One must be on the ground early after a death to find enough of the body left to recognize it as more than a broken skeleton. The big black dogs, covered with long shaggy hair, which dot the landscape everywhere in and about Urga, filling its streets with murderous-looking eyes that keep the pedestrian on the constant qui vive, have learned their task well from many generations of practice. The rapidity with which they can reduce what was a sentient, moving being the day before to a mere sprinkling of broken bones is astonishing. This doubly endears these loathsome beasts to the Mongols, for they believe that the more quickly a body is eaten the better man does this prove the deceased to have been in life. It is especial good luck and proof of unusual sanctity to see the body eaten by birds, but the dogs rarely leave their feathered rivals an opportunity thus to bear testimony to the character of the departed. The birds have their turn after the dogs have given up hope of deriving further benefit from their exertions, and finish off the job by cleaning out the skull and the other morsels for which a bill is needed.
There is nothing either hidden or sacred about these graveless graveyards. Any one may stroll through them, and find them quite as abandoned as any city dump-heap. Dog-nests made of the ragged quilted cloaks in which the bodies are carried out are the only conspicuous feature, except the skulls which lie about everywhere. I wondered at first that there were never any remains of the skeleton except widely scattered and broken bones, until I beheld a dog pick up a rib and carry it off to a comfortable spot on the hillside, there to sit down on his haunches, break it in two, and gnaw the last scrap of nourishment out of it. In the dry desert air the skulls quickly bleach snow-white and brittle; only here and there is one still “green” enough to be gray in color, so solid as to pain the toe that kicks it across the plain. These vast bone-yards are no place for the Westerner, living on his over-refined food, to spend the hour before an appointment with his dentist, for his envy of the full sets of perfect white teeth in almost every skull may become overwhelming.
It seems to be the idea of these putative Buddhists, the Mongols, and of their brethren, the Buriats and Kalmucks, who follow the same custom, that, since all living creatures are brothers, the least a man can do for his dumb fellow-beings is to bequeath them his useless body as nourishment—and thereby, of course, win merit that will improve his reincarnation. The Tibetans do likewise, except that they feed their mountain eagles or condors as well as their dogs, and prepare the food for the latter by mixing it with ground grain. Gruesome as the custom is, there is a thoroughness and promptitude about it which greatly outdoes the Christian mode of burial, a real and visible return of “dust to dust.” I know of no other means of disposing of the dead which gives the corpse so nearly its true value, none which leaves such a true sense of the worthlessness of human remains. Between this and the opposite extreme of an elaborate funeral followed by a showy mausoleum I am not sure but that I prefer the Mongol method.
To the Mongols themselves there is no more sanctity about their scattered bones than about any other form of rubbish. Shepherds or others whose calling brings them there wander or sit about the skull-strewn gullies quite as calmly as if they were in a field of daisies. Relatives seldom if ever come to pick up any of the remains; sometimes the rains wash broken bones down the gullies into the edge of town, where they lie until they are covered up with silt and disappear. Most of them simply disintegrate into the semi-desert soil about them. There is never a sign that the Mongol riding by feels any distress at the thought that some day these same surly black dogs that are tearing to pieces the corpse at the roadside will do the same for him. The tops of skulls, especially of higher lamas and men of standing, are sometimes used as drinking-vessels, or as oil-receptacles in the temples, and specially sainted thigh-bones make excellent whistles for use in ritualistic uproars; otherwise no one seems to have thought of the commercial possibilities of the bone-yards. Nor are these strange people, who might punish with death the stranger who forced his way into the presence of their living god, in the least sensitive about the possession of their remains. A high lama dropped in upon my host one day and chanced to spy a skull-top that had just been presented by some native admirer. He picked it up, looked it over carefully, held it up to a light, and announced that the original owner had been a very good man, proof of which was the condition of the zigzag joints and the fact that the skull was so thin in one spot that the light showed rosy red through it. Perhaps, he added, as he laid it back on the bric-à-brac table and accepted a cigarette, it had been the skull of his good old friend Lama So-and-so.
If I may hazard a guess, it is that this to us gruesome custom has grown up among the Mongols because they are nomads. They cannot carry the graves of their ancestors with them, whereas the dogs will follow of their own accord. Their attitude toward these surly black beasts without owners, which roam the plains as well as make every street of Urga a gauntlet, bears out this impression. Though they are as quick as we to beat them off with any weapon when they get too aggressive, they deeply resent a serious injury to or the killing of one of them by a frightened foreigner. Yet the tendency of any Westerner would be to do just that; I know of few assignments that would give me more satisfaction than to lead a regiment to Urga and exterminate her swarming dogs. Most of them seem to have acquired the disease most prevalent among those they feed upon, and one feels that the slightest bite would prove fatal. Luckily they spend the day largely in sleeping and making love, so that the streets are not always as dangerous as they might be. But they easily gather in packs, and especially at night or during the long hungry winters they are a distinct menace not merely to women and children but to the hardiest men. They are really cowards, these man-eating dogs of Mongolia, as the shrinking look in their tigerish eyes when they are effectively threatened proves; yet they are so accustomed to human flesh that man is to them natural prey, and they seem to have developed a knowledge of human anatomy which tells them where to attack most effectively, as well as what tidbits to prefer when they are not especially hungry. Urga is full of stories of the inability of these ugly beasts to await the natural end of their predestined victims. A man making his way late at night across the noisome market-place outside our window had been dragged down and eaten during the past winter. By poetic justice, he was a lama. In the outskirts just back of one of the temple compounds a Buriat woman was pulled off her horse and devoured one cold winter day before those looking on could come to her rescue. A year or so before, a Russian colonel newly arrived dined late with friends, who asked him as he left whether they could not give him an escort, or at least lend him a cudgel. No, indeed, replied the departing guest, a Russian officer could not be afraid; besides, he had his sword. Next morning the sword and a few buttons and rags were all that could be found of the colonel.
CHAPTER X
EVERY ONE HIS OWN DIPLOMAT
If I found time to see all Urga during my stay there it must have been due to the fact that it is not, after all, a large city, for most of my waking hours were of necessity spent in the various yamens. First, every new-comer must have a passport to remain in town; then we had to get permission from the war minister to carry them before our guns could be returned to us; there were endless negotiations involved in the matter of my confiscated kodak and films; finally, to mention only the high spots, any one leaving the country must have still another passport and fulfil numerous formalities. All these things would still have left some of my eleven days in Urga free if Mongol functionaries worked with even the deliberate speed of our own. But nowhere in all the Orient itself, probably, is the Oriental conception of time more fully developed, and when it came to shifting from one official or yamen to another a question on which no one wished to assume responsibility, these nomad herdsmen turned ink-daubers could “pass the buck” in a way to make our most experienced army officers green with envy.
Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the residence of the “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by throwing themselves down scores of times on the prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by making many circuits of the place, now and again measuring his length on the ground
