SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI
In September, when the _kaoliang_ has ripened to its purple-red, there
is added beauty to the eight-hour climb from Peking, by leisurely
Chinese train, through Nankow Pass and the Great Wall, to Kalgan. Beyond
that treeless, mountain-girdled city the railway turns sharply westward,
timidly keeping within the outer spur of China’s mammoth rampart, and
the traveler to the vast open world to the north must abandon it for a
more courageous form of transportation.
Down to the very doors of to-day the camel caravan, drifting along for
six weeks or two months, was the swiftest thing from Kalgan to Urga,
capital of Outer Mongolia, seven hundred miles away, unless it was
sometimes outsped by the forced relays of the Imperial Chinese Post. But
the ratio between time and distance has of late undergone violent
changes, even in such far-off stretches of the globe. Little more than a
decade back mankind was astonished to hear that a venturesome motor-car
had fought its way from Peking to Paris; five or six years ago men of
more commercial turn of mind took to following this pioneer of swiftness
across the Gobi; and to-day it is a rare week that does not see several
automobiles, always with room for one more passenger, climb out of
Kalgan on their way to Urga.
How some of these ever reach their destination is one of the innumerable
mysteries of the Orient. Our own expedition seemed risky enough, yet it
was a mere parlor-game compared to those we met or overtook along the
way. In the first place there were but four of us—the Russian Jewish
fur-merchant from Tientsin who owned the car, his chauffeur of similar
origin, and we two wandering Americans whom chance had momentarily
thrown together in the intricate byways of the earth. What with our
necessary baggage, the food and beds and arctic garments it would have
been foolhardy to reduce, and the cases of gasolene that completed the
ramparts which made each ascent to our seats a mountaineering feat, I at
least fancied we were heavily laden. Yet we passed on the trail cars
with eight or nine Chinese passengers, and on a memorable morning one
with eleven, besides all manner of baggage, winter garments, and
paraphernalia, somehow packed away in them. They were often old and
crippled cars, too, and no wonder, while our own was fresh from the
factory, with two gasolene-tanks, a host of reinforcements and
accessories, and the right-handed drive befitting left-handed China.
Like all those engaged in the Kalgan-to-Urga traffic, it came from
Detroit, though not of the breed one first thinks of in that connection,
but from the second most popular motor tribe of that habitat. Those who
should know say that this is the only car sturdy and at the same time
economical enough to endure life on the Gobi Desert.
[Illustration:
The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or more hours a day
for twenty coppers, about six cents in our money
]
[Illustration:
Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no automobile can climb
to the great Mongolian plateau unassisted
]
[Illustration:
Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed endless. This
one had thirty dozen loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders
]
[Illustration:
But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing home-made two-wheeled
carts, often with a flag, sometimes the stars and stripes, flying at
the head
]
We honked and snorted and sirened our way through the narrow, dust-deep,
crowded streets of Kalgan, as automobiles must in any genuine Chinese
city, now blocked completely by the deliberate foot-going traffic, now
by languid trains of ox-carts, and always quickly surrounded by gaping
and grinning Chinese, to whom a foreigner seems always to remain a rare
bird, however many of him may be seen daily. Twice we were halted at
ancient city gates by policemen with fixed bayonets. They were somewhat
more deferential to us, and more easily satisfied with the credentials
we chose to show, than toward our two companions with their big red
_huchao_, large as a newspaper page, by means of which the local _yamen_
had given them permission for their journey. Russians are subject now to
Chinese law, and Americans are not, which at times makes a world of
difference. Yet it was at one of these same gates that an American
resident of Kalgan was killed by one of these same guards not long
afterward for refusing to submit to an illegal decree of the local
overlord.
For about two hours beyond the outer gate we climbed a stony river-bed,
wide enough to have carried a stream with ships on its bosom, but merely
crisscrossed by a narrow brook bringing down silt from the treeless
mountains above. The city abandoned us with reluctance, struggling along
for a way in closely crowded shops and dwellings, then straggling more
and more until it dwindled to a single row of mud houses on either side,
finally to little clusters of huts strung together like loose strings of
beads, and breaking up at last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like
into the cliffs of dry fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and
beyond us. The unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of
camels haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid,
heavily riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and
donkeys carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones,
throngs of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims, mingled here
and there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray
soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad
shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once been
red or yellow. Whenever some of the many obstacles brought us
momentarily to a halt these religious tramps came to beg the half-smoked
cigarette from between our lips, to feel the car all over, as if it were
some new breed of horse, and to hint that a dollar or a dime or a few
coppers or even some remnants of food would be more or less gratefully
accepted.
Where the waterless river tumbles down from the high plateau across
which lies nearly all the route to Urga, the slope is too swift even for
the sturdiest of motors, wherefore the adaptable Chinese villagers have
found a new source of income. Before this steeper section was reached,
Chinese along the way began to wave appeals at us, to point out their
lean and hungry mules and horses, in some cases even to climb up over
our baggage rampart with harnesses in their hands, begging the job of
hauling us to the top. Three horses, a mule, and a donkey were at length
engaged, after the bargaining indispensable to both races concerned in
the transaction, hitched with long rope traces to the front axle of our
now silent car, and for more than an hour they toiled upward under the
discouragement of three shrieking Chinese drivers and their cracking
whips, at a pace which that one of us who chose to walk easily
outdistanced.
From the chaos of broken rocks where the animals were allowed to abandon
us stretched a tumbled brown world not unlike the upper reaches of the
Andes. Of road in the Western sense there had been none from the start;
there was even less now. Across pell-mell hillocks with rarely a yard of
level space between them, among rocks of every jagged and broken form,
we plowed for the rest of the morning. Cattle—curiously
effeminate-looking cattle, with long ungraceful horns—flocks of sheep
and goats intermingled, files of camels under varying cargo, here and
there a cluster of black pigs rooting more or less in vain, marked a
trail that might otherwise have been less easy to follow. Men in
cotton-padded clothing and sheepskins plodded beside their animals, or
tramped alone with a worn and faded roll of bed and belongings on their
backs; cheery, amused, seldom-washed people smiled at us over the mud
walls of their compounds; for some time big ruined towers of what was,
or was to have been, another Great Wall, stood at brief intervals along
the crest of the bare, yellow-brown ridge beside us. Then came rolling
stretches of grain, principally oats, most of it already harvested by
the sickle and carry-on-the-back method, for all the vastness of the
cultivation, and lying in carefully spaced bundles in the fields where
it fell, or set up in long rows of closely crowded shocks near the
hard-earth threshing floors.
Bit by bit even this cultivation grew rare and scattered, and finally
died out entirely. By the time the speedometer registered eighty miles
from Kalgan we were spinning along, often at thirty miles an hour,
across high, brown, grass-covered plains, still somewhat uneven, but
with little more than a suggestion of hilliness remaining. Flocks of
sheep far off on the sloping sides of the horizon looked like patches of
daisies; veritable gusts of gray-blue birds of stately flight,
suggestive both of cranes and of wild geese, rose in deliberate haste
before us and floated away to the rear in a vain effort to outdistance
us. Almost frequently we passed long camel caravans, broken up into
sections of a dozen animals each, tied together by a sort of wooden
marlinespike thrust through their noses beneath the nostrils and
attached by a cord to the pack of the animal ahead, the first of each
dozen led by a well padded, skin-wrapped man who was more often Chinese
than Mongol. Some of these camel-trains seemed endless, with dozen after
dozen of the leisurely, soft-footed animals slowly turning their heads
to gaze, with a disdainful curiosity that suggested a world-weary
professor looking out from beneath his spectacles at incorrigible
mankind, upon this strange and impatiently hasty rival that sped
breathlessly past them. Now and again a beast shuffled sidewise away
from us, uttering that absurd little falsetto squeak which is the
camel’s inadequate means of protest at a cruel world; but most of them
refused to be startled into undignified activity by any such ridiculous
apparition. Once on the journey I counted a caravan bound for Urga which
stretched from horizon to horizon across the brown undulating world; and
there were thirty dozen camels bearing cargo, and a score of outriders
to keep the expedition in order.
We spent the night in a Chinese inn, mud-built and isolated, with the
usual stone _kang_, heatable and mat-covered, as bed and only
furnishing. It might have been quiet and restful but for over-zealous
watch-dogs and the arrival long after dark and the departure long before
dawn of two dilapidated cars with seventeen chattering Chinese
passengers. We, too, were off well before daylight, a half-moon lighting
the way as we spun across rolling, utterly treeless country with nothing
but short, scanty grass giving a touch of life to the brown-green
landscape over which a cloudless sun at length poured its molten gold.
Even the confirmed tramp would have found this an unendurable journey on
foot; a motor-car in its prime was scarcely swift enough to avoid
monotony, to come often enough on flashes of interest to keep the senses
from sinking into slothfulness. Pedestrians and lone travelers had long
since disappeared; safety, both from possible violence and from
starvation, demanded banding together, and some form of mount. The big
shaggy black dogs of Mongolia, filthy in diet as those of Central and
South America, but several times more savage, roamed wild across the
plains. A woman abroad at sunrise, gathering the offal left by a camping
camel-train and tossing it with a bamboo pitchfork over her shoulder
into a basket on her back, was the only sign of life for several miles.
Such fuel, like the llama droppings of the Andean highlands, is all that
is to be had in this barren region.
There were striking reminders of the aborigines of the Andes among the
scattered inhabitants of this high plateau. Mongols, distinctive in
face, dress, manner, and physique from the Chinese, had the same broad,
stolid features to be found along the spine of South America, though
they were much more bold and independent of bearing, as if they had
never been cowed by alien races. The interiors of their rare clusters of
two or three huts recalled the Andes, too—the bare earth for floor, a
dozen woolly sheepskins as beds, an extra pair of boots, a couple of
aged pots as total belongings. Instead of heaped-up cobblestones without
mortar, however, these _yourts_ were made of thick rugs of felt fastened
about a light wooden framework into a perfectly round dwelling perhaps
ten feet in diameter, the door, invariably facing the south, so low that
a man could barely enter upright on his knees. Inside, at least under
the wheel-like apex-support of the round and sloping roof, even we
Americans could sometimes stand erect—by peering out through the opening
for the escape of smoke and the entrance of air in pleasant daytime
weather, left by turning back the uppermost strip of felt. At one such
tent, where we halted to satisfy a thirsty radiator, only a soil-matted
old woman appeared and took to feeling along the ground about it for the
vessel that lay in plain sight. She was stone-blind, it turned out, yet
to all appearances quite satisfied with life as she knew it, with only
her miserable _yourt_ and an uninviting water-hole a few rods away. The
Mongol is still a true nomad herdsman, and his round, gray-white
dwellings are easily transportable, so that when one little hollow in
the plain dries up he has only to pack his house and wander along.
[Illustration:
The Mongol would not be himself without his horse, though to us this
would usually seem only a pony
]
[Illustration:
Mongol authorities examining our papers, which Vilner is showing, at
Ude. Robes blue, purple, dull red, etc. Biggest Chinaman on left
]
[Illustration:
A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching our arrival at the first
yamen of Urga
]
Once every two or three hours we passed a cluster of three or four of
these low, movable homes, always at a considerable distance off the
trail. There was still no road, yet we made good speed almost steadily.
Besides the often dim traces of other travelers there was the guidance
of a line of telegraph-poles, carrying two wires but as yet no messages.
In the days before the World War word could be flashed by this route
from Paris to Peking, even from London to Shanghai, in three minutes;
but retreating armies must have fuel even in a treeless desert. Mixed
flocks of sheep and goats, slate-colored goats mingled with those
fat-tailed sheep of Asia which waddled so ludicrously as they scampered
away from us, still found sustenance here and there under the protection
of a mounted shepherd or two. It was still too early autumn for wolves,
but bands of antelopes, like big pretty rabbits, loping gracefully yet
swiftly across the rolling plains, became more and more frequent and
immense as we sped northwestward. Before the journey ended, great lines
of these, like brown-gray heat-waves, sometimes undulated along the
whole horizon, and more than one herd of fifty to a hundred, startled by
the sudden appearance of our snorting black monster, all but ran
themselves off their legs in a mad dash to cross the trail in front of
us, instead of speeding away out of danger.
It was about noon of the second day that we gradually entered the real
Gobi Desert. Yet it was not a desert in the Sahara sense, of mere
shifting sand, but of hard sand and gravel mixed with clay, always
covered at least with the thinnest of grass, and often with tufts of a
grass-bushy sort, enough to keep even a desert from shifting and
blowing. Thus far the weather had been cool but glorious; but no sooner
had we come to the Gobi, where, as any teacher of geography can tell
you, it never rains, than the sky roofed itself over completely with
gray-black clouds and rain forced us to halt and contrive some means of
raising the top over our ramparts of baggage. Skeletons of cattle,
particularly of camels, became more than frequent, blanching into dust
closely beside the trail just where the end of their life’s labors had
overtaken them. Buzzards that looked more like eagles vied with the wild
black dogs in disposing quickly of the carcasses. Nor were the modern
rivals of the camel free from a like fate. Several skeletons of
automobiles caught our eye, and they were always scattered piece by
piece for some distance, as if they had disintegrated at full speed, or
their bones, too, had been picked clean and dragged hither and yon by
those savage dogs that roam the Mongolian plains. Floor-flat and wide as
it is, and almost as free from the “other fellow” as from “traffic
cops,” this natural speedway of the Gobi has had a number of fatal
automobile accidents.
Unlike the Sahara, it is not merely the camel that can cross the Gobi.
Mules and horses make the journey, and the miles-long camel caravans
were rivaled by endless strings of ox-carts, the crudest of two-wheeled
contrivances, plodding along across the dry, brown world as if all sense
of time or destination had long since been cast aside as worthless
paraphernalia. Often, especially in the cold early mornings, we passed
caravans camped out, perhaps for a day or two, while their weary animals
browsed the stingy hillsides. A denim-blue tent backed by scores or
hundreds of bales of hides or wool, if the expedition was China-bound,
or boxes of food, cloth, liquor, and oil products, if Urga was its
destination, with perhaps more uptilted two-wheeled carts than could
have been counted during one of our average halts, usually completed
such a picture as we came upon it. At the sound of our unmuffled engine
tent-doors became alive with gaping, bullet-headed Mongols, lower orders
of whom, or their Chinese counterparts, came to life from beneath what
had seemed to be mere bundles of felt rags and sheepskins on the cold
hard ground, while the horses tethered about the camp with three feet
hobbled together after the Mongol fashion made frantic and often
successful efforts to escape from this new terror descending upon them.
The horses of the Gobi have not yet learned to behold the automobile
with equanimity, and our passing often sent great herds of Mongolian
ponies sweeping away in chaotic masses across the plains in a stampede
which the dozen outriders were powerless to stem.
Twice during the second day we made out large compact clusters of white
buildings on the flank of distant ridges along the horizon—lamaseries in
which scores of Mongol monks pass their days in anything but monasterial
austerity. Once, when we had seen no other living thing for hours, an
old Mongol came loping across the desert on a camel in the teeth of the
cold, raging wind, a picturesque figure in the still almost bright-red
quilted cloak reaching to his ankles, and his pagoda-shaped fur cap.
When we called to him he halted and pulled sharply at the reins attached
to the perforated nose of his beast, which thereupon knelt in
instalments, front, back, then front again, and rose to follow his
dismounted master over to us. Our Russian companions, who managed to
make themselves understood in any language, though actually speaking
none but their own, passed the time of day in Mongol, the one important
word of which seems to be _buyna_, corresponding to the French _il y a_,
but greatly outdoing it in service. The leathery face of the old man was
like a boot that had lain out in the elements for years; the two teeth
he showed suggested the fangs of a wolf; but his smile was as kindly as
that of an Iowa farmer, and while his thankfulness for a cigarette was
very briefly expressed, as becomes a nomad scorning or unaware of the
formalities of a politer world, there was something distinctly manly in
his every movement from the time we first saw him until he mounted his
kneeling camel again and rode away into the vastness of the desert. For
hours afterward there was nothing to catch the attention, unless it was
the compatriot beside me. He was one of those American wanderers in the
Orient who have never recrossed the Pacific since coming out to help
pacify the Philippines a generation ago, and he still preferred a horse
and “buggy” to these new-fangled things fed by gasolene; he had not yet
heard of scores of facts and inventions which have become ancient
history to us at home; and he passed his idle hours in humming the songs
that were popular in our land twenty years back.
At length we ran out from under the great motionless canopy of clouds
into brilliant sunshine again, though even there the racing wind was
almost bitter cold. The Gobi, as I have said, is no Sahara, yet it was
beautiful in its many moods as the sea, stretching away in tawny browns
or cold bluish grays to infinity, or to scampering lines of antelope
along the far horizon. Beyond the mud-walled compound enclosing the
telegraph station of Ehr-lien the smooth, grass-tufted desert gave way
to a savage country of protruding rock-heaps, peaked heaps of blackish
stone outcropping everywhere, as if nature, too, built prayer-piles,
like the pious Mongols, who litter their landscapes with conical piles
of stones wherever they are available, as appeals to the supernatural
powers.
Nightfall found us midway between two mud-walled telegraph stations, and
shelter from the raging wind and the penetrating night air of a more
than four-thousand-foot elevation was highly desirable. Two
weather-blackened _yourts_ broke the immensity about us, far off to the
right. One does not need to look for side-roads on the Gobi; we made a
bee-line for them across the plain. But the unsoaped occupants were not
willing to double up in one tent and rent us the other, for which I was
duly grateful when I had caught a glimpse inside the pen that might have
been assigned to us. Several miles farther on, a larger group of nomad
dwellings appeared, this time to the left across more broken country. By
the time we had struggled near to the settlement we were surrounded by
Mongols and black dogs, several horses had broken their tethers and were
already mere specks on the horizon, and even the camels reclining about
the _yourts_ had risen to protest in their ridiculously childish
falsetto against this unauthorized disturbance. This time there were
half a dozen tents, in much better repair and more nearly resembling
human dwellings. Moreover here there was a man of importance to receive
us. He was a lama, as his close-cropped head and a kind of bath-robe
gown, thickly quilted and still dully red for all its unwashed age, told
us; for the Mongol layman wears a cue and more masculine garments, wore
a cue in fact centuries before this girlish head-dress was imposed upon
the Chinese by their nomad conquerors. But it required the linguistic
lore of our Russian companions to learn that he was also a princeling, a
kind of tribal ruler of a neighboring region, who had come on a visit to
his friend, the family head of this cluster of huts. He was a big brawny
man, rather handsome in his own racial style, with a wide, frank, fairly
intelligent face, pitted with smallpox. We were invited to enter his own
hut, which was round and low and made of thick gray felt, like all those
on the Gobi; but the earth floor was also carpeted with felt mats, and
about the circular walls were several small chests and other simple
articles of household use, not to mention saddles and bridles. The lama
gave orders briefly and to the point, more like a commander than a
guest. A sort of iron basket on legs was set up in the middle of the
tent, filled, by hand, with dried camel-dung, and was soon blazing so
merrily that the bitter night wind outside was more endurable than the
temperature inside the tent. I know no fuel which outdoes that of the
Gobi in quickness and intensity of heat. The Mongols, however, seemed to
be impervious to it. Though inured for many generations to the bitter
cold of their plateau, they crowded into the hut without removing a
single one of their heavy garments, tightly closed the little low door,
and squatted about the roasting iron cage with every evidence of keen
enjoyment. There is but slight differentiation by sex in Mongol dress,
and the men and women alike wore heavy, ungraceful trousers, huge high
boots of soft, pliable, black leather with pointed turned-up toes, and a
thick quilted garment covering all else from neck to calves, not to
mention uncouth fur head-dresses. Even in these desert _yourts_ the
reddish faces and garments of the women are often set off by elaborate
and fanciful hair-dress and other ornaments; but if these existed here
they had been laid away, and the very girls stalked about in their
oversize sock-stuffed boots like lumber-jacks in midwinter.
Mongol tea was prepared over the fire-cage and served us in brass bowls;
but as the resident of Mongolia puts his salt in his tea rather than on
his food, and has other un-Western notions of how it should be
concocted, I did not insist on having my bowl refilled. I found my mind
frequently harking back to such nights as this on the high Andean
plateaus of South America, though there the travel itself had been quite
different. Here was the same bare, vegetationless earth round about, the
same complete ignorance of, or interest in, cleanliness, similar
crowded, comfortless huts, and much the same attitude toward life as
among the Indians of the Andes. But these plateau-dwellers were far more
hospitable, cheery of manner, and with a live human curiosity which,
though it caused them to finger monkey-like any of our possessions they
could reach, had a more agreeable effect on the spirits than the sullen
dullness of their American prototypes. Now and again, when they became
over-troublesome, the lama ordered them outside with a commanding voice
and manner which usually was effective at the third or fourth
repetition. Yet he, too, was not lacking in fingering curiosity, of a
slightly more controllable nature. While we ate we passed out samples of
our strange foreign food to the gaping, over-clad semicircle about us.
One of my canned cherries, dropped into a gnarled Mongol palm, created a
considerable commotion. What was it; and was it safe in a Mongol
stomach, even though this other kind of man ate it without misgiving? It
passed from hand to hand around the circle, each evidently expressing
his opinion of the risk involved, and the consensus seemed to be that it
was up to the original recipient to make the venture. He licked
cautiously at the fruit for some time after it had been returned to the
furrowed hollow of his hand. At length, reassured by the two Russians
and urged on by the lama, he bit gingerly into it—and half sprang to his
feet with the shock it seemed to give his tongue. More reassurance
finally induced him to eat it, and all went well until the stone
betrayed its existence, whereupon there was an instant demand to know
whether the presence of that foreign substance was normal, or whether
his evil spirit was playing new and perhaps destructive tricks upon him.
Considering the quantity of foreign substance the average Mongol absorbs
with his meals, there seemed to be something absurdly incongruous about
this lengthy performance. But then, we of the uninstructed West know
little of the myriad methods the teeming evil spirits of the Orient
devise to trap their victims.
A bit of chocolate caused less flurry, though the semicircle around
which it disappeared unanimously pronounced it too sweet to be
agreeable. A cube of sugar was not a total stranger, and each of the
gathering asked the privilege of letting one melt on his tongue. When it
came to meat, even from tins, there was no mystery left; mutton and beef
form the almost exclusive diet of the Mongols, except for milk and
cheese in summer, and their salted tea. Not only are they true nomads,
but their pseudo-Buddhist religion teaches that it is wicked—or shall we
say dangerous?—to till the soil.
Though there is little formality in Mongol intercourse, I inadvertently
made one _faux pas_ during the evening. Among those who crowded into the
overheated hut was what I at first took to be a handsome youth, but who
turned out to be, under the heavy, sexless garments of Mongolia, a girl,
perhaps of seventeen. When I offered her a tidbit of some sort, she
shrank back without accepting it, while the rest of the semicircle
looked at me with an expression of mingled wonder and resentment, and a
moment later she slipped out through the tightly closed, knee-high door
into the night. I should, it seemed, have been more indirect in my
methods, handing the donation to the old woman or to one of the men of
the family, and hinting that they might pass it on. As it was, I had
evidently boldly made an advance, and that publicly, similar to handing
my door-key to a chance lady acquaintance in the West. The girl
returned, later on, and indirectly accepted a few knick-knacks, but it
was evident as long as I remained that I was a man on whom it behooved
parents and husbands to keep a watchful eye.
The tin cans we emptied were, of course, considered great prizes, to be
quarreled over and at length allotted by the lama. The old woman begged
us to open others and somehow dispose of the food in them, in order that
she might still further increase her stock of kitchen utensils. Her
curiosity seemed to have reached almost a morbid growth, for though we
or the lama drove her several times out of the hut, she was evidently
bent on watching these curious beings from another world disrobe. A
ragged old man who proved to be the tribal shepherd was equally hard to
banish, though for a different reason. He had been accustomed to sleep
in the hut we occupied, and he resisted as long as he dared, and quite
justly, the demand of the lama that he sleep outside. The lama won in
the end, of course, and the shepherd curled up grumblingly in a nest of
quilted rags and sheepskins along the outer wall, where his deep bark
resounded in the desert stillness all through the night. Heavy colds
seem to be quite as common among these permanent denizens of the plateau
as they were universal with the four of us. The fire-cage was carried
outside, but the thick heat remained, in spite of which the lama called
to a boy to pull the topmost layer of felt down over the opening left in
the top of _yourts_ by day, hermetically sealing the place. But he was
right; before morning we would have resented a pinhole in the felt
walls. I had indulged in the luxury of bringing an army cot with me,
which excited not only the wonder but the admiration of our host. The
inventiveness which had produced such a contraption seemed less
surprising to him than the courage I displayed in using it; he, said the
lama, would be certain to fall off it in the night and seriously injure
himself. Instead he stripped to the waist and lay down on a bundle of
blankets and skins along the wall, pulling a rough cover of camel’s hair
over him. But this was not until the formalities of his calling had been
fulfilled. As we were turning in, he called once more to the boy
outside, who soon appeared with two brass disks, loosely tied together.
The lama squatted on his haunches, clashed the disks once together with
a resounding clang, then mumbled for several minutes through his
prayers. Then he sat for some time staring from one to the other of us,
as if wondering what breed of men were these, who dared lie down for the
night without having propitiated the evil spirits which ride the
darkness, until at length he blew out the floating-wick lamp and lay
down.
We were glad, indeed, to see the sun again next morning, when at last it
burst up like the exhaust from a puddling furnace over the low, level
horizon. Already we had bumped our way back to the “highway,” as worthy
of the name as the _caminos reales_, the “royal roads,” of South America
are of theirs, and had sped some distance along it. The eyes suffered
most in this glaring light and the incessant strong head wind from which
nothing short of entirely wrapping up the head could protect them. The
constant bumping and tossing made up for any lack of exercise. Among
myriad rock-heaps, natural and prayerful, we crossed the frontier
between Inner and Outer Mongolia, marked merely by two huger stone-heaps
on either side of the there sunken trail, the summits connected by a
wire from which hung tattered bits of cloth prayers and various mementos
of the pious, culminating in a weather-beaten straw hat of Chinese make.
That was all, except the immensity of the desert, for the
frontier-station was still about fifty miles distant. Then the
rock-heaps died out, and the earth as far as we could see it was thickly
covered with millions of little mounds, like untended Chinese graves,
with hints of scanty tuft-grass on top of them. At long intervals we
passed a caravan, the dull-toned notes of the bell-camels reaching our
ears momentarily as we dashed past. The first camel of one long train
carried the American flag at his masthead, so to speak, to warn would-be
marauders that the hides and wool behind him were under whatever
protection our consuls and diplomats in the former Chinese Empire have
to offer. Otherwise the world about us was mainly a confirmation of the
fact that, while China proper estimates the density of her population at
two hundred and twenty-five to the square mile, Mongolia’s is rated at
two.
Were the world not so slow to accept geographical changes, even in these
days of the constant remaking of maps, we should long since have ceased
to distinguish between Mongolia and China “proper.” Though the Chinese
Republic claims, and to a certain extent maintains, the loyalty of that
strip of earth bordering her on the north and known as Inner Mongolia,
the vast region we call Outer Mongolia cast off Chinese rule a decade
ago. More exactly, it never was under Chinese rule, at least in modern
times, for barely had their kindred Manchus been driven from the throne
of China than the Mongols asserted their independence from the
new-formed republic. That was why we Americans had looked forward with
some misgiving to our arrival in Ude, which occurred early on this third
day. Ude consists of half a dozen _yourts_ and a new mud-walled
telegraph station, a desolate spot, owing its location to a near-by
water-hole. But it is the place where the merits or demerits of persons
entering Outer Mongolia from China are passed upon—passed upon by
unpolished Mongols who have little knowledge of, and less interest in,
the way such things are handled at other boundaries between the
countries of the globe. The Russians had no misgivings; while men of
their race would not willingly have traveled to Urga eighteen months
before, they were now, as it were, among their own people. But, for
reasons which will in due time be apparent, there is just now a certain
lack of welcome in Mongolia toward Americans, in which the British and
certain other important nationalities share. Less than a month before,
two Englishmen in their own car had been halted at Ude and refused
admission to the land beyond, eventually giving up lengthy and useless
negotiations to have this decision reversed, and returning to China. We
had no “papers” calling upon Mongolia to admit us. Our legation in
Peking had only been able to tell us that, if our passports were sent to
the Chinese foreign office, they would be returned—long afterward—with
the information that, while Mongolia was still Chinese territory, it was
in the hands of rebels—they might even have called them bandits—and
since the Chinese Republic could not guarantee the safety of foreigners
in that region, they could not consent to our traveling there, even to
the extent of giving us a visé. The Mongols themselves have no
accredited representative in China, naturally, and while certain other
agents in Peking might have smoothed things over for us if they had
wished, it is their policy to pretend that they and those they represent
have no real power in Mongolia, apparently in the hope of keeping the
world ignorant as long as possible of their doings in that region. It is
customary, therefore, for those citizens of Western nations who wish to
enter Outer Mongolia to pick up their traps and go, regardless of legal
permissions.
But all our misgivings of being turned back at Ude were worry wasted.
The Mongols have a reputation for instability in the conduct of affairs
of government, of stiff-necked severity at one moment and great leniency
in quite a similar matter the next; for after all they are little more
than adult children to whom government is a new and amusing plaything.
Moreover it may be that the letter and the bottle of vodka which the
chief of our party brought for the Ude functionary had their effect; at
any rate he not only did not demand our papers but did not even ask to
see us, so that by the time we had breakfasted on our own food and local
hot water in a _yourt_ next to the official one we were free to continue
to Urga.
Ox-carts with a single telegraph-pole diagonally across them were
crawling northwestward in great trains; new poles and rolls of wire,
both from far off, lay here and there along the way near Ude, where we
ran into the Dane who had been all summer repairing the line which
retreating armies had left a wreck behind them. Within a week, he
promised—and his word proved good—messages would again be flashing from
Paris to Peking, as they had not in more than two years. Mongols and
Chinese now well trained for the task were replacing the last of the
thousands of missing poles which forced neglect or the demands of
military camp-fires had brought down, and their methods were worth
watching. Instead of the sharp spikes at the instep used by our
pole-climbers, the Mongols wore on each foot a semicircle of iron about
two feet long, with saw-teeth on the inside, which made their climbing
suggestive of some tropical spider, and must be taken off whenever they
walked from pole to pole. The Chinese, on the other hand, used a method
characteristic of their overcrowded, man-cheap country—each pole-climber
had two coolie assistants, who carried a ladder! Building, or even
repairing, a telegraph-line across the Gobi is no effeminate matter of
nightly beds and full hot meals. The sole national representative in
Mongolia of this Danish enterprise had been weeks at a time even without
bread, while the less said in his presence about bathing the greater the
popularity of the speaker. Stern methods are needed, too, to protect
such exotic assets as telegraph-poles in an utterly treeless and even
bushless region. By the “law of the Living Buddha,” as it is called in
Mongolia, the cutting down of a telegraph-pole is punishable with death.
The Dane and his party had come across a man so engaged not long before,
and had tied him up and sent him off to be judged by his fellows; but so
effective has the law been that the severed and useless end of a pole
will lie until it rots away close beside a trail along which pass
hundreds of caravans and groups of travelers to whom fuel is almost a
matter of life or death.
For nearly a day’s journey beyond Ude the desert is so smooth and hard
that we could maintain a speed of fifty miles an hour for long
stretches, so smooth that riding the roadless plateau was almost like
falling through space. Sain-Usu, which is Mongol for “Good Water,”
welcomed us for half an hour in one of its three huts, and not far
beyond there rose deep-blue above the horizon the flattened peak that
marks the site of Tuerin. With such splendid going as nature furnished,
it seemed visibly to move toward us; yet the sun was low and the night
cold already biting into our bones when we dragged ourselves to the
ground before the telegraph station at its foot. This highest point on
the trans-Gobi journey, five thousand feet above the sea, is a great
fantastic heap of black rocks, many of them large as apartment-houses,
piled up one above the other, here as carefully as if by the hand of
man, there tossed together in such a pell-mell chaos as to suggest that
the Builder had suddenly taken a dislike to his task and knocked it over
with a disdainful sweep of the hand. On the further slope lies a large
lamasery, where travelers may sometimes find shelter, but not food, for
all the quantities of everything which the pious nomads roundabout bring
the loafing lamas. Otherwise there is nothing whatever except the
yellow-brown plains, sloping away to infinity in every direction.
The last hundred and fifty miles were more like a prairie than a desert,
beautiful light-brown folds of earth, everywhere cut on a generous
pattern, rolling on and on farther than the advancing eye could ever
reach. There was a kind of prairie-dog, too, squatting on its haunches
and gazing saucily upon us, or dashing for the gravel-banked holes with
which it had dotted the plain. These were marmots, of special interest
to our Russian companions, since their skins form one of the most
important items of export for the fur-traders of Mongolia. Mile after
mile they lined the way, whole colonies of them, some of the bluish tint
much sought after by dealers, most of them a beautiful gray-brown which
flashed for a moment in the brilliant sunshine as they dashed
gopher-like for their holes with an impertinent flip of their bushy
tails.
At length women and children, and not merely men, began to appear,
riding on camels and horses; camps of hides and wool grew almost
numerous; there were more settlements along the way, though all of them
were still the round portable huts of the nomads. Great flocks of what
looked like plovers swirled up; big brown birds that seemed a cross
between hawk and vulture rode by on the wind; wild ducks were so tame
and numerous as to have tantalized a hunter. We came out upon a rise
with a magnificent view—the yellow foreground fading to brown as the
world rolled away before us, then a purplish tint, increasing to a blue
that grew ever darker, until the broken ridge along the horizon far
ahead blended into the strip of clouds hanging motionless over it.
Gradually mountains rose on every hand, the few scrub evergreens along
the crests of some of them being the first trees or even brush we had
seen since soon after leaving Kalgan. The cold wind that had cut clear
through us for days seemed to come forth from the Siberian steppes
beyond with renewed savage intensity. Before long the crest-line of
trees became a low but dense green forest, covering all the upper
portion of what we soon learned was the sacred mountain of Urga, where
all furred and feathered creatures are under the protection of the
“Living Buddha.” We entered ever deeper into a broad valley, Mongols in
their long cloaks becoming more and more numerous, and more disagreeably
sophisticated than the simple herdsmen with their long poles and
noose-lassos out on the open plain. There the broad-cheeked nomads had
been more friendly, had more manly dignity, than the Chinese; here the
manliness remained, but there was something surly, almost savage about
them, which we were quickly to learn was no mere matter of outward
appearances. There came a small river, actually crossed by a bridge, a
queer massive wooden bridge with what looked like piles of railway-ties
as pillars; and on down the valley a town appeared, the towers of a
radio-station rose from among the hills, a long row of barrack-like
buildings of a European type grew distinct—and just then our troubles
began.