In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Half an hour later they reappeared, leading the horses but looking solemn. They said something to Bayar and his face fell. They were telling him that his precious tripod, which had been dangling from the saddle, was lost. Galloping between the trees his horse must have brushed it off, and it could not be found. Bayar was despondent. The tripod was the property of the Mongolian TV Film Studio, and in a country where even the smallest item is irreplaceable the loss would get him into trouble. When the errant pack-pony was led in, we rode onward with a glum Bayar no longer wearing his cheery smile. Two hours later, after a tobacco break, as Bayar remounted his horse he found his tripod dangling in its usual place. The herders were grinning broadly. They had been hiding the tripod as a practical joke. Obviously country Mongols, however taciturn and straight-faced, had a sense of humour.

  The appearance of the average arat or herdsman was as Prjevalski had described: ‘a broad flat face with high cheek bones, wide nostrils, small narrow eyes, large prominent ears, coarse black hair, scanty whiskers and beard, a dark sunburnt complexion, and lastly a stout thickset figure, rather above the average height.’ They were unaffected and friendly people whom it was very easy to get to like. They were decent and obliging, and they respected competence and experience. In our little travelling group it was clear that they took their lead from Dampildorj, the close-cropped veteran. He was recognised as the ablest horse-handler and the man who knew the wild Hentei terrain best. It was Dampildorj who set the pace. It was he who decided when and where we would halt for the rest breaks, and it was Dampildorj who, at the end of each halt, gave a brief grunt to signify that we should mount up and ride on. Each halt was identical. Without a word Dampildorj would turn his horse aside from the path, pull up and dismount. Behind him the other arats did the same, and walked forward towards Dampildorj, who by then had sunk down to sit on one heel with the other leg stuck straight forward, and was already searching for his packet of cigarettes. The other herdsmen would join him, each man sinking down into exactly the same posture, to form a tight, intimate circle. Cigarettes were offered and accepted, a box of matches handed round, and very often a small bottle of snuff appeared as well. The herdsmen carried these small items tucked in the front fold of the wrap-around del, which made a single large pocket, and there was a definite formality about the giving and taking. When the snuff bottle was offered, politeness demanded that it was held out in the right hand, with the right arm outstretched and the elbow cupped by the left hand. The recipient took the bottle with exactly the same gesture, turned the snuff bottle over in his hand to admire the workmanship, then uncapped the bottle’s ornate top with its slim spatula and spooned out a tiny helping of snuff. With slow, deliberate movements the snuff was taken, the stopper replaced, and the bottle passed back, again right-handed, to the donor, with exactly the same ritual gestures. The first man then offered his snuff bottle to the next herdsmen in the circle, and so on. All the while the horses looked on. Instead of tying or hobbling his horse, each herdsman usually kept the animal on its lead rein, standing close behind him like a dog on a leash. So an outer circle of horses looked inward over the heads of their riders.

  I was struck by how the herdsmen derived real pleasure from traditional style and craftsmanship. Besides the silver ornaments on their saddles, they valued anything that was old and of good workmanship. One of our guides was something of a dandy. He wore a short overjacket of striking emerald-green silk with a high collar picked out with red patterns and edged with gold braid. From his belt hung a matching green silk tobacco pouch and he carried a long slender Chinese pipe with a tiny bowl which he lit up during our rest breaks. His knife was not the workaday penknife of the other riders, but a beautiful antique dagger, an heirloom, long and slim and held in a silver-mounted sheath which he tucked into his orange cummerbund behind his back. The sheath had an additional double socket which contained two ivory chopsticks, also silver mounted, and from it a heavy silver chain led to an antique half-moon steel once used for striking sparks against flint. This steel too was in a massive silver mounting. Time and time again these trinkets were fingered and admired by his colleagues, and each time they warmly complimented their friend on possessing articles of such workmanship and long history. It was an interesting contradiction to official Mongolian policy where, in theory, such values should long ago have faded away as they represented Mongolia’s feudal past.

  Towards their horses the herdsmen were neither cruel nor particularly affectionate. They regarded their animals as working tools which had to be maintained properly or herding life was impossible. The arats had no vehicles, and with the huge distances involved they were utterly dependent on having fit and reliable horses for transport and work. They never walked, even twenty paces, if they could ride, and a horse was always kept saddled and ready outside their ger. Naturally they needed plenty of remounts, and each man had access to so many spare horses that with rare exceptions they did not bother to name their animals. That is not to say they could not recognise each animal individually. Many herdsmen carried a battered pair of binoculars or a small telescope inside the front fold of their dels, and when they saw a distant group of horses grazing they would whip out the spy glass and at 5 or 6 miles be able to identify each one of their own horses in the group by its colour, conformation and movement. They had raised the animals themselves and knew them intimately, literally picking up the tiny foals and carrying them to their mothers in the first weeks of life. When it came to treating sick horses they had little use for modern veterinary medicines or techniques but relied on time-honoured cures. If a horse developed an abscess in the hoof, they stood the injured foot in the hot ashes of the camp-fire. A sore back was swabbed with a simple solution of salt and water.

  Blood-letting was the cure-all. At the end of our first day’s travel Dampildorj decided that most of the horses were in poor condition after their long winter semi-starvation, and should be bled. He and three other herdsmen stalked the animals, which had been hobbled and turned loose to graze. It was a gruesome business. Each animal as it was caught was again treated to the nose twitch. But this time a second loop of rawhide was slipped over the lower jaw and pulled downward to open wide the animal’s mouth. Dampildorj produced a small penknife and tied a scrap of cloth around its blade, leaving bare a centimetre of the sharp metal tip. Peering inside the horse’s mouth, he carefully picked his spot, and then jabbed crisply upward into the gum behind the upper teeth. A thin stream of blood dribbled down, filled the horse’s mouth, and began to drip on the ground. The animal appeared to feel no pain and began to slobber and lick the blood. The blood was supposed to flow until it stopped naturally, so the mouth had to be held open until this happened, either with the leather thongs or Dampildorj thrust a billet of firewood into the animal’s mouth to make a crude wooden gag.

  After some five hours’ riding, we came to a camp-site in a gulley where a small stream oozed from under a patch of snow on the hillside and provided water for the horses and their riders. There was no special treatment for the horses, other than a brisk currying with a thin wooden blade like a croupier’s spatula which scraped away the dried sweat. The animals were simply turned loose to graze in their hobbles, either singly or, if a particular horse was a known wanderer, it was first hobbled and then tied head to head to another horse to act as a drag. The agility of the little Mongol horses was phenomenal. Even when closely lashed in pairs, one horse would get down on the ground and roll, then wriggle back up on to its feet without throttling its companion, then they would bunny-hop side by side as they grazed, like contestants in a three-legged race. Never did I see the herdsmen give their animals any hay or grain or extra feed. Even with the pasture completely dead and frozen, the horses were expected to forage for themselves, finding enough sustenance in the early morning and at the end of the day’s ride, and getting enough rest, to enable them to run eight hours next day.

  Bayar had set up the camp-stove, a metal cube of sheet iron which could be folded
flat and had been carried in a sack on the pack-pony. With its three-piece tin chimney, the entire contraption was extremely efficient. Firewood was loaded into it and set ablaze. A large bowl of water fitted into the hole on top of the stove and in ten minutes was simmering away briskly. Bayar was brewing tea, the first meal of the day. The tea he produced from a cloth bag like a large tobacco pouch was of the worst possible quality. It was brick tea imported from China at the cheapest price. Knowing the disdain in which the Chinese hold the Mongols, still regarding them as uncouth barbarians beyond the Great Wall, it was not surprising that they sent rubbish to Mongolia, nor were the impoverished Mongols able to afford anything better. The tea bricks they received were compressed from twigs and dust and sweepings from the factory floor, and there was very little genuine leaf. The tea brick had to be battered with a hammer to break off what was needed for the brew. The Mongol herdsmen did not care. They endured one of the most rudimentary cuisines in the world, a fact lamented since earliest times by travellers to the Mongol empire. ‘They have neither bread nor herbs nor vegetables nor anything else, nothing but meat, of which, however, they eat so little that other people would scarcely be able to exist on it’, complained Carpini who, as a friar, must have been accustomed to plain fare and occasional fasting, but who found the Mongol food as inadequate as it was unhygienic:

  They do not use table cloths or knapkins .... They make their hands very dirty with the grease of the meat, but when they eat they wipe them on their leggings or the grass or some other such thing .... They do not wash their dishes and, if occasionally they rinse them with the meat broth, they put it back with the meat in the pot. Pots also or spoons or other articles intended for this use, if they are cleaned at all, are washed in the same manner.

  Prjevalski had been equally scathing about the way the Mongols made tea. ‘The mode of preparation is disgusting,’ he wrote:

  the vessel in which the tea is boiled is never cleansed, and is occasionally scrubbed with argols, ie dried horse or cow dung. Salt water is generally used but, if unobtainable, salt is added. The tea is then pared off with a knife or pounded in a mortar and a handful of it thrown into the boiling water to which a few cups of milk are added. To soften the brick tea which is sometimes as hard as a rock, it is placed for a few moments among hot argols which impart a flavour and aroma to the beverage. This is the first process, and in this form answers the same purpose as chocolate or coffee with us. For a more substantial meal the Mongol mixes dry roasted millet in his cup and as a final relish adds a lump of butter or raw sheep tail fat. The reader may now imagine what a revolting compound of nastiness is produced, and yet they consume any quantity of it!

  Twenty to thirty cups of tea each day was normal, said Prjevalski, and rich Mongols drank from ornate bowls of solid silver while the lama priests used cups made of human skulls cut in half and mounted in silver.

  Paul and I had been issued with small copper bowls of traditional shape but modern manufacture, and were glad to note that camp hygiene had greatly improved since Prjevalski’s time. Also we were very hungry, not having eaten all day, and quite prepared to wolf down whatever food was put in front of us. But we soon found that one feature of Mongol cuisine had not changed since Prjevalski’s journey: a Mongol cooked his food by putting it into boiling water, and that was that. Over the next few months very rarely did I see anyone bother to roast, to barbecue or - if fat was available - even to fry a camp meal. The excuse I heard in Mongolia was that the busy herdsman normally had no time to prepare or eat a more demanding meal, even when he came home to his ger. But palpably that was untrue of the long evenings. The answer seemed to be that a Mongol liked his food boiled, and nothing else interested him. When our dedicated fisherman, the Doc, caught half a dozen splendid trout-like fish the following evening, the treatment was the same. The fish were gutted, chopped up, and then the lumps thrown into boiling water, and the taste boiled out of them.

  Doc’s fish were regarded with suspicion by several of our companions; what they preferred - when they could get it - was mutton. No other flesh had quite the same appeal, though Carpini claimed that the Mongols of his time would happily eat dogs, wolves, foxes, horses and even body lice, saying, ‘Why should I not eat them since they eat the flesh of my son and drink his blood?’ Carpini grimly added, ‘I have even seen them eat mice.’

  Our Mongol companions told us that they would eat beef willingly, camel if necessary, horseflesh under duress. But sheep was easily their favourite, and they were eager to demonstrate the correct way of slaughtering and cooking, though it required a strong stomach to watch them at work. To slaughter the animal, the herdsman threw the sheep on its back and knelt across it like a wrestler holding down his opponent. He then deftly slit the bellyskin with a very sharp knife and, with the animal still alive, slid his hand inside the guts as far as the aorta and squeezed, stopping the heart. In a few moments the sheep’s head flopped over to one side and the animal was dead with scarcely a drop of blood spilled. Briskly the carcass was flayed, and only the half-digested contents of the stomach were thrown away. The rest of the animal - tripes, head, meat, bones - was considered fit to eat and would sooner or later be boiled in the cauldron. In the harsh and demanding world of the nomads nothing was wasted if it was remotely edible and, as Carpini put it; ‘They consider it a great sin if any food or drink is allowed to be wasted in any way; consequently they do not allow bones to be given to dogs until the marrow has been extracted.’ Carpini was understating the case. On one occasion a few weeks later our little team of riders sat inside a tent and had consumed most of the half-boiled intestines of a sheep spread on the earth floor. When my Mongol companions decided they had eaten their fill, they picked up the rest of the meal and threw it out of the tent door to a pair of circling dogs. The dogs, I noted, refused to eat the offal.

  Even if one could skirt around the worst of the sheep guts, it was difficult to escape the monotony of the menu. The regular diet of the herdsmen in late spring consisted of just two items: mutton and tea. Either you started with lumps of boiled sheep and finished with tea, or you began with tea and finished with bits of the sheep. The only substitution occurred at breakfast when Dampildorj dumped the head of the sheep into the embers of the fire. I thought we might have roast sheep’s head for breakfast. But no, he merely wanted to singe off the hair. The charred head was pulled out of the fire with a twig, the tiniest scraps of meat and marrow prised out with the point of a knife ... and dropped into the lukewarm tea.

  At every meal there was salt, but no pepper, and packets of flat, tasteless Chinese flour noodles were added to the boiling pot. Much to Paul’s dismay, for he was a vegetarian, there were no vegetables. But this was just as Carpini had warned, and the official government handbook about Mongolia was being disingenuous when it boasted that ‘the country is self-sufficient in vegetables.’ It was not a difficult claim to make. In the countryside the arats ate no fresh vegetables whatsoever. The climate was too short to grow most types of green stuff and the gers were moved too frequently to make it worth starting a garden. Besides, the herders detested any form of agriculture. Theoretically they should have been ill from such an unbalanced diet and the lack of vitamins, but they were not. On the contrary, they seemed to be outstandingly healthy and it was not uncommon to meet countrymen and women in their 90s still looking remarkably fit. As with Bayar, it was difficult to judge real age among the Mongols. Men in particular looked at least ten or fifteen years younger than they really were. What was even more puzzling, as I was to learn later, was that in the easy days of summer they thrived on an intake of alcohol and high cholesterol which should have been lethal. The only explanation for their robust good health was that a herdsman’s life was incredibly active and, like their horses, only the fittest survived.

  Their hardiness was awe-inspiring. On that first day’s ride the weather was so cold that Paul rode wearing an Andean wool hat, and I had an ex-army fleece-lined cap pulled as low as possible. Neve
rtheless my earlobes began to bleed from chilblains caused by a scything wind. By contrast the Mongol herdsmen considered the day to have brought reasonably mild spring weather. Their dels had extra-long sleeves which they could unfold 6 inches beyond the tips of their fingers as ready-made gloves, but they did not bother to do so, and their headgear of wool hats or traditional steeled caps left their necks and ears exposed. That evening when we set up camp, Paul and I erected our small mountain tent and unrolled double sleeping-bags. Gerel, Ariunbold and the contingent of Mongol artists and volunteers had a tattered canvas tent. But the arats merely picked a spot where a tangle of low leafless willow bushes offered a little shelter from the constant wind. There they placed their saddles side by side in a line on the ground to make a token windbreak, spread their saddle-blankets and lay down in the open, close together for further warmth. The temperature dropped to minus 12 degrees in the night and the wind-chill factor must have made conditions even worse. Yet the herders slept soundly in conditions which would have risked hypothermia for anyone less hardened.

  A quarter of a mile from where we had camped was a so-called ‘Tomb of Genghis Khan’. On a low grassy knoll stood a stone sarcophagus made of four great panels of rock set up on edge to form the sides of what had once been a massive coffin. The lid, the fifth panel, was missing, and the sides of the box had fallen askew. It could not possibly have been the real tomb of Genghis Khan because the sarcophagus was far too modest and the style of the patterns carved into the stone panels was of a later period. It was the burial place of a more recent and less important Mongol chieftain, but nevertheless it was clear why his people had chosen that particular spot.