by Tim Severin
On the afternoon we spent with the cattle-herders Ariunbold must have felt that he had finally mastered the techniques of map-reading. He announced that we had another 38 miles to ride before we reached the next somon centre. Paul and I glanced at one another in disbelief. Thirty-eight miles seemed much too far. Ariunbold spread out the map and pointed out the distance. ‘Thirty-eight miles’, he announced firmly, measuring across the grid lines. My heart sank. Ariunbold was wrong twice over. He could easily have worked out our progress by ordinary common sense, but after all our efforts in the Hentei and after riding across the Hangay it appeared that he still did not know how many miles we were riding on average each day. Just as bad, he did not understand the scale of the map, though he had been using it for a week. It took careful explanation, using bits of string and matchsticks as measuring devices, to show him that what he thought was 38 miles on the map was in fact 19 miles.
The map showed that we should ride down the left bank of the Wild Yellow River, keeping to the main valley, to get to the next somon centre. So when we left the cattle-breeders’ hamlet Paul, Doc, Delger and I rode our horses across a shallow ford and headed down the valley. When we looked back for the others, we were puzzled to see that Ariunbold had not followed us. Instead he was leading Bayar and the two herdsmen-guides along the opposite bank at a fast trot, apparently abandoning our little group. By then we had such a low opinion of his geographical sense that we let him go his own way. As the valley grew wider, the little band of riders on the far bank dwindled in the distance and, sure enough, we watched as one after another the two herder-guides and then Bayar realised that Ariunbold was leading them astray, turned their horses aside and rode back across the valley to join us. Ariunbold was left to his own devices. To our astonishment we saw him continuing on his own way in solitary state. Then, instead of following the main valley, he abruptly turned to the right and disappeared up a side valley. It was baffling. We thought that he must have some special reason for such an odd detour - perhaps he had seen some gers he wanted to visit. But no, Ariunbold not only lacked an idea of scale and could not read a map, he had no sense of direction either. He thought he would find the somon centre up the side valley, and he was selfishly prepared to leave everyone else to look after themselves. After another hour we saw him riding back, obviously knowing that he had made a clown of himself. By then it was too late. As with the original set of herder-guides who had refused to take their horse-herd any further at the end of our over-ambitious first day’s ride from Erdenzu, the Drunk and the Quiet Man had now lost all confidence in Ariunbold. They looked the other way when he announced that we could expect to reach the somon centre the following day. Half a mile further on, we topped a rise and the small town was there below us, a five-minute ride away.
Unlikely though it may have seemed in the middle of Mongolia, the place was a health spa. The river flowed past a steep hill and on the right bank there were hot mineral springs oozing plumes of steam. Facing them across the river stood a hideous sanatorium which resembled a bedraggled factory block constructed to the standard rectangular design of cheap Soviet architecture, and then allowed to fall into neglect. Further along the hillside, to complete the rape of the scenery, were thirty or forty ugly little wooden cabins painted in various colours which had once been sickly and were now merely drab and faded. We had finished a long day’s ride and were looking forward to setting up camp and resting ourselves and the horses. But Ariunbold insisted on making us wait for an hour and a half while he disappeared into the sanatorium. A bureaucrat to the core, he wished to announce his presence to the officials of the administration and consult with them. Maybe, he said to Paul and me as he left, he would be able to arrange for us to meet some of the invalids. Behind his mask, the Doc groaned with despair.
In fact the sanatorium officials either had nothing to offer or did not even want to see Ariunbold because he came back only with the grand announcement that he had arranged permission for us to make camp on the far bank. As the far bank was the usual empty Mongolian countryside which stretched unused for several hundred miles, it seemed a rather hollow concession.
We set up camp and helped Doc catch grasshoppers for fishing bait. All day the grasshoppers, brought out by the warm sunshine, had been swarming in their millions on the pastureland. There had been so many of them that they jumped up in thick clusters around every hoof-fall. The effect was as if the horses were trotting through shallow water and kicking up grasshoppers instead of spray. Disappointingly, Doc had no luck with rod and line. It seemed that the hot springs drained into the river and the effluent killed the fish. So Bayar cooked us a scratch meal, and we were promised a resupply of food when we got to the next relay point. Ariunbold it seemed had not troubled to think about bringing reserve stores with us, but was depending entirely on scrounging free meals from the herders. Equally irritating, he had failed to bring along a small kerosene stove that I had noticed in our camp at Karakorum on the first day. At the time I had suggested that the little stove should be taken as a reserve cooker, but he had refused, saying that we would always cook on the collapsible stove using firewood. Now, of course, we had passed out of the forested zone and firewood was extremely difficult to collect. We were reduced to begging firewood from the local people or doing as they did and burning cattle dung. Unfortunately it was the rainy season and to burn properly the dung which lay scattered about the prairie had to be completely dry. So once again we were reduced to dependence on the local people and asking for help, this time for gifts of dry cow-dung patties from the reserve supply they kept in little canvas-covered stacks beside their gers. When I asked Ariunbold if perhaps we could obtain a kerosene stove locally, he informed me sullenly that there was no point because Mongol horses could never carry paraffin as they objected to the smell and would be frightened by the sound of liquid sloshing around in bottles in the packs. I pointed out that the paraffin could be carried in properly sealed bottles which did not leak or give off a smell, and there was no difference between the sounds made by a bottle of kerosene and a bottle of arkhi, sixteen of which still remained. Mulish as ever, Ariunbold simply repeated that Mongol ponies would never carry paraffin.
The next morning began with the discovery that a second gift horse was limping. This time the trouble was an infected foot. The guides’ remedy was to tip out the stove on the ground and make the horse stand with its sore hoof in the hot ashes. This rough-and-ready blistering had no noticeable effect, and then it was found that the horse I had been riding had a cut leg. A remount was selected, but when I approached the half-wild horse with my saddle, the horse took fright, reared up and lashed out with its front hooves. Oddly enough, I never saw a Mongol pony try to kick a human with its hind legs. Bayar then tried to tame the horse and failed. So too did the Quiet Man. It was left to the very hung-over Drunk to take my saddle from me, walk unsteadily over to the horse and, with one quick motion, throw the saddle on the animal’s back. I was disappointed: I had begun to flatter myself that after nearly 200 miles I had begun to smell and behave like a Mongol herdsman, but now I knew that I still had a fair way yet to go.
On what proved to be our last full day with the Drunk and the Quiet Man we finally hit our stride by ignoring Ariunbold, who rode in the rear by himself. Despite the lame ponies we made 30 miles, riding much faster now that the terrain was not so hilly. We pushed along briskly, with the Mongols encouraging their animals with occasional shoo! shoo! noises which made it seem as we were all suffering from head colds. As we progressed, the change from the green grassland of mountains to the more arid downlands became even more noticeable. It was now 23 July and already the short Mongolian summer was beginning to ebb away. The vegetation was languishing. The wild flowers had begun to wither and droop, and the wild grass was dying back. Now the green whorls and loops of mushroom spore systems stood out vividly against the dry grass on the hillsides as if a wandering giant had been scribbling cryptic messages in some unknown hieroglyphs.
We reached the somon centre of Erdenzot late in the day, and the guides advised us to set up camp on the river flats some distance away from the town. In this way, they said, we would avoid being pestered by curious visitors and also, if Bayar was to be believed, thieves. Bayar and Ariunbold then rode off into town to find the local committee and ask about the next relay of horses and if there was any food. Surreptitiously I gave Bayar some money and suggested that he buy us emergency stores. He managed to purchase a small quantity of sugar, two jars of Russian jam and a loaf of stale bread, as well as the real treasure - 7 pounds of maize flour. It meant that at last we had some proper travelling rations because we turned the cornflour into tsampa, mixing the cornflour into a paste with tea and butter and sugar and either eating it at breakfast, after which we hardly felt hungry again for the rest of the day, or rolling up small balls of tsampa as a snack to be carried in our pockets as we rode.
In the meantime the Drunk and the Quiet Man had ridden up the valley to scavenge. They came back with a broken plank for fir6wood because all the argol, the cattle dung dotted around the floodplain, was wet from the heavy rain which had begun to fall. It was still raining next morning when a small truck drove up to our bedraggled little camp. Riding in the back of the truck was a sheep and a wizened old woman. The driver brought a message from the somon committee to say that it would take them a little time to get together our new horses but the sheep was a gift so we would not go hungry. The wet animal was manhandled out of the lorry and dragged into the tent. There the Quiet Man toppled the animal to the ground and dispatched it, rather more messily than usual, on a dirty piece of tarpaulin. The old crone’s special function, it turned out, was to squeeze out the undigested food from the guts before filling them with blood and placing the offal into the inevitable cauldron of boiling water. The scene was timeless. There were nine people crammed together, crouching inside the rickety and threadbare tent, with the rain drumming on the stained canvas or spitting and dripping in through all the holes and rips, and the fire smoke blowing back into our eyes. We were all damp and smelly and had specks of horse dung stuck to our clothing. Naturally we ate the intestines of the sheep first of all, each man using a knife and his soot-blackened greasy fingers to saw and wrench away tubes of intestines from the steaming mass scooped out of the cauldron and thrown on the soggy ground. The rest of the sheep - fleece, head and disjointed sections of carcass - lay in a bloody heap behind one’s elbow. And if you were thirsty, then you could wash down the tripes with entrail soup made by the old crone. Again, our situation would have been familiar to Rubruck or Carpini or, indeed, to Beatrix Bulstrode.
The Drunk and the Quiet Man set off for home that evening, taking their horses with them, and we settled down to wait for their two replacement guides. This pair quickly earned themselves the nicknames of the Whistler and the Shy One when they showed up early next morning with the best group of horses we had seen so far - a dozen ponies which were very robust, even if a purist would have complained that they were rather short in the leg, to the point that the animal with the longest back and the shortest legs was a sort of equine dachshund. All of these new animals were a uniform dark chestnut in colour, and I could only suppose that each somon region tended to breed its distinct type and colour of horse.
The calm and competent way that the two new guides loaded up the pack-animals was very encouraging, and within an hour we were ready to set out for our next relay point at the somon centre of Galuut, the Mongol word for Goose, named for a nearby lake known for its wild geese. The guides pressed us to get started as soon as possible, because they were worried by the recent heavy rain. Any more rain in the next few days, they said, would cause the rivers to flood until they were impassable. So we set out by 9 am, and as if to make the point our most elderly gift horse, a mealy-mouthed skewbald with a milk eye, a maverick disposition and as ill-favoured as Don Quixote’s Rosinante, nearly drowned in the first hundred yards. We had to cross the river on whose bank we had camped, and Doc searched up and down for a few minutes to find a suitably shallow spot, using his experience as a fisherman. All the horses followed him across safely except Rosinante, who had been straggling along behind the little herd of remounts. The skewbald took its own independent line and strayed into deep water. In an instant the current had plucked the animal off its feet and carried it off into a channel where the floodwater was at full strength. For a while it did seem that Rosinante would not be able to get back on shore. Swimming feebly, the horse was carried further and further downstream until a lucky current swung it into a backwater where the poor beast at last had a chance to heave itself out very slowly and stiffly on to the shingle before rejoining us, looking even more abject than before.
On previous occasions when we changed to a new relay of horses, Ariunbold had made sure that the guides saddled for him the best animal in the herd. He clearly felt it was his due. But this time he had slipped up. He found himself aboard a real plodder, a leaden-footed animal with an iron mouth and a stubborn temperament which refused to be hurried. So Ariunbold trailed along some distance behind us, growing more and more angry, sweaty and frustrated as he whipped and kicked his horse ineffectually. It did not seem significant at the time, but it was to lead to a near-crisis later. For the moment, all of us were relieved to be spared Ariunbold’s presence, though we were sorry for his wretched mount.
Our first halt was at a ger so squalid that it turned even our hardened stomachs. When we rode up, the owner was seated beside his half-dozen children as they sat in the open air, chopping scrap wood into kindling. The children were unkempt and dressed in filthy clothing, and a spattering of human excrement revealed that no one bothered to go more than a few yards from the ger to relieve themselves. The owner was already tipsy and his wife, who appeared soon afterwards, was an alcoholic slattern in a foul temper. When the owner was helped to his feet we realised that he had lost a leg, and he hopped ahead of us insisting we enter his ger. Inside the ger the scene was more depressing. A drunken and straggle-haired sister-in-law propped herself on one elbow and watched us blearily from one of the cots, trying to focus, while the slattern wife grudgingly offered us bread and rancid clotted cream from filthy plates. The inevitable arkhi was proffered in a grimy glass that stank. To cap it all, one of the unwashed small children was tied to a cot post with a leash like a dog and, fortunately bare-bottomed, proceeded to squat and defecate copiously on the floor, an act that was totally ignored by the drunken parents. It was a nightmare of exactly the sort which, even by medieval standards, Rubruck found gross. On hot days he and his companion Bartholomew of Cremona would seek shelter from the sun by sitting under the wagons, and the Mongols, curious to see strangers, ‘would crowd in on us so persistently that they trampled on us in their desire to see all our effects. If they were seized by an urge to void their bowels, they moved away from us no further than one could toss a bean - in fact they would do their filthiness next to us while talking to one another. And they did a great deal more that was excessively tiresome.’ Rubruck also complained that the Mongols ‘never wash their clothes, for they claim that this makes God angry and that if they were hung out to dry, it would thunder. In fact they thrash anyone doing laundry and confiscate it. They are extraordinarily afraid of thunder. In that event they turn out of their dwellings all strangers and wrap themselves in black felt, in which they hide until it has passed.’
Glad to be breathing fresh air again, we left the repulsive place and rode further up the valley until it ended abruptly in a great slope of dark purple rock. The extraordinary colour of the rock was matched in the underbellies of the angry thunderclouds which now rolled across the sky, and seemed to close down like a lid, shutting us into the end of the valley. The two guides warned us that we would be faced with a difficult climb, for they had brought us by an unusual route in order to try to avoid the worst of the flooded rivers. The mountain pass would be taxing for the horses but we would save at least five hours’ riding if we went over
the mountain. The storm struck as we were halfway up, toiling along the zigzag path and leading the horses. The wind battered at our faces and brought an angry slanting rain that chilled us in a few moments. Paul and I had brought ex-army ponchos, but they proved to be worse than useless. They failed to stop the rain from soaking through to our clothes, and they were almost impossible to put on. The half-wild Mongol ponies were terrified by the flapping of the ponchos and the strange smell of the rubberised material, and reared and plunged until they were unmanageable. We had no choice but to dismount and wait until they had calmed down, and then plod up the mountain leading them by their reins.