Part 12

There is a wide plain from Maimachen. It climbs into the first barrier-range and the forest belt of Mongolia, whose plateau is the third terrace in the rise of land from the low frozen flats of the Northern Lena to the Roof of the World,--the Himalayas of the south. The northern city of Yakutsk is at a very low elevation, only a few feet above the sea. Irkutsk on the fifty-second parallel is 1521 feet in altitude, Troitzkosavsk on the fifty-first is 2600, Urga on the forty-eighth 3770, Lhassa 11,000 feet.

Far to the northwest, Mongolia is a forested fur region; far to the south is Shama--the desert. Here at the north and east the forested belt of the Siberian highlands south of Baikal breaks off almost at the boundary.

Snow is over everything, but thinly. It has been worn away on the road, leaving brown patches over which the tarantass, mounting the long slope with horses at a slow trot, lugubriously thuds. A long stretch of straggly trees and stumps tells of Kiahta peasants going over the border to cut wood where no timber-laws limit. Up and up we go, the way steeper every _sagene_,--afoot now and the horses leaning and pulling at the traces. Finally silhouetted against the sky appears a rough pile of stones. At its top bannerets are waving from drooping poles. It is the Borisan on the summit of the pass to which every pious Mongol adds an offering, until the pile is many feet high, with stones, sticks, pieces of bread and bones. Some throw money which no one save a Chinaman will commit the sacrilege of touching; some give a Moscow paper-wrapped sweetmeat, some a child’s worn hat or yellow-printed prayer-cloths waving on their sticks and fading in the wind;--everything is holy that is given to the gods.

A piercing wind, searching and paralyzing, meets the tarantass beyond the crest at the southern border of the forest: it is Gobi’s compliments to Baikal, the salute of the great desert to the great lake. The horses stumble through the drifted snow, scarcely able to walk. The driver, blinded, half-frozen, keeps to the general direction of the obliterated trail. Barely one verst an hour is made, until, under the shelter of the bald white range of hills, the road reappears and the wind is warded off.

A rolling plain between the heights is the next stretch of the way. The afternoon sun, dimly bright, creeps haloed through the lightly falling snow. Deep in the mist appears a dark moving mass. It grows, focuses, and takes shape into a shaggy beast of burden, and camel after camel emerges from the haze, loaded with square bales of tea.

“Ask if there is shelter near,” you shout to the muffled head of the interpreter.

“I will ask,” he replies. Then to the caravan leader: “_Sein oh!_” he cries in greeting.

The foremost camel stares stonily as its Mongol driver twitches the piece of wood which pierces its upper lip, and the whole train stops.

“_Gir orhum beine?_”

“_Ti, ti, orhum beine!_” comes the answer. “It is close at hand.”

Forward the caravan slowly paces, each camel turning his head to stare as he passes out into the mist again. One of them has left a fleck of blood in each print of his broad spongy foot which the driver will cobble with leather at the next halt. Along their trail you drive southward. The mist is clearing as you rise, and the sun shines down on the snow which has crystalized in little shafts an inch high. These spear-shaped slivers have a brightness and a sheen of extraordinary brilliance, and like prisms show all the colors of the rainbow. They cast a gleam, as might a mirror, a hundred yards away. It is as if upon the great white mantle had been thrown haphazard treasuries in rubies and emeralds and diamonds and opals,--myriad evergrowing rivals of Dresden regalias. The sun goes down with its necromancy. Beyond, the soft blanket enfolds the rolling hills. It drapes the rocks and weaves its drooping festoons about the barren mountain-sides.

“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.