Part 13
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.