Chapter VI: Across Mongolia to Urga

Often we saw long files of camels come marching into Peking with dignified tread. Unlike the camels of Egypt and Arabia, which have one hump, these had two. In the winter they were very shaggy with long hair. This hair is so valuable, for making blankets and similar things, that in spring the drivers tie networks of strings about the animals to keep them from shedding it along the way. In olden days these camel caravans carried all the freight between Mongolia and Peking, and even to-day they are strong competitors of the railroads in many parts of northern China.

The camels I saw so strongly lured me to the desert that I decided to follow them over one of the long caravan routes. Besides, I wanted to see Urga, the strange capital of Mongolia, far away across the Gobi Desert. If I had traveled with the camels, however, I should have been six weeks or two months reaching my destination. So I took the train from the northeastern corner of Peking and traveled all day to Kalgan, passing through the Great Wall near the ancient tombs of the Ming emperors. From Kalgan, an American automobile, belonging to a Russian who buys furs and sends them to New York, carried me 700 miles across the desert in three and a half days. Yet there was no road at all most of the way. First we had to climb a sandy and rocky river valley, some of it so steep that teams of mules helped to draw the automobile. Mongolia is a high plateau, several thousand feet above sea level. Then we sped away across the Gobi, sometimes along the tracks made by the camel and ox-cart caravans and sometimes by no track at all.

The red-clad Mongol lamas or priests gathered excitedly around our
automobile whenever they found us halted on the 700-mile trip across
the Gobi Desert to Urga. The car was loaded to the limit.
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All Mongols ride, though their horses usually look too small for them.
This man wears his queer-shaped hat (representing a sacred mountain
in Mongolia) to show that he, like most Mongol men, is a priest or
lama. He wears also red boots and he stands by the side of a yurt or
felt tent.
]

Much of the Gobi is hard gravel, with thin brown grass on it, not shifting sand like the Sahara. There was even quite a lot of fertile land on the first day’s ride, and thousands of Chinese colonists have begun to cultivate this and build villages there. The Mongols themselves are nomads, who do not plant but keep great herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and many horses, which they drive about wherever they can find pasture. Their houses are movable, also, hardly more substantial than tents. The Mongols call them _yurts_. They are round, with an almost flat top, about six feet high in the center. Until they become dirty they are white, for they are made of thick felt, fastened to a light wooden framework. The Mongol women make this felt by laying sheep’s wool on the ground, pouring water on it, and rolling it out into large sheets. One of these houses can be taken down and packed on the backs of animals in an hour, and set up somewhere else almost as quickly.

A Night in a Mongol Tent

We spent one night in a _yurt_. We had expected to sit out on the desert all that night, until we caught sight of three or four weather-darkened felt huts. Half a dozen camels were lying on the bare ground near them, and some twenty Mongol men, women, and children came out of the huts when they heard us coming. One of the men was a lama, or Mongolian priest, and though he also was only a visitor he bossed everyone within reach. More than half the men of Mongolia are lamas, who usually live in great monasteries in various parts of the thinly populated country. They have shaven heads and wear long dark-red cloaks and big red boots.

Such boots, as a matter of fact, are worn by all the Mongols, even women and children. They are large enough to allow for half a dozen thick woolen stockings, for the weather is very cold most of the time in high Mongolia. It is so difficult to walk in these boots that Mongols on foot move much as if they were wearing a ball-and-chain, like prisoners. But this does not matter, for they travel almost entirely on horseback. Men, women, and children are as much at home on a horse’s back as our cowboys are. They all dress a good deal alike, in long coats usually made of sheepskin with the wool on the inside. But the women, especially in the region of Urga, the capital, and of the two or three other towns, wear one of the strangest headdresses in the world. The photograph on page 78 will give you some idea of how peculiar it is.

The nomad Mongols of the Gobi live in round tents or _yurts_. On a
light wooden framework they stretch thick felt made from the skins
of their own sheep. Sometimes they have a stovepipe but usually they
simply leave a flap of the tent open so that smoke may escape. The
Mongols can take a house down or set one up in about an hour.
]

I was glad of the warmth of a great sheepskin coat when I traveled
across the Gobi Desert. With me are a Mongol and his wife.
]

When the lama invited us inside one of the _yurts_ we had to stoop to get through the tiny doorway. The door was merely a flap of felt, and when this was closed the _yurt_ became very hot. Yet the Mongols kept on all their fur coats and other heavy garments, as if they were entirely comfortable. A little iron cage in the center of the tent was filled with fuel which made so quick and hot a fire that I think I should have been roasted if I had not gone outside occasionally. No wonder nearly all Mongols seem to have bad colds! Tea was prepared over this fire-cage and served to us in brass bowls. The Mongols eat almost nothing but meat. When I opened a can of cherries they hesitated to taste them, and they were almost as much afraid of a bar of chocolate as if it had been dynamite. I tried to give a bit of it to a young Mongol woman in the _yurt_, but I found that this is very bad manners in Mongolia. Instead, I should have handed it to one of the older women and let her pass it on to the girl. Yet the women quarreled over the tin cans we threw away, for such things are very valuable to people in a desert land.

Two Mongols of the Gobi Desert riding their camels down a river valley
into Kalgan, a Chinese city. The camels have on their shaggy winter
coats.
]

By and by all the women went to other tents and we lay down to sleep with the lama and two other Mongol men. The lama sent another man outside to sleep on the ground, because there was not room enough for him inside, and all night long we heard him coughing. The lama took off all but his trousers, said his prayers in a loud voice, and lay down on a bundle of sheepskin robes. One of these robes he pulled over himself. When I set up my cot, the lama said he would not dare to sleep on such a thing, for fear of falling off it in his sleep.

We might have lost our way during those three days if it had not been for a row of telegraph poles carrying a single wire clear across the Gobi. This is a part of the line from Peking to Paris. (When our first little girl was born in Peking, the cablegram we sent to America was flashed across Mongolia.) On the third night we slept in a lonely telegraph station where two Russians live the year round. The last half-day was among low hills. Along the way we saw thousands of marmots, looking like gophers or prairie dogs as they sat on their hind legs outside their holes. Many American women wear coats made of the skins of the Gobi marmots. We also saw hundreds of antelope, sometimes long lines of them racing across the horizon.

The Holy Capital of Mongolia

Urga is a holy city. In it lives Bogda-Khan, whom the Mongols call a “living Buddha” and treat like a god. When he dies, his soul is supposed to enter the body of a boy born about the same time, and this boy is brought to the great cluster of palaces inside a wall on the outskirts of Urga and becomes a new Bogda-Khan. Pilgrims come hundreds of miles to worship him, throwing themselves down on their faces on boards placed outside his palace walls. I found this “god” had a dozen kinds of automobiles and spent many thousands of dollars every year for other Western inventions that he hardly knew how to use. Whenever he went to the golden-roofed palaces of Urga itself he rode in an automobile, usually his Ford, though he had several much larger cars.

Just where the driver will sit on this queer vehicle is a mystery, but
perhaps he prefers to stand. The cart is of a Russian-Mongol
variety, seen at Urga, and the passengers are Mongol ladies in their
amazing headdress.
]

Most of Urga is made up of temples and lamaseries, the monasteries of the lamas. The most important ones have roofs covered with real gold which gleams in the cold sunshine until it almost hurts the eyes. Thousands of lamas in their dark-red robes live in Urga, and spend much of their time squatting on cushions in long, closely packed rows inside their religious buildings, studying their sacred texts by shouting them at the top of their voices. In Urga there are hundreds of prayer wheels, or rather, wooden cylinders, each under its own little roof. Inside each “wheel” are thousands of prayers written on tissue paper, and the Mongols think that every time they turn the cylinder around it is the same as saying all those prayers aloud. So long lines of pilgrims march about among the temples and stop to turn each prayer cylinder. Some of the most pious throw themselves face down at every step, when making this circuit, so that it takes them several days to make the rounds and be ready to go home again.

The Mongols do not keep shops, though they sometimes sell things in the open-air market on the bank of their dirty little river. Some Russians have stores in Urga, but nearly all the traders are Chinese. All kinds of furs can be bought there, but nearly everything else for sale comes from China or the outside world. The streets are just muddy lanes, and most of the houses are surrounded by walls of tree trunks set upright in the ground close together and sharpened on top. They reminded me of the stockades our ancestors built against the Indians.

China still claims that Mongolia belongs to her, but most of it is now really independent—or rather, it is controlled by Bolshevik Russia. Although the officials are Mongols, Russian “advisers” sent out from Moscow tell them what to do. These advisers, like the lamas, seemed very surly. Indeed, I have never been in a place where I felt less welcome. For one thing, hardly had we reached Urga before my American companion and I were arrested because someone said we had shot a Mongol on our way across the desert. If we had been convicted we should probably have been shot ourselves at sunrise next morning. But it took us only a few hours to prove that we had been many miles away from where the Mongol was shot, and that he was not hurt much anyway. It is not far from Urga to Irkutsk, where the Trans-Siberian Railway would have carried us to Europe. But of course I turned back toward Kalgan and Peking where I had left my family, crossing the Gobi this time in two and a half days, though even in September we found much snow and ice.

A camel caravan making a slow journey across northern China. Usually
ten or twelve camels are held together by stout cords. One end of a
cord is fastened to the back of a camel and the other end to a stick
which runs through the nostrils of the camel behind.
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