On the Trail of Genghis Khan Page 4
It was a killing that would have consequences.
When Temujin was but nine, Yesugei was poisoned by Tatars and died. Temujin’s widowed mother, Hoelun, was abandoned by the other Borjigin families, beginning a tenuous existence in which Temujin fought with his elder kin to become head of the family, narrowly escaped violent raids, and experienced multiple spells in captivity.
Genghis Khan—whose new self-chosen title approximately translates to “grand leader of all”—had dealt with many enemies since that time. It was emblematic of how far he had come that just three years prior to the defeat of the Naimans, in 1201, he had exacted revenge on the Tatars, wiping them out as a future threat. According to various sources, male Tatars were put to the slaughter and the survivors distributed among other various tribes. And although the term Tatar has endured to the present as a general term for nomad people of the Eurasian steppe, European visitors to the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century were told that the Tatars had once been a people, but that the Mongols had conquered them.
On a personal level for Genghis, the Upper Orkhon valley must have been a gratifying vantage point from which to survey this remarkable path to ascendancy. To the north and east among the mixed forest, mountains, and steppe lay his spiritual home, where he had spent his formative years and proven his ability as a charismatic leader. Southward from the upper Orkhon stretched the Gobi Desert, which spoke more of future aspirations. It was home to various nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, including the Uighurs, from whom Genghis would eventually borrow a script for his previously illiterate tribe. Beyond all that sand and arid steppe also lay China—a land of immeasurable riches that would be the first in his sights once Mongolia had been consolidated. Genghis would eventually die in 1227, after falling from a horse during one of many campaigns to conquer his southerly neighbor.
For a shrewd leader such as Genghis Khan, though, who frequently implied that his rule was mandated by Tengri, the great god of the sky, it was the symbolic importance of conquering the upper Orkhon that would have been at the front of his mind. As long as he held sway over the Orkhon, he would have both an omnipresence among nomads that would help to keep the Mongolian tribes in unity and a strategic gateway to the corners of his growing empire.
Such was the significance of the conquest of the Naimans in the Orkhon River valley, in fact, that just two years later, in 1206, he had the confidence to declare himself the leader of the Mongols, or, more specifically, “The leader of all those who dwell in felt tents.” Steppe history is complex, but of everything I’d read, it was this line about felt tents that gave my journey its primary sense of direction and purpose. Understood in the context of the modern day, this reference would only include Mongolians and a few scattered nomads in China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and other former states of Soviet Central Asia. In the thirteenth century, however, it would have applied to the plethora of nomadic tribes that inhabited the Eurasian steppe. While the vast majority of these nomads would never have heard of Genghis Khan or the Mongol tribes at that time, the unification of the Mongols was to lay the foundation for an empire that would eventually encompass the steppe as far as the Danube and fulfill Genghis’s audacious claim to sovereignty.
Therein lay my journey: I wanted to ride from the symbolic cradle of Mongolian nomadism, where Kharkhorin still stands, through countries and cultures that shared a landmass and a common way of life. The end goal of my journey, the Danube, not only represented one of the approximate boundaries of the Mongol Empire but, more important, the very edge of the steppe, and therefore the farthest people who ever lived in felt tents.
In 1204 Genghis Khan might have been able to unite the warring tribes of Mongolia, but eight centuries later on the same land, Kathrin and I were content to successfully navigate our way out of the horse-theft valley intact. We spent the night camped hidden between the folds of some hills, waking regularly to check on our trio. At dawn the shadows, like our fears of thieves, began to retreat, but the sunrise only seemed to illuminate the scale of the task at hand.
In this first leg of the journey there lay approximately 1,400 km of steppe, desert, and mountains to the Altai Mountains in the far west of the country, and horse rustling was just one element of the greater challenge. To see out a single day safely we needed to learn to see other, less obvious threats, such as an ill-fitting saddle that could fast injure a horse. Without supplementary feed such as grain and hay, we knew one of our main tasks would be learning to recognize and search out grasses that were nutritious for the horses, not to mention learning steppe etiquette and mastering riding. Viewed in this light, the coming three months of summer were a narrow window to earn my nomad credentials. Beyond Mongolia, if I made it, I would face the less forgiving conditions of winter and the prospect of countries where nomadic life and wisdom had long been in decline.
At the heart of the steep learning curve was coming to terms with the nature of the horse. Although all Mongolian breeds are stocky animals that survive the winters by digging through the snow to find feed, they apparently fell into two broad categories. The first included horses with a calm temperament; these were known as nomkhon. The second comprised wild, untamed horses that can nevertheless tolerate humans. Two of our horses—my old white gelding, Bor, and the chestnut gelding, Sartai Zeerd (the name meant “moon crescent chestnut”), were definitely of the latter variety. Just the touch of a brush or a blanket could send them into a wild display of bucking and rearing, and pig rooting—an Australian expression that describes the behavior of a horse when it kicks out with the hind legs while keeping the head down and forelegs planted. Grooming, blanketing, and saddling each morning were therefore nerve-racking procedures. Packing the gear was another art unto itself. Even a small difference in weight between the pack boxes could risk saddle sores and injuries. The boxes subsequently had to be meticulously weighed using hand scales before being hoisted up onto our little bay gelding, Kheer, who by virtue of his calmer nature had become our designated packhorse.
A year would pass before I had learned enough to begin taking the rigors of riding and horse care in stride, and in these first few days it required all our energy and focus just to cope with getting from one camp to the next. The situation wasn’t helped by a regime of night watch shifts that Kathrin and I had decided on. Nonetheless, the predatory feeling to the land did seem to fade with each passing day, and as the horses tired, they became slightly more agreeable.
After a week of straight riding, I found myself reawakening to the romance of the land and settling into a rhythm that was intimately involved with the moods of summer. Casting off from camp down onto a wide treeless plain on what was our twelfth day out from Kharkhorin, I felt the sun’s early rays gently warming us from behind, while the pink hues of the western sky gradually flooded with incandescent blue. Ahead and around us the steppe spread out in vast sheets of luminescent green, appearing utterly empty until the sun revealed the white flecks of gers nestled at the base of tall mountains on the plain’s perimeter. The agent for the changing of the guard from morning to midday was a breeze that came whispering over the young, supple summer grass, bringing a sortie of clouds, the shadows of which bent and twisted gracefully over the curvature of the earth. Also drifting across this sea-like grandeur were nomad riders sitting high in the saddle, their horses’ legs a blur.
In a pattern that would become familiar, the climbing heat of mid-morning coincided with a rising symphony of cicadas and the melting of the horizon into a haze. Herds of cattle, yaks, sheep, and goats disappeared in search of shade and water, and at the sun’s zenith, when the temperature exceeded 30°C, the few horses we passed stood nodding their heads and swishing their tails. Nomad camps, meanwhile, appeared abandoned and lonely. Swept up in pungent clouds of dust and fine particles of dried animal dung, the only sign of movement came from foals lying flat, tied to tether lines, and big wooly guard dogs that lay low in whatever sliver of shadow they could find.
Come late afternoo
n, the sun had burned a path from our backs over our left shoulders and now dangled from the western sky before our eyes. Like the incoming tide, herds converged and piles of smoldering dung were placed around camps, keeping the swarms of mosquitoes at bay. Looking for a place to spend the night, we fixed our course on two nearly imperceptible gers that lay below a rounded peak in the distance.
By the time we reached the gers, the land was basking in golden evening light and the family in camp had been watching us through a spyglass for a couple of hours. Even before we could dismount, children came running with fresh bowls of yogurt, directing us to a place where we could set up our tent. While the horses were taken to a spring-fed trough, a team of young and old descended to help us unpack.
Ever since the horse-thieving incident we had been somewhat wary when it came to getting to know the people, but imbued with the magic of the day’s ride, we happily surrendered. Our ensuing stay became typical of much of our time among nomads in the coming months, but particularly characteristic of central Mongolia, with its abundance of animals and summer dairy production.
With about eight pairs of helping hands, our tent was soon set up and the family piled in. An elderly man wearing a silky green deel—the universal long cloak of the nomads, fastened at the waist with a tightly bound sash—inspected the zips, fabric, and poles, then lay down on its floor as if he were a prospective buyer. Next he inventoried our horse tack and was particularly fascinated by my saddles and rope halters. Much to his disbelief, we had come riding in without a bit in the horses’ mouths, instead using a rein tied to the rope halter. This was a technique the Watson family—who had given both of us our crash course in horsemanship—had encouraged us to do because it allowed the horses to eat and drink freely. The old man shook his head and waved his finger at this bitless riding technique, and was equally unhappy about the packsaddle with its heavy boxes. Horses were considered the aristocrats of the steppe, and by loading mine with deadweight, treating it as a beast of burden, I was breaking an ancient taboo. Today, just as in the time of Genghis Khan, horses were used only for riding, the task of haulage strictly delegated to camels, cattle, and yaks.
My riding saddle was an entirely different matter. The man fetched some spectacles held together with grotty old Band-Aids and ran his hands over the saddle’s every feature, from the deep leather seat to the soft panels underneath. It was an Australian stock saddle with an adjustable gullet—a feature that enabled me to change the width of the front of the saddle according to the size of my horse’s withers. Although I was still somewhat flummoxed by horse tack in general, the old man most definitely wasn’t. He planted my saddle on his own horse and took turns trying it out with several of his sons. By the end of the session he came to me with what would be the first of hundreds of offers for my saddle right across the steppe. In some cases hanging on to it proved more difficult than keeping tabs on my horses, and often I was forced to sleep with the saddle inside the tent.
As the sun began to sink behind the mountains, the matriarch of this family group came out firing off orders, and within seconds everyone had scattered from our tent and returned to their duties. We now turned to the activities of the family with the same sense of fascination with which we had been inspected.
In this camp, which was nestled on a slight rise overlooking the plain, there were three gers that housed three generations. An elderly couple lived in one at the far end of camp together with their youngest, unmarried son, while the other two were home to two of their other sons and their wives and children. We found that keeping track of whose child was whose was especially difficult, since the number of children at any nomad camp swelled in the summertime, with relatives from the provincial centers and Ulaanbaatar sending their children to the countryside for the long school break. At the same time, babies seemed to be frequently handed from one mother to another depending on who was busy and who was not.
There was a distinct structure to nomadic family life, however, that had remained the unwritten law since the earliest records on the steppe. For one, daughters were required to move away to live with their husband’s family, while males generally stayed closer to their parents. The youngest son was shouldered with the responsibility of looking after the parents in their elderly years, but was also given the title of otchigin—guardian of the family’s home and livestock
Although Genghis Khan broke with many nomad traditions, he stuck ardently to the tradition of otchigin when dividing up the Mongol Empire between his sons. His eldest son, Jochi, was given the lands farthest from the center of Mongolia, “to as far west as our hooves have trodden,” which at the time of Genghis’s death included the area from the Irtysh River to the Ural River, in modern Kazakhstan. As the Mongol Empire expanded, Jochi’s sons became the founders and leaders of what became known as the Golden Horde, which included modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and much of Kazakhstan.5 Genghis’s youngest son, Tolui, was entrusted with the heartland, Mongolia, and inherited the responsibilities of chief administrator after Genghis’s death until one of the other sons, Ogodei, was elected grand khan.
Prior to our arrival, the boys of the family had driven immense communal herds of sheep, goats, and yaks back to camp, where the women were ready and waiting with their milking buckets and stools. The goats were the first in line to be milked, and as we watched, every member of the family took part in what was a nightly production line being repeated by tens of thousands of other nomad families across the country.
There were scenes of hysterics as the little children were tasked with rounding up the most mischievous goats. They sprinted after the animals, diving to catch whatever body part they could lay a hand on, whether it be the leg, ears, or even tail, but often ended up facedown in the dust. When one particularly large and courageous goat made a break for the open steppe beyond camp, one of the boys, probably no older than ten, swung up onto a horse bareback and, with his chest pushed out like a little man’s, went galloping off with a shriek.
One by one the goats were tethered head to head with ropes made from yak- and horsehair. Young girls under the watch of their mothers moved from animal to animal, milking away until the pail was full, at which point it would be taken to a ready pot for boiling.
While nomads of the steppe rely largely on meat for survival, in the summer, dairy is a staple. From the boiled milk of goats, yaks, and cows—and, in desert areas, camels—they are able to make a diverse array of products, including creams, butters, cheeses, and yogurts. This is not to mention the renowned fermented mare’s milk, airag—better known by the Turkic term kumys—that Marco Polo remarked was like “a white wine.” It is known from archaeological digs in northern Kazakhstan, where the earliest horse culture has been discovered to date, that this drink, or unfermented mare’s milk at the very least, has been an important part of the diet on the steppe since the earliest of times.
Perhaps the most universal food for horsemen of the steppe, however, was aaruul, which was what the grandmother of the family was preparing this evening. The fresh milk carted into her ger was boiled over a dung-fired stove, left to curdle, and then strained. The resulting curds were then compressed between pieces of wood weighted down by large rocks. These large pressed cakes would be made into various shapes and then put on the roof of the ger in trays to dry. Aaruul could be soft when fresh, but in the dry climate of the steppe it was often hard as rock, to the point where it was have to be sucked rather than chewed, and would last for a very long time. By carrying a bag of this bitter snack, it is said, warriors in Genghis’s day were able to survive ten days without any other food. Kathrin and I had already been loaded up with aaruul by other nomad families, and although I found it overwhelmingly bitter, I eventually came to appreciate the way it staved off hunger during long hours in the saddle.
Midway into the milking process, Kathrin and I were beckoned into a ger and ushered to the grass at the rear, behind the hearth. One of the mothers, a bandy-legged woman with an angelic, youthful
face but the creased, worn hands of someone in middle age, passed us cups of tea even before we were seated.
As I took a sip of the salty milk tea, the lingering sound of the wind in my ears died out. In this felt tent, just steps from the doorway, it seemed as though the vast land and sweeping sky that had so dominated our lives had vanished.
I looked across to Kathrin and said nothing. She sat with her cup cradled in her hands, her eyes wandering about the ger.
Feeling the teacup warm my fingers, I gazed up at the woman who stood next the stove. She was illuminated by a shaft of dying light that passed through the circular opening in the ceiling. She lifted a ladle of milk into the air and let the milk pour back down, then fluidly repeated the process. Steam wafted up, condensing fleetingly on her cheeks, which were as broad and splayed as wings, darkened by the sun but still soft. Her eyes were gracefully elongated, feather-like in shape, emanating femininity, yet her shoulders were wide, big-boned, and brimming with strength.
When the woman retired to an old steel spring bed to cradle her baby, my eyes shifted to the details of the ger. The frame was constructed with six collapsible lattice wall sections that could be swiftly dismantled and tied to the back of a camel or, as was the tradition in this region, strapped to a yak-drawn cart. From the top of the walls more than seventy intricately painted wooden roof poles—much like spokes—angled up to the circular opening at the apex of the ceiling.
Wrapped around the wooden frame like flesh on bone, thick sheets of felt were nearly impervious to sunlight, insulating against the cold and the heat. The felt so effectively damped the sounds from the world outside that one could easily converse in whispers while sitting at opposite sides of the structure, even in the midst of a storm—a quality I could only compare to what I had experienced in a snow cave.