On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  To announce the beginning of the ceremony, a musician made a dramatic entrance in a flashy suit with a dombra cradled in his arms. He roamed about the hall demanding attention with his furious strumming, and as he began to sing, people left the floor. In the past a musician such as he might have been known as an akyn—a talented performer chosen to represent a certain kinship group or family. For centuries, in the absence of the written word, the continuity of nomadic life and a sense of national consciousness rested heavily on such artists.2 In the twenty-first century the akyn evidently had to have a broader repertoire than his predecessor. A tangle of amplifiers, microphones, and speakers was part of the modern arsenal, and in addition to traditional music, many of the songs he performed were slow love melodies to clunky backing music from a synthesizer.

  When finally the bride and groom walked in, the musician serenaded the bride as part of a custom known as betashar, “revealing the face” of the bride. The formalities that followed were as eclectic as the musician’s gamut. A mullah stood alongside a bureaucrat from the registrar’s office, and as the bride and groom, dressed in a generic gown and suit, respectively, signed some papers, the dombra went quiet and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” blared from the speakers.

  Throughout the ceremony, Serik and several old men chaperoned me, making sure I was propped right up close to the action. As a foreigner wearing dirty hiking boots and faded travel garb, I found the experience a little awkward at first. When the official matters were over, though, I was carried into the dining room by the heaving spirits of the crowd. There I paused momentarily in disbelief.

  Three rows of long trestle tables were laden with dazzling platters of fresh fruit, horse sausage, dried curd, pastries, confectionery, salads, and nuts. By every third plate shiny bottles of vodka and sparkling water provided additional polish. I had long since become accustomed to preserved meat, rice, and semolina as the mainstays of my diet, not to mention the frugal existence of the people I had met, so I found this at once overwhelming and perplexing. Noticing my sense of awe, Serik explained that it was a small wedding—only three hundred guests. Kazakhs, I discovered, put their life savings into wedding ceremonies.

  I fell into it all. As a hundred different toasts were raised to the newly-weds, I relished the kaleidoscope of faces that seemed to reflect all corners of the steppe. There were men with large ears, sunken cheeks, and blue eyes, and others with broad faces and olive skin stretched taut over formidable fist-like cheekbones. A woman two seats up from me had large dark eyebrows, a slight red tinge to her face, and a pointy nose. A woman opposite had glowing porcelain skin that blanketed the rounded contours of her wide, open face like snow. Her eyes were almond-shaped, so, depending on her expression, she could swing from an Eastern look to a Western one in an instant.

  After Serik had proclaimed his toast and the akyn made everyone aware over the PA system of the special guest from Australia, we moved back to the other section of the hall. The floors and walls there vibrated with a throng of old and young dancing to contemporary Kazakh music. There were middle-aged women twirling in shrieks of laughter, and grooving old men whose shirts had popped out from their belts and shook like flags in the wind. Judging by the number of empty vodka bottles lying around, there were a lot more festivities to come. Sensing this, and wisely choosing to censor my experience, Serik signaled that it was time to go.

  Music from the wedding echoed in my head as I saddled up and rode out from Kopa. The horses were similarly buoyant—they had gorged so much under Serik’s watch that I was forced to lengthen their girth straps. They were wound up, and happy to move into a trot with the gentlest of commands, but just as inclined to use their excess energy to misbehave. Something a Kazakh herder later told me was partially true: “It is dangerous to rest a horse too long, or a man, for they will soon relax and become weak, lazy, and disobedient.”

  Only a short distance beyond Kopa, a sobering headwind stole away any residual warmth from my stay. The horses also tired a little, and when they fell into line my sense of euphoria and companionship all but disintegrated. Reunited with my solo journey, I refocused my sights.

  Just 50 km from Kopa lay the shores of Lake Balkhash, a long, narrow body of water stretching around 600 km from east to west. A geographical curiosity of the lake, the world’s third-largest inland sea without an outlet, is that the eastern half is saline, while the western half, which curves in a crescent shape to the south, is freshwater.

  My plan was to ride west, parallel to the shoreline, where the moderating effect of the lake would buy me some time before the onset of extreme cold. The challenge of this route lay in the arid and uninhabited terrain. There were no permanent streams or rivers feeding the lake from the north, and the eastern half was too saline for livestock to drink. My only hope in the event there was no snowfall was to rely on getting water from a remote industry-serving railway that ran just north of the shore. At regular intervals there were control points and sidings with camps of rail workers known in Russian as raz’ezds.

  As I headed south from Kopa, then west, tracks and roads petered out, giving way to wide, cracked clay pans, between which grew tough, gray woody plants without foliage. Far to the north the escarpment of the uplands was just visible, but ahead the horizon was one finger thick—so flat and deserted that nothing but Tigon with his tall pointy ears bridged it with the sky.

  The routines of travel that had carried me to Kopa brought reassurance in such a wild setting, but on the evening of the second day I hadn’t found any water or pasture and made for the railway line and a raz’ezd known as Zhaksybulak. During my time there it became clear that while I had left more populated territories behind, I had also departed from communities whose livelihood, like mine, was closely connected with the pursuit of pasture.

  The single-track railway the raz’ezds served carried a cargo of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea in western Kazakhstan, much of which was bound for Druzhba on the border with China. Zhaksybulak itself—the largest siding I came across in the area, and the only one with any livestock and permanent residency—was a disorderly handful of huts clinging to the rail line, laden with litter, broken glass, and a couple of rusting truck chassis. Most of the houses were either half-built or semi-demolished shells, and the rail workers eked out a living in rooms they had been able to improvise and close off to the elements with tarpaulins. Water supplies—even for the token sheep and cow—were brought weekly by train. Through an unbroken maelstrom of wind-whipped sand, dirt, and salt came the rumbling, and screeching of giant steel trains with tanks stained black with oil and grease. Long after they had been eclipsed by the horizon, acrid diesel fumes carried on the wind. With my animals freshly watered, I left as soon as I could.

  The next five days—four riding and one resting—melted into one another. Two subtly different tones of gray offered the only contrast in a landscape of fading monochrome: the sky, which remained overcast and dim, and the featureless, color-drained steppe. There were no livestock, and only morsels of grass and wormwood plant to be found. The lake shoreline remained out of sight.

  I rode a safe distance from the railway line but once a day made a trip to look for water at the raz’ezds that were spaced along the line at 20 km and sometimes 40 km intervals. Some raz’ezds had run out of water and the men had little or nothing to drink for themselves. Most were manned by only one or two workers.

  At night I camped to the north, where there were tiny oases of grass, and retired to the tent, where the world was smaller and easier to comprehend. In Zhaksybulak stories of wolf sightings and attacks had abounded, so I began throwing firecrackers out the tent door before going to sleep as a precaution. One evening I tried to film myself with the firecrackers but forgot to open the tent door before I lit them. The result was a hole burned in the fly—an addition to a growing list of needed repairs.

  Although I resented my dependence on the railway, I had nowhere else to turn when the horses tired and I clean ran ou
t of grain. A day’s ride short of a copper-mining hub called Sayak, I hesitantly approached a raz’ezd, two small buildings trackside.

  In a room flooded with the stench of vodka and tobacco I found three men playing cards, heads down. At first they thought I might be a Russian illegally fishing the lake, but upon seeing my horses, they let loose with all manner of jubilant profanities and agreed to help.3 I paid one of them to hitch a ride on a train to Sayak and bring back a sack of grain and some food supplies for me by evening.

  Waiting a day amid the diesel stench, blackened earth, and scattered rubbish was not pleasant, but the only other possibility for resting the horses and getting supplies was to ride into Sayak myself—something I had been told to avoid at all costs. By all reports, this declining mining town was “full of bandits,” unemployed “Oralmans”—Kazakhs who had recently emigrated from Mongolia, China, or elsewhere abroad—and competing Mafia groups.4 More worrying for me were reports of the corrupt Sayak police. Apparently they were known to abduct people or arrest them on false grounds, drive them out onto a remote part of the steppe, steal their valuables, and leave them for dead. The police were said to be awaiting my arrival, and even though I suspected the rumor to be nothing more than scaremongering, I had managed to fly under the radar of the authorities until now and feared what they might make of my visa papers.5

  After dark a sack of grain, some rice, and some canned meat were delivered. I settled into camp near the tracks, relieved that my time at the raz’ezd had passed without event. Just after tethering the horses, however, a special workers’ train pulled in, and a group of around twenty men piled out. The workers, who had arrived from Sayak for a week of track maintenance, swaggered over to an empty dormitory hut, sniggering and swearing, smoking cigarettes. I was dragged into their smoke-filled den, where vodka was flowing and men sat on their bunks freely spitting onto the floor between drags.

  One man with straw-like hair, pockmarked skin, and an unblinking stare poured me a glass. “Give me one of your horses! Or at least sell it to me cheaply! After all, what do you need three for?” When I refused, he backed off and replied in a gentler tone, “I have heard there are thieves in Sayak coming to steal your horses tonight, so be careful.”

  When I managed to extricate myself from the hut I found Tigon curled up by the door guarding my boots. He leaped up at me, paws on my chest, whining. I ran my hands along his snout, caressed his head behind the ears, and let him bury his moist nose in my coat.

  It should have been obvious that I needed to stick close to my animals this night, but instead I took up an invitation for dinner inside the signal-control room with the engineers. This lapse of caution would very nearly prove the end of my journey.

  I was partway through a slop of canned meat and fried potato when I stepped outside and heard a great thwack and muffled thump from the direction of my camp. Crouching, I could make out the silhouetted figure of someone scurrying away from Taskonir. As I ran toward him I tripped and fell over an object that proved to be my backpack. Even as I rushed to raise the alarm, the turn of events was becoming clear. The mystery figure had taken my backpack—which included my video camera, passport, and money—and leaped bareback on Taskonir for a brazen getaway. What he hadn’t realized was that Taskonir was tethered on the lower front leg with a 20 m line. Taskonir had only made it to the end of the rope before he and his passenger somersaulted to earth.

  It wasn’t long before the would-be thief was dragged into the hut and revealed as the very same man who had warned me about thieves. Since our earlier meeting I had learned that he had been born in Mongolia and immigrated as a child to Kazakhstan, and was colloquially known as “the Mongol.”

  I had barely begun to make sense of these happenings when an engineer from the signal station took command. “You know what we do when there is a problem like this?” he announced. “There is just one solution.” The men around him looked on, captivated. “To drink!”

  They went back inside and raised toasts to anything they could think of. When their vodka ran out they demanded I hand over any alcohol I might have stowed away.

  “Don’t worry, Tim! Timokha! Tamerlane! Timurbek! This is the way we do it—this is the way we solve our problems. Don’t be offended!” the men chanted.

  Even the would-be thief, who was unapologetic, joined in for a drink.

  I retired to the tent and packed so I could leave at the first hint of light, but the course of events still had a ways to run. At two in the morning Taskonir vanished, leading to a sortie of drunken men running clumsily through the dark on a desperate search. Someone tripped on an old wire and fell, and another face-planted on the train tracks. There were rumors that someone had really stolen the horse this time, and that it couldn’t possibly have been the Mongol because he was asleep. But then, just as I was recovering my breath, the men wandered back, leading Taskonir. I tied the horses on short ropes for the rest of the night and lay in my sleeping bag on the ground among them.

  At 6:00 A.M. I was up and saddling, and by sunrise I was ready to go. There was just one last issue to solve: Taskonir’s hobbles were missing. I roused some men and told them to wake the Mongol. When he appeared looking sullen and disinterested, I was already sitting high up on the horse, so I was looking down on him.

  “I don’t care who stole my horse, but I need my hobbles!” I said sternly.

  With a sigh he walked around to the rear of the hut and came back with them.

  Other men came out, rubbing their eyes, to say goodbye as I set off into a fast trot. Tigon was already far ahead.

  “Have a good journey! We hope you are not offended!”

  I kept my eyes straight ahead for hours and didn’t stop until the railway had been so long extinguished from view that I felt beyond its orbit. I felt as though we were setting ourselves adrift back into the embrace of the steppe. I didn’t care if it meant drinking salt water for a whole month; I was no longer going to be seduced by the illusion of security the railway suggested. It was true what I had been told: “The most dangerous wolf of all is that which walks on two legs.”

  By evening my pace slowed to a walk, and the adrenaline ran dry. Safely beyond the gaze of human beings, I felt more able to contemplate what had passed. Given the repercussions that might have ensued if the horse thief had been successful, I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread and anger. Simultaneously, however, the farther I made it from the raz’ezd, the more the personal offense faded, and I began to find something curiously endearing about the thief.

  In a kind of honorable way, the Mongol had warned me of the theft—an unspoken acknowledgment that he liked my horses, and a backhanded compliment. Most interesting was his choice of horse. Had he wanted to steal the most valuable mount for resale, Ogonyok would have been his pick. Instead, he chose Taskonir—a horse invaluable for herding, but long in the tooth and comparatively bony. If the theft was partly born of an appreciation of Taskonir’s qualities, I believed there was some degree of honor in that.

  More broadly, in the context of nomad culture and history, it was clear that my tendency to associate horse theft with the communities of the railway was misplaced. Horse rustling was an art as old as horsemanship itself, glamorized in oral epics of the steppe, and very much a part of everyday nomad life. Kazakhs had explained to me time and time again that he who has the skill to steal horses and cattle and get away with it deserves those animals more than the owner. One had to respect the daring and heroics of such men.

  What was more, in getting my horse back from the Mongol, I had engaged in a centuries-old custom called barimta, which means “that which is due to me.” It dictated that he who has been stolen from has the right to steal back, and if he is good enough, he can confiscate the offender’s entire herd or even his wife until the dispute is resolved. Over time I came to think that the evolving history of this custom said a lot about the nature of the Mongol and the theft.

  Prior to the colonization of Kazakh land, barimta was a
dhered to as a way of resolving conflicts ranging from unpaid bride-prices to contested grazing rights. It was condoned by the tribal justice system known as adat and governed by strict guidelines, such as that the confiscation had to take place in daylight so that the avengers’ skill had to be exceptional and therefore honorable.

  Like nomadic life in general, barimta began to erode with the arrival of the Russians, who gradually supplanted it with their own model of law. In 1822 they criminalized barimta as horse and cattle theft, and in 1868 they decreed that all land previously used for livestock grazing would be taken over by the state. In a move born partly of rebellion, but mostly spurred by the need to keep order among themselves, Kazakhs continued to recognize barimta. The term, however became more synonymous with the brazen horse thefts that Kazakhs carried out against tsarist emissaries.6 These skilled Kazakh horse rustlers passed into legend and were rarely handed over to Russian justice.

  In light of the background of barimta, I felt that the Mongol had stolen Taskonir in rough keeping with the spirit of his ancestors—a thought that offered cold comfort, but was at least a way of coming to terms with the theft. In the future, I would have to accept that if I wasn’t good enough to look after my horses, then the thief probably deserved them more than I did. Ultimately, I would also have to understand that as a foreigner, without the protections of a traditional nomad society or colonial law, I was very much on my own.