• • •
Europe was hardwired to fear nomadic peoples—Scythians, Huns—exploding out of the vast grasslands of inner Asia. Rumors of the latest scourge began to reach Western Europe in the New Year of 1238. The rumors were traded at first only as dark asides, but by the spring they had formed the foundation of a general terror. Europeans called to mind their sins, and those who had neglected their Christian duty hid behind the shield of prayer.
The rumors rolled ahead of the westward advance of a huge Mongol army, 130,000 strong, led by Subutai, last and greatest of the late Genghis Khan’s four “dogs of war.” With Subutai was his master, Batu, son of Jochi, Genghis’s eldest son. News of the advance reached England and France from an unlikely source. The Nizari Ismailis, or Assassins, were a radical Islamic Shiite sect from Syria and Persia against whom Rome’s crusaders had fought for two centuries. The fundamentalists of their day, the Assassins fortified themselves by smoking hashish, which earned them their pejorative name, Hashashin. In broad daylight they carried out political murders of those who oppressed them, or those who did not accept their doctrine. Now suddenly at the courts of England and France were two ambassadors from the Assassins, warning that “a monstrous and inhuman race of men” had burst forth from the northern mountains and, after laying waste to Russia, had turned south and west. The terror was now at the Assassins’ door. Should that buckle, Europe’s was surely next. To counter them, the ambassadors called for an alliance, of all things, with their former enemies. To the Assassins, the Mongols had made the Europeans seem less unspeakable.
Friar Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk at St. Alban’s north of London who was writing a chronicle of his times, said that the race was “believed to have been sent as a plague upon mankind.” They were the “Tartars,” thickset warriors who would “rather be called monsters than men,” following no human laws and showing no mercy. When he said that they “poured forth like Devils loosed from Tartarus,” he was reinforcing a common etymological conflation. He was equating the Tatars, that is, the Mongols, whom Genghis Khan had forged together as a people on the banks of the Onon River, with Tartarus, the underworld of Greek myth where the wicked were punished—prototype of the Christian hell.
To thirteenth-century men of business, the Mongol threat had immediate consequences. Every spring, the wealthy merchants of Novgorod, early Russia’s most prosperous town, sent to Yarmouth on England’s east coast for barrels of pickled North Sea herrings. But in 1238 the Novgorod ships stayed in port as the merchants prepared to guard their city. Other herring eaters also feared to venture out. Spoiled fish piled up on Yarmouth quays, where fifty herrings could be had for a shilling. Seven centuries later, Edward Gibbon wondered at the Mongols’ ability to roil markets: “It is whimsical enough that the orders of a Mogul khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered the price of herrings in the English market.”
As for the Mongol host, at this point it divided. One army, under Subutai, moved south toward the Hungarian plains, a lush, wide grassland on which countless warrior horses could be fattened. The other army pushed west into Poland to counter any threat to the Mongol flank. Early in 1241, the Polish cities of Lublin and Sandomir went up in flames, and then the embellished city of Krakow, capital of Poland, was put to the torch. The Mongol forces moved on, to the Silesian capital of Wroclaw, then Legnica (Liegnitz in German). The city stood on the eastern borders of the Holy Roman Empire. At last, a combined European army attempted to halt the horde. The force was a gaggle of Poles and German and Czech settlers on this newly Christianized frontier, led by querulous oddments of Teutonic Knights, Hospitallers, Templars, and feudal lords.
The Mongols outclassed the Christian knights bickering away beneath their heavy armor. They sowed confusion by lighting smoke screens of burning reeds. Appearing to flee, they drew out the Polish cavalry in pursuit. Their horsemen flashed briefly and then vanished toward the sun, like a darting shoal, leaving the Christian horsemen behind to be cut down by infantry arrows. The commander of the Christian forces, Duke Henry the Pious of Silesia, was run down, his head paraded around Liegnitz on a spear. For souvenirs, the Mongols filled nine large sacks with the enemy’s severed ears.
To the south, Hungary’s grasslands were open, its cities now vulnerable. A Mongol army under Subutai was by the Sajo River near the sloping vineyards of Tokaj. On the far bank, at Mohi, was the Hungarian army under King Bela IV, whom Subutai had drawn away from defending the city of Pest on the Danube. Hungarian lords unhappy with their king claimed that the Mongols were in retreat; they accused Bela of cowardice in not attacking. Yet the king dug in, circling his position with the army’s wagon train.
The Hungarians, Subutai told his men, were “crammed together and shut in as if in a pen.” Subutai crossed the river under cover of dark; it was the day after the Europeans’ shattering defeat at Liegnitz, three hundred miles away. The Mongols lobbed projectiles of burning tar; the Hungarians stampeded, killing many of their own. Most of the country’s noblemen died that day. After Mohi, Hungary was laid waste, half of all human settlements destroyed.
To other Europeans in line, fact and fear-lit fantasy danced like bonfire shadows on a castle wall. “Old and ugly women,” ran one account with a relish for detail, “were given to dog-headed cannibals . . . to be their daily food.” Virgins were deflowered, their breasts “cut off to be kept as dainties for their chiefs.” The notion that Mongols might wipe out Christianity, Pope Gregory IX wrote, “shatters all our bones and dries up our marrow.”
Unity in Western Europe was elusive. It was a region of squabbling rivalries, none greater than between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, whom the pontiff had excommunicated. Nations seemed doomed to topple, one by one. Yet the reckoning never came. Suddenly, in early 1242, the Mongols vanished. They deserted their captured lands and abandoned battlefronts that stretched from central Europe to northeastern China. Europeans could not fathom it. In reality, lesser khans, generals, and their followers were all returning to Karakorum, the new capital on the Mongolian steppe, a place of pastures and tents as much as permanent buildings. There a great khural, a tribal gathering, had been called. Ogedei, son of Genghis Khan, had died in December. The khural was to choose a new great khan to lead the Mongols.
Politics had trumped conquest. Europe, but not Russia, was saved.
CHAPTER 3
48°59.8' N 109°7.8' E
At Changanor the Khan has a great Palace surrounded by a fine plain where are found cranes, five kinds, in great numbers. He causes millet and panicum to be sown in order that the birds may not want.
The Travels of Marco Polo
A low saddle between two rounded hills was all that divided the watershed of the Kherlen, in which we had been till now, from that of the Onon River, our goal. The saddle, then, was the unassuming way to a new land. On the other side was the Amur basin, a drainage of 716,000 square miles, or three times Texas. By foot, it was just an hour’s willow-whacking from our camp. At the pass stood an ovoo, a shaman’s cairn of stones and timber, piled high around a large pine, a horse’s skull lodged among the detritus. Frayed prayer flags festooned the tree, and khadag, blue silk scarves in honor of Tenger, the sky god.
Behind me, I understood now, the forest had been a thin affair in comparison with what lay ahead. It was susceptible to the droughts that grip the steppe stretching out at its back, and to the inadvertent fires of poachers and pilgrims. In front, over the pass, fold upon fold of thick-forested mountains pushed north, like standing waves. It was another world, an unbroken ripple of dark green: barely touched by man, indifferent—a profound stillness. As I sat, a flake of bark caught a breeze high up in a Siberian pine. With a soft snap the flake broke off and, the size of a child’s kite, floated groundward, settling with a rustle. Silence again.
The others caught up with me, bringing my chestnut horse; only Bayara remained to watch over our camp. We rode clockwis
e three times around the ovoo and then descended at a slant into our new world, the forest closing over us. In the dapple were birds we had not seen till now: hoodlum gangs of jays zooming through the branches; a nuthatch, active and extraordinarily tame, working for grubs, upside down, along the fissures of great trunks. On the forest floor were patches of a kind of cranberry and eruptions of soft, silver-blue bobbles: the reindeer moss that Morgan knew so well from the high mountains of the Dukha, whose animals depend on it for their survival.
We were dropping down toward the Onon, which we did not glimpse until we were nearly upon it. To decree where any river begins must necessarily involve a fiction. Only the very rare stream allows you to stand and point to the spot where it bubbles, fully formed, from the ground. The headwaters of Siberian rivers are vast upland expanses of blanket bog, hung over with mist, with no beginning, middle, or end. Those who gave names to the rivers in this region usually demanded some more substantive mark. The Amur itself is deemed not officially to begin until the Shilka and the Argun rivers meet. It is, in other words, by then a powerful stream; the meeting marks the navigable point at which steamers can be of use. But that point is more than a thousand miles downstream from here, and the very utilitarian urge to name the Amur only from the point where it has practical or commercial use willfully ignores the wilder mysteries of all the tributaries higher up.
Batjargal, in his way, was equally insistent. The Onon began where two streams, each no more than three or four horse-lengths across, emerged from a blueberry patch—a patch, as it happened, that could better be measured in miles than in paces. Here the streams slipped together without fuss, 6,700 feet above sea level, at the tip of a gravel promontory that lay between them. I waded across to the spit and here from cupped hands I drank the pure water of the earth, at the heart of an empty continent. And here, too, the confluence had made out of two aimless streams a river with purpose: neither deep nor disturbed, but a river-road brimming with hope and confidence as it slid downhill and then curved to the left, out of sight. If the Onon were a country lane, a cyclist would be compelled to take it.
But it was a waterway, and the question was how to follow it. From here the Onon glided north. As it neared the Russian border, it turned sharply east, running roughly parallel to it. At this point, the Onon’s gentle decline took a more precipitous course as it broke for the lowlands somewhere far beneath us. Batjargal said the ravine was steep and strewn with boulders; it ran for forty or fifty miles, and you had to lead the horses. The prospect seemed unappealing. For one thing, our meat was back in the fridge in Gala’s apartment in Ulan Bator. Even the instant noodles and oats were running low. We were now all gorging ourselves in the blueberry patch.
By this point in the trip, my knees were groaning. But they held out for two more days’ hard riding back to the flat plain where we had begun. We reached the steppe again as the sun was going down. The horses spread out abreast and without a prompt broke into a final glorious gallop, wheeling among wormwood billows and flushing mountain hares before us. Back at the jeep, Gala pulled out a bottle of Genghis Khan vodka from under the seat. A fire was now blazing where we camped, the horses picked out in silhouette. Gala opened the bottle. The first libation went into the fire. The rest was for us. When we woke, the ashes were still smoldering.
That morning we handed in our horses for the jeep, bidding farewell to Bayara and Batjargal. And then we left to skirt the bottom of the Khentii range. Three leech-free nights and much driving later, we had left the mountains behind us, tracing a broad loop first south, then east, then northwest until we met up again with the Onon as it was coursing away from the Khentii range. We had, in short, reached Dauria’s western edge.
• • •
Dauria, a vague and liminal space. Until now I had never wholly believed the place existed. The name appears on no modern maps. But for a very long while, it has had a powerful hold on the Western imagination. In The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, sequel to the more famous volume, Daniel Defoe has his hero return home through Dauria. Probably, Defoe had heard of the region from Europeans attached to the Russian embassies that traveled overland to China in the early 1700s. At any rate, Robinson Crusoe crossed from China over an east-flowing tributary of the Amur to reach good, solid Christian ground at the Russian town of Nerchinsk. Defoe gives what appears to be the first, erratically punctuated, description in English of “the great river Yamour”:
This river, by the natural course of it, must run into the East sea, or Chinese Ocean. The story they tell us, that the mouth of this river is choaked up with bulrushes of a monstrous growth, viz. three feet about, and twenty or thirty feet high . . . ; but as its navigation is of no use, because there is no trade that way, the Tartars to whom it belongs, dealing in nothing but cattle; so nobody, that ever I heard of, has been curious enough either to go down to the mouth of it in boats, or to come up from the mouth of it in ships; but this is certain, that this river running due east, in the latitutude of sixty degrees, carries a vast concourse of rivers along with it, and finds an ocean to empty itself in that latitude; so we are sure of sea there.
Dauria, or the land that was once called Dauria, is perhaps six hundred miles from west to east, and the same from north to south. Its topography defines it. It is rolling, well-watered, tallgrass steppe, with the Onon coursing through it. Lower down, the Onon and the Ingoda meet to form the Shilka; to the south, on flatter ground, freshwater lagoons form out of seasonal floodwaters. The land is a draw for pastoralists and wildlife. Where the Shilka and the Argun rivers meet, the Amur proper begins. That is the heart of Dauria. The land was named after its former chief inhabitants. The Daurs are the descendants of a once-powerful nomadic people, the Khitan. The Khitan are forgotten today, living on only in the word the Russians use for the Chinese, Kitansky, and in our archaic word Cathay. But ten centuries ago they conquered China, ruling as the Liao dynasty, until their martial vigor gave out. The Daurs are the fragment survivors. They number no more than 130,000, nearly all on the Chinese side of the border, living in public housing blocks around Hulunbuir. There, Daurs are best known for their skills in field hockey, a form of which, called beikou, they have played for a thousand years, with sticks made from apricot wood. Nearly half of China’s Olympic hockey team, playing to rules laid down by British Victorians, are Daurs from Hulunbuir.
Diverse peoples had for millennia crossed this open steppe and tarried, peoples who mingled and drew apart again. The Daurs were among the last. Their lands long lay close to great settled powers without formally being part of them. It is where the Russians emerged from the northern forests in the seventeenth century on their way to the Amur, and where China felt the Russian presence for the first time. To China’s alarm, the Russians pushing into their lands were not wanderers from just another small, weak local people; they were subjects of a vast, agrarian continental power, like China’s own. It helps explain why China felt the urgent need to delineate the borders between the two powers, hence the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, signed in an encampment beside Russia’s chief Daurian fort. The nomadic groups, those with the truest claims to a floating land that was being pinned in place, were the victims. They were either exterminated (the Cossacks wreaked havoc among the Daurs), or they were immobilized, denied the rights to their ancient pastoral and hunting ranges. Today, Dauria, as both historical region and ecological zone, runs across the borders of three countries that meet here, Russia, Mongolia, and China. In modern memory, the borders have crackled with mutual antagonisms as two fraternal powers, the Soviet Union and Communist China, fell to squabbling. At one point, all-out war along their long border seemed a distinct possibility. All the while, traces of the old land of Dauria and its rhythms faded but never quite passed away.
I came to Dauria wanting to know better how these territorial stakes had been hammered into the ground, and how boundaries had become fixed. But, unexpectedly, Gala and other conservationists taught me tha
t for all the hardening of borders, the Daurian rivers, lakes, and steppe represented a rich wild ecological region that transcended them. In natural history, Dauria has given its name to a flycatcher, redstart, jackdaw, shrike, partridge, starling, swallow, and hedgehog, among other things. Tantalizingly, the wildness has in recent times grown into a political force. Conservationists understand the importance of preventing Dauria from being carved up, fenced, drained, and domesticated. The work of a handful of Russians, Mongolians, and Chinese in keeping the place wild has helped lower the frontier antagonisms among the three big countries.
For migratory birds, Dauria’s seasonal wetlands, fed by springtime river floods, are a crucial stopover on what is known as the East Asian–Australasian flyway. Each year millions of birds barrel up and down the four avian corridors that make up this flyway. Take one species of sandpiper with tapering bill and cinnamon chest: the red knot, a corruption of “Canute,” for the way the little bird forages for mollusks along the shore, following every retreating wave. It breeds in the Siberian Arctic and then migrates nine thousand miles to spend the northern winter as far south as New Zealand. On the way there and back, tens of thousands of red knots refuel in Dauria.
Dauria is also special because, exceptionally, it is home to several species of a very special bird: the crane. Six of the world’s fifteen species of crane breed in East or Northeast Asia, and in only one place is it possible, in theory, for a traveler to see all six. That place is Dauria.
Perhaps my love of cranes is bound up with the memory of boyhood summers with my Norwegian grandmother, in her cabin in the mountains below the Arctic Circle. There a pair of common cranes, Grus grus, nested most years in the boggy ground at the head of the lake. The birds’ arrival in early summer, gliding over the birch trees at the end of their long haul from North Africa, formed the topic of conversation when my grandmother took me to visit her scattered neighbors, upland farmers who plied me with absurdly sweet pancakes, cream, and jam made from cloudberries (the golden-yellow tundra fruit that Alexander Pushkin called for on his deathbed). Back at the hut, when all was still, the cranes’ fluting cry drifted across the evening waters.
Black Dragon River Page 5
