We forded half a dozen stony little streams, for the going had become abominable in ratio as we approached Urga; we were waved hither and yon across the valley by other rifle-shaking, vainly shouting soldiers, and finally brought up at an ordinary little round felt hut with a smoking stovepipe protruding from its top. It must have been much more comfortable inside this than out in the bitter wind, for those within showed no haste in braving the outer temperature. Finally, however, two or three Mongols crawled through the low door and demanded our huchao, our Chinese permit to make the journey. There was an interminable argument over this, mainly inside the yourt, which we had not been invited to enter. Then two more bullying soldiers with poorly controlled rifles tumbled into the car and ordered us to drive on.
Before a yamen that might have been mistaken either for a run-down temple or a well kept stable we were again halted and commanded to dismount. This place, it turned out, was not yet Urga, but the former Chinese merchant section of Mai-Mai-Ch’eng (“Buy-Sell-Town”) some miles away from the sacred city, in which trading was until recently forbidden. Here a veritable mob of soldiers and petty officials poured out upon us, led by an exceedingly insolent youth in a rich, silky, but much soiled light-blue gown topped off by a kind of archbishop’s miter. He demanded our weapons. We dug them and the bit of ammunition we carried out of our baggage, protesting in vain that as this was all to be examined at the next yamen, and armed guards were to conduct us there, this extra labor of disentangling our overloaded car was unnecessary. But it was plain that there were at least two motives for putting us to this gratuitous trouble: the insolent Mongol youth did not wish to lose an opportunity to show his authority to the full, particularly toward men of a race which seldom fell into his hands; and the whole posse was eager to meddle with our belongings as much as possible. They passed our revolvers and my companion’s rifle from hand to hand, each trying his own method of manipulating them. Fortunately—at the time we felt it was unfortunate—we had not loaded them, or several tragedies might have ensued before their curiosity was satisfied and we were allowed to conclude our journey. Then the overbearing youth in charge decided that he must search our persons for weapons, though we had given our word that we carried none. The implied insult would not have mattered so much had not his hands looked as if he had been handling Gobi fuel incessantly from childhood without a pause even to wipe them, and had his manner been less that of the protected bully venting an unaccountable spleen against the whole white race. But cleanliness and common courtesy, we soon learned, are the two qualities most foreign to the crowd now ruling Outer Mongolia.
The quarrel as to who should have the privilege of the automobile-ride into Urga was at length decided in favor of all who could pile themselves into and about the car and baggage. How the machine escaped a broken back under the burden was a mystery which even Detroit probably could not have explained. Then there came a delay while the blue-gowned youth found and adjusted a fanciful pair of goggles, in all likelihood filched from the baggage of some previous victim, and without which of course the two- or three-mile ride ahead would have been unendurable. We groaned away at last, rifles and our own weapons covering us on every side, first through a half-ruined town of mud alleys between endless palisades of upright logs of the pine family, then across a stony, barren, wind-swept space with several axle-cracking little streams to be forded. Between bumps we caught glimpses of the several distinctly isolated sections of Urga, its golden temples and black dogs, its one lofty building, and the Tibetan texts in stone on the flank of its sacred mountain across the valley. Then we were suddenly turned into a noisome back yard peopled with shoddy-clad and unwashed soldiers and prisoners, the latter engaged in worse than menial tasks under the bayonet-points of the former; the gate to the outside world was closed and barred, and a new set of examiners fell upon us.
If a gang of young East Side New York rowdies should suddenly get the complete upper hand in the city, I can imagine them going through the belongings of their victims along Fifth Avenue in quite the same way as now befell our own. At a word from a superior who would himself scarcely have inspired a lone lady with confidence on a dark night, there sprang forward from all sides a dozen young men who seemed to have been specially chosen for their gangster-like appearance. In their shoddy uniforms of some nondescript dark color, they looked like a cross between low-class Russians and the scum of the Mongolian plains—which is about what they were, in other words Buriats. The pleasure they took both in putting us to annoyance and in prying minutely into our affairs quite evidently purged their task of any stigma of labor. I have passed many frontiers in my day, but never have I beheld an examination in the slightest degree approaching in thoroughness this one. Every single article, large or small, in our valises, bedding-bags, even our lunch-sacks, was picked out one by one, carefully, not to say stupidly, scrutinized, taken apart if that was physically possible, and finally tossed into a heap on the filthy bare ground of the yard. Clean linen must be completely unfolded, stared at minutely on both sides, and crumpled up into a mess from which only a laundryman could rescue it. We were not surprised that such articles aroused the suspicion of the examiners; anything resembling clean linen was quite evidently strange to them. Nor was there any intentional offense meant, perhaps, in mixing our bread and our tooth-brushes with the offal in the yard, for no conscious line of demarcation between these seemed as yet to have been drawn in the minds of the examiners. They did consciously resent our own higher plane of cleanliness, however, when it was called to their attention. I was attempting to rescue my dismembered sleeping-bag from a worse fate by picking it up from the ground where it had been thrown after examination, when one of the rowdies snatched it out of my hand and deliberately tossed it into an especially choice source of contamination.
My shaving-stick was opened with extreme caution, as a possible infernal machine. My safety-razor caused a considerable argument, until a gang-chief ruled that it was not a deadly weapon. The man who picked up an ordinary can of pork-and-beans tore off the label and attempted to unscrew the top in his efforts to examine the contents, and was with difficulty induced to spare me the labor of attacking it with a can-opener. I rescued my exposed films just as they were about to be unrolled, and came very near bodily injury for my interference before our interpreter could get in touch with some one of authority and more or less human intelligence. Thus it went, for more than an hour, through every simplest article we had brought with us. Nor did a single examination of each suffice; whenever anything unusual turned up, which, thanks to the ignorance of the examiners, was often, all of them must satisfy their monkey-like curiosity by thoroughly studying it. It was not that we objected to having our baggage inspected, even with unusual thoroughness—though legally we Americans were not subject to any interference by the local authorities of Mongolia—but at least it would have been a kindness to give the job to men who had some inkling of the paraphernalia of civilization and some hazy notion of why tooth-brushes and offal are not commonly mixed.
In the end they kept our weapons and cartridges, our American passports, and all our papers, down to letters of introduction and scribbled memoranda, which had not escaped their erratic attention. They demanded that the tool-box be removed from the car and the spare tire opened, as possible hiding-places. That these were the only ones they thought of was due to their ignorance of automobile mechanism. The Russian Jews had more influence than we, however, and after long and vociferous wrangling this order was rescinded. In contrast to the deliberation with which they had been examining it, they insisted that we snatch together our heaped-up property and thrust it pell-mell, filth and all, back into our bags and valises. Long blanks must then be filled out, in Russian, with our personal biographies. These went to an inner office, while we still shivered like hopper-screens in the wintry air outside; and at length a man came out to announce that they must also keep my kodak and films. This required a complete reëxamination of all my baggage, for my word as to the number of films I carried could not of course be trusted. Finally we were taken into the sanctum of the Okhrana or the Ghospolitakran, as it is variously called in popular parlance—the “State’s Internal Guard” would perhaps answer as a poor and inadequate translation in English. This is a genuinely Russian form of secret service and espionage within the country, devised under the czarist régime and continued by its receivers, the Bolsheviki, who had recently imposed it upon Mongolia. The plain bare room of European style contained a rough table and a few chairs, a surly Mongol nearer twenty than thirty, in native garb except for a faded slouch felt hat, who proved to be the ostensible head of the secret service, and an older Russian “adviser” in grayish semi-uniform and quite modern glasses. The “adviser” looked as if he had been familiar with the common forms of courtesy in earlier days, but evidently he had either forgotten them or dared not mix them with his “Red” allegiance, for his behavior was as studiously uncivil as that of the Mongol was naturally rude. We had stood for a long time, with empty chairs plentiful, when the pair deigned to notice our existence. A handsome, courteous little Buriat, greatly contrasting with the rest of the crew, explained our cases at length, with special emphasis on the seizure of my kodak. Uncouth soldiers, Mongol, Buriat, and Russian indiscriminately, lounged in and out, most of them carelessly juggling guns with fixed bayonets, glaring ominously at us from time to time, and picking up and examining any of the official papers on the table which happened to catch their fancy. It is said that there are no ranks in the “Red” army; certainly there was no outward evidence of discipline among the detachment of it in Urga, or among their apt Mongol pupils.
The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the uninhabited frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia, where Mongol authorities examine passports and very often turn travelers back
Chinese travelers on their way to Urga; it is unbelievable how many muffled Chinamen and their multifarious junk one Dodge will carry