ornament the table of a burly peasant, who grinningly receives it. The
tense breaths are let out, the forms relax, and the crowd straggles to
the door, lighting cigarettes and pulling down caps. The drama is over.
Next morning at eight a soldier visits your host with a message from
his chief.
“Bring to the police-station the passport of the stranger seen with you
at the theatre last night.”
A town droshky will take one the few versts to Kiahta, where in the
Geographical Society’s museum is the celebrated sketch of the Dalai
Lama made at Urga by a Russian artist, when the young Tibetan monk
had fled before the English expedition to Lhassa. Here, too, are ore
samples and reconstructed Mongolian tents. But it is hard to look
at fossil rhinoceros-heads and at stuffed sabre-toothed tigers and
musk-deer when the camel-trains are passing and China is a verst away.
A courier is necessary now, for resourceful Jacov and driver Ivan are
strangers beyond the border. Perhaps our host knows of a man acquainted
in Mongolia? He will inquire. Next day there presents himself a slight,
bearded, intellectual man, Alexander Simeonovich Koratkov, usually
called, for short, “Alexsimevich.” Bachelor of forty, educated in
the Troitzkosavsk “Realistic” school. He speaks, as well as Russian,
Mongolian, English, French, German, and some Chinese. He has translated
for the English engineers who were brought in to work the Nerchinsk
mines. He is deeply read in Buddhist mythology and sociology. Will he
go down into Mongolia with you? Yes; and so it is arranged.
Provisions are cheap and abundant in the Siberian towns. Sixty kopecks
buy a pound of caravan tea, seventeen kopecks a pound of sugar, the
sort that comes in a cone like a Kalmuck hat. It is a luxury by warrant
of public opinion, so much that it has, of note, been served on baked
potatoes. Before the Buddha pictures of the Buriats, a few lumps may
be the choicest offering. Flour costs six kopecks a pound. Beef, if a
great pud-weight forequarter is bought at the market, twenty kopecks.
Frozen butter will cost twenty-five kopecks per pound. Eggs, of the
Siberian cold-storage variety, forty-eight kopecks a dozen. For thirty
kopecks one gets a piece of milk as big as one’s head. But do not try
to go beyond the native produce, for canned goods, coffee, or sardines.
It is bankruptcy speedier than buying bear-holes. A big magazine will
sell pâté de foie gras, imported from France, at two roubles the tin;
while beneath the Chinese caravansaries’ arcade, bales of tea will be
sold at a few kopecks a pound. One gets cigars in a glass-covered box,
with the government stamp, for a rouble and a half, and they will be
worth about as much as the strings of twisted tobacco-rope which the
Mongols carry off as their single cherished luxury.
And now for transportation. The sledge can serve no more, for the snow
goes bare in places along the caravan trail. We must have a tarantass,
and in time one is produced for inspection. A cask sawed in half,
lengthwise, is the image of its body, a lumber-cart the model of its
clumsy wheels and framework. To the tarantass is hitched the trotter,
with his big bow yoke to bring the weight of collar and shafts on his
back rather than against his neck. At each side of him, with much such
a rig as is used to tow canal-boats, are made fast the two galloping
horses.
When one goes beyond the post-route with his own equipage he has,
fastened under the driver’s seat and behind his own, bags of oats and
hay, which must serve as emergency-rations for the horses against the
days in which none can be secured along the often deserted trail.
Personal provender must be likewise stored away, bags of bread, frozen
dumplings to make soup with, tea, sugar, milk-chocolate, milk, candles,
cheese, matches, kettles, and whatever else one can think of, or
that the ingenuity of Alexsimevich can devise. Hay is piled into the
tarantass bottom to supply the want of springs.
A driver who knows the trails has been found, André Banchelski, a tall
Siberian, of timbering and hunting antecedents, who has a small stock
of Mongol idioms regarding the price of hay and the location of water.
He has reached a very good understanding with Katrinka, one of the
household dependents, and Nicolai is taking an interest in him.
To-night we go to sleep on Nicolai’s plank couch, ready for the march
of the next day. All is ready. To-morrow we cross the Chinese frontier.
V
IN TATAR TENTS
The shaggy ponies, white with the frost of the morning, stand harnessed
to the tarantass; André in his belted sheepskin _shuba_, whip in hand,
is perched on the bag of oats; Alexsimevich sits in a greatcoat of
deerskin, with only a nose and a triangle of black beard visible. The
host, in his gray surtout, and the red-bloused drivers of the sledges
scattered in the courtyard, all have left their samovars to see the
start. The children of the family peep from behind the mother with her
gray shawl-covered head. They group at one side, under the eaves of the
doorway, while Josef, one of the household servants, swings back the
ponderous gates. The reins are drawn in, the whip is lifted, the horses
are leaning forward into their collars, when the cry of “André!” comes
through the opening doorway.
From behind the gathered onlookers, who turn at the sound, runs out
Katrinka, dressed in her best red frock. “André!” she cries. He pulls
back the starting horses, and Katrinka lifts up to him a little bag
embroidered with his initials in blue and red. “For your tobacco.”
He looks down into her eyes and smiles. “_Spasiba_ _loubesnaia_,” he
says, and pushes it into the breast of his shuba.
“_De svidania_, André!” she whispers, then runs back, confused.
The teamsters laugh, pleased and amused as big children at her blushes,
and her brother shouts a commentary from the gateway. “_Vperiod!
vperiod!_” says the interpreter. He has reached forty now without
falling before the charms of any Siberian girl, and he does not
sympathize. “On! on!”
The horses swing out of the great gateway into the snowy streets, with
“Good-bye! Good road!” called in chorus after us.
At a slow trot the lumbering carriage rolls through the quiet town,
misty in the cold of the morning. The row of shuttered shops, with
their crude pictures of the wares within, are opening for the day.
The little park with the benches, which are trysting-places of summer
evenings, cushioned now with six inches of snow, and the low log houses
beyond, loom up and retire rearward, as we pass. The white church and
the fenced cemetery of Troitzkosavsk are left behind, and we are on the
broad paved road by which a sharp trot of half an hour brings us to
Kiahta.
Its scattered houses now in turn begin. The big tea-compound, of four
square white walls, flanks us and is gone. The officials’ residences
and the barracks of the garrison appear and vanish behind. The street
opens out into a big square, where, shimmering against the white
ground, stands the great church of _Voskresenie_, the Resurrection.
On its green dome, lifted high in appeal and in promise, gleams the
gilded cross. In white and green and gold Russia raises inspiringly
the symbols of Slavonic faith before the doors of the heathen empire.
As we pass the white Russian church, the litany of the popes and the
answering chant of the choir come faintly wafted from within. But even
as the Christians sing, the clash of distant cymbals and the roll of a
far-off prayer-drum meet and mingle with the echoes. On the hill across
the border, in vivid scarlet against the snow, with painted walls,
sacred dragon-eaves, and flapping bannerets, flames a Chinese temple.
Here now is the borderland of empires. The neutral strip is in front,
a hundred _sagenes_ broad. The Cossack sentries stand at ease before
their striped boxes, which face toward Mongolia. Far to the east and
far to the west are seen stretching the long lines of posts marking the
boundary. The outmost sentry, as the tarantass rolls across the strip,
hails you with a last “_De svidania!_” (God speed!)
Past the Chinese boundary-post, covered with hieroglyphic placards and
shaped like the lotus-bud, we drive, and in under the painted gateway
of the gray-plastered wall. No Männlicher-armed Chinese regulars,
like those that in Manchuria throng to hold what is lost, guard this
half-forgotten road. No sentry watches; no custom-officer bids the
strangers stop. Through the open gate we ride into the narrow street of
the trading city of the frontier--Maimachen, the unguarded back door to
China.
In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more
striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this
gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one’s own kind,
police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of
European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of
time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust
one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly
strange environment, where the most remarkable of the world’s Asian
races lives and trades, works and rules.
Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by
scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as
men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every
interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party
in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting
vision of the eternal Orient--these are the things for which men travel.
As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses
of banner-decked courtyards seen through great barred doors in the
gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated Chinaman, with
skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long
sleeves, fur-lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open.
Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper
windows, look outward through the peep-hole.
In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last
provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn
up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for
the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents
may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all
the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the
tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the
main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pâtés de
foie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are supported by Russian
inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitzkosavsk. It is amusing to watch the
enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of
cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey.
We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for
native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering
sheepskins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed
metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably
getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the
haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where the Mongols have
heaped their little bundles of provender.
All the while one has an eerie undefined sentiment that something is
lacking. It is not that the houses which face the narrow main street
are low and poor, that the gray mud-walled compounds are grimly
unwelcoming with their closed iron-studded gates. It is not that the
small stocks of goods in the shops tell of a vanished prosperity, now
that the bulk of the tea-trade has left. It is not anything material,
but an oppressive indefinable feeling that something is lacking. Only
when Alexsimevich makes a chance remark, do you realize consciously
what it was you instinctively felt, “It is queer to be in a city where
there is not a woman or child.”
Some have explained the exclusion law which controls the situation by
the self-sufficiency of the Chinese, who wished no real settlement of
their people here,--the fruit of a pride deep-rooted as that underlying
the custom which brings every corpse back to China for burial. Others,
by the desire to avoid transmitting to the Empire the diseases that are
rife in Mongolia. Whatever the basis, the regulation is in full force
to-day. At one time merchants in Maimachen kept their wives across
the border in Russia, which under a subterfuge was not technically
forbidden. But the ability to hide behind a technicality is a blessing
enjoyed especially in democracies. It did not go with the chief of
police, who came down for a squeeze which made it more profitable to
pay the women’s fare home than to continue to offend.
[Illustration: A WAYSIDE TEMPLE]
Associating with the native Mongol women is here precluded by the fact
that there are no settlements near by from which the Chinese might get
indigenous consolation. A deserted tract lies behind the town. Only
camel-drivers, wood-cutters, and sellers of cattle come into Maimachen,
and they leave at night. For though the Mongols, in their pointed hats,
pass along the streets, none may lawfully live within the stockaded
walls, and none keep shop beneath the carved eaves of the houses which
flank its narrow streets. This is the prerogative of Chinese traders
from beyond the far-off Wall.
The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has become prosperous from the
sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long
camel-trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chantu-fou, drinks
his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down
the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their
blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides
in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats
will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year’s
card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your
sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease the
tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets.
It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have
gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And
so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the
unchanging, shall change.
Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the
queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative
faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their
little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait
for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none
of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia? When they sleep on their
wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun?
Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the
ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he
dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall.
The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather-worn gateway of the
woman-less city of Maimachen. “How much they miss!” says André,
filling his pipe from the new pouch. “How much they escape!” retorts
Alexsimevich.
When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue
the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned
gateway with plunging horses urged by the shouts of his Nubian
charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same
physical sensations as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in
full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains;
but where Pharaoh’s robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow,
and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable.
The horses leap free under the knotted lash of the Siberian driver.
With the rumble of low thunder the ponderous wooden wheels bound over
the rutty road, hurling the springless tarantass into the air and from
side to side. You brace yourself with baggage and hold to the sides,
but toss despite all, like corn in a popper. The hay on which you sit
shifts away to one side, leaving the bare boards to rub through clothes
and packs. A sudden splinter makes you jump like a startled deer beside
the way. In this noisy tarantass, down the narrow road grooved with
the ruts of the Mongol carts and sledges that have gone northward, you
tumble and groan and bump and roll out across the open country.
There is a wide plain from Maimachen. It climbs into the first
barrier-range and the forest belt of Mongolia, whose plateau is the
third terrace in the rise of land from the low frozen flats of the
Northern Lena to the Roof of the World,--the Himalayas of the south.
The northern city of Yakutsk is at a very low elevation, only a few
feet above the sea. Irkutsk on the fifty-second parallel is 1521 feet
in altitude, Troitzkosavsk on the fifty-first is 2600, Urga on the
forty-eighth 3770, Lhassa 11,000 feet.
Far to the northwest, Mongolia is a forested fur region; far to the
south is Shama--the desert. Here at the north and east the forested
belt of the Siberian highlands south of Baikal breaks off almost at the
boundary.
Snow is over everything, but thinly. It has been worn away on the road,
leaving brown patches over which the tarantass, mounting the long
slope with horses at a slow trot, lugubriously thuds. A long stretch
of straggly trees and stumps tells of Kiahta peasants going over the
border to cut wood where no timber-laws limit. Up and up we go, the
way steeper every _sagene_,--afoot now and the horses leaning and
pulling at the traces. Finally silhouetted against the sky appears a
rough pile of stones. At its top bannerets are waving from drooping
poles. It is the Borisan on the summit of the pass to which every
pious Mongol adds an offering, until the pile is many feet high, with
stones, sticks, pieces of bread and bones. Some throw money which
no one save a Chinaman will commit the sacrilege of touching; some
give a Moscow paper-wrapped sweetmeat, some a child’s worn hat or
yellow-printed prayer-cloths waving on their sticks and fading in the
wind;--everything is holy that is given to the gods.
A piercing wind, searching and paralyzing, meets the tarantass
beyond the crest at the southern border of the forest: it is Gobi’s
compliments to Baikal, the salute of the great desert to the great
lake. The horses stumble through the drifted snow, scarcely able to
walk. The driver, blinded, half-frozen, keeps to the general direction
of the obliterated trail. Barely one verst an hour is made, until,
under the shelter of the bald white range of hills, the road reappears
and the wind is warded off.
A rolling plain between the heights is the next stretch of the way. The
afternoon sun, dimly bright, creeps haloed through the lightly falling
snow. Deep in the mist appears a dark moving mass. It grows, focuses,
and takes shape into a shaggy beast of burden, and camel after camel
emerges from the haze, loaded with square bales of tea.
“Ask if there is shelter near,” you shout to the muffled head of the
interpreter.
“I will ask,” he replies. Then to the caravan leader: “_Sein oh!_” he
cries in greeting.
The foremost camel stares stonily as its Mongol driver twitches the
piece of wood which pierces its upper lip, and the whole train stops.
“_Gir orhum beine?_”
“_Ti, ti, orhum beine!_” comes the answer. “It is close at hand.”
Forward the caravan slowly paces, each camel turning his head to stare
as he passes out into the mist again. One of them has left a fleck of
blood in each print of his broad spongy foot which the driver will
cobble with leather at the next halt. Along their trail you drive
southward. The mist is clearing as you rise, and the sun shines down
on the snow which has crystalized in little shafts an inch high. These
spear-shaped slivers have a brightness and a sheen of extraordinary
brilliance, and like prisms show all the colors of the rainbow. They
cast a gleam, as might a mirror, a hundred yards away. It is as if upon
the great white mantle had been thrown haphazard treasuries in rubies
and emeralds and diamonds and opals,--myriad evergrowing rivals of
Dresden regalias. The sun goes down with its necromancy. Beyond, the
soft blanket enfolds the rolling hills. It drapes the rocks and weaves
its drooping festoons about the barren mountain-sides.
“Mongol _yurta_!” calls André, turning to point out with his whip the
low dome-shaped hut, black against the darkening sky. On its unknown
occupants we are to billet ourselves, sheltered by the rule of nomad
hospitality. As the tarantass nears the wattled corral, the watchful
ravens stir from their perches. The picketed camels turn to stare. A
gaunt black hound stalks out, with mane erect and ominous growls.
“_Nohoi_,” cries out Alexsimevich, to the inhabitants of the hut; then
adds to you, “Very bad dogs! It is a Mongol proverb: ‘If you are near a
dog, you are near a bite.’”
Beneath an osier-built lean-to a woman is milking a sheep, with a lamb
to encourage the flow. She calls a guttural order to the dog, which
slinks back. Then she comes to the wattled fence, while the sheep
which has been getting milked escapes to a far corner of the yard. The
woman’s head is curiously framed by a triangular red hat, and silver
hair-plates, which hold out like wings her black tresses. The shoulders
of her magenta dress are padded up into epaulettes two inches high. She
is girded with a sash.
“_Sein oh!_” says Alexsimevich.
“_Sein!_” she answers, and opens the gateway to the enclosure around
the hut.
André drives in among the sheep and cows, and you climb lumberingly
down with cold stiffened limbs. André puts his whip upon the felt roof,
for it is a deadly breach of etiquette to bring it into the house.
“You go in,” said Alexsimevich.
It is like entering a kennel, this struggle through the narrow
aperture, muffled to the eyes in double furs and awkward felt boots.
As you straighten up after the crawl through the entrance, a red glare
from the fire just in front meets the gaze. Stinging smoke grips the
throat; you choke in pain. It blinds the smarting eyes. You gasp and
stagger. Then some one takes your hand and pulls you violently down
on a low couch to the left, where in course of time breath and sight
return. There is no chimney, nor stack for the fire of the brazier,
which stands in the centre of the hut. One can see the open sky
through the three-foot hole above. The smoke, finding its way toward
this aperture, works along the sloping wooden poles which form the
framework of the felt-covered tent, filling the whole upper section
with its blinding fumes. To stand is to smother. Sitting, the head
comes below the smoke-line.
With recovered vision, one can look around within the hut. The couch of
refuge, raised some six inches above the floor, is the bed by night,
the sitting-place by day. Against the wall at the left hand, and
directly opposite the door, is a box-like cupboard, along whose top
are ranged pictures of grotesque Buddhist gods, before whom are little
brass cups full of offerings, millet or oil, in which is standing a
burning wick. Beside the door is a shelf loaded with fire-blackened
pots and kettles. Branches of birch for fuel are thrown beneath. On
the far side of the room, three black lambs, fenced off by a wicker
barricade, are huddled together, quietly sleeping.
[Illustration: A MONGOL BELLE AND HER YURTA]
[Illustration: A ZABAIKALSKAIA BURIAT]