Good morning, sighs the crab-like pony. Not going to climb onto my back are you. You?
I swing aboard. We scuttle away and the urtuu melts into the hinterfog. Ahead is a sunken valley suspended in mist. As we bend our path to avoid it, the fog thickens. We can only see a few meters ahead—land and air morphed together. I take the GPS out of my pocket for a consultation. Despite doubting what I see and think, I tell Sandra and Kirsten it might be best to turn around. After the detour, they agree. I hope they’re too navigationally stressed to notice that the recommendation came from me, the young one. There is something set apart about them—or is it me? It might be me.
My stomach moans in search of breakfast—breakfast is not for fun, breakfast is expected.
No, I say, don’t you remember complimentary breakfast in the Ulaanbaatar hotel, where you ate everything and excused yourself because you needed to fatten up for the race?
It is true I ate the waffles, the pancakes, the carrot cake, the coco pops, the omelets, the toast, the fruit and the yogurt, the fried rice, the seaweed, and perhaps more. I say “perhaps” more because by this point I was so drunk on food that we—you and I—don’t remember what happened next.
Crinkles of the human night are smoothed out as the pony trots beneath me, neighing occasionally, moving me always, filling me up. What is it that horses can do for us? It took years around them for me to feel the good ache, the warmth of these creatures so feared by my father.
Horse lovers, he might grumble, have excessive feeling.
Some of his favorite topics include the heating and burglars, the latter arousing such interest that he can talk about them at length—how often they come, what they do when they arrive, and when we can next be expecting them. Sometimes he examines the dog’s larger poos on his lawn and decides human intruders have been plotting an attack all night. Every evening, he shuts every shutter, bang-ba-bang bang-bang. Maybe he is gratified by the idea that his home is worthy of burglary. Like a nation, he cherishes threat.
What is it that horses can do to us?
His sister, Aunt Lucinda, takes another angle. Recently she wrote of the “explosion of mental illness” in our age, “caused by many elements, not least of which is the dramatic speed with which life and communication have evolved within a single generation. In this context, horses have not changed and their heartbeat and ancient affiliation with man become a steadying, rooting influence to all of us involved with them.”
Are you sitting comfortably? I am not—jog-jog-jog-jog-jogging. The ponies are slow, our rate is 8 kilometers an hour. Sandra’s horse keeps tripping and she’s getting catty with him in French. Anger vibrates through her locked-up chin, dyeing the air around her red.
Soon we move in a large group we might call the Fun Bus—a group of riders known to solidify every year somewhere in the middle of the pack, who generally have a good time in the company of others. I can’t work out if I’m here to have a good time, nor whether this race could ever be a “good time.”
My efforts at conversation are fruitless. Chat that might hold the ears at a dinner party is trampled under dutiful hooves, each rider vying to get ahead, too tired or pained to talk. Horses materialize from the fog behind and ahead. Natacha and her cavalier, middle-aged racing friend overtake us at a gallop and disappear into a white haze up the hill. She will ride the whole race alongside him, and he will get her a room in his five-star hotel when they return to Ulaanbaatar.
Kirsten and I keep our ponies trotting constant as the rain. The monotony of riding 40 kilometers settles early. I mow up my time filming riders on the flip-open device ABC Alex has lent me. The cameras are meant for the American riders, but he seems to have branched out. Maybe I bounded up to him for one too many interviews at start camp. I must’ve failed to contain my friendliness.
“Do you see that dot in the distance? That is Sandra. She’s stuck in a heffalump trap, and I don’t believe we’ll be seeing her or her pony for many days now.”
My commentaries are all false, and the pictures unsteady—filmed by one shaky hand on the going pony. Kirsten and Sandra may view my filming as a distraction from the matter at hand, but the finish is so distant it almost seems behind us, hence I’ve got to make this bit now worthwhile. I do also like the thought of Alex watching these films in some lush city apartment in the future, asking himself whether it was all real. Last night his fellow producer even suggested I visit Alex when he next comes to England—as though I can begin making plans beyond this race. I suppose the idea of leaving always does assume a return, but here in the fog, a home-going seems further off than deep-ocean squid.
For an hour we trundle along. We’re only jolts of motion-in-the-making, but when the grafting lapses into the past, there appears a gliding trail behind us, as though we didn’t exert ourselves to get where we are, as though the earth is water and we have been fish, until now.
The rain comes in such lashings that I half close my eyes and so does the pony. I feel his rib cage judder as he whinnies at a passing herd, which makes me realize he probably has better things to do, but I’m talking to the rider in front of me so the thought cannot grow.
Ask again—what is it that horses can do for us?—and still I myself can’t give a precise answer. When I arrive at a horse’s side, I’m amazed I ever managed to forget that they in themselves could be my destination. I feel calm. The horse has been sacred in many cultures for longer than I can know. Down the centuries, across Britain, people have created at least sixteen massive carvings of horses, eight of which are in Wiltshire. I could never fathom their size, nor understand their power, when I looked at them from the car as a child.
In Mongolia, there are, apparently, more love songs about horses than about women. Ponies who come last in races are sung commiseration songs because no one wants them to feel bad. There’s a sense in which your horse is an extension of you: A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings—so goes the proverb. Even horses’ skulls are sacred. They’re made into musical instruments, whose sounds comfort mourning souls.
The idea of the race recedes as the fog thickens. The disorientation makes me feel snug, as though I’m in one of those medieval paintings that’s more than two-dimensional but not quite 3D, the scene curling around you. I trot into barren foothills on the trail of two English competitors, who believe, for quite a long time, that we are lost. Fogged out of existence. Occasionally we bump into twisted animal carcasses, whose dead peace I try to ignore.
I have given up on my Generally Purposeless Soulmate and lapsed back into reliance on those around me. It brays in my pocket. The English riders, Georgie and James, are mostly silent as they guide me along, occasionally conferring with each other as to the location of our lonely ridge in relation to the rest of the planet. I stalked them online before the race—they’re twins my age; they have a Mongol Derby campaign website and everything. James wears a GoPro on his helmet, which makes him look a bit like a Teletubby.
We relax when we find ourselves, though the twins are soon uncertain again, speculating that these are the sinking sands the map book tells us to avoid. The dunes call for a slow march. We rest our reins and let the giggles rise from our new gang led by some South African riders who’ve flapjacked out of nowhere.
Despite the desert, it rains. They said the route to the finish would push us through fourteen different microclimates, so Devan, at least 50 kilometers ahead, is probably bathing herself in sunlight while we brace our faces against the rain and shiver. “You’re not made of sugar—you won’t melt,” Mrs. Nunes used to tell us, back when we were twig-shaped children in her soaked school playground.
It’s 104 degrees down in the actual desert at this time of year. The race’s course won’t traverse the Gobi region because the horses cannot tolerate the heat—people who live there tend to use camels for travel instead. They also use camels to guard their homes when they’re away, and there’s a story about a man who went to visit his neighbor and got sat on by his
camel. This is told without humor because it is true.
Apparently the scale of the Gobi region is good for children’s eyes. It stretches their sight and stops them from needing glasses. In the 1930s, an old lady in the Gobi told an Austrian visitor to take her gift of a lamp, “for his young eyes did not see as well in the desert night as her old ones.”
The dunes fall away at a river. I cross upstream from the twins. A barking dog bounds out to munch the pony and me on the other side. You’re meant to shout “Hold the dogs” at unknown gers, but this phrase wasn’t on the syllabus when the lawyer who cycled over 6,000 kilometers to get here taught us Mongolian at start camp. Natacha and I sat below her bed mouthing bayarlalaa (thank you) and khurdan (fast). A khurdan horse, khurdan, bayarlalaa.
Two more dogs dash over and snap at the pony’s hind legs. He slows again. I ask for a gallop, but he can’t hear. His trot is sideways, his lust for life surrendered. The original dog stands back and barks. Damn that rabies vaccine. If I fall now, what will happen? They say even Chinggis Khan was scared of dogs, though his armies traveled with any number of them, using them as sentries and in attacks.
The thirteenth-century Mongol ruler is very alive in our minds, but like all dead men he’s mostly imagined, bound by myth. No one knows if that’s true—about the dogs. It comes from The Secret History of the Mongols, the main document chronicling Chinggis Khan’s life, which is full of persuasive reports—the great leader, they say, was born clutching a giant clot of blood on the Onon River.
We edge forward. All three dogs cease nipping and focus on barking. This must be the invisible camp perimeter. Through some internal logic, my pony decides we’re safe and bursts into a gallop. We speed down the banks to catch the others, his sandalwood coat rippling over his braced muscles.
“Do you see blood on his back legs?”
Georgie inspects, finding nothing.
XVII
Welcome to the toilet, a stinking hole in the ground with wet boards above to stop you slipping into it. I like the absence of a seat—they can be so cold—but when I bend down, the pain of holding my body in this position is too much. With no celebratory flush to conclude, the quiet remains as I run back towards the horse lines. I hear laughter from two men of the Zangiat family who live at this urtuu. Should I not be running?
Urtuu 3 is set by river tributaries on a flood plain. With the fog lifted, the weather’s better, but the puddles at our ankles contain memories of lengthy rain. Georgie has been standing perpendicular to her pony’s wet chest since she arrived. She seems to have brought her own stethoscope. The secret to racking up 5 kilograms of luggage herein revealed: pack veterinary tools, proceed to entertain yourself at stations. The stethoscope will help her avoid a potential penalty by not “checking in” until her pony is cool.
I hop into a ger, tripping on the sacred entrance board. The woman of the place stares at me and I return her look. Those legs are nothing to do with me, ma’am. She hands me a bowl of soup, which has globules of mutton fat floating on the surface, and watches me eat. I say thank you, “bayarlalaa, bayarlalaa, bayarlalaa,” perhaps too many times, perhaps not once comprehensible. Is this why Brits travel afar? To register their embarrassment in a more profound place? I turn and lift my head out of the ger to Georgie. She waits on the torn grass. Her pony’s rib cage is still pulsating.
Sinking into the middle of the day, I do not feel bold so much as forced into boldness. Georgie is being held at the urtuu and Kirsten is out of sight. I herald myself onto a chestnut pony of no consequence and, with no idea where to go, I teeter away from the urtuu hoping space will piece itself together.
About fifteen minutes beyond the station, on some gummy mud between two valleys, messages begin to pass from his skin to mine.
What is this? I say.
The world in the raw.
What’s “world”?
Well, precisely, he says.
I clutch at what might lie around the corner, how the land will bend this way and that, the future a curve I can’t access. I think back to when I spied the landscape from the airplane window and felt I’d grasped it, yet that was nothing but an abstract sight. A map cannot lead a mind across a river.
Race organizers inscribed the race route onto Google satellite images and used them to compile the map book. It’s not as confusing as the GPS, but it’s still confusing, and blurry now, since the rain has sent the color running. Other riders seem to have waterproof jackets for theirs.
I relax at the sight of Kirsten edging towards me, but she can’t decide where to go either. Dithering in company is nonetheless better than dithering alone. God forbid I’m ever left to navigate by myself.
“Kirsten, it’s your decision,” says I, the pompous English teenager, staring loftily into the sky.
“This way!” she shouts, trotting off.
“But this is northwest! They told us not to head this way.” I imagine the area holds a biblical flood; Charles the steward told us to avoid it.
“Oh,” she says.
We depart the tracks to canter after a herder, the only idea in sight.
“Birrrrrd soum?” I say, interrupting his day.
Kirsten chips in, “Beeerrd soum?”
The soum, which is to say the town, of Burd is meant to be en route to the next station. We offer more variations, trying to straighten out our pronunciation.
“Burd,” says the herder, unamused, as though we are neither friends nor aliens. Neutral non-relations.
“Yes! Yes, Burd,” we chirp.
He points to what seems like a valley end and trots on with an enviable certainty about his day. We should’ve asked him how long it will take to get there, but forecasting journey times is bad luck. I have written the Mongolian for “How far is it?” in my map book, and though the first word is soaked, something like kher khol vē remains. If the race begins to madden me I will show the words to anyone I pass—how far is it? And they might reply, What’s “it”—your infinite tomorrow?
The herder’s suggestion is not the direction of the next station, so we ride back and forth undecided. A little time passes, and then a lot more. I feel a layer of distant frustration settle on my tiredness. Yet neither Kirsten nor I exhibit signs of stress. I think the slung-out plains are moving us away from time.
The same herder rides back with a full storm of mares and foals in his wake. What are you doing, loafing about the steppe? Maybe he thinks this, maybe he does not. Maybe his mind is too large for our presence to surprise it. We decide, finally, to go his way. My legs are still damp from the morning’s rain.
Water runs through the plain. We watch it charging. Neither of the ponies will cross so we stumble on through the floodlands, letting the river push us elsewhere until Kirsten gets fed up at a kink and takes an unannounced turn for the water. I feel my awe gathering until her submerging pony topples, taking her with him. There follows a mass kicking of legs. My admiration shifts to horror. Kirsten’s pony heaves to land and points his ears backwards in search of her body, which is mainly beneath the murky surface. We must not mistake his behavior as loyalty—I think he merely lacks the oomph to gallop away from her through the swamp.
Out she clambers, roaring with laughter, firing off swear words with aspects of Australian slang. She leaps onto her dripping pony. I’m weak with laughter, though karma lets rip farther upstream when a bog traps my chestnut pony and my legs sink into peaty water. The chestnut struggles and I sit tense, clasping my legs, nothing to be done as he works his way out. Kirsten is again in fits of laughter.
On we wind up the wrong side of the river, the splash and suck of hooves filling the silent prairie. Soon there’s a shape carving under the hill like the tip of a slow-breaking wave, closer, closer, until we guess it’s Georgie, looking as directionless as we feel. From afar her whole being seems to twiddle its thumb. I suppose none of us can hope to appear intentional aboard struggling ponies against a rising hinterland. I wonder what she’s doing here, and ask the
same of my own un-thought-through presence, this body plonked on a plain away from home.
My, I didn’t mean to get so serious in the middle of the day. It’s that feeling of losing touch with the thicker points of dawn and dusk, no high stars or rising sun to cling to.
Across the river, Kirsten and I merged with Georgie and wound our ponies through slabs of rock. At no point in particular, Kirsten got off for a really long wee and I felt pangs of envy. I love a wild wee. It was dank around us and the clouds had piled high as if lining up for a funeral. We paused for the obligatory disagreement over direction, during which I sat in a daze and the ponies nattered. I didn’t want to involve my GPS in the argument. It was enough for me to be participating in the race; I couldn’t manage group-work too. I’d start making up what I thought.
“We need to cross over to that side of the valley!” So went Georgie’s prim voice.
“Nah, nah,” said Kirsten. “I’m staying over here.” She gave her horse a convincing kick as the end of her sentence rose.
I followed Georgie, who had discarded her twin brother somewhere in the sands. She bounced along in her saddle at the trot, which likely saved her knees and ankles from swelling but it also meant her weight fell on her horse’s back every stride.
After some minutes of following, I sidled up to her horse’s shoulder.
“So has everyone overtaken us?”
The Fun Bus must have gotten past us in our hour of incompetence.
“Don’t think so. I haven’t seen any other competitors.”
I let out a silent sigh.
Barks were echoing up the valley. Fanged watchdogs bounded out ready to devour us and our horses cowered. I watched the snapping jaws with a little more love that time, knowing they didn’t quite mean it.
Reports were filtering through headquarters in Ulaanbaatar. Devan Horn was 60 kilometers ahead of us—five hours’ worth of riding. She had passed through urtuu 5, where she did not stop to eat. The vet was impressed by Devan’s progress; the field should be afraid, very afraid, said Twitter, in the tone of a Hollywood horror. I was glad to be away from the incremental time of Twitter and other technologies.
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