Riding the Iron Rooster

But they were not fearless, and looking at these great open spaces you could almost imagine what it was that spooked them. They had a dread of thunder and lightning. It was so easy to be struck by lightning here! When an electric storm started they made for their tents and burrowed into layers of black felt. If there were strangers among them they sent these people outside, considering them unlucky. They would not eat an animal that had been struck by lightning—they wouldn't go near it. Anything that would conduct lightning they avoided—even between storms; and one of their aims in life, along with plundering and marauding and pillaging was propitiating lightning.

As I was watching this wilderness of low hills, the city of Ulan Bator materialized in the distance, and a road hove into view, and dusty buses and trucks. My first impression of the city was that it was a military garrison; and that impression stayed with me. Every apartment block looked like a barracks, every parking lot like a motor pool, every street in the city looked as though it had been designed for a parade. Most of the vehicles were in fact Soviet army vehicles. Buildings were fenced in, with barbed wire on the especially important ones. A cynic might have said that the city resembled a prison, but if so the Mongolians were very cheery prisoners—it was a youthful, well-fed, well-dressed population. They had red cheeks, they wore mittens and boots: in this brown country they favored bright colors—it was not unusual to see an old man with a red hat and a purple frock coat, and blue trousers stuck into his multi-colored boots. But that way of dressing meant that the Russians were more conspicuous, even when they weren't soldiers. I say the city looked like a garrison, but it was clearly not a Mongolian one—it was Russian, and there was little to distinguish it from any other military garrison I had seen in Central Asia. We had been passing such big, dull places all the way from Irkutsk: barracks, radar dishes, unclimbable fences, batteries, ammo dumps, and surely those mounds that looked like tumuli were missile silos?

The hotel was bare and smelled of mutton fat. That was the smell of Ulan Bator. Mutton was in the air. If there had been a menu, mutton would have been on it. It was served at every meal: mutton and potatoes—gristly mutton and cold potatoes. The Mongolians had a way of making food inedible or disgusting, and they could transform even the most inoffensive meal into garbage, by serving it cold, or sprinkling it with black carrots, or garnishing it with a goat's ear. I made a point of visiting food stores, just to see what was available. I found fat black sausages, shriveled potatoes and turnips, black carrots, trays of grated cabbage, basins of yellow goats' ears, chunks of rancid mutton and chicken feet. The most appetizing thing I saw turned out to be a large bin of brown unwrapped laundry soap.

The shops sold Vietnamese pens (Iridium brand), North Korean teddy bears and toys, Russian radios. A Russian television set that was the size of a clothes closet, with an eighteen-inch screen, cost 4400 tugriks ($1500 at the official rate of exchange, or roughly a Mongolian's annual income). They made their own shoes, and they made lovely boots and saddles. They made holsters. They sold wolf pelts, and mink coats; and ermine, squirrel, sable and rabbit by the pelt. Their lambskin coats were cheap. I bought a sheepskin waistcoat for the cold. Ten dollars; and stamped in the skin, Made in Mongolia.

"Are you a hunter?" a Mongolian asked me on the street.

It seemed an odd question, but in fact most foreigners who stay in Mongolia—as opposed to those who are just passing through—are hunters. They rake light planes to the Altai Mountains in the west of the country and ambush bears and blow wolves' brains out and do handsome bucks to death.

I asked this man about the food—those goats' ears, that mutton. He said his favorite food was candy. Ulan Bator I subsequently discovered was full of candy stores. It was nothing fancy, it was hard candy, boiled sweets, which they sucked—probably because the air was so dry.

Almost no rain at all falls on Ulan Bator, and Mongolia itself gets only a few inches a year. The skies are eternally blue, and the ground hard and dusty. These people in boots and breeches, dressed for the desert, seemed unlikely residents of barracks. Half the populaton of Mongolia live in Ulan Bator but they could hardly be classified as urban—thirty-five percent of the city dwellers still live in tents.

The members of the tour had become travel weary—tired and grumpy and on each others' nerves. They did not complain out loud; they muttered their regrets. The Americans couldn't understand why there was so little to buy, the Australians hated the food—"Prison food," the Gurneys said; the French quarreled among themselves; the English people said "Mustn't grumble," and Miss Wilkie said, "I think I'm going mental."

I merely listened.