In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  It was now six days since we had ridden out of the great gate of Erdenzu’s lamasery and we were crossing the most favoured part of Mongolia. Nowhere else is more suited for horse-raising than the lush valleys of the Hangay in high summer. The pasture is rich, the forests provide timber, and the rivers and streams offer abundant water. We found that every valley had its scattering of gers tucked away in some favoured south-facing glen, with a herd of mares and foals grazing contentedly nearby. The herders regarded this interval of ease in their hard lives as a god-given privilege. Sometimes we eavesdropped on a herdsman clear across the valley, singing and hallooing at the top of his voice from sheer joy as he rode flat out over the summer pasture. He might have been going somewhere with a purpose, but just as often, when he came in sight, he was simply tearing across the superb countryside for the sheer pleasure of being alive in such wonderful surroundings and feeling his horse galloping away beneath him. Such moments explained why, despite its grim climate and utter isolation, the Mongolian herdsmen are so intensely proud of their land. It was inconceivable to them that anywhere else could be as beautiful or as bountiful as the mountain pastures in high summer.

  The renaissance of Genghis Khan was here, even among these remote herding people. I was surprised to see that there were arats in the heart of the Hangay who wore cap buttons and badges bearing the image of Genghis Khan. They had moved with their families and flocks and herds into regions where they probably would not see a permanent dwelling for three or four months. Yet they were sporting the image of Genghis Khan. Where they had obtained their Genghis Khan buttons was impossible to learn. When asked, they just said that they had seen someone wearing the same badge and managed to get one for themselves. After half a century of official obscurity Genghis Khan seemed to be spreading not just a symbol of national identity, but deep in the countryside his image had the quality of a good-luck charm.

  The lives of the herder families could be read in their collections of faded black and white photographs. Every ger had them, framed and displayed over the chests of drawers at the back of the ger. Here were the obligatory portraits of the father and mother, the picture of the school class in the somon centre, perhaps a snapshot taken of one of the children dressed up as a jockey in the Naadam races, and maybe a picture from a well-remembered visit to Ulaan Baatar. The latter would usually have been taken in the great central square, with the Sukhebaatar statue in the background, by the portrait photographers who lined up with their old-fashioned wooden tripods and ancient cameras waiting for the country visitors. But the most frequent photograph of all was the picture taken during army service. Sometimes it was a self-conscious studio portrait of the young man dressed up in his private’s uniform, but just as often it was the picture taken on the day he came home on his first leave. Still dressed in his uniform, he would be mounted proudly on one of the family horses.

  The only other decoration inside the gers, apart from the painted colours of the chests and the scroll patterns on the slim pillars holding up the roof wheel, were hanging embroideries. They were suspended over the beds and around the walls. Simple outlines of naïve art, they showed animals and human figures, flowers and uncomplicated patterns, stitched in bright colours on plain white backgrounds. The most frequent subject was horses - horses running, horses tethered, foals prancing. Even the Mongol women who chose the designs and stitched the pictures gave pride of place to horses.

  All the next day we climbed, first along the narrow gorge called the Valley of the White Stallion, and when that route petered out against a steep hillside, we turned aside and scrambled up a mountain path until we were above the tree-line. Because the paths were narrow, we usually rode in a long, strung-out line, bunching together only on the valley floors. Mostly we rode in silence, occupied with our own thoughts, and aware that every evening there would be ample time to discuss the day’s events. Occasionally Paul darted ahead, looking for a vantage point for his photography, and Delger was always hurtling back and forth, roaring and whistling at his gang of gift horses to make them move along and stay on track. Ariunbold had faded into the background and made little impression, while Bayar kept going with his usual high spirits, clowning and giving impersonations of drunken arats swaying in the saddle. Our two herder-guides insisted that we stopped regularly to rest the horses, and at least twice a day they changed the pack-animals, loading the baggage on to fresh mounts. Our march had finally settled down into some sort of routine, broken only when a new packhorse bolted. By bad luck the animal was carrying on top of its load the metal chimney pipes for our stove, and these tumbled to the ground with loud clangs that frightened all the other pack-ponies. They disappeared at a panicked gallop into the trees, pursued by Delger waving his goad like Don Quixote’s lance and cursing vehemently, but obviously glad of a little excitement.

  We had crossed the watershed by late afternoon and began descending the far mountainside cautiously. It was so steep and treacherous that when a clumsy gift horse lost its footing it rolled down the slope for 10 yards before scrambling back to its feet. At the base of the hill we came across a single ger, set at what was clearly the upper limit of summer pasture. It was occupied by a young couple so poor that all they owned was the smallest size of ger, its canvas cover ripped and faded, a dented stove, a bed and two wooden cases. They possessed no other furniture, no mirror, no wall hangings, and the earth floor was bare. Yet they already had three children under the age of 3, and the site was so high that the local stream was still banked with hard blue ice in late July.

  Even here we were expected to spend a few polite moments and accept three bowls of ayrag. Then we descended the valley for another twenty minutes and found a much more prosperous family where the wife, a huge bustling laughing woman who clearly dominated her family, directed us to a small ger which turned out to be used only for cooking and storage of food. There she lit the stove and cooked us a series of buttery chapattis, spread with clotted cream, and again it seemed to Paul and me that Mongol cooking did have its compensations. Her husband volunteered to come with us for the next few miles, saying that the rivers were badly flooded and the fords were dangerous. When Baayar mentioned that we would be camping out that evening and had very little food, the wife sent us on our way with a small metal churn of liquid cream which the herdsmen lashed on top of the packs. Unfortunately the canteen lacked a top, and although the herdsmen tried to seal it with a strip of cloth, the jiggling motion of the pack-pony’s trot meant that an occasional spray of cream flipped out and spattered anyone close by. It was a measure of the jerky motion of a Mongol pony’s gait that when we set up camp two hours later we discovered that the trotting motion had turned the cream to solid butter.

  The Drunkard also managed to locate a small plastic jerrycan and get it filled with a gallon of shimiin arkhi. He clasped it to his bosom as he rode, and kept on beckoning us to share his good fortune by taking swigs until finally the Quiet Man succumbed to the temptation. Once we had waded the hazardous fords and were back on a level valley floor, he and our local guide rode in line abreast with Delger and the Drunkard, passing the jerrycan up and down the line and chatting amiably until the Drunkard, who was already half-pickled, was totally inebriated. Our local guide pointed out the next high pass we should cross and turned back for home, but we had left our attempt too late. Halfway up the mountain it became evident that the horses were too tired to make the long climb and we would find ourselves in the wilderness after dark. So we turned round, descended back down the mountain and found ourselves a rather indifferent campsite on a squelching slope where two tarns emerged from the rocks.

  Looking back down the valley we had travelled, we had a view that extended uninterrupted for at least 15 miles. Yet there was no sign of human life, not a single ger or domesticated animal. We were in one among scores of valleys in the Hangay, and the sense of isolation and emptiness was overwhelming. Overhead a griffon vulture was motionless in the sky as it scanned the ground for carrion. Earlier
we had ridden past a flock of these scavengers ripping the bloody remains of a dead calf. Each bird stood as tall as a man’s chest and had a 12-foot wingspan. Yet in that vast landscape even these huge creatures seemed insignificant.

  That evening Paul and I tried to intercept Bayar’s cooking. The Doc had discovered wild onions earlier in the afternoon, identifying them by their bright purple blossoms, and we had dug up at least two dozen bulbs, as well as gathering another couple of pounds of small round mushrooms. Paul and I borrowed the pot and some newly churned butter, and fried onions and mushrooms ready for Bayar’s usual mutton stew. It was another disappointment. The onions were stringy and tasteless, and the mushrooms disappeared altogether once they had been added to the mutton stew. Hopefully spooning out what I took to be a solitary and succulent mushroom bobbing to the surface, I found myself eating, once again, a blob of soft fat from the tail of the inevitable sheep. But by then I found myself quite fond of the taste and texture.

  10 - Cattle-herders

  On the brow of the pass, which we reached at 11 the next morning, stood the biggest obo we had yet seen. There must have been about 40 tons of small rocks and stones heaped up in a great pile by passers-by thankful to have toiled up to the end of their climb. Adding a stone to an obo or walking in a circle respectfully around it assisted the remission of sins and led towards a better reincarnation, according to Buddhist belief. Years of human effort and piety were represented in that untidy mass of rock, which continued to accumulate, and its sheer size and permanence made a mockery of the scheme once fostered by Party activists that all obos in Mongolia should be dismantled and levelled as they were objects of empty superstition. Also you could see why the place was so significant to travellers that they had wished to raise a monument there. We had come to a natural dividing line in the land. After we had ridden our horses in a clockwise circle around the cairn, we paused to rest the animals and, looking back, saw how we had crossed a country of deep narrow valleys and forested mountains. Ahead there were no more trees. From where we stood the land descended in a series of gradual folds with the higher slopes covered only with rough grazing or bare screes of broken shale. Here and there layers of harder rock thrust out as jagged ledges or made coxcombs on the skyline. Below us the pasture on the valley floors was much paler than before, insipid and dotted with round boulders. This was a landscape harsher and more barren than the better-favoured central Hangay, and in the furthest distance where the hills ended lay the beginning of the Great Mongolian Desert.

  As if to emphasise the more austere character of the countryside, the first ger we reached after we had ridden downslope for 3 or 4 miles was a truly melancholy place. A man and his four small children were living in very reduced circumstances. There was no colour in the ger, no decoration, only a functional collection of pots and pans, a stove and a few blankets on the bedsteads. The children were quiet and spiritless. They stood staring at us as though in mild shock, showing little animation. ‘Their mother died recently,’ the Doc explained in a low voice. ‘The family unit is still together, but they are living through very difficult times. Unless the father finds another woman quickly, he will not be able to continue this way of life. He will have to leave the children with their grandparents and go to the city to get work, or maybe stay in the local somon centre as a labourer. A herdsman must have a wife to share the daily tasks. Without a woman to help, he cannot make his living.’ It was a bleak statement of the knife-edge existence of the poorer arat.

  We found that we were passing from the land of the Horse-herders to the land of the Cattle-herders. The valley of the Wild Yellow River which we were now following opened into wide skimpy grassland. Here, instead of one or two gers tucked away in secluded glens with their horse-herds, we came across ten or twelve gers at a time, set up beside the track. Grazing beside these hamlets were yaks and hainags, black and white cross-breeds between yak and Central Asian oxen, which kept the former’s fly swat tail and long hairy fringe on the belly, but added the latter’s extra size and better milk yield. The hainag bulls with their shaggy heads, hump shoulders, wide horns and stupid glare looked very like three-quarter-sized bison living on the prairie, and were very skittish for such ungainly animals. At the last moment, as we rode up to them, they would react in fright as if they had been absentmindedly thinking of something else and had only just noticed our presence. They would suddenly leap into motion, looking utterly ridiculous, huge lumps of beef cavorting away in a see-saw gallop, their tails stuck out horizontally, snorting noisily as their fur pelmets swayed from side to side.

  The gers of the cattle-breeders were bigger and more solidly furnished than the felt tents of the horse-herders, and it was clear that the cattle-men did not shift them so readily. Outside their gers stood motorbikes, as well as the favourite pony hobbled and waiting to be ridden. I eyed the ponies enviously for they were the pick of the local horseflesh, neater and more alert than our collection of part-worn nags. Indeed one of our gift horses was now limping steadily. We had been obliged to use it as a pack-pony and, coming down the obo hill, the animal must have strained a shoulder muscle. We changed the packs to a remount, but I began to wonder how much longer we could continue without a proper stop-over to rest and recuperate our feeble animals. I also realised that we had seen the best of the Hangay, Mongolia’s most beautiful scenery by reputation, and feared that our daily forward slog was becoming repetitive without being particularly instructive. Each day was much like the last. We had established a steady routine of breakfast, then take down the tent, load the pack-horses, saddle up, ride, ride, and ride, with stop-overs at hospitable gers, until we were ready to set up camp again eight or ten hours later. While it was important to Ariunbold that he traverse the entire country, I knew that there was so much more to see and research in Mongolia that Paul and I might be using our time more wisely. Behind this sense of growing frustration was the knowledge that Ariunbold had no real idea how long it would take us to reach the far west of Mongolia. He was still convinced that we would be near the Soviet border in another three weeks, but he was not allowing for rest days for the horses or delays due to bad weather or mishaps. It was more realistic to suppose that he would reach his winter quarters some time in early September, and by then the snow would impede the travel and research that I hoped to do among the tribal peoples of the higher ranges of Altai, some of whom had not been visited by a Westerner in their entire lives.

  For our afternoon meal we were invited into the largest and most prosperous-looking ger of the cattle-herders. The owner was more enterprising than most of his colleagues because he had harvested some of the bountiful crop of wild mushrooms and left them to dry on the roof, the only time we ever saw such an initiative. Courteously he offered us a smoke from his long-stemmed pipe. It was 2 feet long and the tiny bowl could not have held more than half a cigarette’s worth of tobacco. By now one had learned to anticipate the correct formalities. I accepted the proffered pipe with right hand outstretched, admired the workmanship and took a symbolic puff, then passed it back while holding my right elbow in my left hand. Our host then smoked contentedly while we waited for the meal to be prepared. Apparently we would have dried rather than fresh mutton, but the taste proved to be much the same as always. Only the lumps of dried fat were different. They had a pleasantly smoky flavour if you could ignore the unfortunate fact that they bobbed and twirled on top of the boiling broth like eyeballs.

  Ariunbold was becoming a bore and an embarrassment. He had now taken to posturing in front of the herdsmen. As a rule when we arrived at a hamlet, he would stride self-importantly into the main ger, settle himself in the place of leading guest, and look around in lordly fashion waiting to be served. Then, as soon as the herdsmen had arrived to meet the strangers, he would launch into a speech about the grandiose purpose of his mission, and produce his knickknacks, the medals and paizas, and hand them round to be admired. I was reminded of a medieval pardoner selling false indulgences and fake religious
mementoes to gullible peasants. The herdsmen were, by and large, unsophisticated and credulous, and they were usually impressed. The more Ariunbold behaved like this, the more uncomfortable I became, although I could not explain why. I knew that there was something wrong and suspected that Ariunbold was somehow duping the herdsmen. The Doc confirmed my fears. Apparently Ariunbold was telling his listeners that he was on his way by horse to Europe and would soon be famous. He was also on the scrounge, always angling for free supplies and never offering to pay for anything. Doc found this constant cadging as distasteful and demeaning as I did, and he too remarked how Ariunbold seemed to be living in a puffed-up delusion of a dream world. In the evening when we halted to make camp, Ariunbold would do no work but stand around idly and wait for everyone else to erect the tent. Then, once the tent was up, he would order Delger, whom he began to treat like a servant, to carry in his saddle-bags, spread out his sleeping-bag, and lie or sit waiting for the meal to be prepared. He never cooked and very rarely cleaned up or offered to help.

  His laziness in practical daily chores would have mattered less if he had been making any contribution by way of leadership or initiative. But here he was a bungler. He had a detailed Soviet army map of the region, and from time to time would spread it out and pore over it portentously. These map-reading sessions seemed oddly inconclusive, and after a few days I realised that Ariunbold - a product of that elite Higher Party School - did not know how to read a map properly and was largely play-acting. That afternoon I happened to suggest to him that if our two guides wanted to go home early to their families, we could manage to find our way to the next somon centre by ourselves. We could, I told Ariunbold, go across country simply by following the map. Ariunbold shot me a look of pure venom. ‘Only a Westerner would say that’, he said. ‘In Mongolia it is impossible to find your way without a guide. Mongolia is different.’ I was sure that he genuinely believed it. He was one of those unhappy people who have been promoted to a precarious position beyond the scope of their intelligence or their training. Ariunbold feared being made a fool of, and resented his own limitations. The result was that he became sullen, withdrawn and stubborn, and did not seek help which would have been given him. Each day he would go off by himself and try to mark in the day’s progress on the map in pencil. Always he drew the line wrongly. It was either in the wrong place, too short or too long, and he was so churlish about accepting any correction that eventually it was easier to ignore him and his map altogether. Paul was growing more and more exasperated with him, but I still felt strongly that we should respect our position as observers, and not interfere. And this chimed in with the attitude of the other Mongols - as usual they were phlegmatic and patient, and simply got on with their daily chores.