In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Four hours later I awoke and gazed up at the splendid multi-coloured roof of the yurt. Daylight was leaking in through cracks around the door and under the skirt of the yurt, and the light seemed unusually bright and clear. The ribs of the tall roof were more slender and longer than the roof spokes in a Mongol ger, and they were creaking and shifting in a strong wind like the ribs of a lightly built ship. It was bitterly cold. The elderly Kazakh jeep driver was fast asleep right against me. He was a most helpful and excellent guide, who seemed to have friends in all the Kazakh yurts, but now he was snoring loudly. Also he had bad breath. So I eased myself out of the human heap, dragged on my boots, and walked quietly to the wooden door to look out. I pushed open the door a fraction, and halted.

  Outside the world was dazzling white. Now I knew why the chinks of light filtering into the yurt had been so bright. An early blizzard had swept into the high Altai during the night, and dropped 3 or 4 inches of snow. It said something for the efficient design of a Kazakh yurt that the weather change had gone virtually undetected as we slept. Thirty yards away a herd of yaks bunched miserably together to avoid the wind. The snow had frozen on their long coats like poorly applied icing sugar. The black pelts of the snuffling animals were in stark contrast to the brilliant white of the fresh snow. Beyond the herd the valley swept away to a clear blue sky with thin trails of high cirrus cloud. Little flurries of snow crystals skittered over the snowfield like wisps of white steam. Here we were, in the first week of August, and yet snow had already come to the high Altai. It was the first warning to the nomads that they should begin to plan their move with their flocks and herds to lower ground. Last night it had been difficult to gauge just how high we had come in the darkness. But now, gazing across the gleaming snow, it really did feel that we were on the gable end of Central Asia. Camran’s tent was so far up the valley that we were almost at the watershed. Next to us a great rock outcrop reared up like a final massive mountain pivot. Last evening Camran had pointed out two small pinpricks of light to the west. ‘Russians’, he had said. We were, he estimated, just a couple of miles from the Soviet border. Yet no one in authority in Mongolia knew where we were, nor seemed to care. This was Kazakh land, and the Kazakh nomads came and went as they wished.

  There was another yurt pitched a short distance away downslope, and a third felt tent against the side of the valley about a quarter of a mile off. During the next half-hour the Kazakh women began to emerge from them, and it was clear that an early snowfall would make no difference whatsoever to their daily chores. The women had muffled themselves in heavy felt boots and thick padded coats, and wore large woollen scarves pulled tight around their heads. They pummelled and pushed the unhappy yaks to their tether lines, and tied them up for milking. The wind keened past, whipping up little spirals of snow and lifting a light haze of snow crystals which streamed past the women at their work. Seated on small stools, they bowed their heads to keep the snow from their eyes and pushed their heads into the snowy flanks of the animals for shelter, and began to milk with their bare hands. There was a sharp cold in the air, and an elderly shepherd came down from the furthest felt tent, and began to trudge towards me. He was dressed in what I took to be the standard Kazakh coat, a long black corduroy overcoat with wide skirts that reached down to his heels. It was padded to keep out the wind, and on his head he wore the traditional Kazakh hat. The original bright crimson silk exterior had faded to a well-worn cherry pink. Two side flaps hung to his collar to keep his ears warm, and a long, square-cut rear flap protected his neck. The entire hat was lined with the fur from the legs of foxes, hand-stitched in bands to make a meticulous striped effect. The old shepherd was gaunt and black against the snow, and his flock must have drifted away during the night blizzard for the old man trudged off stoically across the wide snowfield to seek out his animals, his silhouette growing smaller and smaller in that huge sweep of land.

  Camran pushed out of the red-painted yurt door behind me. He too was dressed in long black corduroy coat and scarlet hat, and a little spray of brown and dun feathers sprouted jauntily from the crown of his winter cap. They were owl feathers, a sign of good luck. He carried a saddle across his arm, and a bridle, and was on his way to his horse, which he had left overnight tied to a peg on a distant slope. Then he would ride across the ridge and retrieve his small horse-herd and bring them back across the mountain to be closer to the yurt. Later I saw him riding down the scree, driving about a dozen Kazakh horses before him. They were very little different from the Mongol horses, perhaps a little rangier and finer boned.

  In the early afternoon, with the snow beginning to melt, two men on horseback came riding up from the Kazakh yurts in the lower valley. They had heard about our visit to Camran, and were coming to pay their respects and to gossip with Hojanias. They had also heard that I had been asking if there were any eagle hunters in the valley, and so each man made a splendid sight as he came cantering across the snow, carrying on his right arm a huge mountain eagle.

  Carpini, Rubruck, Marco Polo - all the medieval travellers to the Mongol lands had noted the Mongols’ passion for falconry. According to The Secret History of the Mongols it was how Yesugei the Brave, Genghis Khan’s father, had loved to hunt in the valleys by Burkhan Khaldun, and falconry was an abiding passion of the Khakhans. The famous ‘pleasure dome’ of Xanadu was surrounded by a nature park where Kubilai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, loved to go hawking, and as Rubruck had said about his Mongol hosts:

  they have an abundance of gerfalcons which they uniformly carry on the right hand, and they always put a little thong around the falcon’s neck which hangs down in the middle of his chest. When they cast him at the prey, they use this with the left hand to hold the falcon’s head and chest at a downward angle, so that he is not hurled back by the wind or carried upwards.

  During the interview with Rubruck, Khakhan Möngke had been caressing a favourite hunting bird, and when foreign ambassadors visited Karakorum they knew that the most pleasing and reliable gifts to bring were gerfalcons for the royal mews.

  Mongolia still swarms with birds of prey. Across the steppe and in the Hangay and Hentei we had seen hundreds of wild falcons and hawks thriving in the wilds. Kites swooped over our tents looking for scraps, and the mountains are the home for Mongolian mountain eagles similar to the golden eagle of the West. The semi-official Mongolian directory even lists the peregrine falcon as a ‘cosmopolitan species’ along with rat, mouse, sparrow and house-fly. But today the Mongols themselves have given up falconry, and it is left to the Kazakhs to carry on the tradition.

  Their hunting eagles were majestic. Each bird was as big as a man’s torso and weighed 13 or 14 pounds. They were so heavy that the riders used small wooden props reaching up from the saddle to support the carrying arm with its massive padded gauntlet. The hooded eagles swayed easily to the rhythm of the riders, twisting their heads to face any new sound. As the riders dismounted, the eagles shifted their stance and raised their wings to maintain their balance. Their wingspan was 5 or 6 feet, and they gave thin, high-pitched screeches. Camran now reappeared on foot. He too brought his eagle, which he had left for the night sitting on a nearby rock, and he gestured that I might like to hold it. I put on a heavy gauntlet and the superb bird was handed over. I could feel the powerful grip of the huge claws through the heavy padding of the glove, and Camran took my free left hand and brought it across so I could appreciate the massively muscled thighs of the bird. Just a foot away from my face the eagle turned its head nervously, this way and that, ducking and bobbing its head with its cruelly curved beak, a perfect stabbing and tearing weapon. The great bird was aware that he was riding on the arm of a stranger, and I was relieved that it was blind behind its hood.

  The Kazakhs were immensely proud of their eagles, and although the hunting season did not start until October the birds were in peak condition. In the valley, they said, there were at least twenty men who owned hunting eagles, and more eagle hunters could be found in every oth
er Altai group. In the autumn the Kazakhs would begin their hunting forays, riding out into the frozen land with their eagles on their arms in search of the eagle’s natural prey. For the most part the eagles would be flown at fox and wolf, but the very bravest birds had been known to attack snow leopard and griffon.

  Camran and the other eagle hunters were modest about their skills. It was not difficult to train an eagle, they said. The instinct of the birds was to hunt, and with patience and careful handling the mountain eagles were soon accustomed to hunt in company with humans. The owners took their birds from their nests as fledglings and then reared them by hand. As soon as they were strong enough, they were introduced to prey by being flown against rabbits. After that, they were ready. It all sounded far too easy, and I asked if there was any part of hunting with eagles which was difficult. To catch a fully grown wild eagle, Camran replied, that did take skill and cunning, but it was worth the effort. The wild eagles made better and braver hunters than those birds which had been raised from fledglings because they had learned to take their prey in the wild. I asked him how long it took to train a wild eagle to the hunt. Again Camran was quietly unassuming. About a week or ten days, he answered.

  The Kazakhs loved their eagles and treated them well, and yet I could not help regretting that these magnificent birds should be restrained, even though they were well cared for and fed. Without knowing it, Camran responded to the thought. He was stroking his own eagle, preening its feathers. The eagle had its hood removed and was prancing on his arm and flapping its wings, now and again screeching its high piping call. ‘This eagle is three years old’, Camran said. ‘I hope that it will hunt with me for many years, but if it gets tired I will release it early back into the mountains. When eagles grow old or if they are weary, we let them return to the mountains to live as free creatures.’

  14 - The Black Death

  Typically, Genghis Khan perceived a more practical use for Mongol hunting skills. Sweeps by teams of hunters had always given the Mongols an important supply of extra meat. On the steppe grazed deer of different species - gazelle, saiga with its strange bulbous nose, and musk deer. Also there were herds of kulan or wild asses whose flesh was edible and which were just as fleet of foot and difficult to approach. Individual hunters could stalk their prey or lie in ambush by the water-holes, but the most effective method was the battue, or driven hunt. ‘They obtain a large proportion of their food by the chase’, Rubruck noted. ‘When they intend to hunt wild animals, they gather in great numbers and surround the area where they know wild beasts are to be found, gradually converging until the animals are enclosed in the middle of a kind of circle; then they shoot them with their arrows.’

  Genghis Khan turned these small-scale battues into military training exercises on a monumental scale, in which every adult male was expected to take part as a form of war training. In advance of the operation, mounted scouts identified the size and position of the game-herds, and a master huntsman selected an eventual killing ground which might be hundreds of miles away from the starting point, and marked it. Then the Mongol men were sent in their military units to form a far-flung cordon up to 75 miles in length, which swept across the country flushing out every living creature and driving the mass of animals before it. Coordination and discipline had to be perfect. Foxes and even wolves were considered fair game and caught up in the drive, and the sweep might continue for weeks or even months, with sentries maintaining watch at night so that the wild animals did not slip out of the trap. A trooper who allowed even a single hare to double back and escape through the cordon was severely punished. Signals, scouting, concealment, coordinated field manoeuvres, speed of movement were all rehearsed and improved. On the battlefield the value of the Mongol soldier was much more than his endurance or personal courage. It was the extraordinary extent to which he was able to coordinate his efforts with his comrades and operate as part of an integrated team, and this ability was rehearsed again and again during the battue. Gradually the cordon drove the animals towards the final killing ground where the Khakhan himself shot the first arrow into the mass of panic-struck animals, and this was the signal for the troopers to join in the slaughter. Echoing the Kazakh respect for their eagles’ freedom, the Mongols did not kill every animal in the trap. When the Khakhan judged that enough animals had died, he gave the order for the arrow fire to stop, and the cordon opened so that the surviving game was allowed to escape back into the wild.

  According to The Secret History, among the Mongol tribes living near Burkhan Khaldun at the time of Genghis Khan’s rise to power was a people called the Orianghai. Rubruck head about them as the people who strapped polished bones on their feet to skate or ski across the ice and snow of their remote fastness. Today the Orianghai represent only 1 per cent of the population of Mongolia, and they are chiefly renowned for their skill as traditional singers and dancers. Their singing, called hoomi singing, is eerie. Technically classified as split-tone, it is usually performed by men, for it requires considerable muscular strength. The sounds are altered by varying the shapes of the mouth cavity, throat, chest and abdomen to produce several voices simultaneously which are said to imitate the murmuring of streams and the sounds of wind in the mountains. Their frenzied dancing is done with a rapid shaking of the arms and shoulders. Groups of semi-nomadic Orianghai live in Bayan Olgei province alongside the Kazakh, and in response to my request our Kazakh jeep driver promised that he would take Paul, Doc and myself to an Orianghai camp not far from the Chinese frontier.

  He drove us across some of the most unpromising terrain that we had yet seen in the Altai. After leaving the Kazakh eagle hunters and dropping Hojanias back at his home, we embarked on a long, slow climb through a succession of stony valleys. The rock was a dismal slate colour, and where it did not make jagged cliffs it had weathered down into sharp-edged pebbles which grated under the bald tyres of the jeep. Travelling in a rickety jeep was less romantic than by horse, but it did mean that we could scour the countryside more effectively looking for the Orianghai, who proved to be elusive. At the best of times the region must have been inhospitable, but now there was no sign of life, only of death. Where our driver had expected to find Orianghai, not a single nomad was to be seen. Instead, around a rocky outcrop on the hillside, there lay the carcasses of fifteen or twenty sheep, lying in a neat swathe where they had collapsed and died. They might have been killed by disease, but the total emptiness of the valley and the bare slopes told another story. Mongolia’s rainfall is notoriously patchy, and whereas the Kazakhs with Camran had received a snowfall, here the valleys were in the grip of a severe drought. Our driver presumed that the Orianghai must have retreated away from their dying pastures and sought fresh grass in the highest valleys, so we bumped forward.

  Eventually we climbed to a high ridge and on the far side found ourselves looking down into a broad natural bowl. The place was so bare that we might as well have been looking down into the crater of an extinct volcano. The dark grey, steep sides of the bowl were devoid of vegetation. There was only scree and rock, and yet more slopes of sharp-edged pebbles. On the floor of the bowl a small, shallow lake was shrivelling away into a mere skin of water. A border of cracked mud showed where the water had retreated, and that the lake was less than half its usual size. Across the far side of the valley a few patches on the hillside had a faint tinge of green. At every one of these spots were clusters of cattle and horses, bunched together unnaturally as they plucked hungrily at the few blades of grass. On the slope above the animals stood half a dozen felt tents. They were not tall enough to be Kazakh yurts, so they had to be the gers of Orianghai.

  We drove down towards the small lake, passing two Orianghai herdsmen who were glumly driving a small herd of emaciated horses across the flat valley floor. We were 700 or 800 yards short of the lake when suddenly the Doc called out to the driver to stop the jeep. He did so, and the Doc told him to reverse carefully. Doc had pulled out a handkerchief and was holding it over his nose, an
d peering out anxiously over the side of the jeep. ‘Stop now! Stop!’ he called out. ‘Don’t go any further!’ He was looking down at the ground and pointing down with his free hand to what looked like a small raised mound about the size and shape of a molehill, with a hollow scooped out in the centre. At first I could not see what he was so excited about, and then noticed that there was something moving slightly in the hollow. My first reaction was that it was a dead fox because the breeze was ruffling beautiful long, reddish-orange fur. ‘A marmot! It’s dying,’ said Doc.

  I could not understand why he was so worked up. There was indeed a marmot curled up in the top of the hollow, and perhaps it was dead, or on the point of death. But marmots were commonplace. We had seen hundreds upon hundreds of them everywhere in Mongolia. They were steppe rodents about the size of a small badger which sat bolt upright when they saw us riding by, whistled a warning, and then either watched us carefully until we were at a safe distance or, if they thought we were a danger, turned and darted into the security of their deep burrows. Those marmots we surprised feeding at a distance from their bolt-holes would scuttle for safety, humping across the ground rather like seals lolloping for the safety of an air-hole on the pack ice. Colonel Prjevalski, who was a keen naturalist, had given a good description of how the tabargan, as the Mongols called it, spent its day:

  Early in the morning as soon as the sun is up, and the air is a little warmed, it issues out of its habitation and scampers about feeding on the grass, not returning to its burrow, unless disturbed, till about ten o’clock where it remains till two or three in the afternoon, when it comes out and plays and feeds until sunset. This rule is of course not without exceptions but in rainy weather they may never stir above ground although the rain may last several days in succession. The marmot is sagacious and wary, especially when it is hunted by man. Before leaving its burrow it pokes its head out, and remains half an hour in this position to assure itself of safety. Then half its body may be seen, and again it listens and looks all round, and then only comes quite out and feeds on grass. If it notices danger, however far off, it immediately makes for its burrow, sits up on its hind legs and utters a loud, prolonged whistle. Then if the object of its fears approach nearer it conceals itself again below the ground ... The usual mode of killing these animals is by lying in wait for them near the burrow, hiding before they come above ground. They are remarkably tenacious of life, and will escape to their burrows even though mortally wounded, nothing but killing them outright will secure them for the hunter.