IN “RED” MONGOLIA
Across the broken valley at a gallop came two mounted men who turned out
to be Mongol soldiers, picturesque certainly, but not otherwise
particularly inviting. As they rode, they waved their rifles wildly in
the air, and were apparently bellowing to us orders which the raging
wind carried away before the sounds reached us. When they drew near,
their uniforms proved to be the usual costume of the lower-class
Mongol—heavy red knee-boots, pagoda-like fur hats, and a faded, quilted
kind of bath-robe gown covering the rest of their iniquities; but on
their chests and backs were sewed two cloth patches a foot square on
which were several upright lines of Mongol writing, announcing their
official capacity. But for these we might easily have mistaken them for
bandits, for both their manner of riding down upon us and their air
toward us when they had arrived suggested that they had captured booty
and prisoners for ransom rather than that they had merely come to escort
us to town.
One of them, it appeared from their actions, must get into the car with
us; the other would have to ride in with the horses. Like children who
very rarely have the chance of an automobile-ride, they quarreled and
argued for a long time, while the biting wind snapped and lashed at us,
as to which was entitled to the privilege, meanwhile flourishing their
aged rifles with a carelessness that made even such time-honored weapons
dangerous. At length one of them won the point and climbed
unceremoniously aboard, mopping his muddy feet on our robes, stretching
himself out at ease partly on our knees, partly on our most breakable
baggage, and poking us, perhaps unintentionally but none the less
unpleasantly, in the ribs with the business end of his loose-triggered
rifle, while the loser sourly turned away with the horses and the
expression of a six-year-old who had been deprived of his toys and
driven from the playground.
We forded half a dozen stony little streams, for the going had become
abominable in ratio as we approached Urga; we were waved hither and yon
across the valley by other rifle-shaking, vainly shouting soldiers, and
finally brought up at an ordinary little round felt hut with a smoking
stovepipe protruding from its top. It must have been much more
comfortable inside this than out in the bitter wind, for those within
showed no haste in braving the outer temperature. Finally, however, two
or three Mongols crawled through the low door and demanded our _huchao_,
our Chinese permit to make the journey. There was an interminable
argument over this, mainly inside the _yourt_, which we had not been
invited to enter. Then two more bullying soldiers with poorly controlled
rifles tumbled into the car and ordered us to drive on.
Before a _yamen_ that might have been mistaken either for a run-down
temple or a well kept stable we were again halted and commanded to
dismount. This place, it turned out, was not yet Urga, but the former
Chinese merchant section of Mai-Mai-Ch’eng (“Buy-Sell-Town”) some miles
away from the sacred city, in which trading was until recently
forbidden. Here a veritable mob of soldiers and petty officials poured
out upon us, led by an exceedingly insolent youth in a rich, silky, but
much soiled light-blue gown topped off by a kind of archbishop’s miter.
He demanded our weapons. We dug them and the bit of ammunition we
carried out of our baggage, protesting in vain that as this was all to
be examined at the next _yamen_, and armed guards were to conduct us
there, this extra labor of disentangling our overloaded car was
unnecessary. But it was plain that there were at least two motives for
putting us to this gratuitous trouble: the insolent Mongol youth did not
wish to lose an opportunity to show his authority to the full,
particularly toward men of a race which seldom fell into his hands; and
the whole posse was eager to meddle with our belongings as much as
possible. They passed our revolvers and my companion’s rifle from hand
to hand, each trying his own method of manipulating them. Fortunately—at
the time we felt it was unfortunate—we had not loaded them, or several
tragedies might have ensued before their curiosity was satisfied and we
were allowed to conclude our journey. Then the overbearing youth in
charge decided that he must search our persons for weapons, though we
had given our word that we carried none. The implied insult would not
have mattered so much had not his hands looked as if he had been
handling Gobi fuel incessantly from childhood without a pause even to
wipe them, and had his manner been less that of the protected bully
venting an unaccountable spleen against the whole white race. But
cleanliness and common courtesy, we soon learned, are the two qualities
most foreign to the crowd now ruling Outer Mongolia.
The quarrel as to who should have the privilege of the automobile-ride
into Urga was at length decided in favor of all who could pile
themselves into and about the car and baggage. How the machine escaped a
broken back under the burden was a mystery which even Detroit probably
could not have explained. Then there came a delay while the blue-gowned
youth found and adjusted a fanciful pair of goggles, in all likelihood
filched from the baggage of some previous victim, and without which of
course the two- or three-mile ride ahead would have been unendurable. We
groaned away at last, rifles and our own weapons covering us on every
side, first through a half-ruined town of mud alleys between endless
palisades of upright logs of the pine family, then across a stony,
barren, wind-swept space with several axle-cracking little streams to be
forded. Between bumps we caught glimpses of the several distinctly
isolated sections of Urga, its golden temples and black dogs, its one
lofty building, and the Tibetan texts in stone on the flank of its
sacred mountain across the valley. Then we were suddenly turned into a
noisome back yard peopled with shoddy-clad and unwashed soldiers and
prisoners, the latter engaged in worse than menial tasks under the
bayonet-points of the former; the gate to the outside world was closed
and barred, and a new set of examiners fell upon us.
If a gang of young East Side New York rowdies should suddenly get the
complete upper hand in the city, I can imagine them going through the
belongings of their victims along Fifth Avenue in quite the same way as
now befell our own. At a word from a superior who would himself scarcely
have inspired a lone lady with confidence on a dark night, there sprang
forward from all sides a dozen young men who seemed to have been
specially chosen for their gangster-like appearance. In their shoddy
uniforms of some nondescript dark color, they looked like a cross
between low-class Russians and the scum of the Mongolian plains—which is
about what they were, in other words Buriats. The pleasure they took
both in putting us to annoyance and in prying minutely into our affairs
quite evidently purged their task of any stigma of labor. I have passed
many frontiers in my day, but never have I beheld an examination in the
slightest degree approaching in thoroughness this one. Every single
article, large or small, in our valises, bedding-bags, even our
lunch-sacks, was picked out one by one, carefully, not to say stupidly,
scrutinized, taken apart if that was physically possible, and finally
tossed into a heap on the filthy bare ground of the yard. Clean linen
must be completely unfolded, stared at minutely on both sides, and
crumpled up into a mess from which only a laundryman could rescue it. We
were not surprised that such articles aroused the suspicion of the
examiners; anything resembling clean linen was quite evidently strange
to them. Nor was there any intentional offense meant, perhaps, in mixing
our bread and our tooth-brushes with the offal in the yard, for no
conscious line of demarcation between these seemed as yet to have been
drawn in the minds of the examiners. They did consciously resent our own
higher plane of cleanliness, however, when it was called to their
attention. I was attempting to rescue my dismembered sleeping-bag from a
worse fate by picking it up from the ground where it had been thrown
after examination, when one of the rowdies snatched it out of my hand
and deliberately tossed it into an especially choice source of
contamination.
My shaving-stick was opened with extreme caution, as a possible infernal
machine. My safety-razor caused a considerable argument, until a
gang-chief ruled that it was not a deadly weapon. The man who picked up
an ordinary can of pork-and-beans tore off the label and attempted to
unscrew the top in his efforts to examine the contents, and was with
difficulty induced to spare me the labor of attacking it with a
can-opener. I rescued my exposed films just as they were about to be
unrolled, and came very near bodily injury for my interference before
our interpreter could get in touch with some one of authority and more
or less human intelligence. Thus it went, for more than an hour, through
every simplest article we had brought with us. Nor did a single
examination of each suffice; whenever anything unusual turned up, which,
thanks to the ignorance of the examiners, was often, all of them must
satisfy their monkey-like curiosity by thoroughly studying it. It was
not that we objected to having our baggage inspected, even with unusual
thoroughness—though legally we Americans were not subject to any
interference by the local authorities of Mongolia—but at least it would
have been a kindness to give the job to men who had some inkling of the
paraphernalia of civilization and some hazy notion of why tooth-brushes
and offal are not commonly mixed.
In the end they kept our weapons and cartridges, our American passports,
and all our papers, down to letters of introduction and scribbled
memoranda, which had not escaped their erratic attention. They demanded
that the tool-box be removed from the car and the spare tire opened, as
possible hiding-places. That these were the only ones they thought of
was due to their ignorance of automobile mechanism. The Russian Jews had
more influence than we, however, and after long and vociferous wrangling
this order was rescinded. In contrast to the deliberation with which
they had been examining it, they insisted that we snatch together our
heaped-up property and thrust it pell-mell, filth and all, back into our
bags and valises. Long blanks must then be filled out, in Russian, with
our personal biographies. These went to an inner office, while we still
shivered like hopper-screens in the wintry air outside; and at length a
man came out to announce that they must also keep my kodak and films.
This required a complete reëxamination of all my baggage, for my word as
to the number of films I carried could not of course be trusted. Finally
we were taken into the sanctum of the _Okhrana_ or the _Ghospolitakran_,
as it is variously called in popular parlance—the “State’s Internal
Guard” would perhaps answer as a poor and inadequate translation in
English. This is a genuinely Russian form of secret service and
espionage within the country, devised under the czarist régime and
continued by its receivers, the Bolsheviki, who had recently imposed it
upon Mongolia. The plain bare room of European style contained a rough
table and a few chairs, a surly Mongol nearer twenty than thirty, in
native garb except for a faded slouch felt hat, who proved to be the
ostensible head of the secret service, and an older Russian “adviser” in
grayish semi-uniform and quite modern glasses. The “adviser” looked as
if he had been familiar with the common forms of courtesy in earlier
days, but evidently he had either forgotten them or dared not mix them
with his “Red” allegiance, for his behavior was as studiously uncivil as
that of the Mongol was naturally rude. We had stood for a long time,
with empty chairs plentiful, when the pair deigned to notice our
existence. A handsome, courteous little Buriat, greatly contrasting with
the rest of the crew, explained our cases at length, with special
emphasis on the seizure of my kodak. Uncouth soldiers, Mongol, Buriat,
and Russian indiscriminately, lounged in and out, most of them
carelessly juggling guns with fixed bayonets, glaring ominously at us
from time to time, and picking up and examining any of the official
papers on the table which happened to catch their fancy. It is said that
there are no ranks in the “Red” army; certainly there was no outward
evidence of discipline among the detachment of it in Urga, or among
their apt Mongol pupils.
[Illustration:
The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the uninhabited frontier
between Inner and Outer Mongolia, where Mongol authorities examine
passports and very often turn travelers back
]
[Illustration:
Chinese travelers on their way to Urga; it is unbelievable how many
muffled Chinamen and their multifarious junk one Dodge will carry
]
[Illustration:
The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a _yourt_ made of heavy felt over a
light wooden framework, which can be taken down and packed in less
than an hour when the spirit of the nomad strikes him
]
[Illustration:
Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by pouring water on
sheep’s wool
]
A receipt, in Russian, was finally given us for our confiscated
belongings, and about four in the afternoon, ten hours since we had
eaten and five after our arrival, we were at last allowed to drag our
shivering frames away in quest of lodging. There are no hotels in Urga,
and visitors must appeal to the hospitality of one or another of the
stray Europeans living there, of whom, excepting of course the numerous
Russians, there seemed to be a single sample of each nationality. I was
just sitting down to a belated lunch in the home of Norway’s handsome
contribution to this international group when a red-clothed native of
the better class dropped in, hat and all. He was a young man of unusual
attainments for Mongolia, it seemed, educated at the University of
Irkutsk, speaking Russian perfectly, and famous as the only Mongol known
who spoke English. In the last accomplishment, however, he had not
advanced beyond the bashful stage, and consented to display it only when
there was no one to interpret his Russian or his Mongol. He was attached
to the foreign office, though soon to leave for Moscow as a member of
the Communist Congress there; and he had come, mainly out of personal
friendship for my host, to warn me of trouble ahead. A telegram, he told
the Norwegian in Russian, had just been received from a station out on
the Gobi, announcing that two Americans in a motor-car carrying four
persons had killed a Mongol on their way to Urga. He had no intention of
making unkindly insinuations against me or my companion, he said, but we
were the only Americans who had arrived within a fortnight, the only
foreigners who had come within a week, and ours was the only car that
had reached Urga for two or three days, as well as the only one in a
long time with only four occupants. Moreover, we had carried arms.
Absurd as the covert charge was—for our revolvers had lain unloaded in
our baggage throughout the trip—it was not wholly a laughing matter. My
compatriot had frequently fired his rifle at antelope along the way, and
there was a very slight possibility that a bullet had carried too far.
But worse almost than any question of guilt or innocence was the
possibility of becoming entangled in the intricacies of a Mongol court
of justice. Its point of view would be quite unlike that of our Western
judiciary; certainly haste would not be one of its attributes. All at
once the rights of extraterritoriality, to which I was legally entitled
in Urga even though forcibly deprived of them, seemed no mere forced
concession but the only way of being fairly judged in such a predicament
in a land and society so utterly alien to my own. Within an hour or so,
the Mongol thought, they would come to arrest us, and though he spoke
optimistically of the final outcome, he could not recommend even four or
five days in prison as a pleasant week-end. I had already heard
something of Urga’s place of detention, the earth cellar of the
_Okhrana_ where we had been examined, in which a score of Russians and
as many Mongols were even then huddled together, without a suggestion of
daylight, beds, blankets, human conveniences, or anything that could
honestly be called food, with nothing but the cold, damp ground to lie
on and a scanty bit of garbage to eat and drink. Judging by the cavalier
manner in which we had been treated as unaccused and ostensibly free
beings, it was not hard to imagine what those rowdy soldiers about the
place would do to us as prisoners. I did all possible justice to the
lunch before me, for at least if we were to join the community in the
icy cellar I wished to be partly filled up and thawed out before
beginning the experience.
A hasty council was convened of the few Americans—all visitors—and the
more Western Europeans in town. The seriousness with which these treated
the situation was anything but reassuring. Their patent distrust and
unexpressed dread of the sinister powers then ruling Urga recalled
stories of the terror that filled men’s lives in the worst days of the
French Revolution. It was plain that it was not a mere matter of proving
our innocence, if the authorities chose to make this a “frame-up” to be
rid of unwelcome visitors. In the end it was decided that the best plan
would be to forestall the authorities, to go at once to the minister of
justice before some of his less intelligent underlings received and
carried out the warrant for our arrest.
We reached him indirectly through his adviser, who was fortunately a
friend of my host. In the late afternoon light of his wholly European
study this polished and intelligent man in our ordinary garb looked
entirely like a Russian; it was not until next day that his more swarthy
tint and the quilted silk robe he wore to office showed him to be a
Buriat. He admitted that the telegram in question had been received, and
that the warrants would probably be ready within an hour or two—and no
doubt served, I reflected, in this leisurely moving world, just in time
to drag us out of our beds in the middle of the cold night. But as I had
taken the trouble to come and show myself, the Buriat went on, and to
explain my movements to his personal satisfaction, he would suppress the
warrants for the time being, if all four of us would appear at the
_yamen_ of justice, with an efficient interpreter, in the morning.
For all the absurdity of the whole affair there was a sense of relief in
having gained at least a respite, and before dinner was over I had
almost forgotten the matter. But when I woke once during that otherwise
deathly still Urga night, the howling of two or three of her man-eating
dogs had a curiously ominous, almost terrorizing, sound. Only a
fortnight before, fifteen men, a former prime minister among them, had
been shot in a near-by gully and their bodies fed to these dogs, in the
cheery Urga fashion. Those had been Mongols, to be sure, but a score of
Russians were even then shivering out the night in the cellar-prison,
charged with a hand in the same conspiracy, and from thinking of
shooting Russians for treason to actually shooting a stray Caucasian of
another nationality for some other alleged crime would be no impossible
leap for these “Red”-led, self-satisfied nomads. I had to remind myself
several times what a fool I was before I turned over and fell asleep
again.
Few things are ever as serious the next morning as when they happened
the night before, and I could laugh at my midnight anxieties when I sat
down to breakfast. It took some time to get our scattered party
together, and a suitable interpreter was not easily picked up, so that
it was nearer eleven than ten by the time we found a Russian speaking
both English and Mongol and set out for the _yamen_. But we need not
have let a little thing like that worry us. Promptness is neither
customary nor welcome in Mongolia; moreover, there are no two timepieces
in anything like agreement in all Urga, so that an hour or two one way
or the other can always be excused, in the unlikely event of any excuse
being expected, on the ground of incompatibility of clocks. What does an
hour mean, anyway, in a land where time is merely a vacuum? An American
who was just then flirting with the Mongolian Government for an
important concession made an appointment with the minister of foreign
affairs for ten one morning, and was there on the dot. When he had
waited an hour and a half he beckoned to a sub-official and asked
whether the minister would be unable to see him that morning, in which
case he had other matters requiring his attention.
“Oh, yes,” replied the functionary, “he will see you; but it is not yet
ten o’clock.”
However, to come back to our own affairs; we made our way across the
stony, dusty, wind-howling open space between the business and the
official sections of the holy city in time to avoid any risk of being
charged with tardiness. The _yamen_ of justice was a two-story frame
building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese when they held
the suzerainty over Outer Mongolia, as the flaring roofs, sky-blue
façade, dragon-decorated brick screen against evil spirits, palings of
crossed sticks to the number of outriders due the prince who once
occupied it, and the like, told us without any necessity of inquiring.
Two typical Mongol soldiers, resembling Oriental rag dolls that had lain
out in the garden for weeks and then been lost for a few days in the
coal-bin, lumbered to their booted feet from a fantastic sentry-box in
order, as is the habit of their class nowadays, to impress us with their
equality and authority by gratuitously delaying us for a few moments,
and at last we reached our destination. This was one of the barn-like
rooms of the unpretentious building. Near the door rose to the ceiling a
big cylindrical Russian brick stove. Around the other three sides of the
room ran a raised platform, knee-high and a man’s height in breadth. The
reed matting and cushions covering it recalled Japan, but there was
nothing Japanese in the way in which the dozen officials stepped upon it
from the unswept floor in their heavy boots, all more or less covered
with the filth of the streets, and calmly tramped about it or squatted
on their haunches. All these functionaries were dressed in Mongol
fashion; that is, in long robes of dull red, blue, green, purple,
violet, or similar conspicuous color, half obliterated with grease and
dirt, topped off with some one of their many fantastic national
head-dresses. The latter were never removed, nor were we foreigners
expected to take off our hats. In fact there seem to be no social
politenesses among this rude nomad people. They neither shake hands,
unless they are meeting or aping foreigners, nor bow, like the Chinese,
nor use any other gestures of greeting or parting; they stalk into
foreigners’ houses in hats and boots; their whole conduct is as if none
of the little courtesies and formalities of more highly civilized
communities had ever occurred to them, which is probably the case.
The place had electric lights, and from one of the walls hung an ancient
European type of telephone, which was frequently jangling or enduring
the shrieks of one or another bureaucrat, but which never seemed to
bring or transmit any information. Most of the functionaries, big sturdy
men who would have looked more at home herding cattle on the plains,
squatted near little tables or desks, a foot high, some smoking long
pipes with tiny bowls and much silver decoration, others rocking idly
back and forth, while their greasy pigtails, swaying to and fro,
increased the soiled line they had already drawn down the backs of their
gowns. A few were working; that is, writing in their national script, so
different from Chinese, on long strips of cheap tissue-paper folded
lengthwise and opening like an accordion. Their pens were the
camel’s-hair brushes common to the Far East, however, of which each man
carried two in a silver scabbard hanging from his girdle; their ink was
taken from a little flat stone on which they rubbed their pens sidewise,
and their writing-desks were thin squares of board held on their left
hands. A big dinner-bell in a corner of the room served to call
attendants, or to summon prisoners for the next case to be tried. For
justice was being dispensed, leisurely but steadily, all the time we
were there. In the center of the raised platform, opposite the door and
in the chief place of honor, squatted an imposing man who might easily
have been taken for an unusually burly Chinaman, in his darker gown, his
mandarin cap with a colored button, his oily cue, and his rimless
ear-piece glasses. He was fat, and he was fully aware of his own
importance in the Mongolian scheme of things. From time to time a group
of prisoners was brought in by one of the coal-bin soldiers, always
armed with a fixed bayonet. The accused, all ragged, shivering, and
visibly hungry, looking as if they had been living for weeks in an
underground dungeon and had been periodically beaten half to death, were
forced to kneel on the bare floor and bow their heads down to it several
times as an obeisance to the haughty judge. If they failed to do so
promptly, they were prodded or thumped to their knees by the soldier.
The trial consisted merely of the judge’s questioning the cringing
prisoner, during which his honor smoked, stretched himself, and spat
copiously on the floor in front of the kneeling culprits. When he was
done, he growled out something which may or may not have been a
sentence, and the prisoners were led away again. Of the score or more
tried while we were there none was released.
Meanwhile other business, such as our own, went serenely on along the
side platforms. Some of the scribes or officials wrote on their little
boards, some asked questions of an official nature, more chatted and
smoked as freely as if they were in a café. Curious individuals dropped
in now and then. There was, for instance, a little dried-up Jew with
long straggly red whiskers, and a furtive look in his eyes, as if he had
been the last survivor of a dozen pogroms. For more than an hour he sat
inconspicuously in a corner near the door, holding his aged slouch-hat
in his hands, ignored by the contemptuous Mongols, lacking the courage
to address them on whatever matter had brought him.
Our own case moved as we would have had it, except in speed. When
testimony must be written down in Mongol script with a camel’s-hair
brush on the poorest of paper and the least convenient of desks by an
official whose chief code of conduct is never to let any one or anything
hurry him under any circumstances, even a simple affair is not quickly
disposed of. There was a long argument as to how to turn our
extraordinary names into the native hieroglyphics; there were other
lengthy discussions during which I found ample time to study not only
the scene within the room but the big felt tent of fanciful decoration
with a mat-cloth door, in which the minister of justice lived out in the
back yard, a true Mongol nomad still, like many of his highly placed
fellows. The whole case should really have collapsed like a house of
cards, for another telegram had arrived which not merely reduced the
crime from the killing of a Mongol man to slightly wounding a Mongol boy
in the wrist, but showed that, by the records of our stopping-places, we
were at least a day’s travel away at the time; furthermore, the deed had
been done at short range with a revolver—on that point the information
was insistent—and the most cursory examination of our pistols, in the
hands of the secret service department, would have demonstrated that
they had not been fired on the way. In fact, it looked rather doubtful
whether even the slight crime alleged had been committed; perhaps it was
some boyish tale made up to gain sympathy for a scratched wrist.
Officially “the incident was closed” almost before we reached the
_yamen_; but that did not hinder us from being three hours there, nor
did it make it possible to have the thing written up in its legal form
and “deposited in the archives” forty-eight hours later, when the
clearing of our reputations was essential to the making of certain other
requests with which we were forced to trouble the authorities.