“Only tea,” is the reply. It is not quite reassuring.
“That is Pokrin, the one that sells to the Gigin,” the wool-merchant
whispers. “Go with him: he can tell you some tales.”
Obviously one must not miss the acquaintanceship of this modern
Ganymede, cup-bearer of the many-bubbled French nectar and jugged
ambrosia; so on we march to his compound.
Pokrin was on his way to a business appointment; but no rendezvous will
interfere with prospective _chai_. He hangs his coat back on its peg,
bids his wife start up the samovar, and produces the vodka-bottle. Yes,
his family is very well, and he is very busy buying hides. We talk up
and down and roundabout numberless themes, and at last venture: “The
Gigin!”
“Ah, the Gigin was here to see me only a week ago.”
We bow our recognition of the host’s great importance, and he is
started; soon he buckles down into the story.
“The Buddha came up in his carriage with his lamas riding beside him,
and they tied their horses all around here in front. Then Gigin came
in, walking softly because of his gout, and he said, ‘Let us drink
together like friends, without quarreling.’
“I brought out the drinks, and we sat down,--Gigin and I with the lamas
around us. Gigin likes best the strong drinks,--not vodka, but cognac
and sweet champagne. Very many bottles we drank, Gigin and I. And at
last I fell asleep. But Gigin drank still. Then he too fell asleep. In
the morning the lamas carried him to his carriage, and back he drove to
the palace, with the people lying down in the street as he passed. All
the next day I had a very bad pain in my forehead, and it felt large.”
By non-Siberian standards Alexsimevich should be on the way to similar
symptoms in the near future. For the purveyor to the Divinity has
produced an assorted collection of his wares which are being sampled
with due diligence. Cold meats and wheat-bread appear on the table with
the samovar.
“We must eat, or he feels badly,” whispers Alexsimevich, as he makes
a sandwich, an inch and a half through, which is about the depth of
brandy in the Siberian highball.
Other neighbors drift in as the afternoon wears on. The talk turns to
that greatest of local events, the Metropolitan Handicap of Mongolia,
under the high patronage of the Living God. Things become decidedly
stimulating, and the recitals lively. Everybody is living over the
excitement, ejaculating and gesticulating. The child-quality in their
minds keeps so vivid their impressions, that the scenes are projected
almost as by a cinematograph.
From hundreds of miles around, the herdsmen have assembled. The
plain before the city is a riot of color, as the horsemen ride here
and there. In the centre of the field is the gay pavilion for the
yellow-robed bishops and cardinals from distant lamaseries, guests of
the great Gigin.
All through the morning, hundreds of riders and horses have been making
for the starting-point, twenty _li_ (about seven miles) distant. The
jockeys are the smallest boys available: young red-cheeked lamas,
perched bareback on the shaggy racing-ponies. The monks, who are
stewards of the course, have with much shouting finally, at the hour,
lined them up in a long row, facing Urga. One thousand ponies have been
reported as entering. It is a regiment of boys. A signal starts the
whole cavalcade together. The thousand small jockeys shout at once. A
thousand whips come down on flanks. Two thousand heels dig into the
ponies’ withers. Over the irregular plain tear the racers, dodging
around gullies, stumbling in marmot-holes, galloping helter-skelter
amid furious yells. At length they come within sight of Urga. Crowds,
mounted, have gone out to follow them in. The shouts redouble, the
people become frantic; the riders yell at one another, and the horses
are as wild as their masters.
_Shabniars_ and cardinals get to their feet as the cavalcade appears.
The Living God’s heavy eyes brighten up with interest. His chief
soul-mate waves a jewelled hand and chatters excitedly with a lama
of the guard. The foremost rider is close at hand now, the jockey,
wriggling like an eel and almost on the neck of his pony, yelling and
slashing. The field thunders behind. The leader nears the pavilion,
his pony is on the fierce final spurt,--a last cut of the whip, and in
triumph, amid the deafening roar of the populace, the winner passes the
line. Many other riders come in at his heels, but most straggle off
to either side of the course when they see that the finish is lost.
The victor is caught up by the priests and is brought before Gigin,
where he lies on his stomach in adoration. He receives a gift, and is
pensioned for life. The horse’s owner receives a good price for the
animal, which is added to the Gigin’s stable. The mule-cart of the
Buddha is then brought up and he is loaded in. The yellow bishops mount
their steeds, and back to his palace goes the Living God. Thus ends the
great Urga race.
There are other athletic tournaments during the season; most important
of these is the championship wrestling-bout, which every year decides
whether laymen or clergy are the better sportsmen. The Gigin’s pavilion
fronts a ring, with dressing-tents on either side. From one emerges a
layman. He advances by huge jumps and prostrates himself before the
deity. Next, palms on the ground, like a great frog, he leaps into
the ring. The chosen lama executes the same pass from the other side.
They meet, jumping like game-cocks, with quick breaks. At length the
clergyman gets a leg. In an instant he heaves up on it, and over goes
the black man,--out! The whole assembled populace raises a stupendous
howl. Bout succeeds bout, with differing champions and varying issues.
Partisanship is intense. The clergy usually win in these matches, and
have long held the championship.
One guest tells to-night of the photographer who bribed a lama, and got
the first photograph of Gigin. The tale runs that this man, a Russian,
secured admission among a crowd of pilgrims, and snapped the god,
unawares, among his entourage of priests. This photograph, enlarged
and colored, is the one now hawked to the Mongols, and which they set
up for worship among their other gods. The lama was beheaded, they
say. That was several years ago, however: since then Gigin has been
photographed at the races and elsewhere.
At last we break away from the group and return to our lodgings at
Varlakoff’s.
[Illustration: A GRAND LAMA]
We are informed next day that among the invitations so lightly and
uncomprehendingly accepted was one to take dinner with the mayor of
the Russian settlement. We are expected therefore toward evening. So,
late in the day, we gird on our greatcoat and move out heavily. Down
the street we fare forth to the house of the host. A fine well-fed
man is this mayor, with the cordial grip and the slow smile of
good-fellowship. He wears a very long beard. He has taken a fancy to
the embroidered green and pink Chinese ear-tabs as a substitute for the
big fur cap of his own people. The ear-tabs are about as appropriate
to his burgomaster build as baby-blue ribbon on the tail of a fighting
bull-pup. Otherwise, deerskin boots and hunting-coat, he is the real
Siberian. In the mayor’s large sitting-room, along the wall against
which the table stands, is a rank of bottles of divers heights and
fatness, like recruits out for their drill. The samovar of shining
brass leads the array. Four different-sized glasses stand at each
plate, and the intervening area is covered with platters of sausages,
cheese, bread, sprats of every conceivable variety, and a medley of
cold _zakuska_ dishes.
The mayor reaches for the vodka.
“Please, none!” we blurt out.
The mayor looks hurt. Then an idea takes form in his head, and he
shouts something to his Chinese boy, who promptly shuffles through the
door into the street.
Out of the window we catch a glimpse of him turning into the
establishment across the way, where Pokrin’s clerk sells the
wherewithal to make a Russian holiday. The Chinese boy emerges with a
bottle, and trots back across the street with the curious gait made
requisite by the unattached thick-soled slippers. He shuffles into the
dining-room and makes space for one more bottle. Whiskey! The mayor has
bethought himself of the English label, and has sent for it, on the
theory that not to drink, like not to sleep, is unbelievable.
Evidently one must again sidestep, so _chai_ is besought and got down.
Our virtue is rewarded, for the host smiles and is content.
“Poor Pokrin!” he says presently, reminded of the man by the beverage.
“He made over a hundred thousand roubles from selling things to the
Gigin. But now he can’t think of any more things to sell. You saw the
Gigin’s new droshky? But that isn’t like selling an elephant or an
electric-light plant. Pokrin is down to pelicans and fountain-pens.”
He shakes his head sympathetically, and reaches anew for the
vodka-bottle. He goes on reminiscing, half-cynically, half-regretfully,
of the past, while dinner to serve the appetite of a Cyclops keeps
coming on.
In the midst of the repast cries arise outside. A Mongol with a flow of
language is heard calling aloud for “_Bulun Darga!_” (fat policeman.)
“They are after me,” says the mayor resignedly.
The Mongol comes hurtling in, pushing past the Chinese boy.
“Fat policeman,” he cries; “Red Mustache and Long Nose and Blue Coat
are drunk, and are disturbing my _gir_. Come quickly, O Lord, fat
policeman.”
The mayor sighs. “I go”; then he turns to us. “Will you accompany me?”
“Gladly, if we don’t have to eat any more.”
The mayor considers this a back-handed compliment to the amplitude of
his hospitality and smiles.
“_V period_, it is not far.”
He puts on his huge greatcoat, draws on his ponderous boots, takes
a heavy stick, and in vividly embroidered Chinese ear-tabs stands
ready to follow the Mongol. We shoulder open the felted door. From the
low-ceilinged recess between this and the outer door he produces two
other big sticks, like pilgrim’s staves. These he hands to his visitors.
“For the dogs!” he explains.
The Mongol’s hut is soon reached. It is in frightful disorder, and
vodka-bottles are strewn around. The mayor looks up in a little book to
see if Krasni, young Agueff, and Pugachev are not, as he suspects, the
men who in native nomenclature are called Red Mustache, Blue Coat, and
Long Nose. He finds that he has rightly surmised.
“I know them,” says the mayor. “They will come around to me in the
morning. I will tell them to make the Mongol satisfaction. When they
come back and say he is satisfied, I tell them to be good and to do
this no more. _Nietchevo!_”
The irate man is jollied along, and is told that it will be fixed up
soon. Consoled and soothed by the protection of authority, he admits
it was not so bad after all, and he bids us, as we leave, a grinning
“_Sein oh!_”
“Now,” says the mayor, “will you not come and see Urga at night?”
He leads along an icy back street, black as a canyon, with the bulging
mud-plastered walls, twenty feet in height, so close that a cart can
barely pass between them. Not a light is seen save as a ray pierces
the shuttered planking of some compound door. Distant clanging of
cymbals and far-off echoes alone break the stillness. Out from the
gloom of the street we come into the open _piazza_, half a verst wide.
It is unshadowed, and less dark. Threading the heaped-up refuse we
stumble on. The black crows, with lancet-like blood-red beaks, which
search the heaps by day, are gone. The black cannibal dogs wake and
growl as we approach.
“They are afraid of a stick and don’t generally attack people. But,
if several do come at you, crouch down and stay perfectly quiet,” the
mayor counsels.
He then tells of the Cossack who last year, passing by a dog that did
not move aside, drew his sabre and struck the beast. As soon as the
other dogs smelled the fresh blood, they became mad, and half a dozen
came at him. He put his back against the wall and slashed among them.
Many he cut and wounded, but more came and more, in an instant. Soon he
was pulled down, for hundreds were upon him.
A big black-furred brute looks insolently at us as we pass.
“They do not bury the dead here, you know,” the mayor says. “The
corpses are taken to the mountain northward outside the town, and are
left. It is cold to-night. There will be death in the market-place
where the poor lie shelterless. And the dogs wait beside them.”
A little way off, where the prayer-wheel stands, is the twinkling
light of a shrine. The new moon and the few brilliant stars are
frigidly distant. They cast a pale white glow now on the dimly outlined
walls and huts. A beggar, lying unseen, calls suddenly as we pass his
heap of sodden hides. The six-foot Siberian hunter by our side cries
out as he stumbles over and beholds a something, partly eaten, guarded
by a great cannibal dog.
If the thought of the rights of man has drowned sympathy with all that
concerns the government of Russia, visit Urga at night, and the Cossack
of the Russian Guard, swaggering along among the Chinamen,--this
Cossack whom you have heard execrated as the “knout of the Czar,”--will
look to you like a Highlander at Lucknow. The chance to absorb an
unwholesome amount of tannin by way of a samovar, and to sleep on the
floor beside the oven in the whitewashed house of Michael Varlakoff,
will become a privilege more prized than any possessed by His Holiness,
the Living God.
The section of the Russian colony in which we have been lodging
consists of five hundred-odd traders. They have drifted down from
Siberia, and on the free ground of taxless Urga have established their
shops of gaudy European cloths, enameled cooking-utensils, candles,
and cutlery. These Russians, whose whitewashed many-paned houses fill
a quarter of the town, have not the large interests watched by the
English merchants, who dot the globe with their agencies. They are
small Trans-Baikal shopkeepers, transplanted bodily. They build their
houses in the Siberian way, and their wives toil personally at the
oven. They wear blouses and felt boots as the house-dress, and keep the
ikons in the corner. Prosperity is evidenced in the striking-clocks,
the lamps, nickeled samovars, and curtained double windows. But they
are still not many removes from the peasant.
There is, however, another section of Urga’s Russian colony, grouped
around the consulate, a large compound situated a verst east of the
Mongol town, which was built in 1863, and was fortified in 1900,
against the Boxers. Within this compound are the Orthodox Church, the
Russian doctor, the rooms of the twenty Cossacks of the Guard, and the
great empty barracks of the two _sotnias_ that were sent here in Boxer
times, and were, to the regret of their compatriots, later removed. The
barracks are still ready for any future visits, and the breastwork,
with its stake and fosse lined with barbed-wire, is equal to any force
which from a five-hundred-verst radius can assemble against it.
In this quarter, the Russian consul is autocrat. He is the official
notary, without whose stamp no contract is legal, the chief of police,
the guardian of orphans. Around him revolves the society of the few
dozen mondaines of Urga, whose personnel consists of the officials,
the garrison officers, and some half-dozen commercial agents, single
generally, or with distant families. They conduct their bachelor
quarters through Chinese servants, and their cuisines are helped out
by all the canned and bottled delicacies that can be ordered from the
frontier. The gold-mines, and the extensive wool-trade which produces
a commerce of twenty to thirty millions, demand that first-grade men
watch the interests of the great companies which handle the business.
So men of the best cosmopolitan Russian type come, at salaries
proportioned to their sacrifice. They gather in the consulate evenings,
or sit in the fenced-off boxes at the theatrical performances, which
periodically come down from Kiahta.
A few families who have made their sixteen-day camel-trip from Kalgan
and Peking have foregathered here with their household goods and gods.
Buttressed by the companionship of books, this other class lives
in splendidly-furnished rooms, with pictures purchased in Paris,
statuettes from Rome, and grand pianos drawn for days over the passes
by laboring oxen. One converses at the consulate in French, the mother
tongue of none, but the common tongue of all. The few favored guests,
who are invited of necessity over and over, play chess endlessly in the
evenings. The ladies read the latest French novels, or sing the songs
that distant friends have sent from the Riviera or St. Petersburg.
They drive in imported carriages and sleighs for the afternoon airing,
and bemoan Nice and Monte Carlo in winter over the pages of Zola’s
“Rome.” The men subscribe extensively to English, French, German, and
Russian periodicals. They invite such relatives as can be persuaded for
lengthy stays, and shower a guest with the hospitality of old claret,
caviar, and the varied courtesies which the rarity of visitors from the
world inspires. They take long adventurous horseback trips in the dull
season,--explore forgotten monasteries, study the Tibetan inscriptions,
print monographs on the folk-tales, and dream of promotion and
Petersburg.
The consulate has one uniquely circumstanced personality, whose career
is a romance of Eastern adventure. Born in the Baltic provinces, he
studied in the Oriental training-schools, and entered the Russian
diplomatic service at Peking. Here he applied himself indefatigably,
until he knew the Chinese language as did hardly another European. He
could write the ten thousand ideographs, and could speak flawlessly the
Mandarin and the popular dialects. He went to Mongolia and mastered its
languages also,--its spoken idioms and its written grapevine letters.
Then, with his diplomatic entrée, his knowledge of men and tongues,
and the initiative of an adventurer, he launched his grand coup in the
palace of Peking.
He carried away the sole right to the gold of two _eimucks_, a
territory as large as France. Not a Chinaman may pan the metal, not a
Slav may open a mine, save through this concessionnaire. A third of all
gold washed,--these are his terms to those who would lease from him;
just double what he pays the Peking Yamen for his privilege. Fortune
upon fortune he is reported to have made, and the Chinese gold-washers
and the Russian miners who lease from him have gathered their own
stakes, too, despite the Cæsar’s tribute which he exacpts of all that
they produce.
He has spent large sums in bringing down machinery, to do on a
great scale what the shallow veins of ore demanded should be done
on a limited scale. An abandoned gold-dredge lies far up the Iro
River, transported piecemeal at exorbitant expense over the hills.
Traction-engines are here, which could not cope with the Mongol
roads. They consumed forty days going one hundred and twenty miles
to the largest mine. Now they lie rusting in their sheds. Thousands
of ox-carts were engaged for hauling in the various purchases. River
steamers and great oil-drills scattered over northern Mongolia are
relics of his ambition.
His brick house, finely furnished, and his brick smelter stand hard-by
the consulate. The Russians tell of masons imported from Sweden to
build them. The life-history is a bizarre record of great things
attempted by a man whose overleaping ambition stopped nowhere, and
whose expenditures more than once brought him down. But his interesting
meteoric career continues, and twenty _pud_ of gold are said still to
come down yearly from the mines to the most picturesque character in
Russian Urga.
We drive down with one of the officials, to be present at another of
the events in Urga’s meagre happenings--the arrival of the mail.
The Russian post, one delivery a week, crosses Mongolia. The horses
bring in three mails from the Russian frontier. From Urga to Kalgan,
the camel-post guarded by Cossacks, traverses the great desert of Gobi.
Save the Imperial Chinese telegraph, it is the only regular method of
intercourse with the outside world. The two thousand-odd roubles a year
paid by Russia as a subsidy are a small expenditure for the opportunity
of accustoming the people to her service, and for controlling the
avenues of news and communication.
The post-office is at the consulate, and a new postmaster has just been
installed. Thereby hangs a tale which is poured into your ear before
your stay in Urga has been much protracted.
A telegram came from Irkutsk to seize and bring to Verhneudinsk as
propagandists the postmaster’s son and daughter--twenty-one and
eighteen. Twenty Cossacks surrounded the house at three in the morning.
The two were arrested, taken to the mayor’s house, and lodged there.
The next day they were started on the trail to Kiahta. Once over the
border, there would be no more hope. Quickly the leading men of the
colony assembled and telegraphed the Russian ambassador at Peking,
knowing that if the ambassador had official cognizance, he could not
safely authorize an arrest on Chinese soil by the Cossacks of the
Guard. The response was delayed, but there was pressure enough upon
the consul to get the prisoners held at the mining-camp beyond Iro
until the answer was received. At length the ambassador replied that
Chinese suzerainty must be respected. The two were free. But the
father had been advised to resign his post and accept a station which
was offered him at Kalgan, where there were only three Russians, all
warranted proof against propaganda.
Beyond the Russian consulate, six versts, is the Chinese town called,
as are many of these trading-posts, Maimachen, or place of trade. One
can get there by the solitary Cossack-driven droshky that the Russian
colony supports. But more appropriately we go on pony-back, borrowing
an army-saddle and a purple fleece-lined _shuba_, whose skirts reach
around the knees, and whose long sleeves fold over the hands, keeping a
rider reasonably warm in cold weather.
The houses of Mongol Urga are soon left behind, the stockaded lamasery
is passed on the left, and we are on a big open plain. A few minutes’
gallop takes us past the consulate. Beyond it stands a compound girded
by a stockade of saplings, within which are the low mud walls of
straggling houses, amid which the gilded eaves of a more pretentious
residence lift themselves above the rest.
A troop of pig-tailed horsemen trots past: the white tunics of the
riders are covered, back and breast, with red ideograph letters,
which stigmatize the bearers as of the lowest caste--soldiers of the
Celestial service. The man in front holds aloft a gilded pear-shaped
standard, and between the ranks lumbers a covered cart with closed
shutters. The cavalcade wheels to the right and turns in, dipping the
standard as they pass under the gargoyle-tipped beams of the gateway.
Servants come running out of the great house. From the cart is helped
down a Manchu of pallid face and short gray mustache. That wooden
house, girded by mud huts, is the seat of government for this greatest
_eimuck_ in Mongolia. The figure robed in cheap blue cotton is lord of
life and death, the _Zinzin_, Viceroy for the Emperor of China.
This Manchu Viceroy, and his _Tu-T’ung_, or lieutenant-governor, who
represents Chinese authority in the city of Kalgan, are responsible
for the collection of tribute, the administration of justice in the
cities, and the maintenance of order. Over the Chinese inhabitants in
the Maimachen the rule through the agency of the prefect of police
appointed by the Viceroy is direct and absolute.