Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a yourt made of heavy felt over a light wooden framework, which can be taken down and packed in less than an hour when the spirit of the nomad strikes him

Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by pouring water on sheep’s wool

A receipt, in Russian, was finally given us for our confiscated belongings, and about four in the afternoon, ten hours since we had eaten and five after our arrival, we were at last allowed to drag our shivering frames away in quest of lodging. There are no hotels in Urga, and visitors must appeal to the hospitality of one or another of the stray Europeans living there, of whom, excepting of course the numerous Russians, there seemed to be a single sample of each nationality. I was just sitting down to a belated lunch in the home of Norway’s handsome contribution to this international group when a red-clothed native of the better class dropped in, hat and all. He was a young man of unusual attainments for Mongolia, it seemed, educated at the University of Irkutsk, speaking Russian perfectly, and famous as the only Mongol known who spoke English. In the last accomplishment, however, he had not advanced beyond the bashful stage, and consented to display it only when there was no one to interpret his Russian or his Mongol. He was attached to the foreign office, though soon to leave for Moscow as a member of the Communist Congress there; and he had come, mainly out of personal friendship for my host, to warn me of trouble ahead. A telegram, he told the Norwegian in Russian, had just been received from a station out on the Gobi, announcing that two Americans in a motor-car carrying four persons had killed a Mongol on their way to Urga. He had no intention of making unkindly insinuations against me or my companion, he said, but we were the only Americans who had arrived within a fortnight, the only foreigners who had come within a week, and ours was the only car that had reached Urga for two or three days, as well as the only one in a long time with only four occupants. Moreover, we had carried arms.

Absurd as the covert charge was—for our revolvers had lain unloaded in our baggage throughout the trip—it was not wholly a laughing matter. My compatriot had frequently fired his rifle at antelope along the way, and there was a very slight possibility that a bullet had carried too far. But worse almost than any question of guilt or innocence was the possibility of becoming entangled in the intricacies of a Mongol court of justice. Its point of view would be quite unlike that of our Western judiciary; certainly haste would not be one of its attributes. All at once the rights of extraterritoriality, to which I was legally entitled in Urga even though forcibly deprived of them, seemed no mere forced concession but the only way of being fairly judged in such a predicament in a land and society so utterly alien to my own. Within an hour or so, the Mongol thought, they would come to arrest us, and though he spoke optimistically of the final outcome, he could not recommend even four or five days in prison as a pleasant week-end. I had already heard something of Urga’s place of detention, the earth cellar of the Okhrana where we had been examined, in which a score of Russians and as many Mongols were even then huddled together, without a suggestion of daylight, beds, blankets, human conveniences, or anything that could honestly be called food, with nothing but the cold, damp ground to lie on and a scanty bit of garbage to eat and drink. Judging by the cavalier manner in which we had been treated as unaccused and ostensibly free beings, it was not hard to imagine what those rowdy soldiers about the place would do to us as prisoners. I did all possible justice to the lunch before me, for at least if we were to join the community in the icy cellar I wished to be partly filled up and thawed out before beginning the experience.

A hasty council was convened of the few Americans—all visitors—and the more Western Europeans in town. The seriousness with which these treated the situation was anything but reassuring. Their patent distrust and unexpressed dread of the sinister powers then ruling Urga recalled stories of the terror that filled men’s lives in the worst days of the French Revolution. It was plain that it was not a mere matter of proving our innocence, if the authorities chose to make this a “frame-up” to be rid of unwelcome visitors. In the end it was decided that the best plan would be to forestall the authorities, to go at once to the minister of justice before some of his less intelligent underlings received and carried out the warrant for our arrest.

We reached him indirectly through his adviser, who was fortunately a friend of my host. In the late afternoon light of his wholly European study this polished and intelligent man in our ordinary garb looked entirely like a Russian; it was not until next day that his more swarthy tint and the quilted silk robe he wore to office showed him to be a Buriat. He admitted that the telegram in question had been received, and that the warrants would probably be ready within an hour or two—and no doubt served, I reflected, in this leisurely moving world, just in time to drag us out of our beds in the middle of the cold night. But as I had taken the trouble to come and show myself, the Buriat went on, and to explain my movements to his personal satisfaction, he would suppress the warrants for the time being, if all four of us would appear at the yamen of justice, with an efficient interpreter, in the morning.

For all the absurdity of the whole affair there was a sense of relief in having gained at least a respite, and before dinner was over I had almost forgotten the matter. But when I woke once during that otherwise deathly still Urga night, the howling of two or three of her man-eating dogs had a curiously ominous, almost terrorizing, sound. Only a fortnight before, fifteen men, a former prime minister among them, had been shot in a near-by gully and their bodies fed to these dogs, in the cheery Urga fashion. Those had been Mongols, to be sure, but a score of Russians were even then shivering out the night in the cellar-prison, charged with a hand in the same conspiracy, and from thinking of shooting Russians for treason to actually shooting a stray Caucasian of another nationality for some other alleged crime would be no impossible leap for these “Red”-led, self-satisfied nomads. I had to remind myself several times what a fool I was before I turned over and fell asleep again.

Few things are ever as serious the next morning as when they happened the night before, and I could laugh at my midnight anxieties when I sat down to breakfast. It took some time to get our scattered party together, and a suitable interpreter was not easily picked up, so that it was nearer eleven than ten by the time we found a Russian speaking both English and Mongol and set out for the yamen. But we need not have let a little thing like that worry us. Promptness is neither customary nor welcome in Mongolia; moreover, there are no two timepieces in anything like agreement in all Urga, so that an hour or two one way or the other can always be excused, in the unlikely event of any excuse being expected, on the ground of incompatibility of clocks. What does an hour mean, anyway, in a land where time is merely a vacuum? An American who was just then flirting with the Mongolian Government for an important concession made an appointment with the minister of foreign affairs for ten one morning, and was there on the dot. When he had waited an hour and a half he beckoned to a sub-official and asked whether the minister would be unable to see him that morning, in which case he had other matters requiring his attention.