Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Once every two or three hours we passed a cluster of three or four of these low, movable homes, always at a considerable distance off the trail. There was still no road, yet we made good speed almost steadily. Besides the often dim traces of other travelers there was the guidance of a line of telegraph-poles, carrying two wires but as yet no messages. In the days before the World War word could be flashed by this route from Paris to Peking, even from London to Shanghai, in three minutes; but retreating armies must have fuel even in a treeless desert. Mixed flocks of sheep and goats, slate-colored goats mingled with those fat-tailed sheep of Asia which waddled so ludicrously as they scampered away from us, still found sustenance here and there under the protection of a mounted shepherd or two. It was still too early autumn for wolves, but bands of antelopes, like big pretty rabbits, loping gracefully yet swiftly across the rolling plains, became more and more frequent and immense as we sped northwestward. Before the journey ended, great lines of these, like brown-gray heat-waves, sometimes undulated along the whole horizon, and more than one herd of fifty to a hundred, startled by the sudden appearance of our snorting black monster, all but ran themselves off their legs in a mad dash to cross the trail in front of us, instead of speeding away out of danger.

It was about noon of the second day that we gradually entered the real Gobi Desert. Yet it was not a desert in the Sahara sense, of mere shifting sand, but of hard sand and gravel mixed with clay, always covered at least with the thinnest of grass, and often with tufts of a grass-bushy sort, enough to keep even a desert from shifting and blowing. Thus far the weather had been cool but glorious; but no sooner had we come to the Gobi, where, as any teacher of geography can tell you, it never rains, than the sky roofed itself over completely with gray-black clouds and rain forced us to halt and contrive some means of raising the top over our ramparts of baggage. Skeletons of cattle, particularly of camels, became more than frequent, blanching into dust closely beside the trail just where the end of their life’s labors had overtaken them. Buzzards that looked more like eagles vied with the wild black dogs in disposing quickly of the carcasses. Nor were the modern rivals of the camel free from a like fate. Several skeletons of automobiles caught our eye, and they were always scattered piece by piece for some distance, as if they had disintegrated at full speed, or their bones, too, had been picked clean and dragged hither and yon by those savage dogs that roam the Mongolian plains. Floor-flat and wide as it is, and almost as free from the “other fellow” as from “traffic cops,” this natural speedway of the Gobi has had a number of fatal automobile accidents.

Unlike the Sahara, it is not merely the camel that can cross the Gobi. Mules and horses make the journey, and the miles-long camel caravans were rivaled by endless strings of ox-carts, the crudest of two-wheeled contrivances, plodding along across the dry, brown world as if all sense of time or destination had long since been cast aside as worthless paraphernalia. Often, especially in the cold early mornings, we passed caravans camped out, perhaps for a day or two, while their weary animals browsed the stingy hillsides. A denim-blue tent backed by scores or hundreds of bales of hides or wool, if the expedition was China-bound, or boxes of food, cloth, liquor, and oil products, if Urga was its destination, with perhaps more uptilted two-wheeled carts than could have been counted during one of our average halts, usually completed such a picture as we came upon it. At the sound of our unmuffled engine tent-doors became alive with gaping, bullet-headed Mongols, lower orders of whom, or their Chinese counterparts, came to life from beneath what had seemed to be mere bundles of felt rags and sheepskins on the cold hard ground, while the horses tethered about the camp with three feet hobbled together after the Mongol fashion made frantic and often successful efforts to escape from this new terror descending upon them. The horses of the Gobi have not yet learned to behold the automobile with equanimity, and our passing often sent great herds of Mongolian ponies sweeping away in chaotic masses across the plains in a stampede which the dozen outriders were powerless to stem.

Twice during the second day we made out large compact clusters of white buildings on the flank of distant ridges along the horizon—lamaseries in which scores of Mongol monks pass their days in anything but monasterial austerity. Once, when we had seen no other living thing for hours, an old Mongol came loping across the desert on a camel in the teeth of the cold, raging wind, a picturesque figure in the still almost bright-red quilted cloak reaching to his ankles, and his pagoda-shaped fur cap. When we called to him he halted and pulled sharply at the reins attached to the perforated nose of his beast, which thereupon knelt in instalments, front, back, then front again, and rose to follow his dismounted master over to us. Our Russian companions, who managed to make themselves understood in any language, though actually speaking none but their own, passed the time of day in Mongol, the one important word of which seems to be buyna, corresponding to the French il y a, but greatly outdoing it in service. The leathery face of the old man was like a boot that had lain out in the elements for years; the two teeth he showed suggested the fangs of a wolf; but his smile was as kindly as that of an Iowa farmer, and while his thankfulness for a cigarette was very briefly expressed, as becomes a nomad scorning or unaware of the formalities of a politer world, there was something distinctly manly in his every movement from the time we first saw him until he mounted his kneeling camel again and rode away into the vastness of the desert. For hours afterward there was nothing to catch the attention, unless it was the compatriot beside me. He was one of those American wanderers in the Orient who have never recrossed the Pacific since coming out to help pacify the Philippines a generation ago, and he still preferred a horse and “buggy” to these new-fangled things fed by gasolene; he had not yet heard of scores of facts and inventions which have become ancient history to us at home; and he passed his idle hours in humming the songs that were popular in our land twenty years back.

At length we ran out from under the great motionless canopy of clouds into brilliant sunshine again, though even there the racing wind was almost bitter cold. The Gobi, as I have said, is no Sahara, yet it was beautiful in its many moods as the sea, stretching away in tawny browns or cold bluish grays to infinity, or to scampering lines of antelope along the far horizon. Beyond the mud-walled compound enclosing the telegraph station of Ehr-lien the smooth, grass-tufted desert gave way to a savage country of protruding rock-heaps, peaked heaps of blackish stone outcropping everywhere, as if nature, too, built prayer-piles, like the pious Mongols, who litter their landscapes with conical piles of stones wherever they are available, as appeals to the supernatural powers.

Nightfall found us midway between two mud-walled telegraph stations, and shelter from the raging wind and the penetrating night air of a more than four-thousand-foot elevation was highly desirable. Two weather-blackened yourts broke the immensity about us, far off to the right. One does not need to look for side-roads on the Gobi; we made a bee-line for them across the plain. But the unsoaped occupants were not willing to double up in one tent and rent us the other, for which I was duly grateful when I had caught a glimpse inside the pen that might have been assigned to us. Several miles farther on, a larger group of nomad dwellings appeared, this time to the left across more broken country. By the time we had struggled near to the settlement we were surrounded by Mongols and black dogs, several horses had broken their tethers and were already mere specks on the horizon, and even the camels reclining about the yourts had risen to protest in their ridiculously childish falsetto against this unauthorized disturbance. This time there were half a dozen tents, in much better repair and more nearly resembling human dwellings. Moreover here there was a man of importance to receive us. He was a lama, as his close-cropped head and a kind of bath-robe gown, thickly quilted and still dully red for all its unwashed age, told us; for the Mongol layman wears a cue and more masculine garments, wore a cue in fact centuries before this girlish head-dress was imposed upon the Chinese by their nomad conquerors. But it required the linguistic lore of our Russian companions to learn that he was also a princeling, a kind of tribal ruler of a neighboring region, who had come on a visit to his friend, the family head of this cluster of huts. He was a big brawny man, rather handsome in his own racial style, with a wide, frank, fairly intelligent face, pitted with smallpox. We were invited to enter his own hut, which was round and low and made of thick gray felt, like all those on the Gobi; but the earth floor was also carpeted with felt mats, and about the circular walls were several small chests and other simple articles of household use, not to mention saddles and bridles. The lama gave orders briefly and to the point, more like a commander than a guest. A sort of iron basket on legs was set up in the middle of the tent, filled, by hand, with dried camel-dung, and was soon blazing so merrily that the bitter night wind outside was more endurable than the temperature inside the tent. I know no fuel which outdoes that of the Gobi in quickness and intensity of heat. The Mongols, however, seemed to be impervious to it. Though inured for many generations to the bitter cold of their plateau, they crowded into the hut without removing a single one of their heavy garments, tightly closed the little low door, and squatted about the roasting iron cage with every evidence of keen enjoyment. There is but slight differentiation by sex in Mongol dress, and the men and women alike wore heavy, ungraceful trousers, huge high boots of soft, pliable, black leather with pointed turned-up toes, and a thick quilted garment covering all else from neck to calves, not to mention uncouth fur head-dresses. Even in these desert yourts the reddish faces and garments of the women are often set off by elaborate and fanciful hair-dress and other ornaments; but if these existed here they had been laid away, and the very girls stalked about in their oversize sock-stuffed boots like lumber-jacks in midwinter.

Mongol tea was prepared over the fire-cage and served us in brass bowls; but as the resident of Mongolia puts his salt in his tea rather than on his food, and has other un-Western notions of how it should be concocted, I did not insist on having my bowl refilled. I found my mind frequently harking back to such nights as this on the high Andean plateaus of South America, though there the travel itself had been quite different. Here was the same bare, vegetationless earth round about, the same complete ignorance of, or interest in, cleanliness, similar crowded, comfortless huts, and much the same attitude toward life as among the Indians of the Andes. But these plateau-dwellers were far more hospitable, cheery of manner, and with a live human curiosity which, though it caused them to finger monkey-like any of our possessions they could reach, had a more agreeable effect on the spirits than the sullen dullness of their American prototypes. Now and again, when they became over-troublesome, the lama ordered them outside with a commanding voice and manner which usually was effective at the third or fourth repetition. Yet he, too, was not lacking in fingering curiosity, of a slightly more controllable nature. While we ate we passed out samples of our strange foreign food to the gaping, over-clad semicircle about us. One of my canned cherries, dropped into a gnarled Mongol palm, created a considerable commotion. What was it; and was it safe in a Mongol stomach, even though this other kind of man ate it without misgiving? It passed from hand to hand around the circle, each evidently expressing his opinion of the risk involved, and the consensus seemed to be that it was up to the original recipient to make the venture. He licked cautiously at the fruit for some time after it had been returned to the furrowed hollow of his hand. At length, reassured by the two Russians and urged on by the lama, he bit gingerly into it—and half sprang to his feet with the shock it seemed to give his tongue. More reassurance finally induced him to eat it, and all went well until the stone betrayed its existence, whereupon there was an instant demand to know whether the presence of that foreign substance was normal, or whether his evil spirit was playing new and perhaps destructive tricks upon him. Considering the quantity of foreign substance the average Mongol absorbs with his meals, there seemed to be something absurdly incongruous about this lengthy performance. But then, we of the uninstructed West know little of the myriad methods the teeming evil spirits of the Orient devise to trap their victims.

A bit of chocolate caused less flurry, though the semicircle around which it disappeared unanimously pronounced it too sweet to be agreeable. A cube of sugar was not a total stranger, and each of the gathering asked the privilege of letting one melt on his tongue. When it came to meat, even from tins, there was no mystery left; mutton and beef form the almost exclusive diet of the Mongols, except for milk and cheese in summer, and their salted tea. Not only are they true nomads, but their pseudo-Buddhist religion teaches that it is wicked—or shall we say dangerous?—to till the soil.

Though there is little formality in Mongol intercourse, I inadvertently made one faux pas during the evening. Among those who crowded into the overheated hut was what I at first took to be a handsome youth, but who turned out to be, under the heavy, sexless garments of Mongolia, a girl, perhaps of seventeen. When I offered her a tidbit of some sort, she shrank back without accepting it, while the rest of the semicircle looked at me with an expression of mingled wonder and resentment, and a moment later she slipped out through the tightly closed, knee-high door into the night. I should, it seemed, have been more indirect in my methods, handing the donation to the old woman or to one of the men of the family, and hinting that they might pass it on. As it was, I had evidently boldly made an advance, and that publicly, similar to handing my door-key to a chance lady acquaintance in the West. The girl returned, later on, and indirectly accepted a few knick-knacks, but it was evident as long as I remained that I was a man on whom it behooved parents and husbands to keep a watchful eye.

The tin cans we emptied were, of course, considered great prizes, to be quarreled over and at length allotted by the lama. The old woman begged us to open others and somehow dispose of the food in them, in order that she might still further increase her stock of kitchen utensils. Her curiosity seemed to have reached almost a morbid growth, for though we or the lama drove her several times out of the hut, she was evidently bent on watching these curious beings from another world disrobe. A ragged old man who proved to be the tribal shepherd was equally hard to banish, though for a different reason. He had been accustomed to sleep in the hut we occupied, and he resisted as long as he dared, and quite justly, the demand of the lama that he sleep outside. The lama won in the end, of course, and the shepherd curled up grumblingly in a nest of quilted rags and sheepskins along the outer wall, where his deep bark resounded in the desert stillness all through the night. Heavy colds seem to be quite as common among these permanent denizens of the plateau as they were universal with the four of us. The fire-cage was carried outside, but the thick heat remained, in spite of which the lama called to a boy to pull the topmost layer of felt down over the opening left in the top of yourts by day, hermetically sealing the place. But he was right; before morning we would have resented a pinhole in the felt walls. I had indulged in the luxury of bringing an army cot with me, which excited not only the wonder but the admiration of our host. The inventiveness which had produced such a contraption seemed less surprising to him than the courage I displayed in using it; he, said the lama, would be certain to fall off it in the night and seriously injure himself. Instead he stripped to the waist and lay down on a bundle of blankets and skins along the wall, pulling a rough cover of camel’s hair over him. But this was not until the formalities of his calling had been fulfilled. As we were turning in, he called once more to the boy outside, who soon appeared with two brass disks, loosely tied together. The lama squatted on his haunches, clashed the disks once together with a resounding clang, then mumbled for several minutes through his prayers. Then he sat for some time staring from one to the other of us, as if wondering what breed of men were these, who dared lie down for the night without having propitiated the evil spirits which ride the darkness, until at length he blew out the floating-wick lamp and lay down.