HOLY URGA
The holy city of Urga squats out on what would be an ordinary Mongolian
plain were it not for the rows of hills or low mountains which roll up
on either side of it. The landscape is the same yellow-brown, smooth as
the fur of the fox, the city, its wide shallow valley, and the rolling
hills on the right hand are as utterly devoid of trees or even a
suggestion of brush, as the Gobi. Only along the edge, and covering the
upper portion, of the range to the west and south, sacred to the “Living
Buddha” whose two palace compounds sit at the foot of it, is there any
vegetation except the thin brown grass of mountain heights. The soil
does not welcome it, for one thing. Even the forests capping the long
low sacred mountain, though planted centuries ago and strictly
protected, while dense enough, have attained little more than scrub
growth. About forty-five hundred feet above the sea and no great
distance from the Siberian border, Urga is no tropical haven. They tell
me that in summer its middays are sometimes uncomfortably hot; but
though it was only the middle of September when we arrived, all the
clothing we had brought with us was none too much to shut out the
penetrating mountain cold. Five days before, Peking had been sweltering;
here the entire population wore heavy quilted garments, from which
hardly a bare foot peered among the most poverty-stricken even on the
days when a brilliant sun in a glass-clear sky made delightful autumn
weather; before the month ended, howling gales of hail and snow swept
across the city and blotted out the surrounding hills, to leave them
covered with white as far as the eye could see.
The city is built in several towns or sections of distinctly different
characters, separated by bare, stony, wind-swept spaces. Besides the old
Chinese merchant town back up the valley, and the straggling buildings
which partly flank the nature-laid road to it, there is the official
town of _yamens_ and the like, with two great temple compounds closely
allied to it, then the now main business and residential section where
virtually all non-Mongols live, and farther on, a little higher up the
slope of the hills, a whole city completely given up to lamas, with the
great sanctuary of Ganden, only high building in Urga, bulking far above
it. Then, across the flat valley and several little streams, more than a
mile away against the background of the sacred mountain, is the
dwelling-place of Bogda-Han, the “Living Buddha,” flanked at some
distance by his summer palace on one side and on the other by clusters
of buildings housing the things and the men who serve him. Lastly there
are scores of _yourts_, the low round felt tents of Mongolia, scattered
at random outside the permanent city, particularly to the north, the
homes of true nomads who will not be without the comforts of their
portable houses even though they live in the holy national capital.
For that matter, many of the dwellers in the city itself still cling to
the customs and architecture of the plains from which they came. Mongol
princes and saints, of whom there is a generous number in Urga, cabinet
ministers and judges, may have a rather Russian type of frame house
within their compounds, but the chances are that they do their actual
living in their felt tent beside it. The _yourts_ are said to be
uncomfortably warm in summer, whence the tendency of those who are
wealthy by Mongol standards to copy European dwellings; but when the
first early frosts come they like the low crowded tent, with its intense
dung-fire heat, its sense of coziness, even the smell of the sifting
smoke of their pungent fuel, that has come down to them from their hardy
nomadic forefathers. The story is told of some high-placed Mongol to
whom fell a fine big room in one of the government buildings of the
expelled Chinese, who complained that it was as bad as living outdoors
and demanded either that another small low room be built for him within
it or that he be allowed to conduct his official business in his tent.
Urga is as wholly made up of walled compounds as any Chinese city; but
here the walls, instead of being of stone or baked mud, are of upright
pine logs, bark and all, some ten feet high and set so tightly together
that only here and there can one peer through a crack. Between these
frowning palisades, broken for block after block only by identical gates
which are a cross between a wooden arch and a Japanese _torii_ with
three uncurved crosspieces, and painted a dull red, run, not streets,
but haphazard passageways deep in dust, mud, or mere stony soil,
according as nature left them—grim defenseless lanes full of the offal
of man and beast, of putrid carcasses and gnawed bones, and always
overrun with groups of those surly, treacherous big black wild dogs of
Urga, ready the instant they feel they have mustered sufficient force to
pounce upon and drag down the passer-by. Inside, the compounds are bare
and unswept yards, for filth means nothing to the Mongol, and the
planting of a flower or a shrub is far beyond his stage of civilization.
A house or two, even three, perhaps as many felt tents, a tethered
horse, a heap of dried dung fuel, and the inventory is complete. A small
stream, its banks heaped high with filth and garbage, lined with
foraging dogs and squatting Mongols, crossed by half a dozen precarious
bridges culminating in the red one sacred to the “Living Buddha,” which
is barred against every-day traffic, meanders disconsolately through the
gloomy town. For there is a gloominess, an ominousness about Urga which
even the great gleaming gold superstructures of its many temples and
shrines, so brilliant as to cow the eye on days of clear sunshine, do
not dispel.
A few streets of the central town, to which commerce is confined, are
flanked by shops of a hybrid Chinese-Russian character, the great
majority of which are inwardly establishments quite like those of China,
though often scanty of goods and with a discouraged air in these days of
oppressive rule. Then there are numerous open-air markets more worth
visiting for their picturesqueness than for their wares. In one wide
dusty space Mongolian ponies are put through their paces for prospective
purchasers; camels or oxen may be had near-by on certain days; then,
there are several blocks lined with displays of furs, mainly of sheep
and goats in this season, but now and then offering wild pelts at
reasonable figures. Shop after shop is filled from floor to low shack
roof with the gaudy boots worn indiscriminately by all Mongols; little
portable booths or stands overflowing with every manner of silly and
useful trinket, chaotic collections of second-hand hardware spread on
the ground, more or less itinerant purveyors of used garments and of the
heavy silver ornaments that go with Mongol dress, each strive in their
turn to attract and detain the stroller. Almost all these merchants,
from horse-dealers to hawkers of lama rosaries and alleged photographs
of the “Living Buddha,” are Chinese; the Mongol is frankly a nomadic
herdsman and scorns any other occupation. Even in the purulent meat and
vegetable market stretching along the carrion-lined stream just outside
our window there were but few native venders. The more lowly members of
the tribe might consent to slash up and distribute the still bleeding
carcasses of cattle and sheep which Urga consumes in surprising daily
quantities; even out on the plains that is a necessary and respectable
task. But as the Mongol considers it unholy to cultivate the ground, the
huge carrots, the turnips larger than cocoanuts, the squashes, potatoes,
cabbage, lettuce, _kaoliang_, millet, and corn-meal all came from the
truck-gardens of Chinese in inconspicuous hollows about the city and
were sold only by them. Millet and _kaoliang_ and rock-salt were about
the only non-flesh wares appealing to the natives, anyway, for boiled
meat, each mouthful slashed off before the lips with a sheath-knife, as
among the _gauchos_ of South America, is almost an exclusive diet with
them the year round.
There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age
and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great
prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its
architecture and streets which gives this feeling. The poor, and most of
the despised foreigners, may or must go on foot, but the true Mongol,
male or female, young or old, layman or lama, is by nature a horseman.
Even the women, in their incredibly heavy ornaments and cumbersome
garments, sit the tight little wooden saddles covered with red cloth as
if they were part of the jogging animal beneath them. Children ride as
easily and as soon as they can walk. Horsemen are so numerous and so
fundamental in the Mongol scheme of things that the pedestrian has only
secondary rights in the soft-footed streets of Urga. It is not so much
his natural rudeness, nor even his inbred scorn for the horseless, which
makes the Mongol so apt to ride down the walker unless the latter
sidesteps. Probably it has never occurred to him, any more than to his
horse, that all other movable beings should not necessarily always make
way for him.
Besides the omnipresent Mongol pony there are strings of haughty camels
from, or off again to, the desert; there are oxen and their crudest of
two-wheeled carts, and now and again a yak, or a cross between this and
the native cattle, identified mainly by its thick bushy tail. It is not
only this quaint long-haired animal from the roof of Asia which reminds
one of the close relationship between Mongolia and its distant neighbor,
Tibet. The lengthwise Tibetan script stands beside the upright Mongolian
on the façade of more than one building and on many a monument; not a
few of the friendly-looking, darker-tinted natives of the lofty land
behind the Himalayas, recognizable also by their different garb, the
right arm and shoulder protruding from the cloak, may be met in the
market-places; when the visitor begins to poke his nose into religious
matters he finds that Tibet is much closer to him than he suspected.
Though there are sights of an inanimate nature in Urga that are well
worth seeing, it is especially the unique and striking costumes of her
people which cause bitter resentment for the confiscation of a camera.
The Mongols are as fond of gaudy colors as the Andean Indians, though
somewhat less given to barbaric combinations of them. Of a score of
laymen often no two wear robes of the same hue; red, purple, blue,
green, and all the combinations and gradations between them may be seen
in any gathering outside religious circles. Men who pride themselves on
their liberality toward the outside world show a fondness for ugly
slouch-hats of a cheap quality that quickly fades to a nondescript hue.
But these are so few as to be conspicuous among their orthodox fellows,
who display a variety in head-dress which I have not the energy to
attempt to describe. Suffice it to say that these are all striking, both
in color and form, and that the overwhelming favorite seems to be the
pagoda-shaped thing with a ball, generally of colored glass, on top, and
side-wings of fur. This is common to both laymen and lamas and is said
to have been originally copied from a sacred peak of central Asia.
But it would be unchivalrous to expect the men, even of an Oriental race
in which the women form the bottom layer of society, to outdo the other
sex in effective decoration of the cranium. Until I came to Mongolia I
had been laboring under the delusion that in my various wanderings about
the globe I had already run across the final word in woman’s head-dress.
I humbly apologize, and hereby bestow the leather medal upon the ladies
of Urga, without the least fear of ever again having to modify my
decision. In intricacy, ugliness, fearsomeness, unportability,
wastefulness, absurdity, not to say pure idiocy, their contraption
surely outdistances all competitors, at least in our own little solar
system.
It starts, so I have been assured by those of wider experience and
reputation for veracity, often at virtual baldness, which under the
circumstances, or under such a head-dress, is not surprising. Over this
goes a skull-cap of silver in elaborate designs, weighing, if the eye be
permitted to judge what the fingers may not touch, several pounds. I am
no ladies’ _coiffeur_, and I may be getting the cart before the horse,
but it is my strong impression that the hair comes next, most of it the
hair of some one else, naturally, or at least hair which has ceased to
derive its direct nourishment from its wearer. In color and texture,
too, it has a way of recalling the tail of a horse, though this may be
mere coincidence. First of all the hair forms a wig; then it flares out
and is wound, in single strands that give it a cloth-like texture, round
and round two horns that are thin and flat but wider and longer than
those of the water-buffalo, which the lady with these appendages
protruding well beyond her shoulders considerably resembles. Across the
horns, front and back, at close intervals, run inch-wide bars of
silver—replaced by wood or other substitutes in poverty-stricken
cases—while from the ends, perhaps as a concession to the timid
spectator who cannot rid himself of the fear of being gored, are
suspended braids or cords reaching to the waist. A lady of reasonable
tastes might conclude that this is enough, but there are innumerable
opportunities for adding other silver and colored decorations, and
naturally one needs a hat over one’s hair, so that milady of Urga piles
on top, at the jaunty angle of a first-year sailor, one of the
fur-sided, pagoda-shaped helmets favored by the men, thereby crowning
herself in a manner befitting the rest of her costume. Let not the hasty
reader get the impression that this ponderous and deeply cogitated
head-dress is confined to the consorts of princes and saints, nor
relegated to festive occasions and popular hours. The old woman who sold
half-decayed fruit opposite our window wore the whole contraption, and
all available evidence goes to show that it is as seldom removed as is
the fly-trap hat of the Korean male. Indeed, it would be impossible to
reconcile daily hair-dressing with the early hours at which many a fully
clad woman appears. One easily surmises that this unbelievable millinery
was copied from the cattle that have been the Mongols’ constant and
chief companions for many centuries; but why hang the horns on the
woman? Is it to keep before the mind that she, too, is a dangerous
creature, or is it a means of training her in patience and the
uncomplaining endurance of lifelong impediments, like the crippled feet
of the women of China?
In ordinary circles the rest of the female costume of Mongolia would
attract attention, but under the national head-dress it is almost
inconspicuous. It includes big puffed sleeves, for instance, not unlike
those of the Western world a generation ago, but filled with something
that makes them hard and solid, and lifts the puffs some six inches
above the shoulders. Unseemly exposure of the person is not a Mongol
fault. Though personal habits of an indescribable nature are constantly
in evidence among both sexes and all classes, there is never anything
even remotely reminiscent of the freedom of a bathing-beach in more
civilized lands. The woman’s thick, quilted, colorful jacket-gown covers
her from tonsils to instep; her long sleeves serve her, Chinese fashion,
as gloves; though it is known that she wears heavy lumber-jack trousers
quite like those of her husband, even her trim ankles, if she has them,
are never in evidence, for she thrusts her feet into the same mammoth
boots which are universal beneath all ages, ranks, callings, and degrees
of sanctity.
The Mongol boot, as I may have said before, is knee-high, of soft
leather, usually red and most elaborately decorated, the toe turned up
like the prow of Cleopatra’s barge, and it is made much too large for
the foot, in order that many layers of thick socks may be worn in wintry
weather. The extraordinarily slow pace of life in Urga is partly due,
beyond a doubt, to the necessity of stalking about like a hobbled
prisoner in such boots; but then, they were never made for walking,
which is not a natural Mongol means of locomotion. The favorite one is
the single-foot pony, with a kind of Indian rawhide reins, stirrups so
short that the rider seems to be kneeling, and a tight little red
saddle. It is an old joke in Urga that a Mongol would make an excellent
cook—if he could ride about the kitchen on horseback. As the women as
well as the men ride astride, with the easy abandon of born cowboys, it
is perhaps as well that most of them cling to their marvelous
head-dress, for without it there is little to distinguish between the
sexes.
It is said that almost half the population of Urga are lamas. Certainly
there are thousands upon thousands of them, swarming everywhere, in the
market-town as well as in their own temple-topped sections, sometimes on
horseback, more often plodding through the slovenly streets in their
ponderous boots. Their round clipped heads, in contrast to the long cues
of laymen, are often bare in any weather. It is visually evident,
without asking questions, that they wear no trousers under their long
quilted robes, which are similar to those of the marriageable men, yet
easily distinguishable from them. Their gowns, originally saffron-yellow
or brick-red in color, are well suited to the mahogany tint which the
cold of high plateaus gives the Mongol cheeks; but they are so
invariably dulled by grease, filth, and rough desert living as to
suggest that this is considered the most holy and fitting state for
seekers after a pseudo-Nirvana. Cleanliness certainly has no relation
whatever to godliness in this unedifying religion of creaking
prayer-wheels and barbaric hubbub; laity and lamas alike seem frankly to
scorn it. Now and again one saw a prince who had just donned his winter
garments, or a group of high lamas rode by in gleamingly new saffron or
red robes, the yellow streamers from their high hats trailing behind
them, clad in the most spotless of beautiful silks. But there is
evidently something unmanly about such a condition, for those even of
the highest class seem to make haste to reduce themselves to the common
dirty drab, as some of our youths “baptize” a new pair of shoes. From
high to low the Mongols are an unlaundered people, like so many dwellers
in semi-desert lands, apparently never subjecting their clothing to any
cleansing process—so filthy in fact that even the Chinese call them
dirty!
Yet these big brawny Mongols of the Gobi, beside whom the Chinese look
delicate and harmless, bring history home to the beholder in a striking
fashion. It was easy to imagine these fearless nomad horsemen banding
together under a Jenghiz Khan and sweeping down upon the rich but weaker
people to the southward; once in Mongolia, that breeding-ground for many
centuries of new virility for the human race, as it were, it was no
longer hard to understand why the timorous but diligent Chinese should
have spent such incredible toil to fling a wall across their whole
northern frontier, in the vain hope of shutting themselves off from
these dreaded barbarians, scorning civilization but ever ready to loot
it of its fruits. Now and again I met a prince—not a pampered weakling
of a run-down stock, like so many who bear that title in the West, but
big powerful fellows who could ride their horses day after day like
centaurs, sleep out on the open plain, and master their great herds with
the pole-and-noose lasso as easily as any of their herdsmen
subjects—handsome Mongol princes with a truly regal poise and dignity,
for all the countless grease-spots on their silken gowns, whom one could
readily picture in the rôle of another Jenghiz Khan.
Speaking of those halcyon days of the Mongols seven centuries ago, there
seems to be but little differentiation in the minds of historians
between them and the Tartars; but in Mongolia to-day there is a wide
gulf between these two peoples. What is known as a Tartar in Urga at
least, where a few score of them dwell, is no longer a warrior but has
degenerated into a tradesman, a close bargainer wearing mainly European
garb, with a little velvet cap always on his head, topped off by one of
fur when he sallies forth into the street. He is a Mohammedan, too, and
the Mongol certainly is not. Once he seems to have been at home in
central Mongolia; now he lives far to the West, scattered through the
regions about Bokhara, Kashgar, and Samarkand. In much greater numbers
and influence in Urga to-day are two other semi-Europeanized
peoples,—the surly Kalmucks from western Mongolia and Sungaria, and the
Buriats, Mongol by race but grown half Russian during generations under
the rule of the czars in an annexed province, and by long intermixture
with their more Caucasian fellow-subjects.
But though Urga so nearly coincides with that Karakoram which was still
the capital of Jenghiz Khan when his vast conquests ended, one feels
even there that the power of the Mongol is broken, that with his
debauching idolatry and his all but universal taint with one of the most
abhorred of diseases, he will never again have the initiative and the
energy to band together into a menace to more advanced civilizations. He
will do surprisingly well, in fact, if he succeeds in his new attempt to
govern himself. The traveler cannot but be struck by the astonishing
scarcity of children in Mongolia, especially if he has just come from
Japan and China, until he learns that fully a third of the population of
the country as a whole are lamas, and notes the prevalence of missing
noses among both sexes and all classes in the streets of Urga. The most
educated Mongol, in our Western sense, with whom I came in contact
declared that within a century his race will completely have
disappeared. While there is probably undue pessimism in so flat a
statement, there are many signs that the people which once subjugated
nearly all Asia and stopped only at the Danube in Europe is to-day on
the same swift downward path as the American Indian they in so many ways
resemble.
As befits a holy city, Urga is overrun with temples, shrines,
monasteries, and all the myriad paraphernalia of lamaism, that
degenerate, repulsive, yet picturesque offshoot of Buddhism, centered in
Tibet but clinging with a tenacious hold to all Mongolia. Take away
everything concerned with her religion, and the Mongol capital would
shrink to a mere filthy village. Most conspicuous of its structures is
the shrine or temple of Ganden, towering not only above the lama town
about it but over the whole city. A stony and sandy hollow separates
this monasterial section from the secular one, but when one has climbed
the further slope of this he finds himself wandering through just such
another maze of narrow, dunghill streets shut in by high wooden
palisades. Here it will be doubly wise to carry a heavy stick, for not
only are the savage black dogs that everywhere dot the landscape in and
about Urga particularly numerous and ravenous in this log-built
labyrinth, but they are accustomed to seeing only lamas in their dirty
robes, and foreign garb quickly attracts their unwelcome attention. At
least in theory there are no women in lama-town, and as lamaism is not a
religion calling for congregations, even native laymen are conspicuous
in this section by their absence.
As the stroller comes out upon an open space on the summit of the low,
broad hillock, he finds before him not only the great central edifice of
Ganden, built in Tibetan fashion of a square stone wall many feet thick,
with deep window-embrasures of fortress-like size, topped by three
overhanging stories in wood, but also many lower yet no less ornate
buildings flanking and surrounding it. From these, in all likelihood,
proceed barbarous sounds of drum-beating, the hammering of big brass
disks, a cabalistic chanting, and yet more awe-inspiring noises the
source of which he cannot identify. Huge cylinders on the high corners
of Ganden, many of its absurd outer ornaments, and much of the
superstructure of the lower buildings are covered with gold, upon which
the cloudless sun gleams richly. If it is “school” or service time, only
a score or so of ragged, besmeared beggars, most or all of them lamas,
will be in sight, scattered along the outer walls or in the gateways of
the religious structures. One of the largest of these is built like a
mammoth Mongol tent, with a saucer-shaped roof, and inside, if a lone
Caucasian wanderer has the courage to march through the gate and step
into the open doorway in the face of hundreds of scowling bullies in
once-red robes—for the “orthodox” yellow of more genuine Buddhism is
much more rare in Urga—he will behold a veritable sea of lamas, squatted
back to back on wide low wooden benches more or less covered with soiled
cushions, in rows so close together that a cat could scarcely squirm
between them, and stretching so far away in every direction that one
must stoop low to see beneath the idolatrous junk suspended from the low
rafters, even as far as the dais in the center of the building. Here
sits what I suppose we would call an abbot, leading the services or
instructing the gathering in the fine points of lamaism. For this is a
kind of seminary, a lama university to which sturdy red-robed males come
from all over Mongolia and beyond, to perfect themselves in the
intricate hocus-pocus of their faith, in which a bit of Buddhism is
swamped by the grossest forms of demonology and ridiculous
superstitions. The students are of no fixed age; burly men in the
forties and sensual-faced old fellows who are soon to feed the dogs are
almost as numerous as impudent youths already soiled and begrimed in
true lama fashion. For hours at a time this huge gathering rocks back
and forth on its haunches, intoning supplications under the lead of the
abbot, sometimes chanting its litanies to the accompaniment of a “music”
so barbaric as to send shivers up the unaccustomed spine, meanwhile
moving the hands in distorted gestures prescribed by the ritual. Their
devotions consist mainly of the endless repetition of the same brief
prayers, mumbled over and over until the monotony promises to drive the
listening stranger to sleep or to distraction. The notion is that this
never ceasing iteration of the same scant theme will withdraw the minds
of the devotees from worldly things and fix their attention on that
nothingness which is the goal of the seeker after Nirvana; it needs but
a slight acquaintance with lamas, however, to show that the real effect
is to make them mere mumbling automatons, with minds as narrow and as
shallow as their monotonous invocations.
[Illustration:
The upper town of Urga, entirely inhabited by lamas, has the temple of
Ganden, containing a colossal standing Buddha, rising high above all
else. It is in Tibetan style and much of its superstructure is
covered with pure gold
]
[Illustration:
Red lamas leaving the “school” in which hundreds of them squat tightly
together all day long, droning through their litany. They are of all
ages, equally filthy and heavily booted. Over the gateway of the
typical Urga palisade is a text in Tibetan, and the cylinders at the
upper corners are covered with gleaming gold
]
[Illustration:
High-class lamas, in their brilliant red or yellow robes, great
ribbons streaming from their strange hats, are constantly riding in
and out of Urga. Note the bent-knee style of horsemanship
]
[Illustration:
A high lama dignitary on his travels, free from the gaze of the
curious, and escorted by mounted lamas of the middle class
]
From time to time the immense crowded gathering stops to eat and drink,
still squatted in their places, from bowls of tea and of some such grain
as millet, which are passed around among them. This is “holy food,” and
the young lower-class lamas who bring it growl protests if the stranger
comes too near them while they are carrying it. Then the intonations
begin again and go on hour after hour, as tediously as such things can
go only in the East, until at last “school” is dismissed and red lamas
pour forth through the door and gate like wine from a punctured
wine-skin, pausing a moment to take advantage of their first escape into
the open air in many hours, then stalking away in their heavy oversize
boots with that peculiar ball-and-chain gait of the walking Mongol.
Nowhere on earth probably, unless it be in Tibet, is so great a
proportion of the population exclusively engaged in the unproductive
nonsense of saving its souls. Every first son becomes a lama; if a boy
recovers from any serious illness, the parents usually take the vow that
he, too, shall don the red or yellow robe; there are many other reasons,
among them the dread of labor, fear of hunger, hope of more promiscuous
favors from the weaker sex, which add to the crowded ranks of lamas. No
census is available, but in Urga almost every other person one meets
displays the clipped head and collarless gown, while conservative
estimators reckon that fully two fifths of the population of all
Mongolia live, in the name of religion, on the exertions of the rest.
Nor is it possible to conceive of a priesthood—to use the word
loosely—more deeply sunk in degradation. Not merely do the lamas live in
filth and sloth, engaged only in the pursuit of their own salvation, in
no way serving their fellow-men, but they are notorious libertines,
moralless panderers, in many cases beggars of the lowest type. The first
lamas I ever saw were a pair who accosted us at a halt during our climb
out of Kalgan, powerful fellows big and sturdy enough to have laughed at
the most arduous labor, yet who begged even the sweepings of our wayside
lunch and picked up the cigar-butt I tossed away. In Urga lamas
bedraggled to the _n_th degree squatted day after day on busy
street-corners telling their beads and monotoning a brief prayer
incessantly from dawn to dusk for a few stray coppers and scraps of
food.
However, there are lamas of high as well as of low degree—Jenghiz Khan
himself, you may recall, was one. Several of the ministers in the
Mongolian cabinet were lamas; some are princes as well, holding vast
tracts of land and hundreds of slave-like subjects; among a number who
called upon my departing host during my stay I recall a magnificent
specimen of manhood who came to buy for his own use all the best
furnishings of the house, and a strong-featured older man who brought a
thousand silver dollars to make good the debt of a scamp for whom he had
gone surety out of mere friendship. Such strict honesty is not customary
among the Mongols, though they have something like the Chinaman’s way of
keeping promises; hence there was not even the pressure of public
opinion, certainly no fear of legal action, to cause him to yield up for
no value received what was perhaps a considerable portion of his
fortune.
Some of the lower orders of lamas engage in worldly occupations, at
least intermittently, to keep the wolf from the door; and those who do
not live in monasteries may enter into a sort of left-handed marriage,
though their wives are always known as “girls.” The higher ranks are in
theory celibates, but no such rule actually cramps their personal
desires, and the “Living Buddha” himself has led anything but a life of
lonely bachelorhood. Among the rank and file of red-robed roughnecks
much the same standard of sexual morals seems to prevail as that reached
by the lecherous touts of our large cities. It is said to be almost the
general practice to reward a lama who has “cured” a young woman by means
of his incanted gibberish by granting him the temporary boon of her
affections, and foreigners have had experiences in Mongolia which
indicate about the same indifference to lack of privacy in the amorous
adventures of wearers of the red or yellow robe that prevails in some of
their other personal habits.
There are no real schools in Mongolia except these choral gatherings of
lamas. In them they learn to read and write, not Mongolian but Tibetan,
the Latin of lamaism. The laymen boys of better-class families get their
education, if at all, from private instructors, and in rare cases reach
universities over the Russian border. Women have, of course, no need for
other teaching than what their parents and husbands can give them,
though now and then a prince or a wealthy saint hires tutors for his
daughters.
However, to turn away from the retreating stream of lamas and push
onward, even an enumeration of the religious structures and trappings
about the great squat “university” would be wearisome. Most amusing or
imbecile of them all to the Westerner, according to his mood, are the
prayer-cylinders. Why these are more commonly called “prayer-wheels” is
a mystery, for they are invariably cylindrical in shape, varying in size
from the largest to the smallest sections of sewer-pipe. How many
hundreds of these there are, not only in lama-town but everywhere in
Urga, could be computed only by a man of energy and patience. Endless
rows of large ones, each covered by a kind of sanctified guard-house,
stretch along whole sides of the upper town; they line several of the
principal streets; there must be at least one, that could better serve
as outhouse, for every family in Urga. The small ones are as flies in
summer. Each of these upright wooden cylinders contains thousands of
prayers, all, if I am not misinformed, the repetition of the same
monotonous phrase, written in Tibetan characters on scraps of
tissue-paper,—_Om mani padme hun_, “The Jewel is in the Lotus,” whatever
that means. A kind of capstan furnishes half a dozen protruding bars by
which to turn the contrivance, and every turn is equivalent to saying as
many thousand prayers as the cylinder contains. Every pious passer-by
pauses to revolve one here and there; pilgrims, or residents who have
sallied forth especially for that purpose, turn them all, one after the
other, along the whole row or, as far as is physically possible,
throughout the whole town. Thus the creak of prayer-cylinders is seldom
silent, though they furnish a great market for axle-grease. Around the
lower massive stone walls of Ganden shrine something like a hundred
smaller cylinders are so arranged that by a simple twist of the wrist
all of them are turned at once, releasing literally millions of
prayers—a labor-saving device compared to which the proudest invention
of our industrial world is but clumsy and wasteful.
Unlike the disciples of the truer and more kindly Buddhism to the east
and west, the surly lamas of Urga resent visits by strangers to their
sanctuaries, and prevent them entirely to the more holy ones. But there
happened to be no higher official to forbid it when I stepped through
the deep stone door of towering Ganden into a cluttered and musty
interior, and the half-dozen young lamas of the garden variety who at
first moved toward me in a mass, with a manner almost as threatening as
might meet the intruder into a Mohammedan mosque, were softened by a
gesture which implied the eventual bestowal of a silver ruble. Closely
trailed by them I was permitted to make the circuit of the ground floor,
and study from feet to knees the colossal figure of a standing Buddha
which takes up almost all the space within Urga’s most lofty building.
Then they urged me toward the door, but as I refused to part with the
coveted coin for any such slight view they conferred together for some
time in hoarse whispers. Finally one was sent to the outer entrance to
make sure that none of the higher lamas was likely to drop in
unexpectedly, and while two clambered before and three behind me I
climbed a steep crude wooden stairway to the second story. This brought
me about to the hips of the statue. In the semi-darkness of the
building, filled to overflowing with hundreds of small Buddhas, with
silk banners and streamers in many colors, with strings of paper
prayers, with tawdry freaks of an unclean imagination and all the drab
and indecent mummeries of a religion of fear, it was impossible to make
out more than that the figure was of slight artistic merit, and that it
was completely covered with what had every appearance of being real gold
of considerable thickness. A third story on a level with its chest had
low doorways at the four corners which opened upon a gallery overhung by
one of the massive roofs and gave a far-reaching view of all Urga and
its vicinity. Here one might have touched the massive ornamental
lanterns, covered with gold, as were parts of the cornices and many of
the smaller decorations. Still another half-perpendicular, makeshift
stairway led to a higher gallery, carpeted with the droppings of birds
and admitting light enough to show that the contents of the building
were as soiled and unlaundered as the gowns of my suspicious and worried
companions. This was at the level of the Buddha’s face, which resembled
nothing so much as a very young “flapper” given to overindulgence in
rouge, almost a babyish face, with bright crimson lips a yard long and
an immature, affectionate expression that did not in the least befit a
being presiding over the sullen and repulsive religion of Mongolia. Two
sets of arms, one raised and the other extended in a familiar Buddhist
fashion, could be made out in the gloom. Of the weight of actual gold
covering the figure from sandals to coiled-snake coiffure there was no
means of judging, but I would have been prompt to accept it in lieu of
any income I could acquire in the course of a natural lifetime. One of
the lamas wished to know whether we had anything in the outside world
from which I came comparable to their four-story Buddha. Having in mind
only ecclesiastical constructions, I could think of nothing that might
be mentioned as a rival; but I might have told them of a statue on an
island in the harbor of our principal city which just about equals this
one in stature, without bringing in the fact that it is of tarnished
bronze instead of gleaming gold.
It is easier to believe the tales of the old Spanish _conquistadores_
after seeing Urga. If the capital of the Inca empire had half as many
“golden roofs and cornices scintillating in the sunshine,” it would have
been enough to arouse the cupidity of more saintly men than the
followers of Pizarro. Gaze across the holy city of Mongolia in almost
any direction, and a golden superstructure is almost certain to strike
the eye. The lower story is in every case made of materials less
tempting to the light-fingered, and palisades shut them in. But what
burglar would not give all the rest of his earthly chances for one short
half-hour of feverish, unmolested activity at any of those glittering
second stories? That of the holy of holies in the monasterial section to
the east of the official _yamens_, in particular, is of an elaborate
massiveness which suggests some unlimited source of the precious yellow
metal, and when the unclouded sun shines full upon it the eye can
literally not endure the sight. Gold, filth, and superstition—after we
have seen Urga even the least bigoted of us can understand more fully,
if not completely condone, the high-handedness of a Cortez in
overthrowing the heathen idols and burning the unholy temples of
conquered “Gentiles.”
Along the sloping brown hillside just behind lama-town stands a row of
whitewashed brick dagobas, the tombs of saints so holy that their bodies
were not disposed of in the customary Mongol fashion. On the ledges of
these, as on any projecting place inside the prayer-cylinder sheds, and
indeed anywhere on holy edifices where there is room for them and it is
permitted, worshipers have laid heaps of loose stones, each representing
some appeal to supposedly supernatural forces. Of many another strange
device in and about the mammoth temple compounds, there are the
prostrating-boards, slightly inclined planks on short legs for the use
of the pious during their extraordinary genuflexions before venerated
shrines. With that indifference to soiling themselves for which the
Mongols are conspicuous, however, the bare ground suffices most
worshipers, and the boards do no great amount of service. The orthodox
prostration so closely resembles one of the movements in great favor
among our gymnasium instructors that the sight of a group of devotees,
women fully as often as men, repeating it time after time in their
ponderous boots and heavy garments threatens to convulse the American,
at least, with laughter. Though there is no unison among the worshipers,
each one performs the ceremony with a fixed rhythm which could not be
more exact if a maltreated piano were pounding out the periods, so that
the effect is of individual perfection of movement but utter inability
to synchronize the group. The worshiper first stands at attention with
his face to the shrine, as nearly like a soldier as “the conformation of
the body”—not to mention the abundance of clothing—“will permit,”
murmurs a prayer several times over, then bows his trunk to the
horizontal, places his hands on the ground, straightens his legs to the
rear, and lowers himself to the prostrate, even his nose touching the
earth. There he remains a moment, then, flexing his arms until his rigid
body rests on hands and toes, he regains the original position by
performing the same movements in reverse order, repeating the exercise
as long as piety, the weight of his sins, or his dread of evil spirits
suggests. I know from experience that it is a genuine exercise even in
gymnasium garb; what it is in full Mongol attire, sometimes including
even the feminine head-dress, any vivid imagination can picture. No
wonder the Mongols are big and strong; and what call is there for our
famous gymnastico-religious organization ever to establish one of its
Oriental branches in Urga? It may be just as well, perhaps, for us
dilettante gymnasts of the West never to challenge a red-robed lama to
bodily combat; for I have seen more than one of them make a complete
circuit of some holy section of the city performing this prostration at
every other step forward, leaving off at the point where night overtook
them, and returning to start there again at dawn.
Except in Lhasa, and perhaps Rome, the worshiper in Urga has an
advantage seldom to be found on this earth; he may perform his pious
antics, not merely before silent shrines and motionless statues, but
before a living god in flesh and blood. It is a pleasant tramp for any
one with unatrophied legs across the valley to the dwelling-place of the
“Living Buddha.” A few small streams block his way, unless he can hit
upon the stepping-stone fords of the horseless lower classes. But if he
is a Westerner, one of the mounted lamas who are constantly jogging back
and forth between the palace and the city may, out of mere curiosity to
see him at close range, or because all the native benevolence of the
nomad herdsman has not yet been steeped out of him by superstition and
the misbehavior of other outlanders, carry him across on his crupper.
Or, if the stroller is not in a mood for petty adventures, he may take
the causeway. This is a road wide as a Western boulevard and perhaps
half a mile long, raised on wooden trestles which carry it across the
slightly lower part of the valley; but it runs, not from the section
where foreigners lodge and carry on such business as is possible under
present conditions, but, being designed merely for the use of the
“Living Buddha” and his courtiers, it connects his palaces with those of
his late sainted brother, and with the shrine topped by that most
coveted golden superstructure to which he sometimes comes to be
worshiped. Apparently there is nothing sacred about this roadway,
however, for any one may use it, and a gang of Chinese was engaged in
replacing the logs covered with earth—which spells bridge to the
Oriental—of a section that had collapsed. For that matter, it is Chinese
workmen who repair, as they probably originally built, the fantastic
gates and the flaring tile roofs even within the sacred palace precinct,
but for which concession by his holiness and the jealous preservers of
his sanctity nothing probably would ever get mended.
The low chaos of roofs within his principal compound, green, yellow,
blue, golden, a jumble of Chinese, Tibetan, Russian and hybrid
architecture, stands out against the little lines of trees along the
foot of the sacred mountains,—evergreen, white birch, and other species,
now red or yellow, like the omnipresent lamas, with early autumn. A few
guard-houses with a ragged armed Mongol or two lounging before them
surround the place, but these picturesque sentinels do not interfere
with the movements even of foreigners so long as they do not attempt to
enter the sacred precincts. On special occasions non-Mongols have been
permitted to pass the gates, but very, very few have ever entered the
presence or even the actual dwelling of the “Living Buddha” himself, to
whom even the highest of Mongols do not have free access. The elaborate
gates have the same demon guards, the same isolated wall as a screen
against evil spirits, and all the rest of the flummery common to such
structures in China and Korea. Some of the buildings within the
compound, however, might have been taken bodily from some cheap
European, or at least Russian, town, while the confusion of the whole
scheme of structures would not awaken delight in the heart of any real
architect.
The “summer palace” of the human deity, a furlong away, being more
fully Tibetan, is less unpleasing to the eye. At about the same
distance from the main palace in the opposite direction is almost a
town of mainly modern buildings, housing the non-religious belongings
and the servants of the Mongol god. His stables contain many horses;
his garages have automobiles of a dozen different makes, European as
well as American, not to mention the usual proportion of Fords; a
Delco system lights his establishment; and most modern inventions are
represented in one form or another. The “Living Buddha” buys every new
contrivance the West has to offer, merely as playthings, in a vain
attempt to make a noticeable inroad in a burdensome income. A foreign
business man of Urga who has furnished much of it assured me that he
purchases on the average ten thousand dollars “Mex” worth of assorted
junk a day, things of every conceivable kind, which are petulantly
tossed aside when the owner and his swarms of satellites tire of them.
Many of the motor-cars rust away unused, though this modern god does
all his traveling to and from his various thrones by automobile, and
his chauffeur, a khaki-and-legging-clad Buriat, may frequently be seen
speeding about town on the only motor-cycle in Urga.
In striking contrast to this modernity of his surroundings is the
attitude of the Mongols toward their living god. It is something which
we of the West can scarcely conceive, and which probably has no
precedent among even the most pietistic creeds of the Occident. Second
only to the Dalai-Lama of Lhasa in the hierarchy of lamaism, Bogda-Han,
to give him one of the many titles by which he is known among Mongols,
is worshiped by millions throughout a vast space of central Asia. The
attribution of deity with which they invest him is due to the belief
that he is a reincarnation of the original Buddha. When a “Living
Buddha” dies—of which more anon—the high council of lamaism, by the
consultation of certain sacred books and a deal of hocus-pocus which
saner mortals would not have the interest to follow, determine where the
body into which his soul has been reborn will be found. At first blush
it would seem that this must be a new-born babe; but perhaps there is no
nursery in the sacred palace, or no lamas of sufficient experience in
that line to take charge of a puling infant. Therefore, by something
corresponding to poetic license, the signs point to a boy of about nine
years of age, who will be found, say, on such a corner of such streets
in this or that city, doing so and so at a specified hour. A cavalcade
of high lamas travel to the place indicated, which is more likely to be
in Tibet than in Mongolia, capture the new and unsuspecting Buddha, and
carry him off to a life of deification. It is commonly reputed in the
outside world that each Buddha is quietly done away with by what we
might call his cardinals at the age of eighteen, his body embalmed, and
a new find installed in his place. A Russian professor long resident in
Urga has been to some pains to prove that this is not true, that it is
in fact mere nonsense; but he admits the curious coincidence that all
the “Living Buddhas” up to the present one seem to have died at about
eighteen years of age.
[Illustration:
The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on the extreme
left is not what it looks like, for they have no such in Urga but it
houses a prayer-cylinder
]
[Illustration:
A youthful lama turning one of the myriad prayer-cylinders of Urga.
Many written prayers are pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent
to saying all of them
]
[Illustration:
Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops difficult, do much
of their shopping from the two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant,
constant processions of whom tramp the highways of China
]
[Illustration:
An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows worked by a stick
handle widely used by craftsmen and cooks in China
]
The present one played in unusual luck. To an even greater extent than
his predecessors he took advantage of his position to become the Don
Juan of Mongolia, and among his many light-o’-loves there was one to
whom he wished to stick—or who decided to stick to him. Being a god is
very convenient at times. This one calmly overruled the time-honored law
that lamas, and especially “Living Buddhas,” may not marry—though of
course this verb does not exactly fit the case—and attached the minx to
him for life. She seems to have some such power over men as did the old
Empress Dowager of China, an impression borne out by her masterful face
in such photographs of her as are extant. Not only did she succeed in
saving her paramour from the usual fate in his youth, but she so
strengthened his position that he is still on his deified throne at an
age variously reckoned at from fifty to sixty. Some explain this
survival in another way: there were, they say, to have been a fixed
number of reincarnations of the Buddha, of which this is the last, after
which, we are led to infer, the stainless soul will pass into Nirvana;
and of course a few years more or less of hanging back from that
blissful state can do no one any harm, least of all in the Orient, where
the sense of time is so nearly paralyzed. Even among those who do not
accept this view there are many who claim that there will never be
another “Living Buddha” in Mongolia, for political rather than lamaistic
reasons.
The fact is, probably, that while the masterfulness of his consort had
something to do with the survival of the present reincarnation, the
powerful clique about him has been willing to permit it because of his
weakness, which has prevented him from ever grasping any real authority.
Since his gallant youth he has been tainted with that dread disease so
wide-spread among the Mongols, which not only makes him a semi-invalid
easily manipulated by the real power behind his pseudo-divinity, but
which left him some years ago stone-blind. Because he is too sacred to
be touched by impious hands, there was no way of curing him, and now it
is too late. Besides, the high lamas preferred him sickly and supine
rather than well and strong, not to mention the almost complete
ignorance among the Mongols of the real nature of their well nigh
universal ailment.
Perhaps his blindness increases his divinity in the minds of the
faithful, as a sightless witch often wins more followers than one with
all her senses intact. At any rate, Mongols of all classes treat their
living fetish with divine honors. Pilgrims come from all over central
Asia to prostrate themselves on the ground or the prayer-boards outside
his compound; on special days they are blessed, not by his actual
appearance in person—for visibility often breeds contempt, and the
physical labor of being a god should be reduced to a minimum—but by
being tapped on the heads with a contrivance in the hands of
middle-class lamas to which is attached a rope the other end of which is
grasped, hypothetically at least, by the “Living Buddha” seated on his
throne inside his central palace. So divine is he that notwithstanding
his infirmity the excretions of his body are collected in silver and
gold vessels, sealed, and sent out among the credulous as a cure for
their infirmities! Foreigners who have chanced to catch a glimpse of him
on his way to or from the city temples to pray for rain—he has, of
course, the latest and best thing in barometers—or some other ceremony,
describe him as being more cleanly dressed than is the Mongol custom,
but otherwise quite like any other lama of high class, plus a kind of
gold crown. Close inspection might reveal that this alleged pulchritude
is an exaggeration—I am skeptical of the possibility of combining
cleanliness and Mongol—but that has never been permitted a foreigner.
While no manifestos are issued commanding the foreigner to remain within
doors and avert his face, as was long the case when the emperor of China
made his annual journey to sacrifice to the Altar of Heaven in Peking,
armed guards as well as pious fanatics see to it that the divine being
is not too nearly approached during his passing to and fro about Urga.
No later ago than the month of my visit a group of Americans in an
automobile were halted on one side of the unmarked route over which the
“Living Buddha” was to return from the temple where he was just then
enthroned, and compelled to get out and walk across it. As a special
concession to the spirit of modernity, when the insistent guards were
reminded that the abandoned machine could not advance of its own will,
they permitted the chauffeur to climb in again and technically break the
divine law by riding across the prospective trail of the blind god.
Tibetan, as I have said, is the Latin of lamaism. Even in Peking, where
branch clusters of the faith exist, only two or three temples are
permitted, by special dispensation, to carry on their services in
Mongolian, and there is said to be only one in Asia where Chinese is
used. The great stone letters on the flank of the sacred mountain,
visible as far off as the eye can reach, are Tibetan characters. From
Tibet come numbers of lamas, and orders tending to keep the ritual more
orthodox; the Dalai-Lama himself once fled before foreign invaders to
Urga. Neither these seekers after Nirvana from Lhasa and vicinity nor
the traders from the more northern parts of Tibet make the journey now
by the direct overland route. Not only are there bleak mountains and
vast morasses, dreary _despoblados_ without a sign of man for days, and
the fanatical Mohammedan province of Kansu to cross, but in these
settled times there are real dangers from bandits of several
nationalities. So the beaten trail of to-day, except for those Tibetan
divinities who come by sea, like any tourist, leads down through
northern India and across into central China, thence northward through
the former Celestial Empire, which still claims, if in vain,
jurisdiction over all Outer Mongolia.
There is nothing more pleasant than a stroll on a brilliant autumn day
across the golden-brown rolling plains about Urga, especially to the
north and east, where they roll ever higher until all the holy city, to
its most distant and isolated clusters of temples, lies spread out
before one. No suggestion of modern industry breaks the peaceful quiet,
which is enhanced by the law forbidding hunting or any other
interference with wild creatures within a circuit of about twelve miles
about the residence of Bogda-Han. Great flocks of pigeons fly up in
purple-blue clouds only when the stroller has almost walked them down;
less charming birds show a similar lack of fear of man; in the low
forest along the crest of the sacred mountain roam elk, wild pigs, deer,
bears, wolves, some say even moose and reindeer, not to mention many
smaller and more harmless animals. Yet there is something ominous rather
than tranquil and inviting about the scene as a whole; the Elysian charm
is sullied and broken by various repelling things, particularly by the
inhuman Mongol method of disposing of the dead.
This consists simply, except in rare cases of reputed gods or demigods,
of feeding the corpses of all to the dogs. There seems to be nothing
corresponding to a funeral service. Foreign residents say that formerly
it was the custom to load the body on a two-wheeled cart and drive
pell-mell across the hillocks until it fell off, the driver not daring
to look back under penalty of having all the evil spirits which
inhabited the dead man enter his own body. Others say they have
sometimes seen a kind of procession of lamas and relatives follow the
corpse to the hills and stand some little distance off watching its
consumption. Certainly in the great majority of cases there is no more
ceremony involved than in tossing garbage on the nearest dump. There are
no fixed spots for depositing the bodies, but they are thrown hit or
miss on the outer edges of the town, often right beside the main trails
and especially in the shallow, verdureless gullies breaking up the
wrinkled brown country about it.
One must be on the ground early after a death to find enough of the body
left to recognize it as more than a broken skeleton. The big black dogs,
covered with long shaggy hair, which dot the landscape everywhere in and
about Urga, filling its streets with murderous-looking eyes that keep
the pedestrian on the constant qui vive, have learned their task well
from many generations of practice. The rapidity with which they can
reduce what was a sentient, moving being the day before to a mere
sprinkling of broken bones is astonishing. This doubly endears these
loathsome beasts to the Mongols, for they believe that the more quickly
a body is eaten the better man does this prove the deceased to have been
in life. It is especial good luck and proof of unusual sanctity to see
the body eaten by birds, but the dogs rarely leave their feathered
rivals an opportunity thus to bear testimony to the character of the
departed. The birds have their turn after the dogs have given up hope of
deriving further benefit from their exertions, and finish off the job by
cleaning out the skull and the other morsels for which a bill is needed.
There is nothing either hidden or sacred about these graveless
graveyards. Any one may stroll through them, and find them quite as
abandoned as any city dump-heap. Dog-nests made of the ragged quilted
cloaks in which the bodies are carried out are the only conspicuous
feature, except the skulls which lie about everywhere. I wondered at
first that there were never any remains of the skeleton except widely
scattered and broken bones, until I beheld a dog pick up a rib and carry
it off to a comfortable spot on the hillside, there to sit down on his
haunches, break it in two, and gnaw the last scrap of nourishment out of
it. In the dry desert air the skulls quickly bleach snow-white and
brittle; only here and there is one still “green” enough to be gray in
color, so solid as to pain the toe that kicks it across the plain. These
vast bone-yards are no place for the Westerner, living on his
over-refined food, to spend the hour before an appointment with his
dentist, for his envy of the full sets of perfect white teeth in almost
every skull may become overwhelming.
It seems to be the idea of these putative Buddhists, the Mongols, and of
their brethren, the Buriats and Kalmucks, who follow the same custom,
that, since all living creatures are brothers, the least a man can do
for his dumb fellow-beings is to bequeath them his useless body as
nourishment—and thereby, of course, win merit that will improve his
reincarnation. The Tibetans do likewise, except that they feed their
mountain eagles or condors as well as their dogs, and prepare the food
for the latter by mixing it with ground grain. Gruesome as the custom
is, there is a thoroughness and promptitude about it which greatly
outdoes the Christian mode of burial, a real and visible return of “dust
to dust.” I know of no other means of disposing of the dead which gives
the corpse so nearly its true value, none which leaves such a true sense
of the worthlessness of human remains. Between this and the opposite
extreme of an elaborate funeral followed by a showy mausoleum I am not
sure but that I prefer the Mongol method.
To the Mongols themselves there is no more sanctity about their
scattered bones than about any other form of rubbish. Shepherds or
others whose calling brings them there wander or sit about the
skull-strewn gullies quite as calmly as if they were in a field of
daisies. Relatives seldom if ever come to pick up any of the remains;
sometimes the rains wash broken bones down the gullies into the edge of
town, where they lie until they are covered up with silt and disappear.
Most of them simply disintegrate into the semi-desert soil about them.
There is never a sign that the Mongol riding by feels any distress at
the thought that some day these same surly black dogs that are tearing
to pieces the corpse at the roadside will do the same for him. The tops
of skulls, especially of higher lamas and men of standing, are sometimes
used as drinking-vessels, or as oil-receptacles in the temples, and
specially sainted thigh-bones make excellent whistles for use in
ritualistic uproars; otherwise no one seems to have thought of the
commercial possibilities of the bone-yards. Nor are these strange
people, who might punish with death the stranger who forced his way into
the presence of their living god, in the least sensitive about the
possession of their remains. A high lama dropped in upon my host one day
and chanced to spy a skull-top that had just been presented by some
native admirer. He picked it up, looked it over carefully, held it up to
a light, and announced that the original owner had been a very good man,
proof of which was the condition of the zigzag joints and the fact that
the skull was so thin in one spot that the light showed rosy red through
it. Perhaps, he added, as he laid it back on the bric-à-brac table and
accepted a cigarette, it had been the skull of his good old friend Lama
So-and-so.
If I may hazard a guess, it is that this to us gruesome custom has grown
up among the Mongols because they are nomads. They cannot carry the
graves of their ancestors with them, whereas the dogs will follow of
their own accord. Their attitude toward these surly black beasts without
owners, which roam the plains as well as make every street of Urga a
gauntlet, bears out this impression. Though they are as quick as we to
beat them off with any weapon when they get too aggressive, they deeply
resent a serious injury to or the killing of one of them by a frightened
foreigner. Yet the tendency of any Westerner would be to do just that; I
know of few assignments that would give me more satisfaction than to
lead a regiment to Urga and exterminate her swarming dogs. Most of them
seem to have acquired the disease most prevalent among those they feed
upon, and one feels that the slightest bite would prove fatal. Luckily
they spend the day largely in sleeping and making love, so that the
streets are not always as dangerous as they might be. But they easily
gather in packs, and especially at night or during the long hungry
winters they are a distinct menace not merely to women and children but
to the hardiest men. They are really cowards, these man-eating dogs of
Mongolia, as the shrinking look in their tigerish eyes when they are
effectively threatened proves; yet they are so accustomed to human flesh
that man is to them natural prey, and they seem to have developed a
knowledge of human anatomy which tells them where to attack most
effectively, as well as what tidbits to prefer when they are not
especially hungry. Urga is full of stories of the inability of these
ugly beasts to await the natural end of their predestined victims. A man
making his way late at night across the noisome market-place outside our
window had been dragged down and eaten during the past winter. By poetic
justice, he was a lama. In the outskirts just back of one of the temple
compounds a Buriat woman was pulled off her horse and devoured one cold
winter day before those looking on could come to her rescue. A year or
so before, a Russian colonel newly arrived dined late with friends, who
asked him as he left whether they could not give him an escort, or at
least lend him a cudgel. No, indeed, replied the departing guest, a
Russian officer could not be afraid; besides, he had his sword. Next
morning the sword and a few buttons and rags were all that could be
found of the colonel.