On the Trail of Genghis Khan Read online

  Tseren Enebish, my longtime friend in Ulaanbaatar, had told me about the Khotons and suggested I find a local friend of hers named Dashnyam. I was hoping he might guide me through the high passes that would be impossible for me to tackle alone.

  After being pointed in multiple directions, I found Dashnyam’s ger near the mouth of the gorge. As soon as I dismounted, his children ushered me inside to the ger’s back wall and slid a bowl of dried curd and stale pieces of deep-fried dough (known as boortsog) under my nose. While children from neighboring gers massed about the entrance, Dashnyam’s wife ladled boiling tea into a cup, then, with her left hand supporting her right elbow, passed it to me in traditional fashion.

  Dashnyam knelt, cradling a chipped teacup with an open palm, balancing his elbow on his raised knee, and brought his face down to drink.

  “Drink tea, eat boortsog,” he said gently.

  Even at a glance, Dashnyam was different from other Mongolians. In the absence of the pronounced cheekbones that keep the skin stretched taut into old age for most Mongolians, his cheeks fell away in a series of saggy folds and wrinkles. His eyes were wide and almond-shaped, sunken deep in their sockets, framed by bushy eyebrows. The most prominent telltale of his Turkic origins, though, was the craggy, hooked nose that reached out from his otherwise rather hollow face.

  Quite apart from Dashnyam’s Khoton ethnicity was his gentle, kind character. Even as he looked me over, his eyes were thoughtful, betraying a sense of curiosity without hint of opportunism.

  When the tea had begun to revive me I pulled out the map and asked whether he would guide me. At first he scanned the map with narrowed eyes and a pained look of bewilderment, but when I made myself clearer, he cast it aside.

  “When do you want to leave? Today? Tomorrow? I need to fetch a camel!”

  He agreed to travel with me for eight days—time enough to make it over the highest passes. A camel, he explained, was essential, since my horses were tired and unshod, and the way ahead was rocky. It was imperative we leave at the first opportunity, since the passes could soon be blanketed with snow.

  Dashnyam, who was in his late forties but had the stiff, stringy body of someone ten years older, launched himself into action and rode with me into the village. After shopping for supplies, he sent me home. “Take the bag of flour back to my wife and tell her to make boortsog. I am going to find a camel.”

  I spent the day preparing in camp and getting to know Dashnyam’s family, who, it became clear, were sorely destitute.

  The father of five children all under the age of fourteen, Dashnyam owned one old horse and seventeen goats. In the evening, when other families herded sheep and goats by the hundreds, Dashnyam’s eldest son, Tsagana, walked up a slope not far from camp and shooed his flock home. Milking was over within twenty minutes, and the little pail it filled held barely enough for a day’s worth of milky tea. There were no strips of drying meat (borts) hanging in the ger nor pouches of yogurt being stirred, or even the ubiquitous trays of curd drying on the roof. With so few animals, Dashnyam neither had the means or reason to migrate with his family from pasture to pasture, and so shifted no more than about 3–4 km between winter and summer camps. As such, he was caught between sedentary and nomadic lives, without the security of a “five-animal” herd or the safety net of town.

  Come dusk, when Dashnyam returned with a small female camel, I had decided I wanted to give him a horse. With Kathrin gone, I didn’t need a third animal, and Saartai Zeerd, who wasn’t happy on rocks at the best of times, was not suited to the mountains.

  When I first placed the horse’s lead rope in his hands, both Dashnyam and Saartai Zeerd looked at me blankly. But as my offer registered, a nervous smile spread across Dashnyam’s face, revealing a not quite full set of yellow, crooked teeth. Rather than make him a gift outright, I proposed trading the horse for two days of guiding, which Dashnyam said would normally cost $27 (I would pay for the other days in cash). There was a degree of dignity about such a deal that made us both happy.

  At dawn Dashnyam entrusted Saartai Zeerd to his son and told him to take the animal away to pasture. Then we packed the camel, Dashnyam’s wife threw a single spoonful of milk in the air, and we were off.

  Not far upstream we entered the head of the Kharkhiraa River canyon. Mountains drew like curtains over the sky, and the steppe shrank to a puddle behind. The river, which lower down had been nothing more than an unremarkable braid of channels leaching into the thirsty steppe, tumbled through with the momentum of a thousand ice-melt tributaries, carving out a gap through an otherwise impassable wall of rock.

  In the initial stages of the canyon we avoided the river, riding along the bank beneath the shade of tall, elegant poplars still fragrant with the life of summer. After the monotony of the treeless steppe I was struck by the poplars’ leaves, still supple, but turning bright yellow. Cast against the deep blue of the river, the pale sun-bleached river stones, and the red rock of the cliffs, they were an addition to a world full of contrast.

  Where the trees ended, the canyon’s walls drew in tight. Dashnyam forged paths from one riverbank to the other sitting casually with camel in tow, gently tapping the rump of his horse with a whip. I lifted my stirrups to avoid the rapids, gripped Rusty’s mane with one hand, and tugged at Bokus with the other.

  Eventually the river became so deep and concentrated we were forced to ride along a precarious ledge. I was beginning to lose confidence in Rusty, whose hooves slipped about on the loose rock, but then, as abruptly as the canyon had begun, the cliffs parted.

  The plains had now completely slipped from view behind, and before us lay a glacier-carved valley where the river was dwarfed by a wide, rocky flood plain. Within another few minutes, the canyon had become an imperceptible shadow between the overlap of ridges, and ahead grew a sight confirming we had been squeezed through a portal into a different world.

  Weaving through a maze of river boulders came a camel train. From a distance these elegant animals seemed to move in slow motion, their long curved necks extending and retracting with each gait cycle, and their baggage-laden humps bobbing to and fro. The rapid rate at which they grew in size, however, suggested they were moving with remarkable speed. By the time my eyes had focused on the three or four men and women who led the caravan, they had drifted right before us.

  “Good journey!” cried Dashnyam, overcome with such a smile that his pointy chin reached out to greet them.

  “Good journey to you!” they replied, dismounting to join Dashnyam cross-legged on the earth.

  I was too excited to dismount, and rode to the woman who controlled the lead camel. For nomads migration is a special occasion when the wealth and pride of a family is paraded, and this woman embodied the tradition. Sitting in a silver-coin-encrusted saddle embellished with yak horn and decorated with red velvet, she wore a silky golden and green deel with matching earrings and a fluorescent green sash pulled tight in around her thin waist. Traditionally, sashes and belts were important symbols of status and wealth. Men wore them low around the waist, while women wore them high. An unmarried Mongolian would not wear one at all.

  I reached out to shake the woman’s hand, and she obliged me in this unusual gesture with a giggle. Her hands were strong, wrinkled, and worn, yet the twinkle in her eye and the full set of blinding white teeth spoke of a woman younger than me, in her early twenties. When she smiled her eyes and mouth spread as wide as her broad fleshy cheeks, radiating a naivety and wisdom that in my experience are common among young nomad mothers who juggle giant responsibility with the gaiety of youth.

  But the overwhelming emotion that flowed from this woman now was her pride. She motioned to the five camels behind, where, apart from the family’s herd, which had been driven down a day earlier, her entire earthly belongings were on display. Each camel—carrying as much as 300 kg—was packed with segments of two family gers. Lattice wall pieces, cupboards, and milking buckets and cans were all packed on the sides of the camels,
while the wheel-like ceiling structures were cast over the humps. On the heels of the last camel came a huge guard dog of the bankhar breed—the large Mongolian mastiff that is a quintessential of nomad herders—with the beginnings of a new winter coat, and last year’s still hanging off in dung-encrusted dreadlocks.

  The woman pointed to the camel immediately behind her, where the kind of wooden baskets used to collect dung were brimming with odds and ends. Only when she dismounted and pulled the camel to its knees did I realize these baskets contained more than possessions. From the far basket, a young girl, perhaps three years old, raised her head shyly above the humps. Her hair was long and untamed, her cheeks rendered a deep red through exposure.

  The woman lifted a sheet covering the basket immediately in front of me, and there, wrapped in a cocoon of sheepskin, was a newborn. Lying as placidly as the camel, the baby gazed up to a world framed by the wooly outline of the skin.

  I was humbled by the thought that for much of the morning I had feared my horse might make a misstep on one of the narrow ledges or be knocked over by the river’s current. This woman trusted her animals with the precious lives of her most fragile loved ones—showing more trust in those camels than many people in my own society would bestow on another human being. For these people, animals were part of the broader family, and, as such, they carried great responsibilities.

  After bidding farewell to the family, we carried on buoyantly. Dashnyam seemed immensely pleased I had witnessed the camel train.

  “Up there in the mountain they live in the summer camp.” He pointed to the high mountains. “Very, very good grass!” He shook his head passionately, then leaned down from the saddle, picked some grass, and brought it to his mouth.

  Down on the lower steppes where I had traveled with Kathrin, the driving force behind migratory patterns was cryptic, but here it was relatively clear. Nomads spent summer in the high mountains, where the pasture was rich and they could avoid the heat and insects of lower down. The family we had met was moving to the plains for autumn, where dew promised to reinvigorate the grass. Some families would remain on the lowlands for winter, but many would return to camps here in the mountains, where it was marginally warmer. Where nomads moved to depended entirely on the needs of their animals.

  It was, of course, this drive to search out greater pasture that had seen nomads and their animals spread out across the breadth of the steppe all those thousands of years before. And while families in this region might only have been migrating a relatively small distance a year, I was reminded that my journey was not only on the trail of nomads who might have ridden the steppe in the space of a lifetime but, perhaps more important, in the spirit of the people who had shifted across Eurasia on their horses through the space of millennia.

  In the evening as the sun began to fall more steeply, the tips of the ice-encrusted peaks of Kharkhiraa and Turgen breached the horizon. We rode far above the river on a grassy shelf, marveling at cliffs on the far side smattered with splotches of white—signs of ancient kite and eagle nests. On this evening, though, it was signs of continuous human habitation that would leave the deepest impression.

  On a particularly straight stretch, the shifting columns of light illuminated a series of embedded stones in a variety of shapes and patterns—signs of nomad grave markers. Dashnyam led me up the slope to a spot from which we had a bird’s-eye view. The pattern below was a perfect circle, perhaps as much as 50 m in diameter. At the core lay a circular pile of stones from which four straight lines of stones spread out to the perimeter like the spokes of a wheel. As a whole, it resembled a giant sundial, or perhaps the circular wooden ceiling of a ger.

  This was most likely a grave type known broadly as khirigsuur, dating back around 2,700 years to the Bronze Age. Some archaeologists theorize that the nomadic culture of the period was influenced by the Scythian tradition of burying horses and tack together with the deceased. I had read that during excavations of some burial grounds up to forty-five horses had been discovered in a single grave—a sign of the nomad’s enduring belief that the horse carried them into life, through life, and beyond into the afterlife.

  Beyond this grave marker lay many more, of tens if not hundreds of different types. Of the circular kind alone there were numerous intriguing variations. Some were surrounded by a square perimeter, while others were squares surrounded by circles. Many were circles filled out with a cobblestone effect, and still others were circles containing no central pile of stones or spokes.

  While it was impossible for me to judge, some of these were probably those of the Xiongnu, a nomadic people who ruled an empire in greater Mongolia during the Iron Age from the third to the first century BCE. It was their constant attacks on China, including a war with the Han dynasty, that is thought to have triggered the building of the Great Wall of China. Although the origin of the Xiongnu is subject to ongoing controversy and debate, many historians believe they were the original Hunnic people, whose descendants charged into Europe centuries later under the helm of Attila.1

  In a kind of collective cemetery that evidently spanned thousands of years, we rode through silently and slowly, taking in monuments from untold eras and peoples. Among them were long columns of around fifty small vertically standing stones. At the northern end of each column, facing the east, were the figures of men carved from granite. Each man held a cup in one hand and the dagger on his belt with the other. Flowing mustaches hinted at the Turkic origins of the makers, as did sculpted noses more resembling Dashnyam’s features than the average Mongolian’s. These were balbal stones—a kind of engraved headstone found across Central Asia and thought to be memorials to individuals of the diverse Turkic peoples of the steppe.

  Just as remarkable were the large red standing megaliths, known broadly as deer stones, that stood solitary on the periphery of the cemeteries, thousands of years since their makers had placed them there. Although the particular stones we saw had no sign of engraving, other similar standing stones in Mongolia are renowned for extravagant depictions of deer and for some of Mongolia’s—and Central Asia’s—earliest known images of human beings.

  At the far end of the cemetery, we stopped to examine some deer stones. When Dashnyam climbed back onto his horse, I watched him closely. Observing a custom universal among horsemen the world over, he carefully approached his black gelding from the left-hand side and eased into the saddle. Horsemen in the Western world believe this tradition originates from a time when cavalrymen carried swords on their right leg. On the steppe, however, among the descendants of those who introduced horses and cavalry warfare to the West, there is a belief about this custom that is probably older than both the Iron Age and Bronze Age. In a culture where the sun has always been worshipped and gers still strictly face south toward the life-giving orb, the word for “left” in Mongolian, baruun, is the same as the term for “east.” To approach a ger from the east or mount a horse from the left is to approach in the same direction as the sun passes through the sky. To approach from the right and therefore the west is the sign of an enemy and can only invite trouble.

  When the cemetery was behind us, I asked Dashnyam what he thought about the graves. With a distant look in his eyes, all he could tell me was they were in memory of his ancestors, and that those who lay here had been heroes.

  In the morning we reached the confluence of the Turgen and Kharkhiraa rivers, then continued up the main Kharkhiraa River valley as it turned sharply south. The mountains grew taller and the valley sank so deep and narrow that we waited for what seemed an eternity for the shadows of night to peel away down the far western valley side, then up to where we rode high above the rapids on the eastern side. When finally the sun reached us, the frost burned away and my tense, cold muscles eased. Rather than ride alongside Dashnyam, I fell in behind the camel, too tired to speak.

  After leaving the grave markers the previous day we had spent a sleepless night camped with a herding family. From the moment we put our heads down to rest,
the mountains had come to life with howling wolves and the crack and echo of gunshots. Men had been coming and going to check on their animals, and every time I seemed to be falling asleep the ger door would creak open and bang close again.

  Now, with the sun melting any remaining resistance to sleep, I leaned back in the saddle, let the horse guide me forward, and surrendered. Where the stars had been, kites and eagles circled against an incandescent sky painted with streaks of cloud. Where wolves had prowled, the herders from the family we stayed with pushed their flocks high to the lesser-eaten pastures. As my hands loosely gripped the reins, eyelids heavy with gravity, it all passed by in lucid fragments.

  Several hours on, hunger pulled me from my slumber. The river had mellowed to a knee-deep meander, and we descended to ride along the water’s edge through spongy alpine grasses. For the rest of the day the only person we saw was an old man out watching his yaks. He dismounted ahead of us and sat waiting with his sleeves hanging past his hands. I joined him and Dashnyam on the grass and watched as the man’s horse leaned in with its bottom lip quivering and pushed its nose over its master’s forehead. The horse groaned and lifted its head, and turds dropped to the earth in a series of muffled thuds. A waft of fresh dung mixed with the sweet aroma of horse sweat drifted between us. Just as the man appeared oblivious to the cold wind, he didn’t acknowledge the horse, the smell, or the trail of saliva on his scalp.

  Come midafternoon the snow-dusted shoulder of Kharkhiraa peak was emerging at the far end of the valley. I was eager to make progress and disappointed when Dashnyam pulled up at a lonely ger, insisting at first we were stopping for a cup of tea, but later suggesting it was too late to carry on. But my feelings of frustration didn’t prevail long.