“Oh, yes,” replied the functionary, “he will see you; but it is not yet ten o’clock.”
However, to come back to our own affairs; we made our way across the stony, dusty, wind-howling open space between the business and the official sections of the holy city in time to avoid any risk of being charged with tardiness. The yamen of justice was a two-story frame building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese when they held the suzerainty over Outer Mongolia, as the flaring roofs, sky-blue façade, dragon-decorated brick screen against evil spirits, palings of crossed sticks to the number of outriders due the prince who once occupied it, and the like, told us without any necessity of inquiring. Two typical Mongol soldiers, resembling Oriental rag dolls that had lain out in the garden for weeks and then been lost for a few days in the coal-bin, lumbered to their booted feet from a fantastic sentry-box in order, as is the habit of their class nowadays, to impress us with their equality and authority by gratuitously delaying us for a few moments, and at last we reached our destination. This was one of the barn-like rooms of the unpretentious building. Near the door rose to the ceiling a big cylindrical Russian brick stove. Around the other three sides of the room ran a raised platform, knee-high and a man’s height in breadth. The reed matting and cushions covering it recalled Japan, but there was nothing Japanese in the way in which the dozen officials stepped upon it from the unswept floor in their heavy boots, all more or less covered with the filth of the streets, and calmly tramped about it or squatted on their haunches. All these functionaries were dressed in Mongol fashion; that is, in long robes of dull red, blue, green, purple, violet, or similar conspicuous color, half obliterated with grease and dirt, topped off with some one of their many fantastic national head-dresses. The latter were never removed, nor were we foreigners expected to take off our hats. In fact there seem to be no social politenesses among this rude nomad people. They neither shake hands, unless they are meeting or aping foreigners, nor bow, like the Chinese, nor use any other gestures of greeting or parting; they stalk into foreigners’ houses in hats and boots; their whole conduct is as if none of the little courtesies and formalities of more highly civilized communities had ever occurred to them, which is probably the case.
The place had electric lights, and from one of the walls hung an ancient European type of telephone, which was frequently jangling or enduring the shrieks of one or another bureaucrat, but which never seemed to bring or transmit any information. Most of the functionaries, big sturdy men who would have looked more at home herding cattle on the plains, squatted near little tables or desks, a foot high, some smoking long pipes with tiny bowls and much silver decoration, others rocking idly back and forth, while their greasy pigtails, swaying to and fro, increased the soiled line they had already drawn down the backs of their gowns. A few were working; that is, writing in their national script, so different from Chinese, on long strips of cheap tissue-paper folded lengthwise and opening like an accordion. Their pens were the camel’s-hair brushes common to the Far East, however, of which each man carried two in a silver scabbard hanging from his girdle; their ink was taken from a little flat stone on which they rubbed their pens sidewise, and their writing-desks were thin squares of board held on their left hands. A big dinner-bell in a corner of the room served to call attendants, or to summon prisoners for the next case to be tried. For justice was being dispensed, leisurely but steadily, all the time we were there. In the center of the raised platform, opposite the door and in the chief place of honor, squatted an imposing man who might easily have been taken for an unusually burly Chinaman, in his darker gown, his mandarin cap with a colored button, his oily cue, and his rimless ear-piece glasses. He was fat, and he was fully aware of his own importance in the Mongolian scheme of things. From time to time a group of prisoners was brought in by one of the coal-bin soldiers, always armed with a fixed bayonet. The accused, all ragged, shivering, and visibly hungry, looking as if they had been living for weeks in an underground dungeon and had been periodically beaten half to death, were forced to kneel on the bare floor and bow their heads down to it several times as an obeisance to the haughty judge. If they failed to do so promptly, they were prodded or thumped to their knees by the soldier. The trial consisted merely of the judge’s questioning the cringing prisoner, during which his honor smoked, stretched himself, and spat copiously on the floor in front of the kneeling culprits. When he was done, he growled out something which may or may not have been a sentence, and the prisoners were led away again. Of the score or more tried while we were there none was released.
Meanwhile other business, such as our own, went serenely on along the side platforms. Some of the scribes or officials wrote on their little boards, some asked questions of an official nature, more chatted and smoked as freely as if they were in a café. Curious individuals dropped in now and then. There was, for instance, a little dried-up Jew with long straggly red whiskers, and a furtive look in his eyes, as if he had been the last survivor of a dozen pogroms. For more than an hour he sat inconspicuously in a corner near the door, holding his aged slouch-hat in his hands, ignored by the contemptuous Mongols, lacking the courage to address them on whatever matter had brought him.
Our own case moved as we would have had it, except in speed. When testimony must be written down in Mongol script with a camel’s-hair brush on the poorest of paper and the least convenient of desks by an official whose chief code of conduct is never to let any one or anything hurry him under any circumstances, even a simple affair is not quickly disposed of. There was a long argument as to how to turn our extraordinary names into the native hieroglyphics; there were other lengthy discussions during which I found ample time to study not only the scene within the room but the big felt tent of fanciful decoration with a mat-cloth door, in which the minister of justice lived out in the back yard, a true Mongol nomad still, like many of his highly placed fellows. The whole case should really have collapsed like a house of cards, for another telegram had arrived which not merely reduced the crime from the killing of a Mongol man to slightly wounding a Mongol boy in the wrist, but showed that, by the records of our stopping-places, we were at least a day’s travel away at the time; furthermore, the deed had been done at short range with a revolver—on that point the information was insistent—and the most cursory examination of our pistols, in the hands of the secret service department, would have demonstrated that they had not been fired on the way. In fact, it looked rather doubtful whether even the slight crime alleged had been committed; perhaps it was some boyish tale made up to gain sympathy for a scratched wrist. Officially “the incident was closed” almost before we reached the yamen; but that did not hinder us from being three hours there, nor did it make it possible to have the thing written up in its legal form and “deposited in the archives” forty-eight hours later, when the clearing of our reputations was essential to the making of certain other requests with which we were forced to trouble the authorities.
CHAPTER IX
HOLY URGA
The holy city of Urga squats out on what would be an ordinary Mongolian plain were it not for the rows of hills or low mountains which roll up on either side of it. The landscape is the same yellow-brown, smooth as the fur of the fox, the city, its wide shallow valley, and the rolling hills on the right hand are as utterly devoid of trees or even a suggestion of brush, as the Gobi. Only along the edge, and covering the upper portion, of the range to the west and south, sacred to the “Living Buddha” whose two palace compounds sit at the foot of it, is there any vegetation except the thin brown grass of mountain heights. The soil does not welcome it, for one thing. Even the forests capping the long low sacred mountain, though planted centuries ago and strictly protected, while dense enough, have attained little more than scrub growth. About forty-five hundred feet above the sea and no great distance from the Siberian border, Urga is no tropical haven. They tell me that in summer its middays are sometimes uncomfortably hot; but though it was only the middle of September when we arrived, all the clothing we had brought with us was none too much to shut out the penetrating mountain cold. Five days before, Peking had been sweltering; here the entire population wore heavy quilted garments, from which hardly a bare foot peered among the most poverty-stricken even on the days when a brilliant sun in a glass-clear sky made delightful autumn weather; before the month ended, howling gales of hail and snow swept across the city and blotted out the surrounding hills, to leave them covered with white as far as the eye could see.
The city is built in several towns or sections of distinctly different characters, separated by bare, stony, wind-swept spaces. Besides the old Chinese merchant town back up the valley, and the straggling buildings which partly flank the nature-laid road to it, there is the official town of yamens and the like, with two great temple compounds closely allied to it, then the now main business and residential section where virtually all non-Mongols live, and farther on, a little higher up the slope of the hills, a whole city completely given up to lamas, with the great sanctuary of Ganden, only high building in Urga, bulking far above it. Then, across the flat valley and several little streams, more than a mile away against the background of the sacred mountain, is the dwelling-place of Bogda-Han, the “Living Buddha,” flanked at some distance by his summer palace on one side and on the other by clusters of buildings housing the things and the men who serve him. Lastly there are scores of yourts, the low round felt tents of Mongolia, scattered at random outside the permanent city, particularly to the north, the homes of true nomads who will not be without the comforts of their portable houses even though they live in the holy national capital.
For that matter, many of the dwellers in the city itself still cling to the customs and architecture of the plains from which they came. Mongol princes and saints, of whom there is a generous number in Urga, cabinet ministers and judges, may have a rather Russian type of frame house within their compounds, but the chances are that they do their actual living in their felt tent beside it. The yourts are said to be uncomfortably warm in summer, whence the tendency of those who are wealthy by Mongol standards to copy European dwellings; but when the first early frosts come they like the low crowded tent, with its intense dung-fire heat, its sense of coziness, even the smell of the sifting smoke of their pungent fuel, that has come down to them from their hardy nomadic forefathers. The story is told of some high-placed Mongol to whom fell a fine big room in one of the government buildings of the expelled Chinese, who complained that it was as bad as living outdoors and demanded either that another small low room be built for him within it or that he be allowed to conduct his official business in his tent.
Urga is as wholly made up of walled compounds as any Chinese city; but here the walls, instead of being of stone or baked mud, are of upright pine logs, bark and all, some ten feet high and set so tightly together that only here and there can one peer through a crack. Between these frowning palisades, broken for block after block only by identical gates which are a cross between a wooden arch and a Japanese torii with three uncurved crosspieces, and painted a dull red, run, not streets, but haphazard passageways deep in dust, mud, or mere stony soil, according as nature left them—grim defenseless lanes full of the offal of man and beast, of putrid carcasses and gnawed bones, and always overrun with groups of those surly, treacherous big black wild dogs of Urga, ready the instant they feel they have mustered sufficient force to pounce upon and drag down the passer-by. Inside, the compounds are bare and unswept yards, for filth means nothing to the Mongol, and the planting of a flower or a shrub is far beyond his stage of civilization. A house or two, even three, perhaps as many felt tents, a tethered horse, a heap of dried dung fuel, and the inventory is complete. A small stream, its banks heaped high with filth and garbage, lined with foraging dogs and squatting Mongols, crossed by half a dozen precarious bridges culminating in the red one sacred to the “Living Buddha,” which is barred against every-day traffic, meanders disconsolately through the gloomy town. For there is a gloominess, an ominousness about Urga which even the great gleaming gold superstructures of its many temples and shrines, so brilliant as to cow the eye on days of clear sunshine, do not dispel.