ACROSS MONGOLIA TO URGA
Often we saw long files of camels come marching into Peking with
dignified tread. Unlike the camels of Egypt and Arabia, which have one
hump, these had two. In the winter they were very shaggy with long hair.
This hair is so valuable, for making blankets and similar things, that
in spring the drivers tie networks of strings about the animals to keep
them from shedding it along the way. In olden days these camel caravans
carried all the freight between Mongolia and Peking, and even to-day
they are strong competitors of the railroads in many parts of northern
China.
The camels I saw so strongly lured me to the desert that I decided to
follow them over one of the long caravan routes. Besides, I wanted to
see Urga, the strange capital of Mongolia, far away across the Gobi
Desert. If I had traveled with the camels, however, I should have been
six weeks or two months reaching my destination. So I took the train
from the northeastern corner of Peking and traveled all day to Kalgan,
passing through the Great Wall near the ancient tombs of the Ming
emperors. From Kalgan, an American automobile, belonging to a Russian
who buys furs and sends them to New York, carried me 700 miles across
the desert in three and a half days. Yet there was no road at all most
of the way. First we had to climb a sandy and rocky river valley, some
of it so steep that teams of mules helped to draw the automobile.
Mongolia is a high plateau, several thousand feet above sea level. Then
we sped away across the Gobi, sometimes along the tracks made by the
camel and ox-cart caravans and sometimes by no track at all.
[Illustration:
The red-clad Mongol lamas or priests gathered excitedly around our
automobile whenever they found us halted on the 700-mile trip across
the Gobi Desert to Urga. The car was loaded to the limit.
]
[Illustration:
All Mongols ride, though their horses usually look too small for them.
This man wears his queer-shaped hat (representing a sacred mountain
in Mongolia) to show that he, like most Mongol men, is a priest or
lama. He wears also red boots and he stands by the side of a yurt or
felt tent.
]
Much of the Gobi is hard gravel, with thin brown grass on it, not
shifting sand like the Sahara. There was even quite a lot of fertile
land on the first day’s ride, and thousands of Chinese colonists have
begun to cultivate this and build villages there. The Mongols themselves
are nomads, who do not plant but keep great herds of cattle, flocks of
sheep, and many horses, which they drive about wherever they can find
pasture. Their houses are movable, also, hardly more substantial than
tents. The Mongols call them _yurts_. They are round, with an almost
flat top, about six feet high in the center. Until they become dirty
they are white, for they are made of thick felt, fastened to a light
wooden framework. The Mongol women make this felt by laying sheep’s wool
on the ground, pouring water on it, and rolling it out into large
sheets. One of these houses can be taken down and packed on the backs of
animals in an hour, and set up somewhere else almost as quickly.
A Night in a Mongol Tent
We spent one night in a _yurt_. We had expected to sit out on the desert
all that night, until we caught sight of three or four weather-darkened
felt huts. Half a dozen camels were lying on the bare ground near them,
and some twenty Mongol men, women, and children came out of the huts
when they heard us coming. One of the men was a lama, or Mongolian
priest, and though he also was only a visitor he bossed everyone within
reach. More than half the men of Mongolia are lamas, who usually live in
great monasteries in various parts of the thinly populated country. They
have shaven heads and wear long dark-red cloaks and big red boots.
Such boots, as a matter of fact, are worn by all the Mongols, even women
and children. They are large enough to allow for half a dozen thick
woolen stockings, for the weather is very cold most of the time in high
Mongolia. It is so difficult to walk in these boots that Mongols on foot
move much as if they were wearing a ball-and-chain, like prisoners. But
this does not matter, for they travel almost entirely on horseback. Men,
women, and children are as much at home on a horse’s back as our cowboys
are. They all dress a good deal alike, in long coats usually made of
sheepskin with the wool on the inside. But the women, especially in the
region of Urga, the capital, and of the two or three other towns, wear
one of the strangest headdresses in the world. The photograph on page 78
will give you some idea of how peculiar it is.
[Illustration:
The nomad Mongols of the Gobi live in round tents or _yurts_. On a
light wooden framework they stretch thick felt made from the skins
of their own sheep. Sometimes they have a stovepipe but usually they
simply leave a flap of the tent open so that smoke may escape. The
Mongols can take a house down or set one up in about an hour.
]
[Illustration:
I was glad of the warmth of a great sheepskin coat when I traveled
across the Gobi Desert. With me are a Mongol and his wife.
]
When the lama invited us inside one of the _yurts_ we had to stoop to
get through the tiny doorway. The door was merely a flap of felt, and
when this was closed the _yurt_ became very hot. Yet the Mongols kept on
all their fur coats and other heavy garments, as if they were entirely
comfortable. A little iron cage in the center of the tent was filled
with fuel which made so quick and hot a fire that I think I should have
been roasted if I had not gone outside occasionally. No wonder nearly
all Mongols seem to have bad colds! Tea was prepared over this fire-cage
and served to us in brass bowls. The Mongols eat almost nothing but
meat. When I opened a can of cherries they hesitated to taste them, and
they were almost as much afraid of a bar of chocolate as if it had been
dynamite. I tried to give a bit of it to a young Mongol woman in the
_yurt_, but I found that this is very bad manners in Mongolia. Instead,
I should have handed it to one of the older women and let her pass it on
to the girl. Yet the women quarreled over the tin cans we threw away,
for such things are very valuable to people in a desert land.
[Illustration:
Two Mongols of the Gobi Desert riding their camels down a river valley
into Kalgan, a Chinese city. The camels have on their shaggy winter
coats.
]
By and by all the women went to other tents and we lay down to sleep
with the lama and two other Mongol men. The lama sent another man
outside to sleep on the ground, because there was not room enough for
him inside, and all night long we heard him coughing. The lama took off
all but his trousers, said his prayers in a loud voice, and lay down on
a bundle of sheepskin robes. One of these robes he pulled over himself.
When I set up my cot, the lama said he would not dare to sleep on such a
thing, for fear of falling off it in his sleep.
We might have lost our way during those three days if it had not been
for a row of telegraph poles carrying a single wire clear across the
Gobi. This is a part of the line from Peking to Paris. (When our first
little girl was born in Peking, the cablegram we sent to America was
flashed across Mongolia.) On the third night we slept in a lonely
telegraph station where two Russians live the year round. The last
half-day was among low hills. Along the way we saw thousands of marmots,
looking like gophers or prairie dogs as they sat on their hind legs
outside their holes. Many American women wear coats made of the skins of
the Gobi marmots. We also saw hundreds of antelope, sometimes long lines
of them racing across the horizon.
The Holy Capital of Mongolia
Urga is a holy city. In it lives Bogda-Khan, whom the Mongols call a
“living Buddha” and treat like a god. When he dies, his soul is supposed
to enter the body of a boy born about the same time, and this boy is
brought to the great cluster of palaces inside a wall on the outskirts
of Urga and becomes a new Bogda-Khan. Pilgrims come hundreds of miles to
worship him, throwing themselves down on their faces on boards placed
outside his palace walls. I found this “god” had a dozen kinds of
automobiles and spent many thousands of dollars every year for other
Western inventions that he hardly knew how to use. Whenever he went to
the golden-roofed palaces of Urga itself he rode in an automobile,
usually his Ford, though he had several much larger cars.
[Illustration:
Just where the driver will sit on this queer vehicle is a mystery, but
perhaps he prefers to stand. The cart is of a Russian-Mongol
variety, seen at Urga, and the passengers are Mongol ladies in their
amazing headdress.
]
Most of Urga is made up of temples and lamaseries, the monasteries of
the lamas. The most important ones have roofs covered with real gold
which gleams in the cold sunshine until it almost hurts the eyes.
Thousands of lamas in their dark-red robes live in Urga, and spend much
of their time squatting on cushions in long, closely packed rows inside
their religious buildings, studying their sacred texts by shouting them
at the top of their voices. In Urga there are hundreds of prayer wheels,
or rather, wooden cylinders, each under its own little roof. Inside each
“wheel” are thousands of prayers written on tissue paper, and the
Mongols think that every time they turn the cylinder around it is the
same as saying all those prayers aloud. So long lines of pilgrims march
about among the temples and stop to turn each prayer cylinder. Some of
the most pious throw themselves face down at every step, when making
this circuit, so that it takes them several days to make the rounds and
be ready to go home again.
The Mongols do not keep shops, though they sometimes sell things in the
open-air market on the bank of their dirty little river. Some Russians
have stores in Urga, but nearly all the traders are Chinese. All kinds
of furs can be bought there, but nearly everything else for sale comes
from China or the outside world. The streets are just muddy lanes, and
most of the houses are surrounded by walls of tree trunks set upright in
the ground close together and sharpened on top. They reminded me of the
stockades our ancestors built against the Indians.
China still claims that Mongolia belongs to her, but most of it is now
really independent—or rather, it is controlled by Bolshevik Russia.
Although the officials are Mongols, Russian “advisers” sent out from
Moscow tell them what to do. These advisers, like the lamas, seemed very
surly. Indeed, I have never been in a place where I felt less welcome.
For one thing, hardly had we reached Urga before my American companion
and I were arrested because someone said we had shot a Mongol on our way
across the desert. If we had been convicted we should probably have been
shot ourselves at sunrise next morning. But it took us only a few hours
to prove that we had been many miles away from where the Mongol was
shot, and that he was not hurt much anyway. It is not far from Urga to
Irkutsk, where the Trans-Siberian Railway would have carried us to
Europe. But of course I turned back toward Kalgan and Peking where I had
left my family, crossing the Gobi this time in two and a half days,
though even in September we found much snow and ice.
[Illustration:
A camel caravan making a slow journey across northern China. Usually
ten or twelve camels are held together by stout cords. One end of a
cord is fastened to the back of a camel and the other end to a stick
which runs through the nostrils of the camel behind.
]