Part 15

“It is to feed the monks,” says your companion.

The Mongols are going up to the vessels, with buckets suspended to the end of a milkmaid’s yoke. They dip up a load. The soup looks like gray tapioca pudding. What it is made of remains one of the secrets of the monastery, whose chef is stirring the mixture with an oar.

A big stockade, enclosing tents and peaked _soumé_, from which the sound of chattering is heard, appears ahead. As we approach, a whole hive of boys swarm out and scatter in all directions. Some are in red, some in yellow, some wear ordinary Mongol caps, some wear high, yellow sugar-loaf fools’-caps, which fall over on one side. These are the novices in training for the lama hierarchy.

The first-born of each family must by immemorial custom become a lama. In babyhood and boyhood one of these dedicated children is clad in yellow robes and is especially tended. “_Ubashi_,” he is called. When about ten years old the boy goes to school, at Urga. He becomes a _bandi_, or student of the prayers and of the Tibetan language. He runs about as those we have just seen, and at about twenty he becomes a _gitzul_, or first-degree lama. Now he shaves head and beard, and wears a brilliant yellow and red robe. Next he takes the more advanced examination and catechism, and becomes a full priest, or _gilun_, forbidden to marry, to kill, or to work. He may continue his curriculum in one of the departments of the lamasery, studying divinity, medicine, or astrology.

In the divinity course a lama will memorize Tibetan prayers, and pore for years over the big holy books which lie within the chests of the lamasery chapels. He will repeat the creed over his beads, in rapt self-hypnotism, meditating in celestial holiness. He will pray down rain for the grass, and will exorcise glanders from the ponies.

A priest taking the medical course will gain a knowledge of the innumerable herbs that grow on the Tibetan mountains, many of which are of great value as drugs, and are known only to these monastic seekers. Massage, warm sulphur baths, and waters, are part of his pharmacopœia. Mixed with genuine instruction in anatomy and medicine, he will be taught the incantations that cast out _tchutgours_, or evil spirits, the words of power to be written on rice-paper and rolled into a pill for the patient to swallow. He will learn what devil is responsible for the disease which has brought low the lusty herdsman, and the right order of image to make for allaying the infernal anger. He will be taught when the fever crisis is at hand, so that the cymbal-clashers, the drum-beaters, and the prayer-wailers may assemble, and by these holy noises and a transcendental counter-excitement, lift the patient over the fever-point.

If he elects astrology, he will be instructed in casting horoscopes of unfailing value, in reading the stars, predicting their future stations and the coming of eclipses. He will be prepared to declare the reasons for visitations of murrain and to track the trail of straying camels.

Divers are the paths of knowledge, but all may lead to the honor of Grand Lama, head of a monastery, or member of the college of _shabniars_, who form the Council of the Living God. And when the great reaper has called the high priest from his earthly glory, a whitened tomb will be raised to his memory just outside some town along the camel-trail, while his ashes will be moulded into briquettes and godly images, to rest before the gods in the shrine of some _soumé_.

We have arrived at the gateway to the great temple. The wool-merchant disappears inside to work his pull. A young lama comes out to the door, smiles at the foreigner, and then goes in again, and you tremble lest your advent is being announced to some other than the one man who can supposedly be “fixed.” This is the most important temple of Urga, forbidden to foreigners, and seen through good fortune by a few only of the old residents. But every gate they bar to hate will open wide to love--and a ten-rouble note. The merchant comes back.

“We can go in while the lamas pray,” he whispers.

The uncle appears, with an expectant look on his face, and motions us in through the darkness to the anteroom of the temple sanctuary.

From the chamber curtained off at one side comes a low swelling chant.

“Service begins, you may see it from here,” the lama says, just above his breath.

Your station is in darkness, but just the other side of the curtain are the lamas, and their apartment is lighted by windows. Two rows of benches extend the length of their chamber, leaving an aisle between them, reaching from the door to the altar. A score of priests in yellow robes, with red sashes slung tartan-fashion over a shoulder, are sitting on these seats facing each other. They are ranged evidently in the order of their ages. Two old _giluns_, fluent in the Tibetan litany, sit next the altar. Then come younger lamas, the _gitzul_, not yet full priests. Finally next to the door are _bandi_, ten or twelve years old, intense in youthful delight that their part in the ceremony is to pound as lustily as they can the big prayer-drums. The service begins with the chanting of a ritual in form not unlike the Slavonic litanies of Siberia. At appointed times it is necessary to call the god’s attention to the fact that something is going on in his honor. At once a most deafening clamor begins. The small boy with a drum is drowned out by his big brother, further up the line, who officiates upon a huge wooden cornet, and by his uncle with the conch-shell or the cymbals. The droning of prayers is like the buzz of hiving bees. There seem to be no responses, but all of them read together. Presently comes a sudden clamor, almost like a fire-alarm; then the crash and the droning suddenly cease.

“It is over!” says the guide.

The lamas file out by a further door, and we tiptoe in to inspect the holy of holies at the heart of the great lama sanctuary. In the dimness one sees first before him the table for offerings, on which are the two main sacerdotal instruments,--a silver bell and a silver handle like a carving-knife-rest,--and row after row of targets made of dough-paste, of brass cups filled with oil to serve the tapers, of millet, rice, currants. Behind this altar, towering far up into the hollow of the dome, is the bronze colossus of the smiling Buddha, Maidari, the Future God.

Fifty feet in height, the figure is, cross-legged, with open, painted eyes. From Buddha’s hands hang long silken streamers. One of very fine quality is embroidered with the ten thousand gods.

“This,” the priest whispers, “is a present from the Dalai Lama.”

A great festival takes place in summer in honor of this god, who will rule a myriad years hence, when the race of giants descends to kill mankind and to people the earth with their own kindred. The Gigin’s elephant is brought out, and he himself takes the lesser dignity of a carriage in deference to Maidari. Even the gods of the present must honor the gods of the future.

The Gigin’s throne is to the left of the statue. It has triple silk cushions. Around are twelve colossi of Buddha, some ten feet in height, and entirely gilt save for the red lips and the eyes. The hands are held in differing positions, folded, outstretched, pointing. Here and there a silk scroll is hung.

The walls of the sanctuary are lined with shelves like a book-store, and these are loaded with statuettes of the ten thousand gods.

We tiptoe back the way we came, and are soon in the street of the monastery. The uncle has seen us safely away. We betake our route from the Mongol toward the Russian section.

“You saw the throne cushion of Dalai Lama?” the wool-merchant asks. “They have put it back now. Gigin kicked it out of the temple when Dalai Lama left. The Angleski drove Dalai Lama from Lhasa, and he came to Urga to visit Gigin, because here is the second great Buddhist holy place. Now Dalai Lama is very monkish, very austere, and always prays and fasts. But our Gigin”--here follows another expansive smile--“Gigin rode out with his Council, the _shabniars_, and took some of Pokrin’s best champagne in the cart, for they would not have it in Lhasa. Dalai Lama was very stiff. Gigin asked him, ‘Have a drink!’ Dalai did not understand, for drink is forbidden. Then he asked him again, and Dalai Lama refused rebukingly. They came to Gigin’s palace at the foot of the Holy Mountain, which is built like the Russian consulate. After the prostrations, Gigin said to Dalai that he had come far and few women were on the road and those mostly old and ugly. Dalai Lama refused that too. Cigarettes and snuff, and canned tomatoes he offered, but Dalai Lama refused them all. Then, in the Assembly of the Lamas, Dalai rebuked Gigin, and made him sit below his servants in penalty, for Dalai Lama is more of a god than Gigin. All the pilgrims came to offer gifts to Dalai Lama, and Gigin did not get his. For months Dalai Lama stayed here. Afterwards he went away to China. Gigin came to this temple then and kicked Dalai Lama’s throne, throwing it down. He celebrated in the summer palace when Dalai Lama left, for he was very happy.”

* * * * *

Mongol Urga is left behind, and we reënter the Russian town. A hail from one of the passers-by is not long delayed. “Will you have _chai_?” he questions. He is an alert-looking Russian, smartly clad in a _shuba_ of green leather trimmed with sable.

“Must we eat any more dinners to-day?” we inquire.

“Only tea,” is the reply. It is not quite reassuring.

“That is Pokrin, the one that sells to the Gigin,” the wool-merchant whispers. “Go with him: he can tell you some tales.”

Obviously one must not miss the acquaintanceship of this modern Ganymede, cup-bearer of the many-bubbled French nectar and jugged ambrosia; so on we march to his compound.

Pokrin was on his way to a business appointment; but no rendezvous will interfere with prospective _chai_. He hangs his coat back on its peg, bids his wife start up the samovar, and produces the vodka-bottle. Yes, his family is very well, and he is very busy buying hides. We talk up and down and roundabout numberless themes, and at last venture: “The Gigin!”

“Ah, the Gigin was here to see me only a week ago.”

We bow our recognition of the host’s great importance, and he is started; soon he buckles down into the story.

“The Buddha came up in his carriage with his lamas riding beside him, and they tied their horses all around here in front. Then Gigin came in, walking softly because of his gout, and he said, ‘Let us drink together like friends, without quarreling.’

“I brought out the drinks, and we sat down,--Gigin and I with the lamas around us. Gigin likes best the strong drinks,--not vodka, but cognac and sweet champagne. Very many bottles we drank, Gigin and I. And at last I fell asleep. But Gigin drank still. Then he too fell asleep. In the morning the lamas carried him to his carriage, and back he drove to the palace, with the people lying down in the street as he passed. All the next day I had a very bad pain in my forehead, and it felt large.”

By non-Siberian standards Alexsimevich should be on the way to similar symptoms in the near future. For the purveyor to the Divinity has produced an assorted collection of his wares which are being sampled with due diligence. Cold meats and wheat-bread appear on the table with the samovar.

“We must eat, or he feels badly,” whispers Alexsimevich, as he makes a sandwich, an inch and a half through, which is about the depth of brandy in the Siberian highball.

Other neighbors drift in as the afternoon wears on. The talk turns to that greatest of local events, the Metropolitan Handicap of Mongolia, under the high patronage of the Living God. Things become decidedly stimulating, and the recitals lively. Everybody is living over the excitement, ejaculating and gesticulating. The child-quality in their minds keeps so vivid their impressions, that the scenes are projected almost as by a cinematograph.

From hundreds of miles around, the herdsmen have assembled. The plain before the city is a riot of color, as the horsemen ride here and there. In the centre of the field is the gay pavilion for the yellow-robed bishops and cardinals from distant lamaseries, guests of the great Gigin.

All through the morning, hundreds of riders and horses have been making for the starting-point, twenty _li_ (about seven miles) distant. The jockeys are the smallest boys available: young red-cheeked lamas, perched bareback on the shaggy racing-ponies. The monks, who are stewards of the course, have with much shouting finally, at the hour, lined them up in a long row, facing Urga. One thousand ponies have been reported as entering. It is a regiment of boys. A signal starts the whole cavalcade together. The thousand small jockeys shout at once. A thousand whips come down on flanks. Two thousand heels dig into the ponies’ withers. Over the irregular plain tear the racers, dodging around gullies, stumbling in marmot-holes, galloping helter-skelter amid furious yells. At length they come within sight of Urga. Crowds, mounted, have gone out to follow them in. The shouts redouble, the people become frantic; the riders yell at one another, and the horses are as wild as their masters.

_Shabniars_ and cardinals get to their feet as the cavalcade appears. The Living God’s heavy eyes brighten up with interest. His chief soul-mate waves a jewelled hand and chatters excitedly with a lama of the guard. The foremost rider is close at hand now, the jockey, wriggling like an eel and almost on the neck of his pony, yelling and slashing. The field thunders behind. The leader nears the pavilion, his pony is on the fierce final spurt,--a last cut of the whip, and in triumph, amid the deafening roar of the populace, the winner passes the line. Many other riders come in at his heels, but most straggle off to either side of the course when they see that the finish is lost. The victor is caught up by the priests and is brought before Gigin, where he lies on his stomach in adoration. He receives a gift, and is pensioned for life. The horse’s owner receives a good price for the animal, which is added to the Gigin’s stable. The mule-cart of the Buddha is then brought up and he is loaded in. The yellow bishops mount their steeds, and back to his palace goes the Living God. Thus ends the great Urga race.

There are other athletic tournaments during the season; most important of these is the championship wrestling-bout, which every year decides whether laymen or clergy are the better sportsmen. The Gigin’s pavilion fronts a ring, with dressing-tents on either side. From one emerges a layman. He advances by huge jumps and prostrates himself before the deity. Next, palms on the ground, like a great frog, he leaps into the ring. The chosen lama executes the same pass from the other side. They meet, jumping like game-cocks, with quick breaks. At length the clergyman gets a leg. In an instant he heaves up on it, and over goes the black man,--out! The whole assembled populace raises a stupendous howl. Bout succeeds bout, with differing champions and varying issues. Partisanship is intense. The clergy usually win in these matches, and have long held the championship.

One guest tells to-night of the photographer who bribed a lama, and got the first photograph of Gigin. The tale runs that this man, a Russian, secured admission among a crowd of pilgrims, and snapped the god, unawares, among his entourage of priests. This photograph, enlarged and colored, is the one now hawked to the Mongols, and which they set up for worship among their other gods. The lama was beheaded, they say. That was several years ago, however: since then Gigin has been photographed at the races and elsewhere.

At last we break away from the group and return to our lodgings at Varlakoff’s.

We are informed next day that among the invitations so lightly and uncomprehendingly accepted was one to take dinner with the mayor of the Russian settlement. We are expected therefore toward evening. So, late in the day, we gird on our greatcoat and move out heavily. Down the street we fare forth to the house of the host. A fine well-fed man is this mayor, with the cordial grip and the slow smile of good-fellowship. He wears a very long beard. He has taken a fancy to the embroidered green and pink Chinese ear-tabs as a substitute for the big fur cap of his own people. The ear-tabs are about as appropriate to his burgomaster build as baby-blue ribbon on the tail of a fighting bull-pup. Otherwise, deerskin boots and hunting-coat, he is the real Siberian. In the mayor’s large sitting-room, along the wall against which the table stands, is a rank of bottles of divers heights and fatness, like recruits out for their drill. The samovar of shining brass leads the array. Four different-sized glasses stand at each plate, and the intervening area is covered with platters of sausages, cheese, bread, sprats of every conceivable variety, and a medley of cold _zakuska_ dishes.

The mayor reaches for the vodka.

“Please, none!” we blurt out.

The mayor looks hurt. Then an idea takes form in his head, and he shouts something to his Chinese boy, who promptly shuffles through the door into the street.

Out of the window we catch a glimpse of him turning into the establishment across the way, where Pokrin’s clerk sells the wherewithal to make a Russian holiday. The Chinese boy emerges with a bottle, and trots back across the street with the curious gait made requisite by the unattached thick-soled slippers. He shuffles into the dining-room and makes space for one more bottle. Whiskey! The mayor has bethought himself of the English label, and has sent for it, on the theory that not to drink, like not to sleep, is unbelievable.

Evidently one must again sidestep, so _chai_ is besought and got down. Our virtue is rewarded, for the host smiles and is content.

“Poor Pokrin!” he says presently, reminded of the man by the beverage. “He made over a hundred thousand roubles from selling things to the Gigin. But now he can’t think of any more things to sell. You saw the Gigin’s new droshky? But that isn’t like selling an elephant or an electric-light plant. Pokrin is down to pelicans and fountain-pens.”

He shakes his head sympathetically, and reaches anew for the vodka-bottle. He goes on reminiscing, half-cynically, half-regretfully, of the past, while dinner to serve the appetite of a Cyclops keeps coming on.

In the midst of the repast cries arise outside. A Mongol with a flow of language is heard calling aloud for “_Bulun Darga!_” (fat policeman.)

“They are after me,” says the mayor resignedly.

The Mongol comes hurtling in, pushing past the Chinese boy.

“Fat policeman,” he cries; “Red Mustache and Long Nose and Blue Coat are drunk, and are disturbing my _gir_. Come quickly, O Lord, fat policeman.”

The mayor sighs. “I go”; then he turns to us. “Will you accompany me?”

“Gladly, if we don’t have to eat any more.”

The mayor considers this a back-handed compliment to the amplitude of his hospitality and smiles.

“_V period_, it is not far.”

He puts on his huge greatcoat, draws on his ponderous boots, takes a heavy stick, and in vividly embroidered Chinese ear-tabs stands ready to follow the Mongol. We shoulder open the felted door. From the low-ceilinged recess between this and the outer door he produces two other big sticks, like pilgrim’s staves. These he hands to his visitors.

“For the dogs!” he explains.

The Mongol’s hut is soon reached. It is in frightful disorder, and vodka-bottles are strewn around. The mayor looks up in a little book to see if Krasni, young Agueff, and Pugachev are not, as he suspects, the men who in native nomenclature are called Red Mustache, Blue Coat, and Long Nose. He finds that he has rightly surmised.

“I know them,” says the mayor. “They will come around to me in the morning. I will tell them to make the Mongol satisfaction. When they come back and say he is satisfied, I tell them to be good and to do this no more. _Nietchevo!_”

The irate man is jollied along, and is told that it will be fixed up soon. Consoled and soothed by the protection of authority, he admits it was not so bad after all, and he bids us, as we leave, a grinning “_Sein oh!_”

“Now,” says the mayor, “will you not come and see Urga at night?”

He leads along an icy back street, black as a canyon, with the bulging mud-plastered walls, twenty feet in height, so close that a cart can barely pass between them. Not a light is seen save as a ray pierces the shuttered planking of some compound door. Distant clanging of cymbals and far-off echoes alone break the stillness. Out from the gloom of the street we come into the open _piazza_, half a verst wide. It is unshadowed, and less dark. Threading the heaped-up refuse we stumble on. The black crows, with lancet-like blood-red beaks, which search the heaps by day, are gone. The black cannibal dogs wake and growl as we approach.

“They are afraid of a stick and don’t generally attack people. But, if several do come at you, crouch down and stay perfectly quiet,” the mayor counsels.

He then tells of the Cossack who last year, passing by a dog that did not move aside, drew his sabre and struck the beast. As soon as the other dogs smelled the fresh blood, they became mad, and half a dozen came at him. He put his back against the wall and slashed among them. Many he cut and wounded, but more came and more, in an instant. Soon he was pulled down, for hundreds were upon him.

A big black-furred brute looks insolently at us as we pass.

“They do not bury the dead here, you know,” the mayor says. “The corpses are taken to the mountain northward outside the town, and are left. It is cold to-night. There will be death in the market-place where the poor lie shelterless. And the dogs wait beside them.”

A little way off, where the prayer-wheel stands, is the twinkling light of a shrine. The new moon and the few brilliant stars are frigidly distant. They cast a pale white glow now on the dimly outlined walls and huts. A beggar, lying unseen, calls suddenly as we pass his heap of sodden hides. The six-foot Siberian hunter by our side cries out as he stumbles over and beholds a something, partly eaten, guarded by a great cannibal dog.

If the thought of the rights of man has drowned sympathy with all that concerns the government of Russia, visit Urga at night, and the Cossack of the Russian Guard, swaggering along among the Chinamen,--this Cossack whom you have heard execrated as the “knout of the Czar,”--will look to you like a Highlander at Lucknow. The chance to absorb an unwholesome amount of tannin by way of a samovar, and to sleep on the floor beside the oven in the whitewashed house of Michael Varlakoff, will become a privilege more prized than any possessed by His Holiness, the Living God.

The section of the Russian colony in which we have been lodging consists of five hundred-odd traders. They have drifted down from Siberia, and on the free ground of taxless Urga have established their shops of gaudy European cloths, enameled cooking-utensils, candles, and cutlery. These Russians, whose whitewashed many-paned houses fill a quarter of the town, have not the large interests watched by the English merchants, who dot the globe with their agencies. They are small Trans-Baikal shopkeepers, transplanted bodily. They build their houses in the Siberian way, and their wives toil personally at the oven. They wear blouses and felt boots as the house-dress, and keep the ikons in the corner. Prosperity is evidenced in the striking-clocks, the lamps, nickeled samovars, and curtained double windows. But they are still not many removes from the peasant.