On the Trail of Genghis Khan Page 7

  Early in the morning after our arrival I woke with my eyes glued shut by gunk and dust and a terrible throbbing at the back of my retinas. Trying to ignore the pain, I lay listening to what sounded like the soft patter of rain, but which I knew to be a thousand goats and sheep being herded out. The long grueling summer days were what nomads dreaded most—it was crucial to take the sheep and goats as far as possible to graze between dawn and dusk so that they would grow enough muscle and fat to see them through the winter. In some respects winter was an easier life—long dark nights meant lots of sleeping, and during blizzards the animals would not leave the pens.

  After the sound of the sheep tailed off I put my head down for a bit more rest. When I woke again, I was struck by suffocating heat and the sound of an approaching motorbike. Kathrin came to as well, and together we ripped open the door to emerge dazed into the searing white light of midmorning.

  As the motorbike hurtled closer, there was no mistaking the familiar sound of drunken singing. We fast retreated into the tent, from where we watched events unfold through a gap in the entrance zipper.

  A short distance from camp, the driver expertly cut the engine and used the remaining momentum to steer his craft to the doorway of a ger. As it rolled to a halt, two men clinging on behind dismounted and staggered off—one lumbering away for a pee, the other falling unbalanced to the ground.

  When all three had gathered themselves and dusted off their tattered deels, they charged inside, demanding vodka and food from the mother of five who had served us so generously the night before. Not having gotten what they wanted, two of the men went to the second ger, where her in-laws lived. There were several comings and goings before the young brother-in-law of our host ushered the driver out. An argument ensued, and after the driver carelessly knocked over the family’s own motorbike, the gloves were off. A crack cut through the air as the young man’s fist slammed into flesh and bone. The driver stumbled backward, clutching at his face, and fell, butt first, to the ground. Some uneasy moments passed while he recovered, but then he steamed forward, picked up his opponent, and drove him into the ground. No one emerged from the ger. The dogs lay low, unbothered.

  Eventually the brother-in-law and the driver gave in to exhaustion, helped each other up, and then drove off together on the family’s motorbike, leaving the other one there. All fell still and quiet. The white-hot sun crawled across the empty sky, and the dunes of the Borig Del Els wobbled on the horizon. Perhaps drunkenness and the trouble it brought, I speculated, was a welcome distraction in a land that was so desperately lacking in movement.

  When the heat became unbearable we emerged from the tent and stumbled nervously into the mother’s ger, where we found the two drunks fast asleep and the family drinking tea. One of the men was a special guest arrived from Ulaanbaatar, and the other two were family friends. The fight was never mentioned.

  With time I learned that the drunken episode was not only an ordinary feature of steppe life but synonymous with summer. Coinciding with the peak production of milk, summer on the steppe is the nomad’s age-old opportunity to partake in socializing—and drinking. The drunken men had been imbibing nermel arkhi, also known as “Mongolian vodka”—a clear, wine-strength drink distilled from fermented cow and yak milk. When Carpini arrived in Kharkhorin after his long journey from Europe, it is most likely this drink that he witnessed wreaking havoc. “Drunkenness is honorable among the Tartars, and when someone drinks a great deal he is sick right on the spot, and this does not prevent him from drinking more,” he wrote. “In short, their evil habits are so numerous that they can hardly be set down.”

  Years earlier, Genghis Khan also had bemoaned the culture of drinking: “If there is no means to prevent drunkenness, a man may become drunk thrice a month; if he oversteps this limit he makes himself punishable of this offence … What could be better than that he should not drink at all? But where shall we find a man who never drinks? If however such a man is found, he deserves every respect.” Despite Genghis’s apparent will to curb alcohol consumption, his son and successor, Ogodei, was known as a lifetime drinker whose death in 1241—rumored to have occurred during a drinking bout—forced Mongolians to return to the homeland to elect a new leader, and in doing so abandon plans to invade Western Europe.

  On the second morning of our stay I woke feeling overcome by nausea. The semi-broken-down trotters, lips, ears, and boiled intestines from the arrival feast seemed to be inching their way through my bowels like some slowly dying creature. Soon enough the sun surfaced with a vengeance. Stripped down to my underwear in the tent, I couldn’t help but look on in horror at my bloated stomach. As my belly grew taut and round, it seemed to accentuate just how bony my arms and legs had become. After a mere seven weeks on the road, the muscle and fat appeared to have shriveled away, leaving my knees and elbows—knobby at the best of times—more skeletal than I had ever seen them.

  By midmorning the temperature was 40°C. I staggered into the shade of the main ger and joined the family, who were lying on the dirt floor. To keep the ger as cool as possible, the felt was hitched up about 30 cm from the ground, allowing some limited airflow. Just beyond the collapsible wall in the sliver of shade cast by the ger, the mother of the family lay in dry dust and animal dung on her side, her young infant cradled in her arms.

  For the remainder of the day I lay where I had fallen, taking in the world from ground level—every detail of which suggested that even in the paralyzing heat, surviving winter remained at the forefront of their minds. Directly above hung a curtain of meat strips being dried to produce what is known as borts. When dry, the strips would be cut into pieces, then ground into a fibrous powder, ensuring that the meat would be light, easy to carry, and would keep for months. Gansukh had told me that using borts in the old days Mongolian warriors could keep a “sheep in their pocket.” Indeed I had discovered that a kilo of this—a portion of which each night we would add to rice—would last a couple of weeks between Kathrin and me. Next to me in the ger, under a bed, lay a cow stomach freshly filled with the cream known as urum, and beyond the door outside a pile of dried manure—the only fuel for cooking and heating in a land where the temperature could drop as low as −50°C.

  There was no escaping the slim separation from the elements, and as compromised as this family might have been on the plains, where the pastures were thin, the heat was oppressive, and they were vulnerable to the intrusion of summer drunks, I was beginning to understand that there the herds weren’t as threatened as they had been in the mountains. To lose animals, whether it be to wolves, frost, or drought, would be the undoing of any nomad family.

  When finally I emerged feeling better in the cool of evening, both the remaining drunken guests had gone. The herds had arrived from another day of grazing, and children were busily tying up the goats for milking.

  By dawn the next morning we were up and moving.

  Although nomads do not own land, there are some who are more fortunate with the land they inhabit than others—historically the cause of territorial conflict between tribes. One long day’s ride west, we reached a nomad camp nestled into a relative oasis formed by a delicate brook flanked by slender shoulders of silky green grass. Where dust had reigned supreme the previous day, children splashed about in the water, and the women lay out their washing on a carpet of grass. Welcomed by five adult brothers and their extended families, who lived in five or six gers strung out along the stream, we felt a sense of life and prosperity sorely lacking in recent days—and, as would become clear, none of the drunken aggression we had come to expect. Such a camp was all the more welcome given that we were now just a day’s ride from the driest and most challenging leg of the journey to the west.

  By the time we had set up our tent and watched the family’s herd of eighteen fat camels thunder down the steep, dusty banks for a drink, we knew it was a watershed moment for our little troupe. Although Bor, who had been running free without a saddle for two weeks, had improved, we wer
e reluctant to put him back to work. More significantly, Kheer—our loyal packhorse and the mainstay of our caravan—was beginning to show fatigue and early signs of friction sores on his withers. It was nothing a few days of rest and a slight adjustment in the pack saddle wouldn’t cure, but such was our affection for Kheer that we couldn’t bear the thought of pushing him on longer than we needed to. Although it was true he was the kind of horse I would have liked to ride on with to the Danube, quarantine laws forbade the export of Mongolian horses on the basis that they are a “national treasure,” meaning I would have to sell them before leaving the country.

  The idea of trading Bor and Kheer for a new, fresh horse had only occurred to us in the past couple of days, but presented with such an idyllic setting, we were convinced we had found their new home.

  There was great excitement among the families when they realized we were offering two horses in exchange for one, and by dusk children came galloping bareback into camp on an array of mounts. The first horse we checked was tame but had a fresh injury on its back hoof, and the second tore away and bolted to his herd before I had even looked him over. The third horse stole our hearts. A small bay gelding with a long matted mane and dark eyes, he was younger than Kheer at around six years, but equally calm. To prove he was a nomkhon—quiet-natured and tame—six children climbed onto his back, while another clambered underneath and gripped his penis. Through all of this the poor horse stood resigned to his fate, the only sign of any impatience the trembling of his rubbery lower lip.

  The following day we stayed put and celebrated the exchange. Continuing a long-standing tradition, the herder took his horse out onto the steppe with his children, where they plucked hairs from its tail and mane. We too took our horses aside, pulling out a few strands, while stroking them, and whispering heartfelt thanks.

  Mongolians believe the spirit of a horse can live on in its hair, even long after death, and in the past, nomad warriors collected the hair from their best stallions to weave into a sulde or “spirit banner,” which served to bring good luck and as a way of harnessing the spirit of nature. Genghis Khan had famously used a white spirit banner in times of peace and a black banner for guidance during war, and it was thought that after death the soul of the warrior was preserved in these tufts of stallion hair.2

  On this occasion, the herder selling us his horse simply strung up the hair in the ger so that a part of the horse’s spirit would forever be with the family.

  “You should keep the hair from your horses close to you as well, especially when in danger, for it will protect you from bad people. Also, do not give away your halters, or anything else together with a horse that you are selling, because it means you haven’t entirely let go,” he explained through the translated words of Gansukh via satellite phone. I pledged to keep hair from all the horses I used until the Danube.

  After the horse exchange ceremony, we retired to the ger of the elderly parents, where we feasted on a meal of noodles and mutton, and sat watching a Korean soap opera on their shoe-box-size black-and-white TV. Like most well-to do Mongolian nomads, they had a satellite dish parked outside and a solar panel on the roof trickle-charging a 12-volt car battery, which in turn powered the TV. This cobbling together of the nomadic way of life with elements of the modern settled world had appeared a little incongruous to me at first, yet gradually I was coming to accept it as part and parcel of the evolving story of nomad life.

  While the constant need to pick up and move had always ruled out any possession or technology that couldn’t be carried on camels or yaks during migration, whenever something came along that was suitable and could improve their lives, it had historically been embraced with unique nomad ingenuity. In the twentieth century, for example, access to tight-weave cotton led to white canvas ger covers becoming the norm, whereas for thousands of years before, there had been no available material to protect the felt walls and ceilings from rain and wind. During the Soviet period, metal stoves and flues had also come to replace open hearths in gers, dramatically decreasing the prevalence of lung disease and lifting the average life expectancy of nomads. Although TV was perhaps more intrusive than these other innovations, the nomadic way of life out here was master and remained fundamentally unchanged.

  Even if the advent of solar power, batteries, and TVs was an invasion of sorts, it certainly proved invaluable for me. By using a 12-volt adapter, I was able to recharge my video camera, satellite phone, and laptop computer. The system had its downside, though. As had happened on previous occasions, the family sighed and moaned when the TV went dead. My charging had flattened their battery.

  With the TV out of action, dinner was washed down by nermel arkhi and the family’s attention deftly switched from this modern, borrowed form of entertainment to one that was as ancient as nomadic life.

  It was the matriarch of the family, a woman in her seventies, thin and creased as an old bedsheet, who pulled out a stringed instrument known as the morin khuur, or horsehead fiddle. Boasting a trapezoid-shaped box, carved horsehead at the top of a long stem, and two long, parallel strings—one made from 135 tail hairs of a stallion, the other from 105 of a mare’s—it had been handcrafted in a tradition probably unbroken for at least a millennium. The morin khuur’s predecessor, the chuurqin, was believed to date back to the sixth century, supporting a widely believed theory that bowed string instruments originated on the steppes somewhere in Central Asia. Once established by horseback nomads, the tradition is thought to have spread first through Persia and the rest of the Islamic world, reaching western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  As this old woman moved the bow back and forth, the shaky, bony fingers of her left hand pressed on its two strings at the top of the stem, just below the green-colored carved horsehead. The sound coming from the wooden box between her legs was like a scratchy, drawn-out cry, but nevertheless her husband, a bandy-legged old man ignited by vodka and the special occasion, began swaying back and forth rhythmically, his hands and arms twisting this way and that. The music and vodka settled together in my own system and I found my eyes wandering from the fiddle to various points around the ger: the horsehair ropes that tied together the ger, the airag in the corner, and a piece of horse dung dangling from the ceiling for good luck. According to one Mongolian legend, the morin khuur had originated from a boy whose slain horse came to him in a dream to instruct him to make the fiddle using its body so that they would forever be together. In the present day, it was clear the morin khuur was a celebration of this crucial union between horse and man—a relationship that not only made life possible on the steppe but which, like string instruments, had been adopted in Europe and become a part of the making of history across the globe.

  When we were saddled the next morning, the man from whom we had bought the horse came to our tent with his ten-year-old son. If the grief we felt in leaving our horses behind was difficult, then it was hard to imagine how it was for them. The horse we had bought, named Bokus, was the boy’s favorite and had been raised from birth by the family. Over the years the boy had no doubt learned to experience and interpret the world around him from the back of Bokus. Now Bokus was abruptly about to leave for good, and as his father lifted the boy onto the horse for the last time he sat looking pale and bewildered.

  Just before riding out, the boy’s father pressed a gift into my hand—a wolf’s ankle bone tied onto a necklace. “Keep it with you for luck,” he whispered.

  The boy cried at first, but by the time we had crossed the brook, I turned to see that everything was returning to normal. The camels had been released for a day of herding, and the boy was moving them out on a different horse. A woman was wandering down to collect water, and a sheep was being slaughtered in the morning cool. Bor and Kheer were mingling with the family’s herd and didn’t raise their heads from the grass as we moved away.

  A day’s ride west from the family’s oasis-like camp, the corridor between the Borig Del Els and the Khan Khokhii mountains widened
to a thirsty plain extending west to where sand dunes in the north gave way to the shallows of the giant saline lake Uvs Nuur, and the Khan Khokhii in the south became the foothills of the greater Altai range. Not far from the southwest corner of the lake lay the provincial capital, Ulaangom.

  Even before I’d left Australia, a quick scan of maps suggested that the greatest obstacle in traversing Mongolia would be crossing these wide, dry deserts and plains, which separate central Mongolia from the western provinces. I had trusted that a way through the driest zone would come to light en route, but nomads we had met of late had been adamant there were no gers or fresh water for at least 100 km. The only solution we could think of was to start in the evening, ride through the cool of night, and keep going for as long as necessary.

  In theory, this first attempt at night riding—a routine that would become the norm a year later in Kazakhstan—was a prospect that excited me. In practice, it became a farce.

  We started late in the dark and not far from camp became disoriented and rode into a swamp. Rusty sank up to his chest in mud, and it was a good half hour before he extricated himself. For a couple of hours thereafter we made swift progress, but then the absence of the moon and a suffocating cover of clouds conspired to render the world a soup of blacks and grays, inducing a feeling of motion sickness. The flashlight batteries went dead, and we spent a frustrating hour searching for my compass after I accidentally dropped it. Most unfair was the cold—expecting a sultry night in prelude to a searing hot day, we instead found ourselves hunched over in a damp breeze. The only way to stay warm, awake, and nausea-free was to walk.

  When the world resurfaced, it came in a series of fragments between long periods when my eyes struggled to break open. At first an endless black, empty plain materialized, preyed upon by swirling gray clouds. A couple of hours later, the silhouette of mountains grew from the south, tapering off into the western horizon. To the north a slim flicker of silvery gray indicated the waters of Uvs Nuur, the hills beyond which lay in Russia. We had come far closer to the southern mountains than we intended but were still half a day’s ride from their base. The lake was even farther.