To the Ends of the Earth

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 Ulaanbaatar 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 block of flats 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, and 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 multicolored 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 Ulaanbaatar. Mutton was in the air. If there had been a menu, it would have been on the menu. It was served at every meal: mutton and potatoes—but 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 shops, 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.

Chinese Inventions

THE CHINESE ARE THE LAST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD STILL manufacturing spittoons, chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, bed warmers, claw hammers, “quill” pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron plows, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, and steam engines.

They still make grandfather clocks—the chain-driven mechanical kind that go tick-tock! and bong! Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world’s first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, it was forgotten about; they lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel (“great iron”). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snow-flakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope), and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane, and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, two thousand years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book—the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, in the year A.D. 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese, who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610, is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels, and whisky.