Chapter VI: Part 6

“Mongol _yurta_!” calls André, turning to point out with his whip the low dome-shaped hut, black against the darkening sky. On its unknown occupants we are to billet ourselves, sheltered by the rule of nomad hospitality. As the tarantass nears the wattled corral, the watchful ravens stir from their perches. The picketed camels turn to stare. A gaunt black hound stalks out, with mane erect and ominous growls.

“_Nohoi_,” cries out Alexsimevich, to the inhabitants of the hut; then adds to you, “Very bad dogs! It is a Mongol proverb: ‘If you are near a dog, you are near a bite.’”

Beneath an osier-built lean-to a woman is milking a sheep, with a lamb to encourage the flow. She calls a guttural order to the dog, which slinks back. Then she comes to the wattled fence, while the sheep which has been getting milked escapes to a far corner of the yard. The woman’s head is curiously framed by a triangular red hat, and silver hair-plates, which hold out like wings her black tresses. The shoulders of her magenta dress are padded up into epaulettes two inches high. She is girded with a sash.

“_Sein oh!_” says Alexsimevich.

“_Sein!_” she answers, and opens the gateway to the enclosure around the hut.

André drives in among the sheep and cows, and you climb lumberingly down with cold stiffened limbs. André puts his whip upon the felt roof, for it is a deadly breach of etiquette to bring it into the house.

“You go in,” said Alexsimevich.

It is like entering a kennel, this struggle through the narrow aperture, muffled to the eyes in double furs and awkward felt boots. As you straighten up after the crawl through the entrance, a red glare from the fire just in front meets the gaze. Stinging smoke grips the throat; you choke in pain. It blinds the smarting eyes. You gasp and stagger. Then some one takes your hand and pulls you violently down on a low couch to the left, where in course of time breath and sight return. There is no chimney, nor stack for the fire of the brazier, which stands in the centre of the hut. One can see the open sky through the three-foot hole above. The smoke, finding its way toward this aperture, works along the sloping wooden poles which form the framework of the felt-covered tent, filling the whole upper section with its blinding fumes. To stand is to smother. Sitting, the head comes below the smoke-line.

With recovered vision, one can look around within the hut. The couch of refuge, raised some six inches above the floor, is the bed by night, the sitting-place by day. Against the wall at the left hand, and directly opposite the door, is a box-like cupboard, along whose top are ranged pictures of grotesque Buddhist gods, before whom are little brass cups full of offerings, millet or oil, in which is standing a burning wick. Beside the door is a shelf loaded with fire-blackened pots and kettles. Branches of birch for fuel are thrown beneath. On the far side of the room, three black lambs, fenced off by a wicker barricade, are huddled together, quietly sleeping.

Seated beside the fire close by is the girl of nineteen who has just saved you from asphyxiation. The long fur-lined working-dress, common to all ages and sexes of Mongols, is buttoned on her left side with bright brass buttons, and is belted in with a sash. She has not the padded shoulder-humps, nor the spreading hair arrangement, which gave to her mother, who welcomed us, so weird an appearance. Her complexion is swarthy like an Indian’s, not the Chinese chalky yellow, and she has red cheeks and full red lips. Her eyes are large and black. The rest of the party have stayed a moment outside to ask about hay and water. You have made this solitary and awkward entrance. The girl has no more notion than a bird who the strange man of another nation may be, who has stumbled into her home. But it does not trouble her in the least. For a moment she looks you over calmly, with a smile of amused curiosity, rolling and wringing with her fingers a lambskin which she is softening. Then composedly she bids you the Mongol welcome, “_Sein oh!_” and holds out her hand. Her grip is as firm and frank as a Siberian’s.

Now Alexsimevich comes tumbling through the door, and next André. Both are used to these huts, and artistically stoop below the smoke-line. All our impedimenta--blankets, furs, pots, kettles, bread-bag, rifles--are heaped in a mound within the space between the couch and the tethered lambs. The girl has not stirred from her work.

“They are friends of yours then, Alexsimevich?” you ask.

“No, no, I never saw them,” he answers. “Any one may take shelter in any _yurta_ in Mongolia.”

A small head suddenly makes its appearance from the pile of rugs on the sofa opposite on the women’s side of the tent. There emerges, naked save for a bronze square-holed Chinese _cash_ fastened around her neck, a little slant-eyed three-year-old. The water in the small cups offered to the _dokchits_ has long been ice, and one has full need of one’s inner fur coat and cap in the hut, where the entrance, opening with every visitor, sends a draft of air, forty degrees below zero, through from the door to the open hole which serves as chimney. And still this tot can step out naked and not even seem to feel it.

“The child’s name?” asks Alexsimevich.

“Turunga,” replies the girl.

“And your own?”

“Sibilina,” she says, and smiles.

Turunga carefully inspects you, and solemnly accepts a lump of sugar which she knows what to do with, even if it is a rare luxury offered to gods. She sits down, in an evidently accustomed spot on the warm felt before the brazier, to play with the scissors-like fire-tongs, carefully putting back the red coals that have fallen out on the earthen platform.

The tarantass-driver, having piled up your impedimenta, excavates from its midst the bag of rye-bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the little bag of _pelmenes_, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the _yurta’s_ flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She brushes out this water on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is the picketed lamb’s especial territory, to which the felt rugs before the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water.

“_Boutzela! boutzela!_” she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver over the basin to see by: “it boils.” Into the Mongol’s pot go our _pelmenes_, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant description of Siberian _pelmenes_ was given on the quaintly-worded French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk: “Meat hashed in bullets of dough.” They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day’s drive across the plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our hostess’s big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually thaws the outlying regions of the body.

But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the least that she has home-made _pelmenes_ every two or three days--she wants these particular meat-balls. The little mouth begins to pucker and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes the place of the _pelmenes_. We fill a heaping ladleful and André furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied.

The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at André, then throws more sticks of the precious firewood on the embers. André has caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our six-foot Siberian hunter.

The dog barks in the yard, but without the menace which hailed us, and the crunch of a horse’s hoofs sounds on the frozen ground outside. The flap opens, with its inrush of freezing air. Stooping, there enters a typical Mongol, squat of figure, round of head, with broad sunbrowned face and a short queue of black hair. He wears a funnel-shaped hat, magenta-colored, and is enveloped in a long _shuba_, with brass buttons down one side like a fencer’s jacket. About his waist is a sash with jingling knives and pouches. He is the head of the family, come in from herding his horses. He turns back the long fur-lined cuffs which have protected his gloveless hands, and stretches out both his arms for you to place your hands over his. It is the man’s ceremony of welcome. Then he produces a little porcelain snuff-bottle. This must be received in the palm of the right hand with a bow. It is to be utilized, and passed back. If the herder is out of snuff, the bottle is offered just the same and you must appreciatively pretend to take a pinch. Such is etiquette.

The soup is gone now; the pot, cleaned out for the tea, is again on the boil and the leaves are thrown in. André has borrowed a hatchet from his host, and has chopped off a piece of milk, which goes in as well.

It is in order to ask the new arrival, Subadar Jay, to pass his wooden cup for some of the beverage. He takes it and the lumps of sugar without a word of thanks. The Mongol language has no expression to signify gratitude. Silence does not, however, mean that he does not appreciate. The dozen pieces of Mongol sandal-sole bread which he gives you later are worth two bricks of tea in open market, and this current medium of exchange--caravan-brought tea--is worth sixty kopecks the brick. No small gift, this bread, to an interloping stranger who is brewing tea by his fire, and camping unasked on his bed. A Tibet-schooled lama knows the Buddhist maxim, “Only accomplish good deed, ask no reward.” But the unlettered Mongol layman knows its practice.

Little Turunga has played naked before the fire long enough now; she is caught up; her reluctant feet are put into the boots with pointed upturned toes, and her body into a miniature sheepskin “daily,” such as her mother and father wear. The little girl is as smiling and shy and coquettish as any child of white skin and complex clothes.

“Will you sell Turunga for a brick of tea?”

“No, no,” says the mother, gathering the little one quickly up into her arms, while the rest of the family smile at the offer and her solicitude. “No, no, not even for ten bricks!”

Everybody laughs, Turunga with the rest, in a child’s instinctive knowledge that she is the centre of admiring attraction.

Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands Turunga over to her father,--unheard-of in Siberia,--and he plays with the child, giving her pieces of sheep’s tail to eat from his mouth, answering her prattle or baby-talk and endless questions. At night, about eight o’clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother’s _shuba_.

Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many things,--of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of the beauty of the housewife’s silver headplates, of water and roads, of whether or not the Mongol _dokchits_ on the altar are like the Gobi wolves that hate Chinese.

It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however) have a familiar sound--although there is said to be no common ancestry with the Indo-Germanic tongues; perhaps it is only the instinctive sound-imitation which makes the Mongol baby cry “Mama” to its mother, as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. “Mine,” for instance, is _mina_; “thine” is _tenei_. A horse or mare is _mari_. The word for “it is,” “they are,” is _beine_, a fairly respectable form of the verb “to be” in Chaucer’s English.

The grammar is delightfully simple. In the vernacular there is no bothering about singular or plural. “One hut” is _niger gir_; “two huts,” _hayur gir_. “Milk” is _su_, and apparently the word for “water” was formed from it--_ou su_. If one wants to know whether it is time to throw in the meat-balls he says, “_Ou su boutzela?_” with a rising inflection (“Water boils?”) and the answer is, “_Boutzela_.” The “moon” and a “month” are _sara_, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (_hourut_), one says, “Bread good be” (_Boba sein beine_); this gives him great pleasure.

Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours: 2 and 3 are nearly the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra tail. When the teapot overturns, they say “_Harlab!_” to relieve their feelings. There is no word for “so good,” “farewell,” or “much obliged.” These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final “good” (_sein_). So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up, for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, “_Sein oh!_”

A not unbarren amusement is to study out one’s own derivations for some much-explained words. _Tamerlane_ is often given as meaning “the lame.” Why does it not rather come from _temur_ (iron) and mean “man of iron,” as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden king? The Amur River has _khara-muren_ (black water) usually given as its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word _amur_, which means simply “quiet”?

In the hut to-night, while we are comparing mother tongues, the brazier-fire has burned to red brands. The girl reaches into a basket beside the door for pieces of dried camel-dung, and puts them on, that the embers may be fed and live through the night. These _argols_ do not smoke; she may close the chimney-hole with the flap of felt, and the hut will be kept somewhat warm through the night. The Mongols prepare for sleep: they take off their boots, and slip their arms from the sleeves of their fur _shubas_, in which they roll themselves up as we in our blankets. But how hardened they are to the cold! A naked arm will project and the robes become loose, but they do not wake.

We keep on all our inner clothing and roll ourselves about with skins until we are great cocoons. André gives a good-night look to his horses; then he, too, lies down. With our heads beside the altar of the gods, we sleep, in the Mongol’s _gir_.

How cold it is in the morning when we wake! The embers have burned to a gray ash; the iciness of the waste outside has gripped like an octopus the little hut, and sucked its precarious warmth through the night-long radiation. The chimney-hole is open again, and the mother is starting a blaze with her few pieces of birch firewood. André has gone out to harness the horses. He has left the door flap a little wrinkled, and the wind whirls through it and up the chimney, keen as a scimitar.

Alexsimevich is getting out the tea-bowls and the bread. You put a reluctant hand from under the blankets and seize your fur cap. Then you disengage the inner fur coat from its function of coverlet, and struggle, sleepy-eyed, into it. If you have the moral courage to take off these friends in need, and the inner coat and sweater, to get a bowlful of snow-water, and hunt among the baggage for soap and a towel, all at five o’clock in the morning of this freezing weather, then you have full license to call the Mongols dirty degraded heathen. If, however, you sit and shiver, and promise yourself that you will bathe at Urga, it is elementary fair play to be discreetly silent about the little failing of your hosts. You will rejoice, too, in open admiration of courage, when you find, as you sometimes will, a clean-shaven well-groomed lama, or a washed and combed village belle, on the road to the sacred city.

“Ready,” says André. You finish a goodly portion of rye-bread and several bowls of Alexsimevich’s tea, while he is carrying out the luggage and making a pyramid of it in the tarantass. You put both hands out to shake those of Subadar Jay, of his wife, and Sibilina. You give a last chunk of sugar to little Turunga, and crawl out under the tent-flap. The family calls “good-bye” from the gateway as you climb in. Then up the hill you start, for the next day’s ride.

It is slow to travel by this schedule. One can advance by day and rest by night, but daylight travel and night sleep, while most comfortable for a man, are the least efficient for a horse. If progress be the aim, one must adopt the teamster’s system. This involves a start at midnight, and eight hours of travel at a slow trot,--six to seven versts per hour. Then, at eight in the morning, a halt for the ponies. One hour they stand in harness, before getting their quarter _pud_ of hay; after which comes water, and finally, seven and one half _pfunde_ of oats. Four hours of halt are involved, in which one can roll up in his blanket and sleep. Then off again for eight hours of trot, and another four hours of halt at eight in the evening. So the watches go, with some hundred versts made daily.

Noon to-day finds us climbing the hills on foot, to stretch our cramped limbs and ease the horses, as in old times the English tourists climbed the St. Gothard on the way to Italy. We are chilled, and racked by the jar of the road, and glad of even strenuous freedom. Presently we get on again, and ride down the far slope. It is the camel-boat of the steppe, this tarantass.

A solitary gnarled tree shows in the waste of snow--the one seed that lived, on the barren waste, of all that the Siberian winds had brought. An eagle is watching from its upper branches. Further on are higher hills, with trees growing on their northern declivities alone. No foliage can stand the sun, which steals the moisture and bakes the rocks on the southern slopes. As we pass one of these isolated groves, the bald trees are seen to be packed with old nests; for the birds from miles around come hither, as the only refuge for their eggs. Deer watch us, standing ten yards off; for these Mongols are poor hunters and their religion sanctifies life. A lama may not kill even a fly: it might be his own father, transmigrated into this form for insufficient piety. A big white hare starts through the trees, stops, and runs again. Thousands of little marmots scurry to their holes in the plain at the alarm of the tinkling bells. A kite soars with a marmot writhing in his claws. Big gray jack-rabbits bound along the road ahead. A troop of partridges let us pass their wallowed holes six feet away. They peer up, their heads protruding from the snow, their yellow aprons glistening like shields, tame as guinea-fowl. At length we drive into Zoulzacha village.

One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters. To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely muffled, you worm under the felt hut-flap, and see through the pungent smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar. Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and looks up. “_Amur sein!_” he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you to a place on the low sheepskin-covered couch, to the right of the altar, opposite him.

The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and unwrinkled features of this young man of twenty-five. The gaze of his brown eyes is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped, and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with the smoke-blackened, hardship-wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under the suns of the running-track. His features are defined, the nose not so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange, trimmed and girdled with red.

He welcomes the guests without question,--it is the rule of Mongol hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is for your great Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native’s couch. At the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces; the soiled and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is put away in a basket, the bright fire-irons are ranged in a row. The couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished, and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new and clean.

But most of all, in the proprietor himself is there an air of freshness and cleanliness, of youth and vigor, and of self-confidence. When you burst into a place like this, covered with snow and muffled up in furs, disturbing the master of the house at his prayers; when your driver lays the uninvited mattress down in the warmest place, a man cannot but feel like a thrice-dyed barbarian bounder, even if the home be a fifteen-foot felt hut open at the top, and situated on the borders of the Gobi Desert. So feeling, the first impulse is to let the host know that you are not quite, of intent, what you are by accident,--a big hulking foreign savage. So you hastily think over what you can give to put yourself less at a disadvantage. The prized reserve of milk-chocolate comes to mind. “Will the host have some?” you ask.

“_Da blagodariou!_” he answers in Russian, to your surprise.

With mixed gladness at having made good thus far in any event, and regret at the diminished store of this commodity, you take a little spoonful of the snuff which the host is now offering in a beautiful porcelain bottle, patterned in flowers. Then you come back with a cigarette. Most of these people know what cigarettes are, though some smoke them with their noses.

“No, thanks!” and he points to his closely-cropped head.

Alexsimevich, who has followed into the hut, explains: “You speak to a priest, he does not smoke.”

A screen hangs before the altar opposite the door. You look hesitatingly at it. Without demur, the lama, at the visible interest, draws back the veil. There, in painted grotesqueness, is Janesron, the red god of Thunder, and bearer of the lightning sword. He glares down with his three eyes upon the sunken orbits of a sheep’s head, laid out as an offering. Black Gumbo, the six-armed good spirit, is also there, and both are surrounded by attendant demons. All are pictured artistically, the minute detail of Tibetan workmanship showing in their squat bodies. The polished wood of the frames is as finely wrought as a Japanese sword-hilt.

On the box-top, beneath the gods, are set out in neat array the best of Mongol dainties. These are disposed in little polished brazen cups shaped like wine-glasses. There are raisins and dried plums, caravan-carried from the far-off Middle Kingdom, and lumps of sugar brought down from Russia in some trader’s pack. Millet fills one cup, water another; each symbolizing some ancient seizin. A wick, sunk in oil, flares in the centre, and casts a flickering, uncanny light upon the deities. Spread on a low seat, six inches above the felt rug on the floor, are rows after rows of _boba_, the gray Mongol biscuits, in shape like the thick soles of a sandal. As a centre-piece between the stacked loaves rests the brown roasted sheep’s head. It is the feast of the New Year that this unusual volume of offerings betokens. The old year of the Horse passes with the rise of to-night’s new moon. The leap-year--that of the Ram--will then begin. All the families in the _eimucks_ of Mongolia will feast on the grosser part of the offering which now lies in its ranked regularity undisturbed. For the present the priest takes light refreshments while waiting for his midnight rite.

“Will you have some of the tea that has been brewed for you by the old mother while you were looking at the altar?” asks Alexsimevich.

It has been made, not from the loosely-packed leaves, but from the hard tea-bricks. A chunk of this has been cast into the great iron bowl over the brazier when the fagot-fed fire has melted the ice and has brought the water to a boil.

Solemnly you are presented a wooden bowl of tea, which you receive in both hands, and as solemnly sip. The evening meal is cooked and eaten, your sugar reciprocating the lama’s tea.

As the evening wears on, amid the smoke of cigarettes and brass-bowled pipes, the lama brings out quaint paper slips of Buddhist prayers.

“You are interested?” He will write for you a charm. “_O mani padmihom_,” he tells you. “The Buddhist prayer.”

“Oh, thou jewel in the lotus-flower, hail!” says the interpreter.

It is mighty, this ancient Buddhist prayer, which is murmured by so many millions from Japan to Persia, from Malay to Siberia. It is symbolic, esoterically, of much. The jewel is the soul, the lotus is Buddha, the prayer, a wish that the spirit be in them which was in _Saka-muni_, their Lord. On endless rosaries this prayer is told. It is on the lips of priests and women, it is carved around the stones which travelers throw upon the _obos_, the “high-places” of Old-Testament record. It is murmured by the pilgrims as they prostrate themselves. The disciplined body, the praying tongue, and the mind intent on sacred things, all incline the soul to the acquirement of merit.

The lama draws now with his quick hand, trained to the Tibetan script of the Urga monastery-school, sketches of his temple, _Zoulzacha Soumé_, of his people’s summer tent of cloth, and winter hut of felt. He writes out the Mongol numerals, and explains the cycles of years, in answer to questions regarding the New-Year festival. He describes the puzzling element-and-animal system, by which the _chére mari_, or earth horse, is 1907, the _chére khoni_, or earth ram, is 1908, and so on through a sixty-year epoch.

He quotes Mongol proverbs come down from old priests and rulers: “One may buy slaves, but not brothers,” and, in the spirit of Macchiavelli, “You can govern a State by truth as well as you can catch a hare with an ox-cart.”

Now it is nearing moonrise. From his rolled purse the priest draws a small slip of paper ruled into a half-inch checker pattern, in every square of which there is a symbolic group of letters. The lama consults this. Then he brings from the chest beneath the altar a long narrow box in which are strips of faded paper thick as parchment. On these in red and black are traced quaint characters, written, as is our script, from left to right. The priest selects a dozen of his long sheets and puts them carefully on his couch. He touches the box to his forehead and restores it to its place. Then he turns and speaks to the interpreter.

“The lama must make ready for the night of the New Year,” you are told; and as you look, off comes the red sash and yellow robe. The young priest stands up in his vivid blue jacket and walks to the entrance of the _gir_. From a cupboard he takes a towel, and from the fireplace, ashes. Pouring warm tea into a wooden bowl, he scrubs hands and face with the vigor of an athlete after a run. Then back to the cupboard he goes, and off comes the blue jacket for a clean new silken one. A rich yellow robe is donned. A bright silver knife is slung upon a new red sash which girdles his waist; and smart and erect as an officer of the Guards, the lama steps over, prostrates himself before his deities, then goes out into the night to his temple service.

“Creeds are many, but God is one,” murmurs Alexsimevich.

It is regrettable that the rule of lama celibacy prevents the arrangement of the usual kidnapping marriage-ceremony between this young priest of Zoulzacha, and Amagallan (blissfulness), the belle of the Odjick encampment. It is early in the first moon, Sara, of the year of the Ram, and holiday still reigns in Mongolia. Doubtless she, too, is a sooty Cinderella at other times; but to-day she is a reigning princess, dressed in the best that a father, owner of a hundred sheep, can furnish. A bright new blue coat, lined with fine white lamb’s-wool, is belted around her rather ample waist with a red sash. Her boots are of evident newness. But the triumph, the chef d’œuvre, is her pointed red hat made of the brightest Chinese silk. It is topped with a gold and black knot and is garnished with gold braid. The flaps, turned up at the sides and the back, are of a long silky dark-gray fur. A broad red ribbon fastened behind is brought forward and rests on her breast. She has a feminine eye to its brilliant contrast against the blue dress. Two long tassels of pearls, set in coral-studded silver earrings, frame a rosy, laughing face; for Amagallan is exhilarated with the consciousness of being very well-dressed.

The presence of two young herdsmen in dark red and blue, and one lama of the first degree,--and consequently not estopped from the race, like a full-fledged priest,--bears testimony to the effectiveness of the costume and the girl. The wiles with which she distributes a smile to one, a dried Chinese plum to another, and a mild frown to a third, reveal even more the universal woman. Amagallan is not at all averse to adding to her string three masculine Russians. There are only two foreign nations in Mongolia, Chinese and Russians. Into the latter class come all stray visitants--Americans, Buriats, and Troitzkosavsk teamsters. The girl stands up now and greets this American with a frank hand-shake. She invites him to sit down with the rest. Since there is scriptural permission to eat meat offered to idols, the fact that the evening’s feast has stood at the feet of Buddha need not deter one from partaking of the little dumplings, gray cheese, and dried fruits. Amagallan hands them out on one of those sole-shaped biscuits, which serve as plates until one has eaten what is on them, after which they go down themselves. A fat sheep’s-tail is sliced for your benefit, while a coarse lump of dusky-looking sugar is an ultimate delicacy, eaten as candy. Muddy brick tea follows, of course. The Mongol bread is good, but it takes resolution to do one’s duty by the gray cheese, the resin-like desiccated milk, and the sheep-fat just seethed.

A chatter of conversation goes on, the neighbors drift in and out, and those of our _gir_, as the evening wears on, make excursions to the other huts and exhibit and drink more muddy tea for politeness’ sake. The hostess in each tent shakes your hand before feeding you. The formality makes you temporarily one of the tribe and family, to be treated with courtesy and hospitality. Thus you are taken into the social life of a simple affectionate people.

We meet in one hut a traveling friar who has tramped sturdily from Tibet, pack on back and prayer-beads on arm, begging, praying, selling relics claiming to cure rheumatism, and the eye-diseases which the smoky huts induce. He carries on a pole an image of Gumbo and others of the _dokchits_, together with a hodge-podge collection of rosaries, strips of silk, bells, beads, pipe-picks, etc. These are jingled during parts of his prayer, where it is necessary to keep the god attentive.

In one hut they are playing the age-old game of _tawarya_. A bag is produced containing hundreds of sheep’s-knuckles, colored blue. Everybody gets a handful. Then a girl holds out her fistful of them, and each man guesses the number. There is a rapid fire of shouted numerals,--“_niger, hayur, urbu, durbu!_” The one who guesses correctly gets the handful of knuckles. This person next holds out his fistful, and so it goes. It is an uproarious sport, interspersed with quite unnecessary grabbings of disputed handfuls,--part of the game that Amagallan is playing, even if not germane to _tawarya_.

Finally through the darkness you make your way back to the _gir_ in which you are billeted. The wreathing smoke from its dome is illuminated to-night by the beams from the fire below. It rises in dimly bright convolutions, beautiful in its small way as the great Northern Lights. You spread your felt on the floor of the tent and roll up in your rugs. The teamster needs a timepiece to regulate his hour of harnessing, for you must start at daybreak. Leave your watch for him on the altar of the _dokchits_. It will be safe in this hut by the desert of Gobi, among the remnant of the Golden Horde.

* * * * *

The days’ marches have taken us well up among the ridges of the Kentei Mountains. To the eastward is the peak which, despite the claims of Urga’s Holy Mountain and of a site near Tibet, has the best authority for being the burying-place of Genghis Khan.

In 1227 the great conqueror died. The confused records tell of his body’s being taken northward to a mountain which was the heart of his empire, from whose slopes sprang the sources of the three great Mongol rivers,--the Tola, the Onon, and the Kerulon. Beside its sacred lake the Manchu Amban of Urga sacrifices annually to the Nature-spirits. It is both a survival and a memorial to the bloody sacrifice of every living being on the road to the grave,--a tribute which tradition says the guards of Genghis Khan’s funeral cortège offered to their departed chief.

Huts are far apart in these highlands now, and the whistling winds pierce the very marrow. The tired horses can hardly crawl forward on the doubtful trail. Far up in the heights, beside an old caravan-route, superseded by a newly-cut artery of travel, we come very late upon an ancient wooden shrine.

The worshipers have gone. They lived their time in a village near by, but with the exhaustion of pasturage for the flocks, under nomad necessity they moved. A new camel-road was tramped out by drivers, who must find shelter amid habitations. So in the shrine, long unpainted, the smiling Buddha presides now over his famished altar.

Very, very old, very, very poor, is Archir the warden, who welcomes you. For forty years he has watched in his _gir_ by the dragon-gargoyled gate. The spear with which he stood to his post of old is blackened, and its red tassel is dulled and faded. A tattered fringe is along the edge of the felt door to his _yurta_, and holes are under its walls close to the ground. His pile of wood is pitifully small, and few are his sandal-sole biscuits. His _shuba_, sheepskin-lined, is blackened with the soot of years.

Archir refuses courteously what he knows is a rare foreign delicacy, a Russian cigarette. “A lama,” he says, “may not smoke.” But his own hospitality is of the thoughtful kind which comes from the heart. He hands you a sheepskin softened by long massaging between his trembling old hands, that his own covering, not your coat, be burned by the sparks from the brazier. He notices that your tea-bowl is awkwardly held, and he brings a little table to put before you. He sees your driver fumbling for a match to light his pipe, and reaches him a coal with the fire-tongs. He clears his couch that you may sit in comfort. He offers you the first use of his fire for cooking.

In the old days many came to pray to the smiling Buddha. The drivers of the tea-caravans from far-off China left their offerings of fruit and silk scarves. The herdsmen whose lambs had lived well through a bitter winter gave sheep fat of tail to the two yellow-robed priests who chanted and clashed the cymbals through the long days and into the nights. The little boys dedicated to the gods, shaven-headed, rosy-faced, crooned their lessons in the Tibetan tongue, sitting on the floor of the big blue school-gir beside the shrine. Every day pilgrims on their way to Urga stopped to pray in the _soumé_, and filled the tent of the young guardian with eatings of noodle-soup and drinkings of tea, with gossip and with song.

But all is changed now in his little hut. The rule of non-marriage he keeps in the spirit, where so many lamas observe it only in the morganatic letter. This has left him alone in his old age, and pitifully solitary now that even the dwindling camel-trains, of whose tea-traffic the Manchurian Railway has robbed them, pass by no more. The priest is unfed even by pilgrims. These have gone with the rest to the routes of a better prosperity.

Archir has seethed his evening meal of sheep-meat and flat pieces of dough. He has let the fire die down to embers, and has pulled the covering over the round hole. The freezing winds very soon make his hut so cold that one feels like a thin shaking uncovered creature even beneath the heaped furs. One’s ungloved hands grow numb as he lies by the brazier.

In the morning we too depart, and like the Roman legionary beside the Vesuvian gate of Pompeii, the old priest waits, alone, unquestioning, uncomplaining, till a greater God than he of the _soumé_ shall send the summons of relief.

* * * * *

The mountain-ranges, one after another, stretch their towering barriers across the path. They trend northeast and southwest, as in Siberia. First comes the Sharan Daba, the white range, whose pass leads down to the Iro River, rich in alluvial gold. The streams flow westward into the Cellinga, whose waters empty into Lake Baikal, and thence by the Angara River, into the far-off Arctic Ocean.

Ridge follows ridge now, and valley follows valley,--narrow cuts, with shallow streams, and huts clustered upon their sides. Out from the almost deserted borderland, the Mongol encampments are not unfrequently pitched where there is water for the flocks. If any wood be near by, it is well, since then the dried dung can be reserved for the smokeless evening fire when the top hole is closed.

When the steep mountain climb has been passed, it is as if a gateway had been opened through the constricting ridges. The broad valley of the Haragol stretches out. Down, down, we go, onto a plain, in the centre of which we come to an enclosure with a high mud wall and a peaked gateway, gaudily decked with red banners and vivid placards. Outside the mud walls of the compound, far and wide, are checker-board squares with irrigation ditches between. Huge stacks of hay and straw are piled up near the gate, the wonder and envy of the nomads, who never have more than the scantiest store. Within are booths facing the courtyard. A little temple occupies one corner. Two-wheeled carts are drawn up along the wall. Troughs and picket-poles are ranged in line, ready for the caravans.

Now, around the tarantass, there gather from their threshing the dwellers of the compound,--coolies from the far-off Pink Kingdom, with puffy blue trousers and tight-buttoned jackets, flail in hand and metal pipe in mouth. They stare stolidly without comment at the frost-covered horses, the robes, and the bearded strangers. Expressionless they stand watching every movement. Alexsimevich asks a question; no one answers. We sit for a moment mutually expectant. Not one of the Chinese stirs or speaks.

Then André swings down and leads the team through the gateway into the compound. Alexsimevich leads the search for shelter. We cross the courtyard to the building which serves for the lodging of travelers. Its walls are of mud, and a big adobe chimney projects up one side. Beneath low eaves a small window with white paper panes blinks like the sightless eyes of a blind man. We stoop, pushing open the crudely pivoted door, enter the smoky chamber, and the door swings back behind.

We are standing in what seems an unreal world--a stage-scene or a cavern from the Arabian Nights. In front and on each side close in dark windowless walls. Behind comes a feeble light from the little paper-paned window. In the dimness, a flickering fire throws fitful gleams on dusky figures, idols, and wearing-gear hung on pegs driven into the wall.

As your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the details take shape. A clay stove is to the left. Fagots are heaped beside it, copper kettles rest upon its top, pigtailed figures are crouching around. In front, a platform, raised four feet above the clay floor, occupies the whole width of the room and extends back into the darkness. A group of men are seated, cross-legged, around a little brazier, smoking. Others are lying rolled in blankets.

With our luggage André staggers in. No one stirs. Some of the group around the stove turn their heads to look, but that is all. André heaps the food-bag and blankets in a vacant spot on the _kang_. We make room on the stove for our pots to boil the water for tea. On this self-elbowed place amid the rest we sit cross-legged, propped against the clay wall. The smoke from the oven, led under the _kang_, warms it so that the outer coat can come off. A little tabouret some six inches high stands in a corner, and serves as a table for the repast.

The shelter is far better, as comforts go, than any of the Mongol tents. The icy wind that sweeps the latter is barred off. There is a stove to replace the nomad’s brazier; a warm _kang_ instead of the floor to rest upon. But how different is the spirit of the hosts! There are no frank hand-clasps here, no interested gossip and inquiries of the adventures by the way. No generous bringing out of fat sheep’s-tails and snuff-bottles for the guests’ delectation. You cannot but have the feeling that these people are as indifferent to your existence as they are to the pariah dog that howls outside the walls. They are exclusive, non-welcoming,--these Chinese. They are strangers to the land, self-sufficing in their toilsomely cultivated rye- and wheat-fields, an isolated, womanless, working settlement.

Despite the better quarters and comfort which these inns afford, one prefers to go to a Mongol tent and be among men more human, if less civilized. When the bread is thawed and the tea is boiled, we eat, pay the Chinaman who gave the wood, and with a sense of relief go out again to the tarantass and the road.

For versts now the way is along the alluvial plain, seamed with irrigation-ditches and dominated by several of these walled Chinese factories. As the sun goes down, however, there appears a solitary building, and André gives a glad shout, seeing that it is built of wood and has windows and big centre chimney. “_Russky dom!_” he cries.

A low mud wall surrounds the enclosure. Inside some quilts are hung in the air, that the cold may kill the vermin. A big black dog comes up, but unlike the scavenger beasts of the Mongol encampments, it signals welcome with friendly tail-waggings and good-natured barks, approaching at once as if accustomed to kindly treatment.

The quilted door of the house opens. A booted figure appears with the familiar red blouse, and the Russian greeting hails you, “_Zdravstvouitie!_”

“An Orthodox Buriat,” says Alexsimevich.

We mount his wooden steps, shake his hand, and enter the big warm room.

It is as if one were back in Siberia. The Buriat’s Siberian wife, in shawl and kerchief, is busy at the whitewashed oven. Brilliantly-colored comic prints detail the misadventures of the young recruit, with doggerel ballad rhymes beneath. Chickens peck beneath the stove, the samovar hums on the table, and figures sipping tea are grouped around it on the benches, or are lying on the floor enjoying the genial warmth.

“Hail, Alexsimevich!” comes a voice; and a tall bearded Siberian, dressed in a Mongol robe, rises.

“Aha, Vladimir Vassilivich!” answers our interpreter. “Good-day!”

A volley of questions at once overwhelms him. The party has been long away from Kiahta, and we have the latest news.

“A Kiahta merchant, my friend, and his son,” Alexsimevich explains.

Overcoats are being doffed, mufflers unwound, and boots kicked off. The babble of talk continues. A place is made for us at the table, and glasses of tea, with immense slices of cheese and ham, are placed before us. When more tea and cigarettes have completed the repast, Alexsimevich paces up and down, relating with dramatic gestures the latest gossip from Troitzkosavsk.

In the midst of his narrative, which all are following with great interest, there comes an incident of heightened vividness.

“Sh--sh!” a warning signal sounds. One of the auditors points to a shape rolled in blankets, and lying on the bench.

“_Gaspaja_” (a lady), they say.

Alexsimevich completes his tale in a lower tone and with more artistic circumlocution.

But it is the other side’s turn to tell a tale, for why, in the ferocious cold of midwinter, with--save for this one Buriat’s house--the Mongol huts only for nightly shelter, why does a lady come down here?

The merchant explains: “She has twisted her knee-joint, and in Irkutsk, in Tomsk even, the Christian doctors cannot heal her. A lama tells us that warm sulphur-water will soften the sinews, and the bone can be brought back into place. We go to the warm springs of the Holy River. I have been there in old times, and I know the way.”

With pathetic eagerness the party has gone to do the lama’s bidding, and bathe in the Mongol Jordan. Evening comes. The lady’s bench is pulled over close to the oven. The merchant and his son lie down beside it on the floor. Servants and drivers roll up at their feet, and all sleep, in amity.

It takes resolution to awake at daybreak and leave the luxury of this shelter. But when horses are harnessed, riders must ride. The rising sun comes up over the white plain. The Buriat waves “good-bye” from his doorstep; the dog barks in farewell, and we lumber on southward.

A sugar-loaf hill marks the end of the valley. We turn up now into the mountains, the driver somewhat in doubt as to the way. A boy of about fifteen years, a yellow-robed lama novice, rides by. Alexsimevich hails him to ask the road to Urga. A complicated explanation follows, hardly understood.

“I show you,” says the boy.

For a dozen versts he rides along on his pony beside us, chattering and laughing. When, after a devious trail, the pass is in sight, he starts off, and will not, at first, accept any present for his trouble.

Valley follows valley now, the trail fairly well defined. Mongol huts give a chance for rest and for cooking. A welcome is bidden us in each, the nearest water is shown, and invitations to come back are freely extended.

There is now one last range to cross, the Tologoytou, highest and steepest of all. Even the mounted Mongols, who have caught up with our toiling tarantass, swing off and climb afoot. Trees are on either hand, and the white wall-like face of the barrier passed in the morning seems a bare verst away. There comes a whole slope of boulders and rocks, jagged and broken, like the moraine of a glacier. And then, at long last, we reach the high-heaped Borisan at the summit, with its fluttering prayer-flags. The foremost Mongol throws on a rock, leaps upon his pony, and rides twice around the mound.

“_Argila! argila!_” (bridles free! bridles free!) he cries, and trots down behind the crest.

We, too, throw on a stone, and take the steep descent.

Beyond the low rolling ridges below is the white of the Holy Mountain, topped with green foliage. Here one may not kill the thronging hare and deer and pheasants. As we gallop down, the _obos_, the white memorial monuments, take shape from the snow. In the dark-gray dimness of the city beyond, green and gold roofs become distinct, lighted by the last glow of the sinking sun. Huts cluster close now along the road, and the shadows of innumerable dogs pass and mingle and pass again, where the gray mud walls and houses begin to be continuous. In the dim twilight the tarantass thunders into the great wide way which ends in the main street of Urga.

Two hundred feet broad is this street. Mud walls twenty feet high flank it. The gates to the enclosures are closed. The fast-fading light discloses hardly any passers-by. Save for a distant tom-tom there is deep silence brooding over the city. A great empty square is entered, where a few figures are passing in the distance. We approach one of these, who upon our question lurches up to the tarantass. He is a Russian clad in Mongol _shuba_, rather the worse for liquor.

“I will show you,” he says amiably.

Affectionately leading the horses, he reels down one dark alley, then down the next, until we come to a second broad street and to an enclosure with a lantern-lighted gate. A cry brings at length a stir within. The gate swings open.

“The _Varlakoff_ house!” says the guide thickly.

The tarantass is led in, and we stumble through the darkness into a Russian home of some pretensions. In the main room is a lamp and a table covered with a red cloth. A glass of tea is available and is quickly swallowed. Then, tired out, we roll up in our blankets, on the floor, and drop off to our first night’s sleep in Urga, the Holy City of Mongolia.

VI

THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD

The murmur of many voices pierces the blanket over your head. Sleepy-eyed in the warmth, you peer out from the chrysalis of coverings to watch the people moving about. Alexsimevich has extricated himself from the mound which he constructs nightly on the floor, out of luggage-bags, felt mats, rugs, and overcoats. Under all the heaped wrappings that he uses in the icy Mongol tents, he has camped and slept close up against the white wall of the oven. Truly the Siberian is brother to the salamander. He pulls on now his big felt boots and runs a pocket-comb through his beard.

The wife of our host, come to the door for a survey, notes progress and returns to the female region. The Hazan Varlakoff, gray-bloused and wearing deerskin boots, enters next. He lights his first cigarette; his wife with the bowl of sugar and the plate of bread follows. She has gotten up earlier than her husband, so she is several cigarettes ahead, but he is cutting down the lead.

Perhaps one had better get up one’s self. It is an easy operation here. “Getting up” consists in emerging from the rolled blankets and stretching. “Dressing” means pulling on boots. One can wash over in the corner, where the brass can lets out a trickling stream of cold water when the needle-valve underneath is pushed up.