Riding the Iron Rooster

Leaving the Trans-Siberian route and heading south, the train climbed the bare, brown hills and in the brown valley below was the river clogged with muddy ice and the hideous city smoking on its banks. Just a few miles south of Ulan-Ude the land is arid and desertlike, the gobi that is more or less changeless as far as China: big bushes rather than trees, and rough grasslands beaten by sand, and a few settlements, but even those few are sorry places. In many empty places, watching the train go by, was a man in a brown fur hat and padded jacket, smoking a cigarette. He was motionless and solitary, almost emblematic. How had he gotten there?

The great dune-shaped hills were covered with dust and yellow grass. There were no trees. Black goats browsed near some isolated cabins, and horses were tethered. The people did not show themselves. It seemed to me that almost nothing is known of these settlements—no foreigner is allowed in them, they produce no writing; they are mute. They were places of utter simplicity, too—their water came from holes in the ground, their heat from the firewood stacked against the cabin. It was a desolate part of the Soviet Union. It was as though we had already entered Mongolia. Outside the larger settlements were graveyards, each grave surrounded by a rectangle of fence, to prevent—what? Probably wolves from digging up the corpses.

At midnight we reached the Mongolian border, and spent several hours on each side going through formalities. The Russians and the Mongolians were equally rude. They searched luggage, they took beds apart and lifted the floorboards of the sleeping car.

"English books? English magazines?"

I showed them what I had, but they were not interested. Their great search was for pornography, I was told, which they considered vastly more dangerous than political propaganda. The Mongolians in particular felt pornography was evil.

Perhaps accustomed to outsiders not speaking their language, the Mongolians went about their business silently, hardly gesturing, only occasionally muttering—but when they muttered they did so in Russian. Mongolian men and women alike had boyish faces.

That was why I almost jumped out of my skin when the fierce attendant barked at me early the next morning. I had locked my compartment, but she had a master key. She knocked and an instant later whipped the door open and went "woof-woof!" She made me understand that she was saying Get up in her language. She wanted the bedding. But we hadn't been able to go to sleep until two in the morning—that was the hour we had left the frontier. It was now seven. We were due in Ulan Bator (Red Hero) at nine-thirty. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Then this Mongolian attendant did an amazing thing—the sort of trick that clever adults attempt at children's parties. She reentered the compartment, barked softly, and seized the edges of my bedding in both hands. And in one swift maneuver ("Woof!") she jerked my bedding off me—sheets and blankets—leaving me shivering, and she hurried away on bandy legs.

We were traveling on long, straight tracks through the enormous expanse of grassland, among bulgey hills and smooth slopes. In sheltered and shadowy places there were crescent patches of snow. There was the occasional horseman, bundled up against the wind, making his way in the emptiness—no roads, no tracks, nothing but the circular tents known as yurts (the Mongols themselves call these ghurrs). It was an extraordinary landscape—pale yellow, under a blue sky—extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable: here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.

The Mongols reached the eastern limits of China. They rode to Afghanistan. They rode to Poland. They sacked Moscow, Warsaw and Vienna. They had stirrups—they introduced stirrups to Europe (and that made jousting possible and perhaps started the Age of Chivalry). They rode for years, in all seasons. When the Russians retired from their campaigns for the winter, the Mongols kept riding and recruiting in the snow. They devised an ingenious tactic for their winter raids: they waited for rivers to freeze and then they rode on the ice. In this way they could go anywhere and they surprised their enemies. They were tough and patient, and by the year 1280 they had conquered half the known world.