by Gore Vidal
“Snaps, one word is worth a thousand pictures,” I said. “Which word?” he asked. “That would be telling,” I told him. But now comes the time when I must come to Snaps’s aid and through the living word transmit to the reader’s eye the wonder that is Mongolia when the monsoons are almost done with and the heat has dropped after July’s 113 degrees Fahrenheit and lizards cook in Gobi.
* * *
We are in a jeep, lurching over rough terrain. The driver is young, wears a denim jacket, grins as he crashes over boulders. Picture now a gray streaked sky. In the distance a dun-colored mountain range, smooth and rounded the way old earth is. We are not yet in the Gobi proper. There is water. Herds of yaks and camels cross the horizon. But once past this watered plain, the Gobi Desert begins—only it is not a proper desert. Sand is the exception, not the rule. Black and brown gravel is strewn across the plain. Occasional white salt slicks vary the monotony. All sorts of shy plants grow after a rain or near one of the rare springs. Actually, there is water under a lot of the Gobi, in some places only a few feet beneath the surface. For those who missed out on the journeys to the moon, the Gobi is the next best thing.
“The word Gobi,” authority tells us (Géographie Universelle, P. Vidal de la Blache et L. Gallois), “is not the proper name of a geographical area, but a common expression used by Mongols to designate a definite order of geographical features. These are wide, shallow basins in which the smooth rocky bottom is filled with sand, pebbles, or, more often, with gravel.” L’autre Vidal tells us that, properly speaking, the Gobi covers a distance of 3,600 miles, “from the Pamirs to the confines of Manchuria.” But Outer Mongolia’s Gobi, together with that part of the Gobi inside China to our south and west, is the desert’s heart, once crossed by the old silk route that connected the Middle Kingdom with the West.
We arrive in darkness at Tsogt, a small town on whose edge is the fenced-in administrative center of the park. We slept in spacious yurtas, worthy of the great Khan. In the dining yurta a feast of mutton had been prepared. We were joined by several Russian specialists connected with the park. One was a zoologist, given to wearing green camouflage outfits with a most rakish hat. Another had spent a winter in New York City, where “every square meter costs one million dollars.”
Next day, at second or third light, we were shown a fuzzy film of all the fauna that the park contained, from wild Bactrian camels to wild bears to the celebrated snow leopard and, of course, the ubiquitous goat. But once the Gobi is entered, there are few herds to be seen, and only the occasional tweet, usually a kite or a variety of low-flying brown-and-white jay. As befits a World Wildlife Funder, Tweet-tweet was becoming unnaturally excited. Snaps, too, was in his heaven. Bliss to be in Gobi, almost.
After the film we boarded a plane that I had last flown in in 1935, and flew south across the Gobi, which I had last seen in the pages of the old Life magazine, circa 1935, as portrayed by Margaret Bourke-White. Time kept warping until I noticed that Snaps was furtively vomiting into his camera case; others were also queasy. When I suggested that air be admitted to the cabin, I was greeted with 1935 stares of disbelief. So we returned to base. We were then loaded into jeeps and crossed a low mountain range to the park itself.
On a high hill with dark mountains behind, the Gobi stretches as far as anyone could wish, its flatness broken by the odd mountain, set island-like in the surrounding gravel. I got out of the jeep to commune with the silence. The driver started to pluck at small dark-green clumps of what turned out to be chives. We ate chives and looked at the view, and I proceeded to exercise the historical imagination and conjured up Genghis Khan on that famous day when he set his standard of nine yak tails high atop Gupta, and the Golden Horde began its conquest of Europe. “Hey”—I heard the Americanized voice of Boris Petrovich—“did any of you guys see The Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor?” A chorus of noes did not faze him. “Well, why not?” It was Tweet-tweet who answered him. “If you have gone to the theater seriously all your life,” he said sternly, “there are plays that you know in advance that you will not be caught dead at.” But Tweet-tweet had not reckoned with the Russian sense of fair play. “How can you say that when you wouldn’t even go see her in the play? I mean, so she was crucified by the reviewers…” Thus, put in our place, we descended into Gobi. Thoughts of Taylor’s fleshy splendor had restored Genghis to wraithdom and dispersed the Horde.
We stopped at an oasis, a bright strip of ragged green in the dark shining gravel. Water bubbles up from the earth and makes a deep narrow stream down a low hill to a fenced-in place where a Mongol grows vegetables for the camp. The water is cool and pure, and the Mongols with us stare at it for a time and smile; then they lie down on their bellies and drink deeply. We all do. In fact, it is hard to get enough water in Gobi. Is this psychological or physiological? The Mongol gardener showed me his plantation. “The melons don’t grow very large,” he apologized, holding up a golf ball of a melon. “It is Gobi, you see.” I tried to explain to him that if he were to weed his patch, the vegetables would grow larger, but in that lunar landscape I suspect that the weeds are as much a delight to him as the melons.
As we lurched across the desert to the Yendiger Mountains, we passed an empty village where nomads used to winter. Whether or not they are still allowed in the park is a moot point. No straight answer was available. We were told that certain sections of the park are furrowed off—literally, a furrow is plowed and, except for the park rangers, no human being may cross the furrow unless he wants to be detained for poaching. Are there many poachers? A few…
At the deserted village, each jeep took a different route toward the dark mountains in the distance. En route, the jeep that I was traveling in broke down four times. Long after the others had arrived at camp, our group was comfortably seated on a malachite-green rock, sipping whisky from the bottle and watching the sun pull itself together for a Gobi Special sunset, never to be forgotten. Tweet-tweet said that in the Galapagos Islands Tom Stoppard had worked out a numeric scale with which to measure the tasteless horror of each successive night’s overwrought sunset. But I defended our Gobi Special. For once, Mother Nature was the soul of discreet good taste. Particularly the northern sky, where clouds like so many plumes of Navarre had been dipped in the most subtle shade of Du Barry gray, while the pale orange of the southern sky did not cloy. True, there was a pink afterglow in the east. But then perfection has never been Mother Nature’s ideal.
The jeep functional, we drove between dark brown rocks along the bottom of what looked to be an ancient riverbed until we came to a turn in the ravine, and there was the campsite. In a row: one yurta, a dozen pup tents, a truck that contained a generator. “This is the first electricity ever to shine in this part of Gobi,” said the Soviet director. As the Mongol lads strung electric lines from tent to tent, Snaps, with narrowed eyes and camera poised, waited. “You never know,” he whispered, “when you’ll get a shot of electrified Mongol. Tremendous market for that, actually.”
We were told that close to camp there is a famous watering hole where, at sundown, the snow leopard lies down, as it were, with the wild ass. But we had missed sundown. Nevertheless, ever game, our party walked halfway to the hole before settling among rocks on the ridge to fortify ourselves with alien spirits against the black desert night that had fallen with a crash about us. As we drank, we were joined by a large friendly goat. Overhead, the stars (so much more satisfactory than the ones beneath our feet) shone dully: Rain clouds were interfering with the Gobi’s usual surefire light show. I found the Dipper; it was in the wrong place. There was a sharp difference of agreement on the position of Orion’s Belt. Shooting stars made me think, comfortably, of war. I showed Boris Petrovich what looked to be one of the Great Republic’s newest satellites. “Keeping watch over the Soviet Union,” I said. “Unless,” he said, “it is one of our missiles on its way to Washington. But, seriously,” he added, “don’t you agree that Elizabeth Taylor was a
first-rate movie actress? You know, like Susan Hayward.”
First light seized us from our pup tents, where we had slept upon the desert floor, inhaling the dust of millennia. As I prepared for a new day of adventure, sinuses aflame, there was a terrible cry, then a sob, a gasp—silence. Our friend of the evening before, the goat, was now to be our dinner.
We checked out the watering hole, which turned out to be a muddy place in the rocks; there were no signs of beasts. Again we were on the move, this time southeasterly toward the Mount Mother system. The heat was intense. We glimpsed a wild ass, wildly running up ahead of us. Some gazelles skittered in the distance. The countryside was almost always horizontal but never pleasingly flat. To drive over such terrain is like riding a Wild West bronco. As we penetrated deeper into the preserve, vegetation ceased. What thornwood there was no longer contained greenery. Thornwood—with camel and goat dung—provides the nomads with their fuel. We were told that poachers are more apt to steal the wood in the preserve than the animals.
Suddenly, all of our jeeps converged on the same spot, close to the steep dark-red Khatan Khairkhan, an island of rock rising from a dry sea. The drivers gathered around a circle of white sand some six feet in diameter. Three spurts of icy water bubbled at the circle’s center. Again, the happy smiles. Mongols stare at water rather the way northerners stare at fires. Then each of us tried the water. It tasted like Badois. Camel and wild-ass dung in the immediate vicinity testified to its excellent, even curative, mineral qualities.
Halfway up the red mountain, we made camp at the mouth of a ravine lined with huge, smooth red rocks. Glacial? Remains of a sea that had long since gone away? No geologist was at hand to tell us, but in the heights above the ravine were the Seven Cauldrons of Khatan Khairkhan, where, amongst saksaul groves and elm trees, the waters have made seven rock basins, in which Tweet-tweet and White Hunter disported themselves while Snaps recorded the splendors of nature. The author, winded halfway up, returned to camp and read Mme. de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves.
That night our friend the goat was served in the famous Mongolian hot pot. Red-hot rocks are dropped into metal pots containing whatever animal has been sacrificed to man’s need. The result is baked to a T. As usual, I ate tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread. We drank to the Golden Horde, now divided in three parts: Outer Mongolia, which is autonomous, thanks to the “disinterested” Soviet Union’s presence; Inner Mongolia, which is part of China and filling up with highly interested Chinese; and Siberia, which contains a large Mongolian population. Since functioning monasteries are not allowed in China or Siberia, practicing Buddhists come to Ulan Bator, where there are a large school, a lamasery, and the Living Buddha. This particular avatar is not the result of the usual search for the exact incarnation practiced in ancient times. He was simply selected to carry on.
Even rarer than a functioning lamasery in Mongolia is Przhevalski’s horse. These horses exist in zoos around the world, but whether or not they are still to be found in Gobi is a subject of much discussion. Some think that there are a few in the Chinese part of the Gobi; some think that they are extinct there. In any case, the Great Gobi National Park plans to reintroduce—from the zoos—Przhevalski’s horse to its original habitat. We drank to the Przhevalski horse. We drank to the plane that was to pick us up the next morning when we returned to base. “Will it really be there?” I asked. “No problem.”
At dawn we lurched across the desert beneath a lowering sky. At Tsogt there was no plane. “No problem.” We would drive four or five hours to Altai. Along the way we saw the marks that our tires had made on the way down. “In Gobi, tracks may last fifty years,” one of the Russians said.
At the Altai airport low-level anxiety went swiftly to high: The plane for Ulan Bator might not take off. Bad weather. The deputy minister of forestry made a ministerial scene, and the plane left on time. There was not a cloud on the route. We arrived at dusk. The road from the airport to the city passes beneath not one but two huge painted arches. From the second arch, Ulan Bator in its plain circled by mountains looks very large indeed. Four hundred thousand people live and have their being beneath a comforting industrial smog. As well as the usual fenced-off yurtas, there are high-rise apartment houses, an opera house, a movie palace, functioning streetlamps, and rather more neon than one sees in, say, Rome. Although our mood was gala as we settled in at the Ulan Bator Hotel, low-level anxiety never ceased entirely to hum. Would the visas for the Soviet Union be ready in time? Had the plane reservations for Moscow and the West been confirmed? Would we get back the passports that we had surrendered upon arrival?
* * *
The next day, our questions all answered with “No problem,” we saw the sights of Ulan Bator. A museum with a room devoted to odd-shaped dinosaur eggs, not to mention the skeletons of the dinosaurs that had laid them. Every public place was crowded. A convention of Mongol experts was in town; there was also a delegation of Buddhists, paying their respects to the Living Buddha, who would be, his secretary told me, too busy with the faithful to receive us that day. Undaunted, Snaps and I made our way to the Buddhist enclosure, where we found several temples packed with aged priests and youthful acolytes with shaved heads. As the priests read aloud from strips of paper on which are printed Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, their voices blend together like so many bees in a hive while incense makes blue the air and bells tinkle at odd intervals to punctuate the still-living texts. In a golden robe, the Living Buddha sat on a dais. As the faithful circled him in an unending stream, he maintained a costive frown. Outside, aged costumed Mongols of both sexes sat about the enclosure, at a millennium’s remove from cement block and Aeroflot.
The United Kingdom’s man in Ulan Bator, James Paterson, received us at the British Embassy. Outside, a suspicious policeman stands guard with a walkie-talkie, keeping close watch not only on the ambassador and his visitors but on the various Mongols who paused in front of the embassy to look at the color photographs, under glass, of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Mongols would study the pictures carefully and then, suddenly, smile beatifically. How very like, I could practically hear them say to themselves, our own imperial family—the Khans of yesteryear!
Paterson is tall and tweedy with a charming wife (in central Asia all of us write like the late Somerset Maugham). “I am allowed to jog,” he said. “But permission must be got to make trips.” Since he knew that I was asking myself the one question that visitors to U.B. ask themselves whenever they meet a noncommunist ambassador (there are four, from Britain, France, Canada, and India)—What on earth did you do to be sent here?—he brought up the subject and laughed, I think, merrily. He was raised in China; he was fascinated by the Mongol world—unlike the French ambassador who, according to diplomats in Moscow, used to go about Ulan Bator muttering, “I am here because they fear me at the Quai d’Orsay.” When I asked Paterson where the French ambassador was, I was told, “He is no longer here.” Tact, like holly at Christmas, festooned the modest sitting room, where a much-fingered, month-old Economist rested on the coffee table.
A reception was given us by the minister of forestry. He is a heavyset man with gray hair and a face much like that of the old drawings of Kublai Khan. He hoped that we had enjoyed the visit to the park. He hoped that there would be more money from the United Nations, but if there should be no more, he quite understood. White Hunter found this a bit ominous, as he favors further UN funding of the park. Tourism was discussed: A new guest complex would be built at Tsogt. The plans look handsome. Room for only eighteen people—plainly, a serious place for visiting scientists. Elsewhere, hunters are catered for.
Tweet-tweet spoke eloquently of the Wildlife Fund’s work around the world. “Under its president, Prince Philip,” he intoned. The Mongol translator stopped. “Who?” Tweet-tweet repeated the name, adding, “The husband of our queen.” The translator could not have been more gracious. “The husband of whose queen?” he asked
. Tweet-tweet went on to say that if it were not for the politicians, there would be world peace and cooperation, and the environment would be saved. I noticed that the minister’s highly scrutable Oriental face, so unlike our veiled Occidental ones, was registering dismay. I interrupted. “As one politician to another,” I said, “even though I have just lost an election, having polled only a half-million votes”—roughly a third of the population of Mongolia, I thought, in a sudden frenzy of demophilia—“I am as peace-loving as, I am sure, His Excellency is.” I got a wink from the minister, and after dinner a powerful pinch of snuff. Even in Mongolia, we pols must stick together in a world made dangerous for us by well-meaning Tweet-tweets.
The next day all was in order; there was indeed no problem. The ten-hour trip took place in daylight. As we stretched our legs in Omsk, White Hunter noticed a handsome blond girl beyond the airport railings. He turned to Boris Petrovich. “What are the girls like here?” Boris Petrovich shook his head. “Well, I was only here once, when I was on the junior basketball team. We played everywhere.” White Hunter said, “You mean you didn’t make out?” Boris Petrovich looked shocked. “Well, gosh, I was only sixteen.” I told him that in the United States many males at sixteen have not only passed their sexual peak but are burned-out cases. Boris Petrovich’s eyes glittered. “I’ll bet there are some movies on that,” he said. “You know, that soft-porn stuff on cassettes.”
Before our party separated at the Moscow airport, we agreed that the Great Gobi National Park was a serious affair and not a front for Soviet missiles or, worse, a hunters’ paradise with Gobi bears and snow leopards as the lure. Snaps was thrilled with the Buddhist pictures; less thrilled with the Gobi, “of an ugliness not to be reproduced”; pleased with the pictures of the people, though we had failed to penetrate a single yurta. White Hunter had hopes that the United Nations would raise enough money to keep the park going. Tweet-tweet was satisfied that wildlife was being tended to. Meanwhile, Boris Petrovich darted between the two groups—one headed for London, one for Rome.
