In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  I looked for other mammoths in Yakutsk’s Permafrost Institute–now declining for lack of funds–but there were none. They had mostly ended up in the Zoological Museum of the czarist capital, a converted warehouse on the Neva where I had seen them that summer. They parade through its gloom in a queue of helmet-like skulls and spatular feet and crazily twirling tusks. Harmless, obsolete herbivores, their bones are blackened by age and frost. They stand over 10 feet tall. But behind, as with the Yakutsk mammoth, their rib-cages narrow like the frames of inverted ships, dwindling to stiff-looking hind legs and wispy tails.

  The Berezovka mammoth is here too, framed in its hide and hair, just as it was found. It squats on the ground with both hind legs thrust forward beneath it, broken, its forelegs groping at the earth it could not scale. It looks oddly domestic, as if performing a party trick. Its flanks and legs are still fringed with reddish hair. One of its eyelids is intact. So is its tongue, and its lower lip, edged with black bristles.

  On its piecemeal arrival in St Petersburg, the skeleton was recomposed and put on display. A week afterwards, Czar Nicholas II and his young empress paid it a state visit. But in the steam-heated hall the stench was so powerful that the Czarina stood with her handkerchief crushed to her face. Nauseous and very bored, she begged to be taken ‘as far away from this as possible’.

  The new concierge in my hotel bellows at me in the hall: ‘Go to the OVIR police! All foreigners have to register! Register now!’

  I trudge off, out of interest, to the hideous Victory Square, where a tank squats on a plinth, and enter the half-burnt-out naval college where the OVIR offices are meant to be. For fifteen thousand miles now, faced by the jumbled rules which have succeeded Soviet law, I have avoided all officialdom, delegating my registration to boarding-houses which did not bother, or to nobody, then moving on. Somebody tells me the OVIR offices are five storeys up. There are no signs anywhere. I climb past the dank rooms of a half-abandoned hostel. The police office is littered with rats’ droppings. The only official working is a Russian woman who orders me to come back tomorrow, then continues thumbing through documents. I never return.

  Marfa and Sergei were circus artists: he a juggler and musician, she a dancer and throat-singer. They had come from Yakut villages deep in the taiga. A few years ago they petitioned the president to build a national circus, but the money had run out, leaving a ghostly circle of concrete foundations near their flat in October Street, and a shortfall of twenty million dollars. They had even bought two bear-cubs, which were now grown-up and fierce. Marfa asked: ‘Do you know anybody who’d like two bears, very nice?’

  She and Sergei were now in their forties, but they kept the adolescent brightness of the circus. Their apartment was hung with souvenirs from tours abroad, and their dressers piled with photographs, toys and trophies collected over twenty years. They had no children. Marfa’s auburn hair jostled round a face of rebellious prettiness. ‘The circus is our child,’ she said.

  They showed me photographs of their homeless troupe on tour–in Nice, in Moscow, in Alaska. Here was Sergei writhing to the rhythm of his drum, in a costume dripping with shamanic ornaments, and Marfa like a page-boy in striped culottes, throat-singing–black eyes and red lips in a moon face. One sequence of snapshots showed them all posed above a wintry estuary of the Lena, as if celebrating something earlier, purer. But a closer look disclosed the hectic antics of the strong man bending nails, and Sergei in a shaman’s headband from which a pair of plastic antlers sprung.

  It was, I supposed, a marketable version of the culture they had lost. Perhaps this was the only way they knew to preserve it: by this, and by the ancient magic of her singing–the half-involuntary sounds of wandering herdsmen and hunters.

  I had never heard throat-singing before. In Tuva the voice can accompany its own melody with a flute-like continuum, as if two–even three–people were chanting at once. The physiology of this singing is still imperfectly understood; but the tongue, touching the palate, separates the throat and mouth into two resonating chambers, to produce a monody of eerie pureness. These songs transformed Marfa. They closed her eyes in a suddenly powerful face. All sense of the hybrid circus vanished.

  At first her lament sounded odd to me. The notes travelled in long lines of steel, without tremolo, which would then suddenly, tragically, break. They sounded like some unknown instrument. Sergei had closed his eyes too. This was, after all, other than art: it was an expression of lost nation, a little holy. The song elicited a lonely spareness in her. She had entered the shrine of her voice.

  ‘My parents never taught me Yakut things. I only remember there was fear around the places where shamans had been buried. People still remembered those sites, and avoided them.’

  Tania is sitting in the Yakut restaurant in Lenin Square. She has dolled herself up. Beneath a glossy black fringe her eyes are cavernous with mascara, and her lips crimson. A grinning Yakut waiter lingers round us. The menu is treacherous with local dishes. Elk is off, he says. So is pine-flavoured reindeer-horn jelly.

  ‘I don’t remember Yakut cooking,’ says Tania. ‘My parents were professional people, they loved Russian things. Only sometimes I’d hear my father singing when he was happy, and his songs were those strange, old ones.’

  I scan the menu, but decide against horse-blood sausages or boiled reindeer. I play for time by ordering a jug of koumiz, the fermented mares’ milk of the steppes, then I opt half-heartedly for pony in a cream mushroom sauce, while Tania orders sauteed horse intestines.

  I say: ‘But Yakut culture is returning, isn’t it? Yakut language in government, Yakut festivals.’

  ‘The festivals are synthetic, they don’t mean a thing. A while ago somebody like that museum scholar decided we should revive the summer solstice ceremony, led by a white shaman. I’d never even heard of it. So now everybody celebrates it idiotically in the streets.’

  ‘Where did they find the shaman?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not a shaman. He’s an actor. The shamans are all dead.’

  My pony meat is light and pleasant. I feel vaguely guilty. But Tania doesn’t. Yakuts love their horses, she says, but they breed some for eating. Her goldfish lips are smacking a little, and she has ordered a side-dish of tongber–raw, frozen pony liver. It lurks by my elbow. Around us, Yakuts and Russians are gluttonously mingled.

  Later I joke with her a little. ‘Then is nothing left of paganism? Nothing a bit sacred?’

  ‘Only odds and ends.’ The currant wine is going to her head. She giggles. It tastes like a sweet port. ‘I remember childhood stories about the white Siberian cranes, which are special to us Yakuts–sacred, in a way. I heard that if you went deep into the forest, and saw the cranes dancing, you would be happy for ever.’ She pops more pony liver into her mouth. ‘I’m getting drunk…. But later of course I realised that white cranes were an endangered species, and that you’d have to be a hunter and go far, far up north to find them, and that even then they might not be dancing.’

  Since long before the Academician praised the work of Yuri Mochanov, I had wanted to meet the isolated archaeologist who believed that civilisation started in Siberia. In Russia he was a lonely giant. In the West he was almost unknown. In his institute at the Yakutsk Academy of Sciences I awaited him for hours, while scrutinising the dark red quartzites from his excavations. They lay on sorting trays, like blood-clots. At last, nervously, a young assistant guided me to his apartment.

  In its doorway I saw a robust man with a handsome, open face. A gush of raven hair turned him younger than he was, and his Brezhnev eyebrows invested him with a look of forceful enquiry. In his broad-checked shirt he looked more like a lumberjack than a scientist. His hands came out in welcome, as if he already knew me.

  ‘From England! Come in! There’s just me and Paula here. But come in!’

  His flat was crowded with bric-a-brac, and walled in books and journals. Paula was a German shepherd dog, lavishly greedy. Her bowls of meat and biscuits dotted t
he landing, the hall, the kitchen. Everything was misted in dust. Ashtrays scattered the chairs, the desk, the lavatory floor. The study was a cell of smoke.

  Every room betrayed the long absence of a wife. ‘She’s very ill. She’s with our children in Kiev. Something has gone wrong with the glands of her neck.’ In the harsh light of the kitchen he looked paler. ‘I think she’s been through too many expeditions with me. We’ve worked together for thirty-five seasons, always. And like me she doesn’t stop smoking.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘I won’t be happy until she’s back. When she’s back I’ll start to work again.’

  We sat in his cramped kitchen in the old Russian way, the way I remembered among Moscow and Leningrad dissidents twenty years ago, talking in heady abstracts, drinking vodka or coffee out of chipped cups. In Yakutsk, time had stopped.

  It was hard being alone here, he said. He had just finished his last season’s excavations after sixteen years at Diring Yuriakh, the site on the Lena which had made his name. He did not want to go on. He was already sixty-five. His workers had grown old alongside him, become fathers and grandfathers. Money was short. ‘I want to document it all now.’

  He had uncovered 4,000 artefacts above the old bedrock of the river–mostly quartzite choppers and scrapers–and he believed they belonged to a civilisation over two million years old. To anthropologists, the claim was astonishing, almost unthinkable. It turned human evolution on its head. Earliest man was stirring not only in the Rift Valley, Mochanov maintained, but in the wastes of Siberia.

  He showed me many charts and photographs. He sounded angrily bewildered. ‘Western archaeologists refuse to believe my work. I don’t know why. They’ve come from everywhere–France, America, Britain, Germany, Sweden. They slap my back and we get drunk together, and they’re like friends. But when they see the work they simply say: “This cannot be!” And they go quiet. I say: “Tell me, if you can’t believe it, why not? Where have I gone wrong?” The artefacts, the stone tools, they’re beyond dispute. It’s the stratum that’s in debate. Yet it’s the oldest stratum above the Lena bedrock. Geologists have confirmed this. So the geology is right, the archaeology is right–but still they don’t believe me! And this civilisation could go back two and a half million years! Older than African man–or maybe the same age.’

  I asked: ‘But who were they? Where did they come from?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’ He became peevishly vague. ‘Who can know the age of man on Earth? Only God knows, or maybe doesn’t. Maybe these civilisations were caused by something out of the cosmos.’

  With misgiving I mentioned the Academician.

  ‘Yes, he’s a friend. A very intelligent man…he has these theories…and it is hard to understand the world without them.’ A silence fell, filled with his frustration and my scepticism. Then he said: ‘I was astonished when I started the dig in 1982. I hadn’t anticipated anything like this. I thought I was going mad. I kept saying: “No, this can’t be. Something will happen. We’ll uncover something to disprove this.” But in 1983, it was more of the same: tools at bedrock level. And in 1984 we found beautiful stratigraphy. And then I believed it. I believed it.’

  He burnt with a thwarted energy. He was a field archaeologist in his bones. But now he wanted time to read, to think. In this isolated town, his scholarship was long out of date. Often his reading had come to him by chance. He talked of Teilhard de Chardin…. ‘And the work of Moritz Wagner, a contemporary of Darwin, saved me from madness at that time. He explored the possibility of man’s origins in a cold environment instead of a tropical one, and he valued stone implements–rather than bones–like I do.’

  But stone, I thought cruelly, did not submit to radio-carbon dating. You could dream around it.

  ‘Some people say Diring Yuriakh may be as old as three million years. Yet others’–he gazed down, and I sensed that these others were the vital ones, the heavyweights of the West–‘well, others say it is 500,000 years old. Or less, even less.’ Paula thrust her muzzle into his hand. He seemed to be caressing her loyalty. ‘Do you want to see the excavation video?’

  We went into his sitting-room; it was crowded with kitsch, as the Academician’s had been: Chinese seals, mammoths carved in mammoth ivory, cheap Buddhas, a bust of Peter the Great. He closed out the light, and the video flickered on. ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ he said.

  It poised 120 metres above the east bank of the Lena, and looked like a sandy beach. His bulldozers had ploughed its terrace two kilometres square, but the permafrost began only six metres down, he said, and the work had been back-breaking. ‘But we dropped shafts to 40 metres, and still we found the same things. There was no doubt. You see the clusters there?’

  I saw oval groupings of stones: an anvil, hammer-stones, flakes, axes. ‘We found them again and again. They seem to form little workshops. The place was a town, certainly, a kind of town. In its day it was level with the Lena. And look, there’s my dog!’ Paula was often in the picture, cantering across the dunes. Then the camera strayed back over the circles of precious stones, while the bulldozers puttered behind. Down the excavation shafts the permafrost enclosed smears of red sand, like undried blood splashed against the walls. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, ‘and it’s already falling in, vanishing. This was our last day.’

  Workmen were wending down from the abandoned terrace, while he watched them beside me, in silence, in his slippers. Sometimes his camera wobbled off, beguiled by the watery mudflats of the Lena’s west bank, by an elk swimming the river, by its hills at sunset. He was afraid of forgetting. At last he said: ‘Now that it’s all over, I want to convene a world conference. Because what can be more important than the arrival of man on earth? How did it happen? Man is not an animal.’ He stroked Paula apologetically. ‘Darwin was a fine scientist who knew about physiology, but the movements of peoples were not his field. That is what we need to discuss now. The origins of man.’

  He was not a Russian chauvinist, I sensed, only fatally cut off from his peers. I promised to send him some articles he requested from Britain: on excavations in Pakistan which seemed to parallel his own. I was also to send him, with a heavy heart, the findings of American geoarchaeologists who had tested Diring Yuriakh. They had used the new technique of thermoluminescence, which can estimate how long quartzite has been buried by measuring the electrons trapped in its crystals, and they had come up with a site date around 300,000 bc. Perhaps Mochanov already knew of this, and could not bear it. He did not write back.

  Yet the site was unique in its way. Mochanov’s findings pushed back habitation of the Arctic edge to a time far more remote than had been supposed. Here, it seemed, some unknown people had slipped through a crack in the Great Ice Age, and made a fleeting life.

  Before I left, Mochanov quaintly took my photograph and gave me his interim report on Diring Yuriakh, published in 1992. He lingered in his doorway. With Russia’s economy in the state it was, he knew his conference on the origins of man was a pipe-dream. But there was one thing he wanted to do, he said, while he still could. He wanted to fly to Kenya with his wife–‘we always used to fly together’–and to look down, at last, on the Rift Valley.

  The only other passengers in my twin-engine Antonov were three soldiers wrapped in overcoats against the cold, with caps clamped over their ears. Beneath us the Lena, freezing over from shore to shore, still trickled steel-grey through its ice. But all its tributaries had frozen solid, and the floes drifting on its current were sticking on snow-blurred islands. I had hoped to find a truck going east to Magadan and the Pacific, but the single road was impassable, ruptured by permafrost, and this battered Antonov was the only way out. As it banked over Yakutsk, the wrecked collage of thousands upon thousands of snow-drowned cottages showed in pencil-line walls and the dark tracks around them. Once I thought I could make out the empty site of Sergei and Marfa’s circus; then came the toy figure of Lenin in his square; then the chessboard of tenements where Tania waited for a future and Mochanov
laboured over the advent of man. At last the clouds closed over them and we were heading east under a darkening sky.

  The faint, continual vibration of the aeroplane kept me awake, vaguely alarmed. From time to time, when the clouds parted, a frozen desolation of mountains glimmered below, with no sign of life. And this wilderness continued for six hundred miles. Seventy years ago, along its single track, a few traders from Yakutsk brought brick tea and contraband vodka to depleted tribes, and returned with mammoth ivory, furs and a few girls to the brothels of Yakutsk, sold by their clans for the price of a poor reindeer each.

  Below us now the valleys were black with stunted larches, where the rivers lay inert. Soon we seemed to be flying over pure glacier, knotted with peaks and clefts. Its icy stillness filled our cabin. The soldiers were muffled asleep, and I gazing down, numbed.

  Within living memory this emptiness had become a continent of death-camps. In 1931, a few years after huge gold deposits were discovered, a region embracing all north-east Siberia beyond the Lena–a land vaster than Mexico–fell under the agency named Dalstroy, which soon became a branch of the Ministry of the Interior and the secret police. Dalstroy was a law unto itself. In its zone the Soviet constitution did not hold. It ruled a waking nightmare.

  This country of Kolyma was fed every year by sea with tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly innocent. Where they landed, they built a port, then the city of Magadan, then the road inland to the mines where they perished. At first the convicts were peasant kulaks and criminals, then–as Stalin’s paranoia heightened–imagined saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries from every class: Party officials, soldiers, scientists, doctors, teachers, artists.