by Tim Severin
Such confident naivety is understandable. With an area larger than the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy combined, (slightly larger [3 per cent] in area than Alaska, Mongolia has the same population density as Nevada) the Mongol homeland is not only huge but is physically isolated behind massive barriers. Across the north extend the trackless taiga forests of Siberia. To the west and south rise the mountain ranges of the Altai, and in a great arc along the southern and eastern flank lies the Gobi, not a single broad desert so much as a series of barren basins, surfaced variously with gravel, stones, dust or sand. The basins are believed to have been scoured out over the aeons by the action of the wind which, in the spring season, can still raise a dust storm which lasts for one or two weeks, and has been known to continue for fifty-seven days without interruption. At other times, after the rains, parts of the Gobi become a sprinkling of shallow alkaline marshes. Here time itself seems to be in a warp. As if this was the boneyard of the Lost World, scores of dinosaur skeletons have been found lying on the surface of the ground just where they fell, including two - one a meat-eater, the other a herbivore - still locked together in their final death struggle. Here have been found the recognisable remains from monsters as terrifying as Deinocheirus, the ‘Terrible Handed’ with its 24-inch claws, or as bizarre as Aviraptor, a proto-bird that flew and had a massive beak like a parrot and a crested head like a cassowary. In the Mesozoic era all these grotesques bred, lived and died in what is now the wilderness of the Gobi, and their nests fossilised and survived. Some contain clutches of petrified dinosaur eggs, surprisingly small to produce such giant offspring. Others were the final resting place for broods of hatchlings that died in a pathetic huddle, eight or ten at a time.
Waiting for the main expedition to begin, I made a reconnaissance into the Mongolian Gobi and quickly appreciated that the Mongols were not just the horse-breeding people that their historical image projects. In what must be one of the bleakest, least hospitable places on earth, a single Mongol family of a Gobi aymag or district was tending 400 camels, a constantly bawling, groaning, squealing, defecating troop. Here life was stripped to the bone. The father was almost black, his skin darkened by the constant sun and wind. A big, taciturn man, he seemed old at first sight, stooped and bow-legged, but he was probably still in his mid-40s. He had a round, impassive face battered by wind and driving dust, and was dressed in a faded padded coat of khaki, the right shoulder smeared with a fresh streak of bright green camel excrement. His three sons, aged between 6 and 14, ran back and forth yelping and chivvying the camels which were being separated into nursing and barren mothers. The children held long whippy poles with short strings that they used as cattle switches. Occasionally a boy would scramble on to the back of a pony to go chasing after some straying camel. The women of the household were equally careworn and stoic - the wife in a shapeless gown of blue silk, her hair tied in a scarf to keep out the dust and sand, and a wizened grandmother who occasionally appeared from the tent, moving with tortoise slowness, her dark brown face so wrinkled by age and exposure that even her skeleton seemed to be collapsing inside the shrivelled skin. Everything in view was muted and weather-beaten. The stony plain of tiny gravel fragments, sharp and angular, merged imperceptibly into sand hummocks interspersed with clumps of grass and occasional bushes of dusty grey-green. The camels had shed their winter fur and, incongruously, their skins had the texture and colour of elephant or water buffalo hide.
His beasts, the camel-herder explained, travelled best in late autumn or early winter. Then, with their humps fattened by the summer pasture, they could go for thirty-three days without food, and nine days without water. Each could carry 550 pounds of baggage and cover 32 miles a day. In short, they matched the speed and exceeded the carrying capacity of a horse, and I realised that the Gobi, which was seen by the outside world as a barrier, had been to the Mongols nothing of the sort. The Chinese might have hoped that the Gobi was their immense natural dry moat lying along the foot of the Great Wall, helping to shield them from the steppe barbarians. And on Mongolia’s opposite border the great oasis civilisations of Bukhara and Samarkand may have felt secure behind their surrounding wastelands. But they were deluded. No desert could have hindered the ambitions of these tough, resilient people. Colonel Prjevalski travelled with them in the Gobi and witnessed their ability to endure the daily hardship of crossing the barrens on their regular trips between Mongolia and the Chinese trading cities:
In the depth of winter, for a month at a time, they accompany the tea caravans. Day by day the thermometer registers upwards of -20 degrees of Fahrenheit, with a constant wind from the north-west, intensifying the cold until it is almost unendurable. But in spite of it they keep their seat on their camels for fifteen hours at a stretch, with a keen wind blowing in their teeth. A man must be of iron to stand this; but a Mongol performs the journey backwards and forwards four times during the winter, making upwards of 3000 miles. (4)
From his nation’s camel-herders Genghis Khan formed the supply train of the medieval Mongol war machine.
Beyond the camel man’s tent was a wonderful contrast. For another 4 miles the Gobi continued flat, then came a mountain wall. There were no real foothills, just a few deeply eroded slopes before the bare rock began. Then the land reared steeply upward across a front that extended as far as the eye could see in either direction. It was the northern face of the Gobi Altai mountains, a small sector of a rampart 1000 miles long. On the far side lay China. Standing on shifting sand among noisy camels, it seemed odd to look up and see on the main crest of the nearest ridge a white line - permanent snow. As if to accentuate the contrast a line of eight crescent sand-dunes lay against the foot of the rock wall. They were glowing butter yellow in the evening sunlight. Hundreds of similar dunes would merge further south-east to form a sand-sea with ridges 250 feet high. When the gale sweeps across these sand-hills, the sands shift and moan with musical notes. Marco Polo believed the sound to be the wailing of demons trying to lure caravan travellers to their deaths.
As if that combination of mountain, desert and snow were not arresting enough, I could see a lake shimmering beside the dunes. But it was a mirage. The light was reflecting off a white expanse of salty mud, dried as hard as cement and cracked into crazy paving with a web of fissures. Thirty-five years earlier there had indeed been a lake here, with fish and gulls and reed-beds. After the rainy season it spread outwards for 10 miles from the foot of the mountains. Then came an earthquake. The local inhabitants said that the earth’s crust must have split because the water drained away downwards, leaving the fish to die in a desert. I recalled the story of the first American expedition to examine the Gobi scientifically, in the Twenties. They had camped overnight on the shore of a similar shallow lake. In the night the wind, which had been heaping up the water on one side of the lake, changed direction and, blowing from another quarter, drove the water away so quickly that hundreds upon hundreds of small silver fish lay stranded on the damp ground. In the moonlight the scientists watched as the fish lay and flapped in their death throes. The noise of the doomed shoal was like the sound of a crowd softly applauding.
If the West has been allowed only a distorted picture of Mongolia in the past 100 years, that half-knowledge was nothing compared to the total ignorance which held sway at the time of Genghis Khan immediately before pioneers like Carpini ventured into the steppes. No one in Europe had even heard of Mongolia or knew anything whatever about its inhabitants until the advance guard of Genghis Khan’s mounted army burst upon them. It was a complete mystery where these ferocious cavalrymen had come from. There was a theory that, like the vanishing lake in reverse, the earth had split open and the Mongols had ridden up from Hades. Nor did Europe find itself dealing with talentless savages. Leading that first raid was Sübodei, a Mongol tribesman turned general whom Genghis Khan had selected to command a probe in depth. Liddell Hart, the military historian, judges that the strategic ability of this humble tribesman and his master wa
s matched only by Napoleon (Great Captains Unveiled, 1927). Sübodei’s raiding force operated unsupported in the field for two years, made a great 5000-mile circuit of the Caspian Sea, defeated twenty nations including an army put together by the Russian princes, and withdrew in good order as mysteriously as it had appeared. It left behind the black legend of the Mongol Horde. Traumatised by the shock of the invasion, the victims claimed that the Mongols were cannibals who ate raw flesh and rode giant horses.
Nearly eight centuries later something of the same dread lingers on. Superficial reactions to the mention of Mongols and Mongolia can evoke a hint of the Yellow Peril, of the brutal barbarians, even a momentary confusion between Mongol and mongolism, the congenital condition now known to result from the presence of an extra chromosome which retards normal human development. Typically, the Victorian doctor who first recognised the condition named it because the victims reminded him of caricatures of the Mongol face.
Reports from the few Western travellers who ventured into Mongolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did little to dispel these misgivings. On the whole they describe the Mongols as degenerate and dirty. They complain of the appalling squalor and lassitude, the poverty, and the enormous numbers of priest-lamas who wandered about the countryside begging and spreading syphilis until 90 per cent of the population was infected. The visitors pronounced the Mongols to be incapable of hard work. Prjevalski, in whose honour the Wild Horse was named, roundly declared that ‘the most striking trait in their character is sloth’:
Their whole lives are passed in holiday making which harmonises with their pastoral pursuits. Their cattle are their only care, and even they do not cause them much trouble. The camels and horses graze on the steppe without any watch, only requiring to be watered once a day in the summer at the neighbouring well. The women and children tend the flocks and herds. The rich hire shepherds who are mostly poor homeless vagrants. Milking the cows, churning butter, preparing the meals and other domestic work falls to the lot of the women. The men as a rule do nothing but gallop about all day long from yurt to yurt [felt tent to felt tent], drinking tea or kumiss, and gossiping with their neighbours.
Just before the First World War a formidable Englishwoman, Beatrix Bulstrode, had much the same impression. ‘The Mongols have never worked, and it is highly improbable that they ever will,’ she stated in her book A Tour in Mongolia, after she had made two forays into Mongolia out of China, where she had already travelled extensively. (5) The first trip was by oxcart and pony and took her into Inner Mongolia, and the second went through Siberia and down to the capital, then called Urga. Mongolia’s reputation for lawlessness and civil strife can be judged from the fact that setting out for the second expedition she carried no fewer than four firearms: a hunting gun taken to pieces and hidden in her trunk among her underwear, a Mauser pistol and a large Colt revolver under her Burberry, while ‘a smaller weapon I carried in my pocket.’ This walking arsenal persuaded The Times correspondent in Peking, David Fraser, to contribute a foreword to her book, in which he wholeheartedly endorsed her view of the Mongols. She was ‘particularly instructive in her analysis of Mongol character. The Mongol is simple, happy, good-natured, intensely lazy, and apparently entirely lacking in practical qualities. His very disposition is the cause of his past and present troubles. He is, in short, not fitted to compete with the outside world’ (A Tour in Mongolia, Methuen, 1920).
The Times correspondent, Beatrix Bulstrode and the other critics did not grasp that by their culture the Mongols abhorred laborious routine. The only fit occupation, in their opinion, was to raise sheep and cattle and camels and horses on the grasslands, and move freely, obeying only the change of seasons. The notion of cultivating the land was anathema. To the Mongols a ploughman was the picture of a man in bondage, pitifully stooping over the dirt like a slave. When arable farming was introduced as an experiment in the early Twenties, the Mongol arats had the absent-minded habit of planting a field of crops, then moving away and not coming back for the harvest.
Seen from the air, the first impression of modern Mongolia is still one of a vast emptiness. In a country which extends across three time-zones there is only one full-sized city, and just 500 settlements can claim to have more than 500 inhabitants. Ridges of bare bleak hills extend below the wings of the aircraft without a trace of human habitation except for an occasional cluster of tiny dots that are sheep flocks grazing the stony slopes. Every 30 or 40 miles a neat white round blob like a tiny field mushroom marks the home of the herdsman. It is his ger, the circular felt tent which has been the Mongolian dwelling since long before the time of Genghis Khan and is better known in the West as a yurt, the name that Colonel Prjevalski preferred. In Ulaan Baatar, where there is a chronic housing shortage, hundreds of gers are laid out in streets and blocks to form suburbs. Each is wired for electricity, but lacks drainage or plumbing, and at night the interiors are lit by the luminous white light of television screens. In the modern city the apparently anachronistic ger is still more suitable in some ways than the grim Soviet-style apartment blocks, their shabby exteriors disfigured by rust streaks from the decaying iron balconies, ugly festoons of external wiring and graffiti-scrawled doorways to filthy communal stairwells. The concrete apartments may have central heating and running water, but when the winter comes the city ger dwellers, like their country cousins, add extra layers of felt to the roofs and walls of their tents to keep out the aching cold.
For the past seventy years the Mongols have been remorselessly pressured to change their way of life. In 1921 the Red Army entered Urga, later to be renamed Ulaan Baatar, and put an end to the outlandish and bloody adventure of the ‘Mad Baron’ whose flamboyant escapade could have been possible only in such an out-of-the-way corner of the world. A Balt and a renegade officer in the White Army, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg surfaced out of the turmoil of the Russian Civil War, crossed into Mongolia in early October 1920 and seized power with the help of an irregular force of desperados he grandly dubbed the Asian Cavalry Division. His portrait shows a haunted-looking man about 40 years old, with a tall forehead, receding hairline and pale eyes which have a psychotic stare. He wears a traditional Mongolian robe, its high collar closed with the usual braid fastenings. Epaulettes have been added to the shoulders of the gown and the Star of St George’s Cross is pinned to his chest. The odd mixture of West and East in his costume reflects the Baron’s crossbred plans. He claimed to be a Buddhist and proposed to march back into Siberia at the head of a Mongol army, drive out the Reds, and establish an eastern Asiatic Pan-Mongolian kingdom, loyal to the Tsar. The ‘Mad Baron’s’ brief regime in Urga unleashed a wave of executions, looting and arson. His ruffians went around murdering every suspected Bolshevik they could lay their hands on and made themselves so detested that they eventually had to evacuate the city with very few additional recruits to the imperial cause. On 21 August 1921 the ‘Mad Baron’ was captured by Red soldiers and taken away to Novosibirsk, where in the following month he was shot. It is said that at his trial the judge offered Ungern-Sternberg his freedom if he would sing the first verse of the Internationale. The Mad Baron retorted that the judge would have to sing the Russian national anthem first. In July that same year, with the Red Army watching from the wings, Mongolia’s fledgling communist party had announced the new regime, and Mongolia became the world’s second oldest communist state.
From that moment forward Mongolia’s history shadowed that of the Soviet Union. The communists of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party faithfully copied every change in Moscow policy, from Stalinism through Brezhnev to the most recent clamour for reform. In theory Mongolia was modernised, industrialised and sovietised. It was a new-born, forward-thinking nation rejecting its feudal past and marching towards the bright new socialist dawn. Yet in the spring of 1990 the first demonstration calling for democracy in Ulaan Baatar, as it was reported in the Western press, included a member of the Mongolian crowd carrying a placard which read: ‘Me
n and Women of Mongolia! Mount Your Horses!!!’
3 - The Secret History
Ariunbold introduced me to his partner Gerel, who looked much more the popular image of a descendant of the Horde. Gerel was tall for a Mongol, at least 6 feet, and had an intense, untamed air. His fierce-looking face was framed by jet-black hair which was rather long and greasy, and his menacing appearance was accentuated by a wisp of a Fu Manchu beard and moustache. He had a very abrupt way of speaking, and this gave the impression that he was bottling up his anger and about to explode with rage at any moment. He was a sculptor by profession, and his long slim fingers and delicate hands made a contrast with his intimidating manner. His all-consuming passion was hunting. Gerel was pure macho. When he modelled, his sculptures were images of deer and bear and big horn sheep. He liked to work with bone and antlers, and set his pieces on backgrounds of natural rock, felt and leather. A huge bearskin, the pelt of one of the many dozens he had shot, was spread across the floor of his tiny apartment. He kept hunting rifles tucked behind the sofa, and he proudly leafed through his collection of grainy black and white photos with scene after scene of hunting camps and hunting parties, and dead animals with hunters standing proudly over them. He and Ariunbold were both romantics, but whereas Ariunbold was an office-worker with dreams, Gerel had worked as a hunter-guide, and could cook over a camp-fire, break in a horse and tie a pack-saddle. He carried himself with a swagger, and there was no doubt that he was a powerful, if rather volatile personality. Despite his forbidding appearance I was to find he was very genuine and helpful, and committed to making the expedition a success.