Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

But despite the wild jolting, the magnificence of that drive will stay with me forever. The great hills were nearly mountains. There were, however, no trees; and grazing animals had cropped the lush grass so low that it was as smooth as a golf course. A brook flowed through the bottom of a valley, and yellow flowers bloomed all around. Slender columns of smoke came from a ger here and there. Herds feasted on the vegetation: yaks and cows and sheep and goats and even the occasional stray camel from the Gobi, and astonishing numbers of horses running free. There were no predators and no hiding places; the feeling was of sublime peace.

Every so often a herdsman would come into view, smoking a pipe, watching his flock; children played and laughed by the water’s edge. Women emerging from their gers surveyed the scene with satisfaction as they arranged trays of cheese on their roofs to dry. Eagles circled overhead in deliberate patterns, while smaller birds flew lower. Marmots darted from their holes and scampered in and out of sight. Here were innocent stretches of earth that had been neither exploited nor deliberately preserved. I have never encountered a terrain that was at once so magnificent and so unthreatening; no evidence of the monstrous force of nature was here, but only the golden, the light, the perfect.

Of all the animals of Mongolia, I loved the yaks most. Large and inept, with vain faces and a gratuitous leg-obscuring fringe similar to what you’d find on a Victorian sofa, they moved with the disgruntled self-assurance of old ladies elaborately done up in tattered versions of bygone fashions. A few spry creatures waved their absurd fluffy tails in the air like parasols or darted daringly across the road, mad great-aunts with spring fever. Most of them eyed us dubiously, offering no threat but preserving an air of mild disapproval. They liked being photographed; they would gaze straight into the camera and blink flirtatiously.

Almost none of the land in Mongolia belongs to anyone; it never has. You may drive over any part you want; you may pitch a tent wherever you like. A herder in the Gobi Desert said to me, “When I move my ger, I feel the exhilaration of possibilities and freedom. I can go anywhere, put my house anywhere, take my flock anywhere, except maybe some few little places where they built a city.” He stopped for a moment to pour me tea with camel’s milk. “Tell me, is America also a free country?” For the first time in my patriotic life, I found that question difficult to answer. One-third of Mongolians live below the poverty level, but when I talked about the American dream, that herder said, “Why would a son want a different life from his father’s?” I asked about his young children, who were playing underfoot. “I am sending them to school,” he said, “and if they want to be politicians or businessmen, that is up to them. I went to school and I chose to remain a herder; I hope they will make that choice also, because I can imagine no better life.” The fashionable wisdom is that capitalism has won out over communism, but I left Mongolia persuaded that these two systems had never been opposites, that the real opposite of both is nomadism, a way of life that can be as close to joyful anarchy as humankind will ever reach.

We stopped several times for gas as we traveled south toward the Gobi. The desert starts gradually: bit by bit the plants become sparse, and then the land flattens. The smooth, glorious grass fades away. We drove for hours and hours across Dundgovi (Middle Gobi) Province, which was dull and bleak. Then we came to Ömnögovi (South Gobi), where the sand was even and yellow, and vegetation almost entirely absent. An hour or two later we arrived at one of the Gobi “forests,” full of plants with thick stems and thin leaves, like old driftwood stuck in the sand and decorated with arugula. After that, the real desert began: flat, without ornament of any kind, and vast, vast, vast.

We spent the night at the Bayanzag—a region known as the Flaming Cliffs—where great crumbling formations of limestone, bright red and warm gold, frame and reframe the desert around them. The wind brayed at us through tunnels carved into the cliffs. In the distance we could see snowcapped mountains. Fossils were everywhere, as though the dinosaurs hadn’t bothered to clean up when they moved on to their next campsite.

The guides, the photographer, and I decided to spend that moonless night with some camel herders, so we simply stopped at their ger and introduced ourselves. The camels of Mongolia don’t spit at you as Arabian camels do. They are curious creatures that turn to follow you as you pass. Their two humps are topped with tufts of long fur. When they lack water, their humps droop like aging bosoms. At night, they howl—an eerie sound, like the spirits of purgatory crying out.