would never master the art of traveling light the way he did.
When he was ready to go, I gave him a packet of Russian cigarettes and paid him for an extra couple of days. He presented me with a packet of matches, which I accepted with two hands and brought to my forehead, according to custom. The packet hit the headlamp that was still strapped on my head, and went tumbling to the ground, to my embarrassment, since in Mongolian culture dropping a gift was a grave sign of disrespect.
Lastly, I split our meager rations—a few pieces of curd and some old sand-encrusted jellybeans from the bottom of the boxes. He lifted the collar of his deel over his head so he could tightly wind the sash around his waist. Then he mounted up and swung his arm in an arc to the northwest, indicating the way I was to travel.
I watched him shrink into the distance until he disappeared beyond a ridge. The melancholy cry of his camel lingered for a few moments, but then I was alone.
From the Kharkhiraa-Turgen range, there remained about 250 km until the point where the borders of Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, and Russia converge in the heart of the Altai Mountains—a two-week journey. Just two days after saying goodbye to Dashnyam, however, I crossed the Khovd River, and it was there that my Mongolian journey effectively came to an end. I had reached Bayan-Olgiy Aimag, at Mongolia’s westernmost extent, where Kazakh nomads have been in the vast majority since migrating to the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Nominal Muslims who speak a Turkic tongue, many I met gravitated culturally more toward my next destination, Kazakhstan, than to Ulaanbaatar, and certainly they were geographically closer to the former.
With hindsight, I would come to understand that because the Kazakhs from Bayan-Olgiy had been isolated during the period of Soviet revolution and Stalin’s ensuing rule, these people had retained a more traditional and authentic culture than their brothers and sisters in Kazakhstan itself. At the time, however, I felt that Bayan-Olgiy simply represented the end of my Mongolian experience, and a prelude to a land that would dominate the next twelve months of my life.
Short of the border itself, I decided to finish up my journey beyond the village of Tsengel. There I managed to sell my horses to a Tuvan school-teacher who promised to use Rusty and Bokus as work animals and not slaughter them for winter meat. Since neither the border with Russia nor China in Mongolia’s West was open to foreigners, getting to Kazakhstan by horse through either country was impossible. I had therefore decided to fly over the mountains into Kazakhstan and buy horses as close as I could to Kazakhstan’s eastern border.2 It would prove to be the only stretch of terrain—about 250 km as the crow flies—that I would not be able to travel by horse to the Danube.
Kazakhstan
6
STALIN’S SHAMBALA
In Mongolia I had ridden for more than seventy days and 1,400 km from east of the old empire capital, Kharkhorin, to the far western province of Bayan-Olgiy. It had been a time crowded with challenges—among them learning to ride, familiarizing myself with nomad ways, and getting through the daily test of finding water and grass. And yet in the scheme of my journey to the Danube, it had been little more than a prelude to the challenges that lay ahead. I had, after all, been riding through the forgiving conditions of summer in a land where nomads were often nearby to lend a hand.
It was with feelings of trepidation and excitement that I looked ahead to the next broad chapter of my journey: Kazakhstan. The trepidation was because I knew Kazakhstan would be the make-or-break leg of the journey—not simply because of the sheer distance involved, the topography I could expect, and the fact that winter would be on my heels, but because of the social legacy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which I would confront in its many forms.
And yet I would also be heading into the heart of my journey—the remote center of Eurasia, which had been pivotal in the history of steppe nomads. Somewhere out there in the immense and sparsely populated deserts, steppe, and mountains—during a crossing that promised to be more than twice as far as that of Mongolia—there beckoned the kind of freedom of travel and cultural immersion I had dreamed of.
One of the first times I had heard anything about Kazakhstan had been in 2000 during the bicycle journey. Chris and I had stayed for some days with an ethnic German family in Siberia who had recently moved from the Kazakh steppes, where they had lived in exile since Stalin deported the Volga Germans during World War II. They had told of a land so hot in summer that Kazakh nomads wore heavy sheepskin coats and hats to insulate from the sun. In winter, the wind and the cold were more severe than in Siberia—compounded by the absence of the shelter and firewood found there in the dense taiga forest. Since that time, I had been fixated on maps of Kazakhstan, and my fascination with the country had steadily grown.
Almost equal in size to Western Europe, and the largest of the former Soviet nations behi
nd Russia, Kazakhstan occupied what for many in the Western world is a geographical blind spot, stretching from the north Caspian Sea in the west (that technically lies in Europe) to China and the Altai in the east. In the south its borders pass through the legendary Central Asian deserts of the Kyzylkum and Karakum, and the ridgelines of the Tien Shan, China’s “Celestial Mountains.” To the north, sweeping grasslands merge with the beginnings of the Siberian taiga.
Significantly for me, Kazakhstan lay at the geographical heart of the Eurasian steppe, encompassing the most extreme terrain and climate of the nomads, and it was home to the world’s oldest continuous horseback culture. Historians believe it was in the country’s north, where present-day Akmola province lies, that an ancient people known as the Botai (c. 3700–3100 BCE) became the first humans to domesticate the equine.
Since that early period of nomad history, the Kazakh lands had played a central role in the rise and fall of steppe empires, including that of the Mongols. While the grasslands, desert, and mountains stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Altai did not have the kind of treasures sought during the conquests of China, Europe, and the more fertile regions of Central Asia, it was a strategic steppe heartland that could be used as a horse highway bridging Asia with Europe, and a vast sanctuary where millions of horses could be grazed. In Genghis Khan’s own lifetime, some of his most important conquests were launched from here, including the crushing of the Khwarezm Empire in Central Asia. These were also the lands that Genghis’s oldest son, Jochi, had been given control of after his father’s death, and which became entrenched as part of the Golden Horde.1
Just as important as the strategic nature of the Kazakh territory for the Mongols were the people who inhabited it. Tribes of mixed Turkic descent, they shared a common nomadic way of life with the Mongols, in some regions moving as much as 1,000 km a year in pursuit of pasture. The inherent rigors of this life made them formidable soldiers, and although the Mongols initially faced fierce resistance during their probing campaigns—most notably from the Kipchaks—historians estimate that the Mongolian army that invaded Europe consisted of only around 10 percent Mongolian soldiers; the bulk of the remainder were of Turkic extraction. In fact, as the Mongol Empire fractured into autonomous khanates in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Turkic came to replace Mongolian as the language of the ruling class in much of the southern, central, and western regions, including the Golden Horde.