Passersby are meant to add a rock to the ovoo in respect and then circle it three times clockwise to bless their journey. This shamanic practice predates Buddhism in Mongolia by thousands of years. I have been told that even secular Mongolians from the city still tend to flick milk to the heavens and place stones on ovoos. Shamans, meanwhile, are central to many steppe communities. Among other business, they maintain relations with nature and hold ceremonies to heal people, often by retrieving their souls.
Under communist rule, both Buddhist and shamanic worship were forbidden in Mongolia, but the steppe was unyielding to the Ulaanbaatar government, and devotion to ovoos continued in secret. I’m pleased by the thought of this spot free from the outstretched tentacles of the city authorities. I sing as we circle the rocks and scarves while Kirsten records on her camera. She shouts after us as we stride off into the evening. “Your singing voice could injure a small child.”
My clothes will not dry as the cold air of night settles, but having made it through the storm, I forget the idea that there’s more to come. The strong weather has christened me into the journey, and I feel horrible yet whole, seduced by the sway of the animal beneath me.
In old Mongolian folklore, weather is a manifestation of Tengri the sky god’s mood, lightning a sign of his power. My clothes will not dry as the cold air of night settles, but having made it through the storm, I forget the idea that there’s more to come. In The Tempest, the opening sea-storm unhinges human government, washing characters onto the island’s shore. There, cleansed by the squall, they seem fresher than before. The steppe downpour has christened me into my journey. I feel horrible yet whole.
Seduced by the sway of the animal beneath me, I begin daydreaming. For some minutes, I imagine seals, envious that they can spend nights on beaches without getting cold. Then again, they do exhibit a striking lack of athleticism as they balloon over rocks. Would I sacrifice my ability to move on land for the talent of sleeping at peace on it, at the edges? These thoughts I raise with Kirsten and Sandra, and their reply is silence.
We ride on through a symphony of green. The hills cushion our sides, ushering us on.
XV
The evening is clouding herself together. The second urtuu lies in view up the hill. The bungee rope lets out a forlorn moan from inside my backpack. Tomorrow night, I say, your turn will come. We have until 8:30 p.m. to make it to the urtuu, after which we’ll be penalized with a two-minute wait for every minute over. We come to a stream around 8 p.m.
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land.
These lines from Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum doze in my Winnie-the-Pooh notebook, mirroring the Mongolscape. Wide-eyed Iona, a friend of Arthur’s, sent me a list of poems the night before I left Ulaanbaatar, this one from Macaulay:
To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds . . . ?
She hoped the poems would be my solace, but they left me with a grand sense that I was embarking on a mission for a higher cause. Which you are so ploddingly not, utters the pony beneath me.
When we reach the urtuu at 8:15 p.m., Helen the vet, a jovial South African, greets us in an oversize raincoat. Her nimble, blue-eyed face and wispy blond hair remind me of my mother. She bends to the pony, listens to his heart, and announces that its rate is well below 64. I ask the interpreter to thank the herder for allowing me to ride this creature. I want to speak Mongolian directly to him, and it feels shameful that I can’t. Is it a crime to grin at him instead? We humans speak ten thousand languages; a little eye contact must ripple through them all.
Devan Horn was well into the lead.
“At least four hours ahead of you guys,” said Gloria, the ABC reporter with real-life airbrushed cheeks.
Apparently Richard was with Devan at urtuu 3, snapping photos of her lying imperially upon a bed.
I bent through the doorframe of a ger and fumbled over some sleeping bodies. The more awake riders were discussing the news: Devan had managed three stations when the rest of us had barely done two. Matthias was down and out—that was a shock—but the Texan’s race was going according to her plan, with the bonus of a bed.
That night, the Mongol Derby website published an interview with the race’s founder. Who, he was asked, will win?
“I haven’t a clue,” he said, pausing. “Time and a thousand kilometers of arse-pounding steppe will tell.”
In horse riding sports, competitors often don’t invest in winning. You go out in the simple hope that you and the horse will get on well together over the obstacles at hand. Maybe Devan’s attitude added an Olympic tinge to the Derby that year, one from which her fellow competitors, including me, were failing to find immunity. Few riders had taken the race so seriously in the past, when pairs shared first place, men crossed the finish line holding hands, and riders drank spirits while racing.
I slide about camp, skirting clusters of people and their conversations. I have an appointment with the evening and don’t want to be noticed. When I see someone turn, I dart into the crowded ger, where a broad-cheeked lady from the urtuu’s Erdenebileg family sets hot noodle-and-mutton soup on my lap. Five gulps, finished. Dotingly she passes me a second helping. I thank her endlessly, meaninglessly, and withdraw to a corner to strip off my soaking jodhpurs. Next to me a rider is pinning herself into yogic positions, “easing the tension,” she says, twisting her head away from me. I sit scratching my legs.
Half an hour past the 8:30 deadline, businesswoman Lynne rides in with a sad story on her lips. After she fell behind Adam, a drunken man chased her on his motorcycle, groped her, and tried to lasso her pony.
Once everyone is tented, I twirl and sprint and go, horseless down the wet, grassy hill and up again. Noodle energy. My feet flap along under the mass of me, yelping. The bunions are cross after their full day in boots. I return panting to a girl who shows me the toilet, which is simply earth, all earth. You can go anywhere. I crouch to the earwigs, who graze the evening in search of lost centuries. Fading rain and final sunlight dab the hills around this, the coziest of valleys. Lying between here and the finish is twelve times today’s distance. My, how many days will that take?
Deep in our sleeping bags, Natacha and I marvel at how strange it is not to have seen each other since the start line. Already time is passing strangely, and the morning feels a billion years behind us.
When I mention I might ride with her tomorrow, Natacha replies, “No bloody way am I riding with you! I don’t trust you one inch.” She lands on the “inch” and splutters onwards, as though coughing the idea of me out of her system. “Can you imagine how wrong things would go! You’d get me so lost we might even disappear from this earth.”
I cackle, mildly offended, wondering whom I will ride with instead since there’s no chance I’ll find my way alone.
I didn’t think about rain, so I don’t have a change of clothes. No pajamas. No second pair of jodhpurs. Just a spare pair of socks and a pair of knickers. “Oh dear, I’m going to have to sleep naked.”
It wasn’t necessary for me to say that aloud but I don’t think anyone noticed. At the end of a day on a horse, you can bed down anywhere, in any company. I jot some notes into Winnie-the-Pooh—First pony a tortoise and a hare. Won the umbrella race then lost his legs. Such a jolly long-john’s way—and peel off my wet underwear, hugging my knees to squeeze out the cold.
Dear Mum,
I’m trying to fall asleep, imagining the parts you’ve played in this story, since its beginnings lie not now, but with you. Brolly, my first pony of the Derby, was just like Brendon, with similar gray fur and balky behavior.
This race is not an arrow shooting out of a bow. We pause at the stations and cease in the evenings. If an arrow at all, it stutters a lot and would like to return to its bow. Perched in this Elysian valley among snoozing people from faraway lands, I ask
myself if we’re even racing.
I’m not sure how aware you are of my habit of moving away, but it’s one I tend to lapse into, especially when bodies are stuffed together in social gatherings. It always feels to me as if we’re a bubbling liquor, or a waiting violence. I can’t cope with the desire for climax and the simultaneous going-nowhere-ness, so I flee, or estrange myself in daydreams.
Things are different in this tent. Our gang is intent on racing and sleeping rather than stirring up social potions. We form a harmless, haphazard collection, only accidentally social. I’m spinning out a love affair with the oddity of our day together. I’ve been flinging remarks at Todd, the Australian snoozing beside me who told someone at start camp to “just hurry up” and sleep with him. I can see the outline of his smile, but he isn’t replying. This may mean I’m ruining his dreams of beer. Am resisting the urge to tug at his beard. If you were here you might call me an annoying bluebottle.
Today, Ma, I have seen the earth thrusting storms around and pulling bones down to her core. The coldness has left me aching and broken, like eggshell. It’s useful pretending I’m neither cold nor achy, thinking of seals and such like, but then I wonder whether it’s helpful to always be an actor to myself, as though this isn’t painful—or as though the wound inside my tummy isn’t there. Am I a stranger to my deepest depths? How do we all lock so much inside our eyes?
Itching rules the night. I pray nobody makes off with my jodhpurs before I wake.
I suppose it’s not right, but I felt I was missing out when I was eleven. I swayed on the riding-school ponies like a shaking minaret and thought this meant I could ride, but I didn’t have my own pony with whom to progress. I’d lie in bed in London, gazing at magazine adverts of competition ponies leaping over hedges, longing for that freedom and independence, plus the accompanying poo-picking rituals. But I feared Mum would go silent or judge me for daring to want such a Big Thing. It had taken at least a year of diplomacy to win her over with my hamster campaign.
Indeed, all the advertised ponies were too expensive, and my mother was hesitant—until I walked into the kitchen one July afternoon to find her in a state of ecstasy. What was it? Nothing other than the kitchen mice and the decoration of the Christmas tree ever propelled her into such hysteria. She told me how the vicar’s wife’s sister had put her in touch with an Irish lady selling a horse called Grageelagh Brendon. Word of mouth is my mother’s trusty friend. She hadn’t understood many details from Mary, Brendon’s owner, on the phone, but she kept repeating one of Mary’s lines in her attempted Irish accent—“Ooo, ’e’ll do the job”—and thrust me a faxed photo of a jumping horse that may or may not have been Brendon. She had fallen in love with a hazy silhouette.
Mum knew he was only four, too young for an eleven-year-old’s first pony, but how irresistible a price. Three days later I laid my head on her red poncho aboard the 3 a.m. ferry to Ireland. What with the stench, the sticky floors, and the noisy drunken men, we couldn’t waste the journey. Brendon was already ours.
It didn’t matter that we found him moping at the back of a dim stable in a crumbling yard run by loud chickens and a solitary goat, nor that Mary made jokes about the fact that I couldn’t ride at all like Aunt Lucinda. Even now Mum hasn’t forgotten the lunch of white bread and ham we were served, a meal she’d have stuck her nose up at in England but now, on an empty stomach in such a setting, found quite exquisite.
Brendon came home to Appleshaw. I flung myself into the relationship, devoted to the bum he so loved to thrust at me in the yellow stable. We often tried to take him cross-country jumping, Aunt Lucinda’s forte, but he was rarely persuaded to step over the foot-high wooden carrot, let alone anything larger. His despondence made us feel hopeless, yet we were also hopeful and, somewhere, satisfied. Early days.
At the time, Aunt Lucinda was our comic engine, our oracle. As the winter light withdrew on Sunday afternoons, she’d sit in our kitchen advising, talking at the speed of a gallop with her lower back slumped, fidgeting as usual (she often picks at food just to give her hands somewhere to go, and has been known, as a guest, to consume a pot of honey at breakfast). Lucinda’s rants would conclude with a “Crack on!” and leave us steaming with her energy, itself of military origin—her father, my paternal grandfather, whom neither my mother nor I have ever met, had commanded a cavalry unit. Our family has always tried never to look back, only forward, Lucinda wrote when he died in 1977, as though the Prior-Palmers had a constitution.
It was my grandfather who had begun the Appleshaw tack room, where his bits—the molded pieces of metal a horse takes in her mouth to receive direction—still hang like ammo, albeit beneath the spider webs that also shroud memorabilia from Lucinda’s career: rotting horse wreaths, stable plaques from Badminton, a moldy “Welcome Home, World Champion” sign above the doorway. Though these objects were decaying by the time Brendon and I got to know them, their stories found life in my mind.
I am no longer sure that following in footsteps is a good aim, since a story can really only happen once in a family. It feels tiring enough inheriting some of their traditions; I often ask myself if I move through the world inside an envelope of the family declensions—blind drive and courage, critical vision and imperial self-importance—to name a few.
But in those early years, all I wanted was to ride, as Lucinda had done. She won Badminton, the world’s most challenging three-day event, age nineteen. I read all three of her books and dreamed of her beginnings, especially of Be Fair, her first horse, who’d made her European champion and was buried beside an Appleshaw compost heap which you could smell burning every autumn. My mother chimed in with nostalgic memories of Lucinda’s competing days—the grace of her cross-country riding, her lemon-yellow colors, the tears of her supporters.
Mum herself was ant-like in her devotion to my cause, quietly present. She would arise on frozen winter dawns beneath her lopsided turquoise hat and drive me to fixtures across the West Country. Unmoved by the mothers who bought their children expensive horses for the national teams, she never saw the need for me to be mounted on anything more than an honest donkey.
And maybe the type of horse didn’t matter to me, either. In one sense, those days were precious for the space they created away from home.
XVI
This morning the wakeup is successful, as far as wake-ups go—for I am still a teenager during this race, and waking up is not for fun. I have a theory, unproven, that the blood vessels in your eyes can burst if you get up too quickly.
I see figures clambering round the ger, organizing the dawn. Insect bites line my thigh and the nettle rash is in full bloom. I scratch hard, as if there’s a herd of creatures to dig out from beneath my skin. I shouldn’t have slept naked.
My socks have disappeared, the socks know where they are—these are the only words I write in Winnie-the-Pooh this morning. Slowly goes the hour. I pull my damp jodhpurs on and feel my buttock muscles losing the strength they regained in the night.
Without a shower to wash off my dreams, I push my head out into the tightness of morning. Raindrops tap at my ears. The long day will not hold my hand, but it feels created, and only created days can I seize. Creation was never the feeling when waking up in London to a thrash of cold water and Mum growling my name, white walls filling the daylight, uptight chimneys and dutiful pigeons holding the charade together outside the window.
Riders are leaving the urtuu. They rode in before me last night so they had first choice of the ponies at 7 a.m. I’m unsure what the time is now—the supermarket watch might have known, back when it was working properly. Glum horses face away from us on the line. They droop their eyelids, cock their back legs, and hang their heads low. Closer, I catch their warm, dirty smell as it steams up into the rain—horse-smell is the same the world over. I let it replace the absent breakfast.
There is something of a traffic jam at the lines, but eventually I get to choose a small dun. He’s the color of darkening desert. The pixie i
nside me wakes a little after I do, when Alex from ABC asks for an interview while I tack up the horse.
“Looora, why do you always smile? Why do you always look so happy? Is that your strategy?”
I catch his eye across the pony’s neck, laughing as the final words stream from his mouth, wondering how this slick, articulate man from Manhattan wound up here. His combed dark hair is clear-cut against the tangled horses’ manes behind him.
“Strategy?” I say, looking away. “I’m not sure what that means. It’s just easier to be happy when everyone’s whingeing.”
I mean to say, I just love the situation! But that sounds flippant, which is what happens when I try an American accent.
I’m not the happy-go-lucky deluxe edition Alex sees. I’m a natural grump who runs up to her bedroom to feast on forgettable fights with her brothers. But my smile today is true. Spirits are high. The question is, what will I do when there’s no one left to display jolliness to? I suspect I will cease being jolly.
Alex carries on with his questions. I chat to his camera as I move about the pony, fixing straps and girths into place. I can hear the doctor giving an intense interview to Gloria’s camera beside me.
“You know, yesterday’s riding encapsulated the extremes these riders are dealing with.” He grunt-coughs and clears his throat, as if to boost his presence. “Just take a look at the thirty-two-degree heat and then the transition to the thunderstorm.”
Damn, the reporters must like his stubble, his sensationalism, and his oracular sense of self. He will definitely make it onto the documentary instead of me. I don’t know when that kind of British self-assurance became so marketable. Perhaps it’s a good thing to be assertive. I’m just so used to swallowing myself as I speak that I can’t help seeing self-assuredness as indulgent.
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