We were glad, indeed, to see the sun again next morning, when at last it burst up like the exhaust from a puddling furnace over the low, level horizon. Already we had bumped our way back to the “highway,” as worthy of the name as the caminos reales, the “royal roads,” of South America are of theirs, and had sped some distance along it. The eyes suffered most in this glaring light and the incessant strong head wind from which nothing short of entirely wrapping up the head could protect them. The constant bumping and tossing made up for any lack of exercise. Among myriad rock-heaps, natural and prayerful, we crossed the frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia, marked merely by two huger stone-heaps on either side of the there sunken trail, the summits connected by a wire from which hung tattered bits of cloth prayers and various mementos of the pious, culminating in a weather-beaten straw hat of Chinese make. That was all, except the immensity of the desert, for the frontier-station was still about fifty miles distant. Then the rock-heaps died out, and the earth as far as we could see it was thickly covered with millions of little mounds, like untended Chinese graves, with hints of scanty tuft-grass on top of them. At long intervals we passed a caravan, the dull-toned notes of the bell-camels reaching our ears momentarily as we dashed past. The first camel of one long train carried the American flag at his masthead, so to speak, to warn would-be marauders that the hides and wool behind him were under whatever protection our consuls and diplomats in the former Chinese Empire have to offer. Otherwise the world about us was mainly a confirmation of the fact that, while China proper estimates the density of her population at two hundred and twenty-five to the square mile, Mongolia’s is rated at two.
Were the world not so slow to accept geographical changes, even in these days of the constant remaking of maps, we should long since have ceased to distinguish between Mongolia and China “proper.” Though the Chinese Republic claims, and to a certain extent maintains, the loyalty of that strip of earth bordering her on the north and known as Inner Mongolia, the vast region we call Outer Mongolia cast off Chinese rule a decade ago. More exactly, it never was under Chinese rule, at least in modern times, for barely had their kindred Manchus been driven from the throne of China than the Mongols asserted their independence from the new-formed republic. That was why we Americans had looked forward with some misgiving to our arrival in Ude, which occurred early on this third day. Ude consists of half a dozen yourts and a new mud-walled telegraph station, a desolate spot, owing its location to a near-by water-hole. But it is the place where the merits or demerits of persons entering Outer Mongolia from China are passed upon—passed upon by unpolished Mongols who have little knowledge of, and less interest in, the way such things are handled at other boundaries between the countries of the globe. The Russians had no misgivings; while men of their race would not willingly have traveled to Urga eighteen months before, they were now, as it were, among their own people. But, for reasons which will in due time be apparent, there is just now a certain lack of welcome in Mongolia toward Americans, in which the British and certain other important nationalities share. Less than a month before, two Englishmen in their own car had been halted at Ude and refused admission to the land beyond, eventually giving up lengthy and useless negotiations to have this decision reversed, and returning to China. We had no “papers” calling upon Mongolia to admit us. Our legation in Peking had only been able to tell us that, if our passports were sent to the Chinese foreign office, they would be returned—long afterward—with the information that, while Mongolia was still Chinese territory, it was in the hands of rebels—they might even have called them bandits—and since the Chinese Republic could not guarantee the safety of foreigners in that region, they could not consent to our traveling there, even to the extent of giving us a visé. The Mongols themselves have no accredited representative in China, naturally, and while certain other agents in Peking might have smoothed things over for us if they had wished, it is their policy to pretend that they and those they represent have no real power in Mongolia, apparently in the hope of keeping the world ignorant as long as possible of their doings in that region. It is customary, therefore, for those citizens of Western nations who wish to enter Outer Mongolia to pick up their traps and go, regardless of legal permissions.
But all our misgivings of being turned back at Ude were worry wasted. The Mongols have a reputation for instability in the conduct of affairs of government, of stiff-necked severity at one moment and great leniency in quite a similar matter the next; for after all they are little more than adult children to whom government is a new and amusing plaything. Moreover it may be that the letter and the bottle of vodka which the chief of our party brought for the Ude functionary had their effect; at any rate he not only did not demand our papers but did not even ask to see us, so that by the time we had breakfasted on our own food and local hot water in a yourt next to the official one we were free to continue to Urga.
Ox-carts with a single telegraph-pole diagonally across them were crawling northwestward in great trains; new poles and rolls of wire, both from far off, lay here and there along the way near Ude, where we ran into the Dane who had been all summer repairing the line which retreating armies had left a wreck behind them. Within a week, he promised—and his word proved good—messages would again be flashing from Paris to Peking, as they had not in more than two years. Mongols and Chinese now well trained for the task were replacing the last of the thousands of missing poles which forced neglect or the demands of military camp-fires had brought down, and their methods were worth watching. Instead of the sharp spikes at the instep used by our pole-climbers, the Mongols wore on each foot a semicircle of iron about two feet long, with saw-teeth on the inside, which made their climbing suggestive of some tropical spider, and must be taken off whenever they walked from pole to pole. The Chinese, on the other hand, used a method characteristic of their overcrowded, man-cheap country—each pole-climber had two coolie assistants, who carried a ladder! Building, or even repairing, a telegraph-line across the Gobi is no effeminate matter of nightly beds and full hot meals. The sole national representative in Mongolia of this Danish enterprise had been weeks at a time even without bread, while the less said in his presence about bathing the greater the popularity of the speaker. Stern methods are needed, too, to protect such exotic assets as telegraph-poles in an utterly treeless and even bushless region. By the “law of the Living Buddha,” as it is called in Mongolia, the cutting down of a telegraph-pole is punishable with death. The Dane and his party had come across a man so engaged not long before, and had tied him up and sent him off to be judged by his fellows; but so effective has the law been that the severed and useless end of a pole will lie until it rots away close beside a trail along which pass hundreds of caravans and groups of travelers to whom fuel is almost a matter of life or death.
For nearly a day’s journey beyond Ude the desert is so smooth and hard that we could maintain a speed of fifty miles an hour for long stretches, so smooth that riding the roadless plateau was almost like falling through space. Sain-Usu, which is Mongol for “Good Water,” welcomed us for half an hour in one of its three huts, and not far beyond there rose deep-blue above the horizon the flattened peak that marks the site of Tuerin. With such splendid going as nature furnished, it seemed visibly to move toward us; yet the sun was low and the night cold already biting into our bones when we dragged ourselves to the ground before the telegraph station at its foot. This highest point on the trans-Gobi journey, five thousand feet above the sea, is a great fantastic heap of black rocks, many of them large as apartment-houses, piled up one above the other, here as carefully as if by the hand of man, there tossed together in such a pell-mell chaos as to suggest that the Builder had suddenly taken a dislike to his task and knocked it over with a disdainful sweep of the hand. On the further slope lies a large lamasery, where travelers may sometimes find shelter, but not food, for all the quantities of everything which the pious nomads roundabout bring the loafing lamas. Otherwise there is nothing whatever except the yellow-brown plains, sloping away to infinity in every direction.
The last hundred and fifty miles were more like a prairie than a desert, beautiful light-brown folds of earth, everywhere cut on a generous pattern, rolling on and on farther than the advancing eye could ever reach. There was a kind of prairie-dog, too, squatting on its haunches and gazing saucily upon us, or dashing for the gravel-banked holes with which it had dotted the plain. These were marmots, of special interest to our Russian companions, since their skins form one of the most important items of export for the fur-traders of Mongolia. Mile after mile they lined the way, whole colonies of them, some of the bluish tint much sought after by dealers, most of them a beautiful gray-brown which flashed for a moment in the brilliant sunshine as they dashed gopher-like for their holes with an impertinent flip of their bushy tails.
At length women and children, and not merely men, began to appear, riding on camels and horses; camps of hides and wool grew almost numerous; there were more settlements along the way, though all of them were still the round portable huts of the nomads. Great flocks of what looked like plovers swirled up; big brown birds that seemed a cross between hawk and vulture rode by on the wind; wild ducks were so tame and numerous as to have tantalized a hunter. We came out upon a rise with a magnificent view—the yellow foreground fading to brown as the world rolled away before us, then a purplish tint, increasing to a blue that grew ever darker, until the broken ridge along the horizon far ahead blended into the strip of clouds hanging motionless over it. Gradually mountains rose on every hand, the few scrub evergreens along the crests of some of them being the first trees or even brush we had seen since soon after leaving Kalgan. The cold wind that had cut clear through us for days seemed to come forth from the Siberian steppes beyond with renewed savage intensity. Before long the crest-line of trees became a low but dense green forest, covering all the upper portion of what we soon learned was the sacred mountain of Urga, where all furred and feathered creatures are under the protection of the “Living Buddha.” We entered ever deeper into a broad valley, Mongols in their long cloaks becoming more and more numerous, and more disagreeably sophisticated than the simple herdsmen with their long poles and noose-lassos out on the open plain. There the broad-cheeked nomads had been more friendly, had more manly dignity, than the Chinese; here the manliness remained, but there was something surly, almost savage about them, which we were quickly to learn was no mere matter of outward appearances. There came a small river, actually crossed by a bridge, a queer massive wooden bridge with what looked like piles of railway-ties as pillars; and on down the valley a town appeared, the towers of a radio-station rose from among the hills, a long row of barrack-like buildings of a European type grew distinct—and just then our troubles began.
CHAPTER VIII
IN “RED” MONGOLIA
Across the broken valley at a gallop came two mounted men who turned out to be Mongol soldiers, picturesque certainly, but not otherwise particularly inviting. As they rode, they waved their rifles wildly in the air, and were apparently bellowing to us orders which the raging wind carried away before the sounds reached us. When they drew near, their uniforms proved to be the usual costume of the lower-class Mongol—heavy red knee-boots, pagoda-like fur hats, and a faded, quilted kind of bath-robe gown covering the rest of their iniquities; but on their chests and backs were sewed two cloth patches a foot square on which were several upright lines of Mongol writing, announcing their official capacity. But for these we might easily have mistaken them for bandits, for both their manner of riding down upon us and their air toward us when they had arrived suggested that they had captured booty and prisoners for ransom rather than that they had merely come to escort us to town.
One of them, it appeared from their actions, must get into the car with us; the other would have to ride in with the horses. Like children who very rarely have the chance of an automobile-ride, they quarreled and argued for a long time, while the biting wind snapped and lashed at us, as to which was entitled to the privilege, meanwhile flourishing their aged rifles with a carelessness that made even such time-honored weapons dangerous. At length one of them won the point and climbed unceremoniously aboard, mopping his muddy feet on our robes, stretching himself out at ease partly on our knees, partly on our most breakable baggage, and poking us, perhaps unintentionally but none the less unpleasantly, in the ribs with the business end of his loose-triggered rifle, while the loser sourly turned away with the horses and the expression of a six-year-old who had been deprived of his toys and driven from the playground.