by Tim Severin
That evening half the entire vodka stock, destined to last the entire trip, was consumed. Next morning a sorry-looking gang of Mongols rose late and stumbled peevishly about the camp. Only Paul and I, who had retired early, were in comparatively good humour. The others were suffering from hangovers, and were sodden. Under the night’s rain Ariunbold’s famous new tent had sagged still further, and water had leaked through every pore. It seemed that before stitching the tent together, no one had even bothered to check whether the material was waterproof, which it was not. So for the rest of the following day the camp was decorated with all the expedition’s finery that had taken up the little time Ariunbold had devoted to the preparations - fancy tunics, dels and denim jackets were hung out to dry, and the dye leaked from them.
It was a sorry and bedraggled start to Ariunbold’s sector of the project, and I found myself wondering whether matters would improve as they had done on the trial ride in the Hentei. Ariunbold was boasting that it would take the vaunted Mongol horses no more than four weeks to reach Bayan Olgei. But I was doubtful. By my estimate it would require at least two months, allowing for rest days. Unless Ariunbold’s amateurish performance changed for the better, it risked being a futile waste of the precious chance to explore more of traditional Mongolia.
8 - A Hundred Remounts
We returned to the monastery in the afternoon to collect our supply of remounts. We found that the three local arats who would be our guides had driven a mob of more than 100 horses into the vast compound of the lamasery. They were exuberantly chasing them up and down inside the walls, wielding their uurgas or pole lassos - a device like a long fishing rod with a leather loop at the end - to capture the animals they required for saddling. This meant chasing their victims to the distant temples and back again at a spectacular gallop. It was an unconventional setting for an exhilarating and impromptu rodeo, but no one seemed to mind the commotion, least of all the lamas. The half-wild horses were stampeding in every direction and often refused to be subdued even when a lasso had them caught by the throat. The mounted herder would then have to twist his lasso pole, deliberately tightening the loop until the unfortunate animal half-choked, its breath wheezing out in painful gasps, and a herdsman on foot could sneak up, grab an ear so it could not escape, and slip on the bridle.
Through the Mongolian National Silk Roads Committee, Ariunbold had obtained official permission - and a small amount of funding - to try to re-create a genuine wonder of the Mongol empire: the orto system, which had provided the fastest and most efficient communication across Asia until the building of the railways. Genghis Khan and his heirs did not invent the principle of the orto system, having inherited it from earlier cultures like the Khitan, (it was then known as the yam [Turkish] or dzam [Mongol] system) but they developed it into an undertaking which almost beggars the imagination. The Mongols set out to create a chain of horse relay stations from the Yellow to the Black seas, an overland distance of 5000 miles. At each relay station there were local horses on standby, ready for use by travellers carrying the imperial paiza. Many relay stations would also offer guides and lodging, and some supplied carts and draught animals for hire. The resources required for the operation were stupendous, even for a people accustomed to owning large numbers of horses. In Mongolia alone it has been calculated that the orto system would have needed a reserve of 3 million animals. In addition, each relay station would have had a manager, grooms, shelter, watering facilities, commissariat, and a substantial acreage of pasture on which to keep the remounts.
The supreme effort of the orto system - and the source of its greatest pride - was the facility it offered to the high-speed dispatch riders. These men carried urgent imperial messages over distances that no regular system of post-riders has ever achieved, before or since. Unlike the riders of the American Pony Express who handed over their satchels of mail, one sector to the next, the crack Mongol couriers were expected to ride the full distances themselves, carrying the letter on their persons for total security. Consequently they forced their bodies to the absolute physical limits of endurance, riding day and night, rarely stopping for food or rest, their bodies strapped up tightly with leather belts to keep them upright in the saddle. A comparison between the orto system and the much better-known Pony Express puts this difference in perspective. The Pony Express riders could cover 2000 miles in ten days using relay stations about every 10 or 15 miles. But it was a very short-lived temporary measure, lasting just eighteen months, during which time 616 runs were made. The orto riders normally did 50 to 70 miles a day, or 120 miles on demand. In emergencies they galloped 250 miles per day, and their service lasted - at least in Mongolia - for seven centuries.
It was Marco Polo in his Description of the World who provided the West with details of this astonishing communications network. He himself never visited Mongolia proper, but eighteen years after Rubruck’s visit to Karakorum travelled by a more southerly route through the western desert of China to reach the court of Kubilai Khan at Khan balik, the ‘Khan’s City’ at Peking. There he found a Mongol dynasty imposed on a Chinese culture - Kubilai Khan did not even use Chinese, but spoke Mongol - and heard about Mongolia from the Mongols at court, and saw for himself the orto in action as its riders kept Kubilai Khan in touch with his far-flung empire:
When one of the Great Khan’s messengers sets out along any of these roads he has to go only twenty-five miles and there he finds a posting station ... Here the messengers find no less than 400 horses stationed by the Great Khan’s orders and always kept in readiness for his messengers when they are sent on any mission ... And this holds good throughout all the provinces and kingdoms of the Great Khan’s empire. When the need arises for the Great Khan to receive immediate tidings by mounted messenger, the messengers ride 200 miles in a day, sometimes even 250 ... They tighten their belts and swathe their heads and off they go with all the speed they can muster till they reach the next post-house twenty-five miles away. As they draw near they sound a horn which is audible at a great distance so that horses may be got ready for them. On arrival they find two fresh horses, ready harnessed, fully rested, and in good running form. They mount there and then, without breathing space, and no sooner are they mounted than off they go again ... (The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by R. E. Latham, Penguin Classics, 1958.)
The orto system was at the very heart of the success of the Mongol empire. Genghis Khan and his heirs had grasped the fact that fast, efficient communications gave them a clear advantage over their enemies, and that without such communications the enormous empire was ungovernable. Indeed the orto system was so useful in the vast undeveloped spaces of Central Asia that it continued to be used in Mongolia long after it had died out in the rest of the world, and state relay stations with their herds of horses were maintained as late as 1949. Retired ambassador Tsevegmid, a dignified old gentleman now in his 80s and Mongolia’s former envoy to China, whom I met in Ulaan Baatar before going to Karakorum, had told me how as a young man he had been given permission to use government orto facilities as he travelled across Mongolia to his first job. He had been one of the first formally trained teachers in the country and had been sent to report to his new school some 470 miles away. He still kept his official pass, written in red ink in Mongol script, which instructed each staging post to provide him with food and shelter, a guide and horses free of charge. ‘The system worked well,’ he told me. ‘The rich families in each area took it in turns to provide the horses at the staging posts. It was a matter of pride for them. In those days we still had the bukhia, the specialist post-riders. They were the strongest riders of all, hand-picked, always young men, very fit and strong. Usually they came from rather poor families as the work was very, very hard. With important government messages they would gallop from station to station, not taking any rest breaks and not even touching the ground at the changeover, but jumping from one horse to the next. Because of the physical strain of their work, they wore the bandages that Marco Polo wrote a
bout, wrapping leather or cloth belts around their bodies so tightly that they could stay upright in the saddle for day after day.’ Our expedition did not intend to gallop across Mongolia at such a breakneck pace, but we did plan to change our horses relay by relay in the manner of medieval travellers carrying the imperial paiza. Our staging posts would be the smaller administrative centres, the so-called somon centres which were essentially the administrative headquarters of the agricultural communes, westward from Karakorum along the old imperial routeway. Ariunbold was supposed to have visited each somon centre and made the right arrangements so that in theory they were ready to provide us with two guides and a change of horses as we travelled across country.
Emerging from the monastery with our remounts, we must have looked more like a small contingent of Genghis Khan’s army than relay riders, because our guides insisted on bringing along the entire herd of at least 100 spare horses, including several mares with foals. Once again we turned right for luck and this time, after making half the circuit of the outer wall, headed for a landmark that I had specially requested that we should visit - the largest and most impressive relic of the days when Karakorum had been the centre of the Mongol world empire. This was the statue of a massive stone tortoise carved of granite and set in open land about half a mile to the north-west. Into a slot in the tortoise’s back had once fitted a stone tablet, its text proclaiming the Great Khan’s edicts or, according to another theory, a charm against flooding. Now the stele is gone, and the back and head of the stone tortoise were heaped up with small pebbles balanced there by Mongols as an offering to the spirits of the place. According to the Russian archaeologists the tortoise had been one of a pair which had been standing on each side of the main gateway into the town of Karakorum when Rubruck arrived.
Rubruck found Karakorum town disappointingly small for what was effectively the capital of the world. It was no bigger than the suburb of Saint-Denis in Paris, he wrote, yet there were so many courtiers that 105 cartloads of drink had to be hauled to supply the Khakhan’s guests at a single banquet. Abutting the town and the sole reason for its existence was the royal enclave, protected by its own triple wall. Here Rubruck did find something to gape at. Dominating the imperial grounds was a magnificent pavilion standing on a raised mound of beaten earth. The interior, he reported, was like a huge church with a middle nave between rows of pillars. Visitors entered through one of three doors on the southern side, and found themselves looking down the length of the great hall to the imperial dais at the far end. There sat the Great Khan in magnificent state on a spotted panther skin. To his right his son and brothers occupied pews lifted up to form a sort of balcony, and opposite them, on the Khan’s left, were similar elevated seats for his wives and the palace women. Access to the Khan’s throne platform was by two stairways, up which climbed the imperial butler carrying the imperial drinking goblets, because the entire pavilion was really no more than a huge banqueting hall. The Great Khan, who remained a nomad, used it only twice a year as he passed by Karakorum on his annual migration between the seasonal grazing lands. The Russian excavations revealed that the pavilion was very grand, measuring 165 by 135 feet, its floor covered with light green glazed tiles, and the colonnades rested on granite bases were painted and lacquered. The main item of furniture was so curious and splendid that its fame had spread as far as Persia. It was an ornate contrivance devised by a French jeweller who had been captured in Hungary and now lived in Karakorum, and it was placed near the main entrance. In the shape of a tree, everything was made of solid silver - leaves, branches, fruit, trunk. It was a human-powered drinks dispenser. At its base were four silver lions which gushed out white mare’s milk, while above them four branches decorated with hollow curling serpents of silver were ready to spew forth wine, distilled mare’s milk, mead or Chinese rice wine. When these drinks were needed, the chief steward signalled to a man crouching inside the gadget, who puffed into a tube that led to a mechanical angel at the top of the tree. The angel raised a trumpet and sounded a note. This was the signal for the palace staff, who were standing ready outside the hall, to pour the different drinks into their respective conduits so that the pipes of the tree could deliver their drinks, which were caught in silver basins.
William the goldsmith from Paris was by no means the only Westerner living in Karakorum at the time. Attached to the imperial court was all the human flotsam swept up in the successful Mongol military campaigns across half the world -prisoners of war, slaves, mercenaries, interpreters. From Europe Rubruck met Russians, Hungarians, Georgians and Armenians, and what with Chinese merchants, Tibetan priests, Arab and Persian traders, and Central Asian envoys, they turned Karakorum into an international rendezvous where Rubruck was just one of many foreign visitors. He excited attention only when, as a friar, he insisted on walking about barefoot. In the cruel Mongolian climate, this caused some surprised comment. But as Rubruck himself confessed, the weather eventually got so bitterly cold that he feared he would damage his feet irreparably and so took to wearing warm footwear like everyone else.
With our 100 horses we circled the enigmatically smiling stone tortoise for more good fortune: Paul and myself, Ariunbold, Gerel, who because of pressure of work was able to ride with us only for the first day, and the three leathery herdsmen-guides. Bayar and Doc had gone on ahead with the entourage of friends and well-wishers to our first staging post. The other permanent member of our team was Delger Saihan, a young man who had been looking after the gift horses near Karakorum. Paul and I immediately recognised him from our earlier ride to Burkhan Khaldun, where Delger had been one of the youngest and most active herdsman volunteers, full of the energy of youth and a tireless worker. His name meant ‘Broad Good’ and he was only 17 years old, (by Mongol count, 18, for the Mongols consider an extra year in the womb as part of a human life) though he looked barely 15. His father now lived in Ulaan Baatar but Delger had been brought up in the countryside by his grandmother. Gerel and Ariunbold had hired him to care for the expedition’s small squad of gift horses, though the animals we would borrow at the relay stations were to be the responsibility of the herder-guides. With his rumpled del, runny nose, grubby face and smelling of horse, Delger could have been a feckless and cheery stable lad anywhere in the world.
What with arriving late at Karakorum for the departure ceremony, collecting our remounts, recovering from hangovers, and drying out the drenched equipment, it was not until the following morning, 18 July, that we moved onward, heading west towards the first somon centre where we would change our relay horses. Once again we were behind schedule, and so once again we rode off at a tearaway pace. But this time, instead of travelling through the frozen brown scenery of the Hentei in late May, we were entering the Hangay mountain massif of central Mongolia at the beginning of the summer, and the contrast could not have been greater. Now the weather was like an English spring day, and the countryside was a vivid green and carpeted with millions upon millions of wild flowers. It seemed that nature was thrusting with maximum effort to grow, flourish and mature in the brief space of a Mongolian growing season. The explosion of blossom was so overwhelming that the flowers would have seemed vulgar and overdone but for the fact that they had seeded themselves naturally and were in proportion to the sheer scale of the landscape. The flowers grew in colonies so that there were solid blocks of different colours, from bright yellow to purple, with patches of pale violet and occasional dark red. When we were not riding across this extravaganza, the horses’ hooves sank into the lush spring grass or kicked up the smells of mint and thyme. Beatrix Bulstrode had caught the glory of similar countryside when describing her ride into Urga: ‘range upon range of mountains disclosed themselves as we ascended among a perfect wilderness of flowers. Peonies, roses and delphiniums, Japanese anemones, blue columbines, red and yellow lilies - a background of dark pine forest, and away in the distance blue mountains beneath a canopy of soft masses of rolling clouds.’
We began by riding up a long a
nd well-favoured valley, where clusters of three or four gers were placed at intervals along the edge of the river. Floodwater had overflowed the banks to make backwaters and temporary ponds. Thunderclouds drifted across the sky, and whenever the shafts of sunlight broke through, the flocks of sheep glowed a bright white against the green pasture. The herds of horses beside every ger were sleek and glossy, and every animal had its head down and was gorging itself on the lush summer grass as if frantically compensating for the long winter famine. There were young animals everywhere - foals, calves, lambs, and the wild Siberian cranes which scurried out of our path like oversize guinea fowl, followed by their young broods. When we splashed across a small stream, wild ducklings were ushered clear by their alarmed parents.
At first the ride was exciting and spectacular. There was the constant rumble of 100 sets of hooves, the shouts of the herdsmen, the mob of horses surging forward, the flow of animals shifting and changing their positions, and the sheer exhilaration of riding at a fast pace across such unspoiled countryside. As the sides of the valley closed in, steep crags of deeply fissured rock rose to our left. Large birds of prey perched on the rocks, and kites wheeled over the river which, now that it was more constricted, was flowing in a dangerous flood. Whenever a horse tried to approach the bank, the herdsmen-guides galloped up and drove it back, for any animal that slipped into the water would have drowned.
Sure enough, after three or four hours, the well-remembered riding aches and pains set in. First the knees began to hurt, then the base of the spine and finally the ribs. Each source of pain became more and more insistent, however much you changed position in the saddle. The hammering, jarring, flat run of the Mongol horses was as excruciating as ever, and the five-minute rest breaks offered very little respite. I understood why the Mongol dispatch riders had found it necessary to strap up their bodies in tight bandages, and I could not help noticing that our gift horses brought from the Hentei were the laggards among the herd. There were five of them and they ran together as a group, always at the back, for they were slower and more clumsy than the rest. They were an ugly gang. Two had milky eyes, one was definitely elderly, and not one of them could be described as well-proportioned.
