by David Yeadon
“These areas are closed. There has been a mistake. Have some tea.”
In this country where “face” is a key factor of communication, no one likes to say “no” outright!
And so the meetings began, sixteen in all, and we became increasingly depressed. Finally, on the third day, as we waited for the ultimate “no” to be pronounced, in walked the local chief of security police and declared that we may go where we wished and that special passes would be issued immediately.
“You are very lucky,” he told us as we toasted one another’s endurance. “You are going somewhere that has never been opened to Westeners before. You will see many things. You will remember this journey.”
How right he was.
Out, out, and even further out. Across eroded hills, over vast areas of dunes, salt flats, and high steppes where wild horses roamed the horizons, silhouetted against burning skies. Out where the road became a track, then a vague marking in the soft earth, and then nothing but an improvised line of sight across dry hardscrabble grasslands. Out across more than three hundred backside-flattening miles of empty country into the unknown, to find the herdsmen and a place to rest for a while. We were a happy and expectant bunch of explorers and quite unprepared for our next challenge.
It began innocently enough—brief buffetings of breezes from the north and the prattle of blown sand on the side of the Jeep. Then—almost imperceptibly—the sun began to take on halos, a series of strange golden rings in a gradually yellowing sky. Dust devils whirled up in the distance, first one, then four simultaneously, then a whole stretch of grasslands spinning skyward in a swirling column.
We all became quiet. The driver sat up straight and tightened his grip on the wheel. Then the sun disappeared. Just like that, it vanished in a strange beige mist and sand began blowing in through the open windows. “Uh-oh!” groaned Tony. “A blooty sandstorm.” (Tony always had problems with his ds). In less than a minute visibility was down to yards, and a gale came howling straight across our path, blowing the sand horizontally. We closed all the windows. The heat became unbearable and fine dust still billowed through. Sweat streamed down our faces in brown rivulets. The track—hardly more than a path—kept disappearing, and telltale tiremarks ahead were quickly obliterated. At one point we almost ran straight into a dune, until we realized that the dune itself was actually moving across the track in front of us, driven on by the furious wind. The driver’s face was as set as stone. Somehow we kept on moving. Six times we hit soft sand and labored out with four-wheel drive. No one talked—we all watched for signs of the route and willed on our silent driver.
“We must not stop,” Tony broke the silence. “Neber” (Tony also had problems with his vs). But fate had other plans.
We stopped as abruptly as hitting a barn door. We had lost the track and slid into talcuum-soft sand. This time the super-drive failed, and we sank deeper.
“Out—push” said Tony, and we knew it was the only way.
The next few minutes are as imprinted on my mind as the “sand burns” were on my body. We heaved and gasped and heaved again in that mad maelstrom. The wind was blastfurnace hot and the sharp sand filled every pore. We were five deaf, blind, suffocating creatures, hardly human, struggling to push the heavy Jeep out before the newly drifting sand sealed her even deeper. We were motivated by an increasingly real fear of being stuck and cut off by dunes without supplies in this howling wilderness.
Somehow we did it. Somehow we found the track and somehow we got out of that place. And just before we left I looked behind and saw, like ghostly shadow puppets, the faint silhouettes of two camels moving together through the fury…I called to the others and we all turned. But they were gone.
And the party rolled on at the herdsman’s house in the middle of nowhere. After the sandstorm, fate was kinder to us, and by evening we had found the perfect place to stay—this small brick house in a hollow with a family whose welcomes and kindnesses never ceased.
We had become celebrated guests of honor, a sheep had been killed for us in the courtyard (it is customary to watch the ritual but I invented some lame excuse and didn’t), and, as we sprawled like Arabian potentates on the cushions and rugs spread across the kang, we could smell the meat—the whole animal—cooking in the adjoining kitchen.
And the dancing and the songs continued with no letup in pace or enthusiasm. I remember one Mongolian long song with the most beautiful words:
I am a small flower hidden in the grass
The spring winds let me breathe and grow high
I live in the mountains and in the grassland
The grassland is my mother
I love Mongolia—I am Mongolia.
“In Mongolia,” the pretty red-cheeked girl from the kitchen explained, “a person who cannot play the flute or the morin khour or sing the songs of this land is not alive—is not human—is not Mongolian! And,” she added with a serious frown, “I am Mongolian, not Chinese. We are not Chinese!” She spat out the last word.
Then she whispered to her friend, who was also acting as our interpreter. “She wants to know if she can touch your beard. She has never seen a West-man before. She has never seen a red beard!”
So the apple-cheeked girl stroked my beard with her plump fingers, blushed even more brightly, and scurried back into the kitchen to supervise the cooking. Her friend laughed, as did the others around the table. Then she leaned over and whispered: “They are very happy you are all here…they are very glad you come.”
The night was full of moments like this. One song was so sad it left us all teary-eyed—even the singer; another was so loud and clap-happy that our palms blistered; a third, a rowdily erotic drinking song, transformed our placid driver into a raging romeo with a Mario Lanza voice and a lust for the pretty female duetist as big as his larynx.
Our herdsman-host at one point invited me to look at the old photographs of his family and relatives hanging in large frames on the wall next to a brightly painted red-and-green chest of drawers, one of the few pieces of furniture in the house. He led me outside into the moonlight to stand by the shrine to his ancestors, decorated with banners and ribbons and the remains of offerings. It stood like an altar just beyond the courtyard door, guarded by two silvered replicas of Genghis Khan’s trident spear—the prime symbol of Mongolian identity and pride.
Then a great shout went up. It was 2:30 A.M. and the tiny house roared once again into frantic activity; people ran around with fresh bottles of maotai, gleaming plates, huge Mongolian meat knives, and baskets of fat white bread buns. “Sit-sit-sit!” we were told. “It’s coming!”
And so—it came!
A mountain of meat emerged on a platter the size of a car hood; thigh-size chunks of juicy mutton piled up pyramid-fashion and covered with the sheep’s fatty back (rear end pointing toward me as guest of honor!), topped by the whole head, eyeballs, horns—the lot—smiling through billows of steam and the whole vast display dripping deliciously….
I cut the first slice with a ritual knife, and then it was a free-for-all as twenty ravenous revelers tore the exquisitely tender “finger mutton” from the bone and scooped moist meat into mouths sore with songs and scorched from over seven hours of toastings.
And what a feast it was, flowing on and on into early dawn with that special camaraderie that comes from unexpected mutual enjoyment and excitement. At around 5:00 A.M. bodies collapsed one by one onto the kang; herdsmen, their wives, children, commune leaders, all of us, shoeless and serene, for two hours of deep sleep before breakfast.
Blurry-eyed, we awoke and washed in an enamel bowl in the courtyard. The sun was already warm and over the wall, I could see the goats beginning their never-ending search for grass across the hazy hills.
Bowls of mare-milk tea came to the table on the kang along with dishes of hard yellow millet, sweet yak butter (souyou), a golden pile of fried dough, and tooth-cracking cookies baked from yogurt and flour. Amid elaborate mixings of tea, millet, and souyou (stir
red with the little finger), we slurped in unison, as was obviously the custom. Someone sprinkled the earthen floor of the room with water to keep the dust down and removed a couple of errant chickens wandering in from the courtyard. The women were busy as usual, cleaning, feeding a sick foal, checking the herd, milking the goats and horses (fermented mare’s milk is used to make the potent airag drink of the herdsmen), and removing traces of the previous night’s revelries. The men sat quietly, slurping endless bowls of tea, smoking ferocious little Mongolian cigarettes, and talking quietly to us about the old days in the grasslands.
We were curious about changes in the nomadic traditions of the herdsmen. Once the great grasslands were full of wandering groups of families with their herds of sheep and goats, living in ingenious round yurts made of layers of felt, canvas, and hides stretched over wood-lattice frames. They would select temporary camps, as many as ten different sites a year across the immense plains and ranges, moving their flocks, horses, and camels through sunny summer days and furious winter blizzards. The famous Kashmir goats were renowned for their endurance and the silky quality of their underlying fleece, which retained warmth in conditions that would freeze a man to the marrow in minutes.
“Oh, we still have our yurts,” our host told us. “Smaller ones though now. Normally we don’t need them, the grasslands are better irrigated and most families build houses nowadays and stay in one place. Sometimes though, if the rain is late, like this year, we send the younger men off with the herd to new pastures, and they live in the small tents. But it’s mostly communes now—there are around eight hundred families in our commune.”
We looked out over the vast empty spaces beyond the courtyard.
“Ah!” He laughed. “You won’t see many of them! We live a long way apart, we’re quite independent, but for certain things we all come together. Particularly for weddings and the big festivals—we come together for the wrestling and the racing—and the maotai. There are over ten million people in Inner Mongolia, but you’ll hardly see any. Strangers don’t realize—they can’t imagine—just how far these grasslands go. For hundreds of miles”—he stretched his arms as wide as he could and smiled gently to himself—“hundreds of miles…”
His smile was a smile we came to know well with these people. We called it the “Genghis Khan grin”—a proud knowingness of the immensity of their land, a smell of freedom in the wild unchecked winds, a sense of “possessing the whole earth,” which must have given the great conqueror and his Mongol hordes the grand visions of world domination that they essentially achieved during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
“We’re just herdsmen now,” said our host, but there was that flash in his eye that still sends shivers down the spines of the Han, China’s primary racial group, who have been actively settling in these wild regions for decades to the point where they now form over eighty percent of the population.
I wondered about the two-humped Bactrian camels, once the main mode of transport in the grasslands.
“Many things are changing,” they told us. “We still have our camels, but we let them wander for most of the year. We don’t need them now to carry the fleece to the cities. They usually come home to birth and then leave again. We concentrate on our goats and sheep—these are our life.”
Over the slow, easy days, we watched and became part of the steady rhythm of their lives. I sat cross-legged on the ground while the goats were combed for their precious white cashmere fleece, hardly more than four ounces per animal (“…takes at least twenty goats to make a good sweater”). I wandered with the younger herdsmen over the high windy hills and watched them use their pebble-throwing yang-cha sticks with unbelievable accuracy to keep their animals in check. I ate the hard arul cheese and drank airag for lunch in the bright midday sun.
And in the silences my mind would fall silent and become as vast as the spaces around me. It seemed that everything I saw was actually within me, within an all-enveloping mind—an eagle, alone and soaring on spiraling air, a flash of light on quartz crystals, a wisp of wind rattling the grasses, the crack of rocks splitting in the dry, hard heat. I had never sensed the power of silence so intensely: each object seemed wholly distinct and full of individual energy and yet totally a part of everything around me. And even my own body and spirit—for fleeting but seemingly infinite moments—became a part of the land in the vibrant wholeness of this magical place.
Eventually, we left, a lot more quietly and stilled in spirit than when we arrived. The herdsmen had allowed us to become part of their world for a brief period and to sense the slow, steady rhythms; the strong underpinnings of their lives. The ribbons on the ancestors’ altar table waved in a warm breeze as we said our farewells, and the trident of Genghis Khan gleamed as bright as ever in the morning sun.
We headed off across the sandy hills; my mind was too full of feelings to talk, too full of excitement at what we had found, too full of anticipation for what was to come next….
EPILOGUE
The Wildest Places of All
Time to fly.
The ground had held me too long.
I needed another landscape—a free-form topography of blue and white. I needed to float among the hammerheads, to ride the updrafts into a world beyond the grist and grind of the human merry-go-round—to leave the earth for a while and touch the wild places inside once again.
A friend had a plane, a tiny Piper Cherokee, forever tied down by a runway, too far out of town for casual jaunts. He dreamed of great journeys—an Atlantic crossing via Newfoundland and the Azores; a Pacific odyssey full of touchdowns on Robinson Crusoe Islands, a world circumnavigation with stops in all the forgotten places. But the plane just sat there, full of tantalizing possibilities, draped in dreams.
“America from Five Hundred Feet.” What a splendid book idea excuse for this serendipitous photographic adventure. To bid farewell to the concrete calamities and the tawdry esthetics of the earthbound. To lift up, out, and off, leaping into infinities.
So we did.
I was proud of him. Beneath the careful man, clogged by schedules and mind-bound by meetings, I found the spirit of the boy, brimming with fantasies, clutching the cirrus tails, reaching out to touch new possibilities.
A small plane is pure magic. For what seems like forever, you’re ticking off checklists, testing tires, tediously playing with dials and switches, deafened by the prattle and boom of the little engine, talking gibberish to robotlike voices in the tower, noting details about wind speed and air traffic and vectors and quirks of the ever-fickle weather. And then it’s suddenly different. The runway skims by, the engine screaming in anticipation, the nose lifts, the seat springs groan and creak as your body weight doubles in that first thrust of flight, and—you’re off. The ground drops away, becoming a rinky-dink, toy-town picture book of dollhouses and Matchbox cars and spongy trees and tiny white-spired churches.
The world is all yours. You can go anywhere, do anything. Turn left, turn right, fly in circles, climb, dive, do a somersault, loop a loop if you must, play peek-a-boo with clouds, chase a rainbow, tease a thunderhead, skim the spuming surf, kiss a mountaintop, make the long grasses wave like silky hair, roll your wings at a farmer in his field, bombard the cumulus galleons with their wind-ripped sails. Your spirit soars with the Cherokee; you feel light as duck down, free as a feather. And you remember, you know again, just how precious and perfect life and being alive can be. The high of the whole. The best high of all. Because it’s true.
Look up and it’s a pure Mediterrenean-blue dome, arching over to a golden haze. Look down and the patterns intermingle: the patchwork panels of fields, a random quilt of greens and golds and ochres; the pocket-comb geometrics and curlicues of ploughed furrows; the silver-flashed streams; the Baroque tangles of woods and copses on humping hills; the sprinkle of villages along a tattered coastline ribboned with white surf. Gone are the gas stations and the hype lines of neon-decked motels and junk-food stands and auto showrooms and
traffic lights and do-this do-that signs and billboards and all the gaudy excess of street-bound life.
This was a new world up here, fresh, bright, traffic free—and all mine! I wanted to shout down to farmers and tell them how beautiful their fields looked—bold abstract masterpieces of color and form that could grace the walls of any gallery. I saw lovely things: a single fishing boat with the shadow of a galleon, apexed in a flat pyramid of cut ocean; the fluid lines of submerged reefs, receding in filigreed layers from turquoise to the deepest of royal blues; moonscapes of gravel pits and quarries concealing pools of clear green water; the silty delicacy of estuaries edged by curled traceries of emerald marshes; Frankenthaler earth patterns of water absorption in fields of new wheat. It was an esthetic unfamiliar to me. A world of fresh beauty; juxtapositions of form, color, and texture I’d never imagined before.
Evening eased in slowly and seemed to last forever. As the sun slid down into its scarlet haze, we rose up to watch the shadows scamper across the rolling land. A modest line of trees following a winding country road cast quarter-mile-long shadows, purpling the furrows. Little hillocks produced mountain-sized echoes of themselves across the fields. Even a tiny white farm cluster of barns and outbuildings became a Versailles shadow, suggesting towers, turrets, and elegant cornices. Cows were giraffes, a tiny red truck became a triple-decker bus, a man heading for home across a bronze field was a stick-legged giant.
And when the night came, it came with grace in a slow canopy of velvety purple, sprinkled with stars. The west gave up its glow with reluctance and the night allowed a dignified retreat. An equitable ritual, well rehearsed over the eons. And we watched the gentleness of it all, floating easily in the evening air, not wanting to leave, reluctant to face the disordered scramble of earthly matters. So we flew on, abandoning ideas for a touch-down somewhere in the flatlands below us. Food and flight plans, taxis, motels, and beds could all wait. The night invited us to stay and we accepted, watching it flow in, filling the lower places, rising up the flanks of the ranges, leaving little islets of light on the high tops for a while until they too were submerged in the purple tide as we floated on into the mysteries of the dark.