The Russian road to China

IN TATAR TENTS

THE shaggy ponies, white with the frost of the morning, stand harnessed to the tarantass; André in his belted sheepskin shuba, whip in hand, is perched on the bag of oats; Alexsimevich sits in a greatcoat of deerskin, with only a nose and a triangle of black beard visible. The host, in his gray surtout, and the red-bloused drivers of the sledges scattered in the courtyard, all have left their samovars to see the start. The children of the family peep from behind the mother with her gray shawl-covered head. They group at one side, under the eaves of the doorway, while Josef, one of the household servants, swings back the ponderous gates. The reins are drawn in, the whip is lifted, the horses are leaning forward into their collars, when the cry of “André!” comes through the opening doorway.

From behind the gathered onlookers, who turn at the sound, runs out Katrinka, dressed in her best red frock. “André!” she cries. He pulls back the starting horses, and Katrinka lifts up to him a little bag embroidered with his initials in blue and red. “For your tobacco.”

He looks down into her eyes and smiles. “Spasiba loubesnaia,” he says, and pushes it into the breast of his shuba.

“De svidania, André!” she whispers, then runs back, confused.

The teamsters laugh, pleased and amused as big children at her blushes, and her brother shouts a commentary from the gateway. “Vperiod! vperiod!” says the interpreter. He has reached forty now without falling before the charms of any Siberian girl, and he does not sympathize. “On! on!”

The horses swing out of the great gateway into the snowy streets, with “Good-bye! Good road!” called in chorus after us.

At a slow trot the lumbering carriage rolls through the quiet town, misty in the cold of the morning. The row of shuttered shops, with their crude pictures of the wares within, are opening for the day. The little park with the benches, which are trysting-places of summer evenings, cushioned now with six inches of snow, and the low log houses beyond, loom up and retire rearward, as we pass. The white church and the fenced cemetery of Troitzkosavsk are left behind, and we are on the broad paved road by which a sharp trot of half an hour brings us to Kiahta.

Its scattered houses now in turn begin. The big tea-compound, of four square white walls, flanks us and is gone. The officials’ residences and the barracks of the garrison appear and vanish behind. The street opens out into a big square, where, shimmering against the white ground, stands the great church of Voskresenie, the Resurrection. On its green dome, lifted high in appeal and in promise, gleams the gilded cross. In white and green and gold Russia raises inspiringly the symbols of Slavonic faith before the doors of the heathen empire. As we pass the white Russian church, the litany of the popes and the answering chant of the choir come faintly wafted from within. But even as the Christians sing, the clash of distant cymbals and the roll of a far-off prayer-drum meet and mingle with the echoes. On the hill across the border, in vivid scarlet against the snow, with painted walls, sacred dragon-eaves, and flapping bannerets, flames a Chinese temple.

Here now is the borderland of empires. The neutral strip is in front, a hundred sagenes broad. The Cossack sentries stand at ease before their striped boxes, which face toward Mongolia. Far to the east and far to the west are seen stretching the long lines of posts marking the boundary. The outmost sentry, as the tarantass rolls across the strip, hails you with a last “De svidania!” (God speed!)

Past the Chinese boundary-post, covered with hieroglyphic placards and shaped like the lotus-bud, we drive, and in under the painted gateway of the gray-plastered wall. No Männlicher-armed Chinese regulars, like those that in Manchuria throng to hold what is lost, guard this half-forgotten road. No sentry watches; no custom-officer bids the strangers stop. Through the open gate we ride into the narrow street of the trading city of the frontier—Maimachen, the unguarded back door to China.

In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one’s own kind, police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly strange environment, where the most remarkable of the world’s Asian races lives and trades, works and rules.

Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting vision of the eternal Orient—these are the things for which men travel.

As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses of banner-decked courtyards seen through great barred doors in the gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated Chinaman, with skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long sleeves, fur-lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open. Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper windows, look outward through the peep-hole.

In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pâtés de foie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are supported by Russian inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitzkosavsk. It is amusing to watch the enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey.

We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering sheepskins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where the Mongols have heaped their little bundles of provender.

All the while one has an eerie undefined sentiment that something is lacking. It is not that the houses which face the narrow main street are low and poor, that the gray mud-walled compounds are grimly unwelcoming with their closed iron-studded gates. It is not that the small stocks of goods in the shops tell of a vanished prosperity, now that the bulk of the tea-trade has left. It is not anything material, but an oppressive indefinable feeling that something is lacking. Only when Alexsimevich makes a chance remark, do you realize consciously what it was you instinctively felt, “It is queer to be in a city where there is not a woman or child.”

Some have explained the exclusion law which controls the situation by the self-sufficiency of the Chinese, who wished no real settlement of their people here,—the fruit of a pride deep-rooted as that underlying the custom which brings every corpse back to China for burial. Others, by the desire to avoid transmitting to the Empire the diseases that are rife in Mongolia. Whatever the basis, the regulation is in full force to-day. At one time merchants in Maimachen kept their wives across the border in Russia, which under a subterfuge was not technically forbidden. But the ability to hide behind a technicality is a blessing enjoyed especially in democracies. It did not go with the chief of police, who came down for a squeeze which made it more profitable to pay the women’s fare home than to continue to offend.

Associating with the native Mongol women is here precluded by the fact that there are no settlements near by from which the Chinese might get indigenous consolation. A deserted tract lies behind the town. Only camel-drivers, wood-cutters, and sellers of cattle come into Maimachen, and they leave at night. For though the Mongols, in their pointed hats, pass along the streets, none may lawfully live within the stockaded walls, and none keep shop beneath the carved eaves of the houses which flank its narrow streets. This is the prerogative of Chinese traders from beyond the far-off Wall.

The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has become prosperous from the sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long camel-trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chantu-fou, drinks his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year’s card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease the tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets. It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the unchanging, shall change.

Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia? When they sleep on their wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun? Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall.

The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather-worn gateway of the woman-less city of Maimachen. “How much they miss!” says André, filling his pipe from the new pouch. “How much they escape!” retorts Alexsimevich.

When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned gateway with plunging horses urged by the shouts of his Nubian charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same physical sensations as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains; but where Pharaoh’s robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow, and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable.

The horses leap free under the knotted lash of the Siberian driver. With the rumble of low thunder the ponderous wooden wheels bound over the rutty road, hurling the springless tarantass into the air and from side to side. You brace yourself with baggage and hold to the sides, but toss despite all, like corn in a popper. The hay on which you sit shifts away to one side, leaving the bare boards to rub through clothes and packs. A sudden splinter makes you jump like a startled deer beside the way. In this noisy tarantass, down the narrow road grooved with the ruts of the Mongol carts and sledges that have gone northward, you tumble and groan and bump and roll out across the open country.

There is a wide plain from Maimachen. It climbs into the first barrier-range and the forest belt of Mongolia, whose plateau is the third terrace in the rise of land from the low frozen flats of the Northern Lena to the Roof of the World,—the Himalayas of the south. The northern city of Yakutsk is at a very low elevation, only a few feet above the sea. Irkutsk on the fifty-second parallel is 1521 feet in altitude, Troitzkosavsk on the fifty-first is 2600, Urga on the forty-eighth 3770, Lhassa 11,000 feet.

Far to the northwest, Mongolia is a forested fur region; far to the south is Shama—the desert. Here at the north and east the forested belt of the Siberian highlands south of Baikal breaks off almost at the boundary.

Snow is over everything, but thinly. It has been worn away on the road, leaving brown patches over which the tarantass, mounting the long slope with horses at a slow trot, lugubriously thuds. A long stretch of straggly trees and stumps tells of Kiahta peasants going over the border to cut wood where no timber-laws limit. Up and up we go, the way steeper every sagene,—afoot now and the horses leaning and pulling at the traces. Finally silhouetted against the sky appears a rough pile of stones. At its top bannerets are waving from drooping poles. It is the Borisan on the summit of the pass to which every pious Mongol adds an offering, until the pile is many feet high, with stones, sticks, pieces of bread and bones. Some throw money which no one save a Chinaman will commit the sacrilege of touching; some give a Moscow paper-wrapped sweetmeat, some a child’s worn hat or yellow-printed prayer-cloths waving on their sticks and fading in the wind;—everything is holy that is given to the gods.

A piercing wind, searching and paralyzing, meets the tarantass beyond the crest at the southern border of the forest: it is Gobi’s compliments to Baikal, the salute of the great desert to the great lake. The horses stumble through the drifted snow, scarcely able to walk. The driver, blinded, half-frozen, keeps to the general direction of the obliterated trail. Barely one verst an hour is made, until, under the shelter of the bald white range of hills, the road reappears and the wind is warded off.

A rolling plain between the heights is the next stretch of the way. The afternoon sun, dimly bright, creeps haloed through the lightly falling snow. Deep in the mist appears a dark moving mass. It grows, focuses, and takes shape into a shaggy beast of burden, and camel after camel emerges from the haze, loaded with square bales of tea.

“Ask if there is shelter near,” you shout to the muffled head of the interpreter.

“I will ask,” he replies. Then to the caravan leader: “Sein oh!” he cries in greeting.

The foremost camel stares stonily as its Mongol driver twitches the piece of wood which pierces its upper lip, and the whole train stops.

“Gir orhum beine?”

“Ti, ti, orhum beine!” comes the answer. “It is close at hand.”

Forward the caravan slowly paces, each camel turning his head to stare as he passes out into the mist again. One of them has left a fleck of blood in each print of his broad spongy foot which the driver will cobble with leather at the next halt. Along their trail you drive southward. The mist is clearing as you rise, and the sun shines down on the snow which has crystalized in little shafts an inch high. These spear-shaped slivers have a brightness and a sheen of extraordinary brilliance, and like prisms show all the colors of the rainbow. They cast a gleam, as might a mirror, a hundred yards away. It is as if upon the great white mantle had been thrown haphazard treasuries in rubies and emeralds and diamonds and opals,—myriad evergrowing rivals of Dresden regalias. The sun goes down with its necromancy. Beyond, the soft blanket enfolds the rolling hills. It drapes the rocks and weaves its drooping festoons about the barren mountain-sides.

“Mongol yurta!” calls André, turning to point out with his whip the low dome-shaped hut, black against the darkening sky. On its unknown occupants we are to billet ourselves, sheltered by the rule of nomad hospitality. As the tarantass nears the wattled corral, the watchful ravens stir from their perches. The picketed camels turn to stare. A gaunt black hound stalks out, with mane erect and ominous growls.

“Nohoi,” cries out Alexsimevich, to the inhabitants of the hut; then adds to you, “Very bad dogs! It is a Mongol proverb: ‘If you are near a dog, you are near a bite.’”

Beneath an osier-built lean-to a woman is milking a sheep, with a lamb to encourage the flow. She calls a guttural order to the dog, which slinks back. Then she comes to the wattled fence, while the sheep which has been getting milked escapes to a far corner of the yard. The woman’s head is curiously framed by a triangular red hat, and silver hair-plates, which hold out like wings her black tresses. The shoulders of her magenta dress are padded up into epaulettes two inches high. She is girded with a sash.

“Sein oh!” says Alexsimevich.

“Sein!” she answers, and opens the gateway to the enclosure around the hut.

André drives in among the sheep and cows, and you climb lumberingly down with cold stiffened limbs. André puts his whip upon the felt roof, for it is a deadly breach of etiquette to bring it into the house.

“You go in,” said Alexsimevich.

It is like entering a kennel, this struggle through the narrow aperture, muffled to the eyes in double furs and awkward felt boots. As you straighten up after the crawl through the entrance, a red glare from the fire just in front meets the gaze. Stinging smoke grips the throat; you choke in pain. It blinds the smarting eyes. You gasp and stagger. Then some one takes your hand and pulls you violently down on a low couch to the left, where in course of time breath and sight return. There is no chimney, nor stack for the fire of the brazier, which stands in the centre of the hut. One can see the open sky through the three-foot hole above. The smoke, finding its way toward this aperture, works along the sloping wooden poles which form the framework of the felt-covered tent, filling the whole upper section with its blinding fumes. To stand is to smother. Sitting, the head comes below the smoke-line.

With recovered vision, one can look around within the hut. The couch of refuge, raised some six inches above the floor, is the bed by night, the sitting-place by day. Against the wall at the left hand, and directly opposite the door, is a box-like cupboard, along whose top are ranged pictures of grotesque Buddhist gods, before whom are little brass cups full of offerings, millet or oil, in which is standing a burning wick. Beside the door is a shelf loaded with fire-blackened pots and kettles. Branches of birch for fuel are thrown beneath. On the far side of the room, three black lambs, fenced off by a wicker barricade, are huddled together, quietly sleeping.

Seated beside the fire close by is the girl of nineteen who has just saved you from asphyxiation. The long fur-lined working-dress, common to all ages and sexes of Mongols, is buttoned on her left side with bright brass buttons, and is belted in with a sash. She has not the padded shoulder-humps, nor the spreading hair arrangement, which gave to her mother, who welcomed us, so weird an appearance. Her complexion is swarthy like an Indian’s, not the Chinese chalky yellow, and she has red cheeks and full red lips. Her eyes are large and black. The rest of the party have stayed a moment outside to ask about hay and water. You have made this solitary and awkward entrance. The girl has no more notion than a bird who the strange man of another nation may be, who has stumbled into her home. But it does not trouble her in the least. For a moment she looks you over calmly, with a smile of amused curiosity, rolling and wringing with her fingers a lambskin which she is softening. Then composedly she bids you the Mongol welcome, “Sein oh!” and holds out her hand. Her grip is as firm and frank as a Siberian’s.

Now Alexsimevich comes tumbling through the door, and next André. Both are used to these huts, and artistically stoop below the smoke-line. All our impedimenta—blankets, furs, pots, kettles, bread-bag, rifles—are heaped in a mound within the space between the couch and the tethered lambs. The girl has not stirred from her work.

“They are friends of yours then, Alexsimevich?” you ask.

“No, no, I never saw them,” he answers. “Any one may take shelter in any yurta in Mongolia.”

A small head suddenly makes its appearance from the pile of rugs on the sofa opposite on the women’s side of the tent. There emerges, naked save for a bronze square-holed Chinese cash fastened around her neck, a little slant-eyed three-year-old. The water in the small cups offered to the dokchits has long been ice, and one has full need of one’s inner fur coat and cap in the hut, where the entrance, opening with every visitor, sends a draft of air, forty degrees below zero, through from the door to the open hole which serves as chimney. And still this tot can step out naked and not even seem to feel it.

“The child’s name?” asks Alexsimevich.

“Turunga,” replies the girl.

“And your own?”

“Sibilina,” she says, and smiles.

Turunga carefully inspects you, and solemnly accepts a lump of sugar which she knows what to do with, even if it is a rare luxury offered to gods. She sits down, in an evidently accustomed spot on the warm felt before the brazier, to play with the scissors-like fire-tongs, carefully putting back the red coals that have fallen out on the earthen platform.

The tarantass-driver, having piled up your impedimenta, excavates from its midst the bag of rye-bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the little bag of pelmenes, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the yurta’s flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She brushes out this water on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is the picketed lamb’s especial territory, to which the felt rugs before the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water.

“Boutzela! boutzela!” she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver over the basin to see by: “it boils.” Into the Mongol’s pot go our pelmenes, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant description of Siberian pelmenes was given on the quaintly-worded French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk: “Meat hashed in bullets of dough.” They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day’s drive across the plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our hostess’s big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually thaws the outlying regions of the body.

But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the least that she has home-made pelmenes every two or three days—she wants these particular meat-balls. The little mouth begins to pucker and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes the place of the pelmenes. We fill a heaping ladleful and André furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied.

The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at André, then throws more sticks of the precious firewood on the embers. André has caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our six-foot Siberian hunter.

The dog barks in the yard, but without the menace which hailed us, and the crunch of a horse’s hoofs sounds on the frozen ground outside. The flap opens, with its inrush of freezing air. Stooping, there enters a typical Mongol, squat of figure, round of head, with broad sunbrowned face and a short queue of black hair. He wears a funnel-shaped hat, magenta-colored, and is enveloped in a long shuba, with brass buttons down one side like a fencer’s jacket. About his waist is a sash with jingling knives and pouches. He is the head of the family, come in from herding his horses. He turns back the long fur-lined cuffs which have protected his gloveless hands, and stretches out both his arms for you to place your hands over his. It is the man’s ceremony of welcome. Then he produces a little porcelain snuff-bottle. This must be received in the palm of the right hand with a bow. It is to be utilized, and passed back. If the herder is out of snuff, the bottle is offered just the same and you must appreciatively pretend to take a pinch. Such is etiquette.

The soup is gone now; the pot, cleaned out for the tea, is again on the boil and the leaves are thrown in. André has borrowed a hatchet from his host, and has chopped off a piece of milk, which goes in as well.

It is in order to ask the new arrival, Subadar Jay, to pass his wooden cup for some of the beverage. He takes it and the lumps of sugar without a word of thanks. The Mongol language has no expression to signify gratitude. Silence does not, however, mean that he does not appreciate. The dozen pieces of Mongol sandal-sole bread which he gives you later are worth two bricks of tea in open market, and this current medium of exchange—caravan-brought tea—is worth sixty kopecks the brick. No small gift, this bread, to an interloping stranger who is brewing tea by his fire, and camping unasked on his bed. A Tibet-schooled lama knows the Buddhist maxim, “Only accomplish good deed, ask no reward.” But the unlettered Mongol layman knows its practice.

Little Turunga has played naked before the fire long enough now; she is caught up; her reluctant feet are put into the boots with pointed upturned toes, and her body into a miniature sheepskin “daily,” such as her mother and father wear. The little girl is as smiling and shy and coquettish as any child of white skin and complex clothes.

“Will you sell Turunga for a brick of tea?”

“No, no,” says the mother, gathering the little one quickly up into her arms, while the rest of the family smile at the offer and her solicitude. “No, no, not even for ten bricks!”

Everybody laughs, Turunga with the rest, in a child’s instinctive knowledge that she is the centre of admiring attraction.

Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands Turunga over to her father,—unheard-of in Siberia,—and he plays with the child, giving her pieces of sheep’s tail to eat from his mouth, answering her prattle or baby-talk and endless questions. At night, about eight o’clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother’s shuba.

Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many things,—of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of the beauty of the housewife’s silver headplates, of water and roads, of whether or not the Mongol dokchits on the altar are like the Gobi wolves that hate Chinese.

It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however) have a familiar sound—although there is said to be no common ancestry with the Indo-Germanic tongues; perhaps it is only the instinctive sound-imitation which makes the Mongol baby cry “Mama” to its mother, as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. “Mine,” for instance, is mina; “thine” is tenei. A horse or mare is mari. The word for “it is,” “they are,” is beine, a fairly respectable form of the verb “to be” in Chaucer’s English.

The grammar is delightfully simple. In the vernacular there is no bothering about singular or plural. “One hut” is niger gir; “two huts,” hayur gir. “Milk” is su, and apparently the word for “water” was formed from it—ou su. If one wants to know whether it is time to throw in the meat-balls he says, “Ou su boutzela?” with a rising inflection (“Water boils?”) and the answer is, “Boutzela.” The “moon” and a “month” are sara, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (hourut), one says, “Bread good be” (Boba sein beine); this gives him great pleasure.

Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours: 2 and 3 are nearly the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra tail. When the teapot overturns, they say “Harlab!” to relieve their feelings. There is no word for “so good,” “farewell,” or “much obliged.” These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final “good” (sein). So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up, for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, “Sein oh!”

A not unbarren amusement is to study out one’s own derivations for some much-explained words. Tamerlane is often given as meaning “the lame.” Why does it not rather come from temur (iron) and mean “man of iron,” as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden king? The Amur River has khara-muren (black water) usually given as its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word amur, which means simply “quiet”?

In the hut to-night, while we are comparing mother tongues, the brazier-fire has burned to red brands. The girl reaches into a basket beside the door for pieces of dried camel-dung, and puts them on, that the embers may be fed and live through the night. These argols do not smoke; she may close the chimney-hole with the flap of felt, and the hut will be kept somewhat warm through the night. The Mongols prepare for sleep: they take off their boots, and slip their arms from the sleeves of their fur shubas, in which they roll themselves up as we in our blankets. But how hardened they are to the cold! A naked arm will project and the robes become loose, but they do not wake.

We keep on all our inner clothing and roll ourselves about with skins until we are great cocoons. André gives a good-night look to his horses; then he, too, lies down. With our heads beside the altar of the gods, we sleep, in the Mongol’s gir.

How cold it is in the morning when we wake! The embers have burned to a gray ash; the iciness of the waste outside has gripped like an octopus the little hut, and sucked its precarious warmth through the night-long radiation. The chimney-hole is open again, and the mother is starting a blaze with her few pieces of birch firewood. André has gone out to harness the horses. He has left the door flap a little wrinkled, and the wind whirls through it and up the chimney, keen as a scimitar.

Alexsimevich is getting out the tea-bowls and the bread. You put a reluctant hand from under the blankets and seize your fur cap. Then you disengage the inner fur coat from its function of coverlet, and struggle, sleepy-eyed, into it. If you have the moral courage to take off these friends in need, and the inner coat and sweater, to get a bowlful of snow-water, and hunt among the baggage for soap and a towel, all at five o’clock in the morning of this freezing weather, then you have full license to call the Mongols dirty degraded heathen. If, however, you sit and shiver, and promise yourself that you will bathe at Urga, it is elementary fair play to be discreetly silent about the little failing of your hosts. You will rejoice, too, in open admiration of courage, when you find, as you sometimes will, a clean-shaven well-groomed lama, or a washed and combed village belle, on the road to the sacred city.

“Ready,” says André. You finish a goodly portion of rye-bread and several bowls of Alexsimevich’s tea, while he is carrying out the luggage and making a pyramid of it in the tarantass. You put both hands out to shake those of Subadar Jay, of his wife, and Sibilina. You give a last chunk of sugar to little Turunga, and crawl out under the tent-flap. The family calls “good-bye” from the gateway as you climb in. Then up the hill you start, for the next day’s ride.

It is slow to travel by this schedule. One can advance by day and rest by night, but daylight travel and night sleep, while most comfortable for a man, are the least efficient for a horse. If progress be the aim, one must adopt the teamster’s system. This involves a start at midnight, and eight hours of travel at a slow trot,—six to seven versts per hour. Then, at eight in the morning, a halt for the ponies. One hour they stand in harness, before getting their quarter pud of hay; after which comes water, and finally, seven and one half pfunde of oats. Four hours of halt are involved, in which one can roll up in his blanket and sleep. Then off again for eight hours of trot, and another four hours of halt at eight in the evening. So the watches go, with some hundred versts made daily.

Noon to-day finds us climbing the hills on foot, to stretch our cramped limbs and ease the horses, as in old times the English tourists climbed the St. Gothard on the way to Italy. We are chilled, and racked by the jar of the road, and glad of even strenuous freedom. Presently we get on again, and ride down the far slope. It is the camel-boat of the steppe, this tarantass.

A solitary gnarled tree shows in the waste of snow—the one seed that lived, on the barren waste, of all that the Siberian winds had brought. An eagle is watching from its upper branches. Further on are higher hills, with trees growing on their northern declivities alone. No foliage can stand the sun, which steals the moisture and bakes the rocks on the southern slopes. As we pass one of these isolated groves, the bald trees are seen to be packed with old nests; for the birds from miles around come hither, as the only refuge for their eggs. Deer watch us, standing ten yards off; for these Mongols are poor hunters and their religion sanctifies life. A lama may not kill even a fly: it might be his own father, transmigrated into this form for insufficient piety. A big white hare starts through the trees, stops, and runs again. Thousands of little marmots scurry to their holes in the plain at the alarm of the tinkling bells. A kite soars with a marmot writhing in his claws. Big gray jack-rabbits bound along the road ahead. A troop of partridges let us pass their wallowed holes six feet away. They peer up, their heads protruding from the snow, their yellow aprons glistening like shields, tame as guinea-fowl. At length we drive into Zoulzacha village.

One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters. To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely muffled, you worm under the felt hut-flap, and see through the pungent smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar. Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and looks up. “Amur sein!” he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you to a place on the low sheepskin-covered couch, to the right of the altar, opposite him.

The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and unwrinkled features of this young man of twenty-five. The gaze of his brown eyes is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped, and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with the smoke-blackened, hardship-wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under the suns of the running-track. His features are defined, the nose not so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange, trimmed and girdled with red.

He welcomes the guests without question,—it is the rule of Mongol hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is for your great Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native’s couch. At the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces; the soiled and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is put away in a basket, the bright fire-irons are ranged in a row. The couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished, and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new and clean.

But most of all, in the proprietor himself is there an air of freshness and cleanliness, of youth and vigor, and of self-confidence. When you burst into a place like this, covered with snow and muffled up in furs, disturbing the master of the house at his prayers; when your driver lays the uninvited mattress down in the warmest place, a man cannot but feel like a thrice-dyed barbarian bounder, even if the home be a fifteen-foot felt hut open at the top, and situated on the borders of the Gobi Desert. So feeling, the first impulse is to let the host know that you are not quite, of intent, what you are by accident,—a big hulking foreign savage. So you hastily think over what you can give to put yourself less at a disadvantage. The prized reserve of milk-chocolate comes to mind. “Will the host have some?” you ask.

“Da blagodariou!” he answers in Russian, to your surprise.

With mixed gladness at having made good thus far in any event, and regret at the diminished store of this commodity, you take a little spoonful of the snuff which the host is now offering in a beautiful porcelain bottle, patterned in flowers. Then you come back with a cigarette. Most of these people know what cigarettes are, though some smoke them with their noses.

“No, thanks!” and he points to his closely-cropped head.

Alexsimevich, who has followed into the hut, explains: “You speak to a priest, he does not smoke.”

A screen hangs before the altar opposite the door. You look hesitatingly at it. Without demur, the lama, at the visible interest, draws back the veil. There, in painted grotesqueness, is Janesron, the red god of Thunder, and bearer of the lightning sword. He glares down with his three eyes upon the sunken orbits of a sheep’s head, laid out as an offering. Black Gumbo, the six-armed good spirit, is also there, and both are surrounded by attendant demons. All are pictured artistically, the minute detail of Tibetan workmanship showing in their squat bodies. The polished wood of the frames is as finely wrought as a Japanese sword-hilt.

On the box-top, beneath the gods, are set out in neat array the best of Mongol dainties. These are disposed in little polished brazen cups shaped like wine-glasses. There are raisins and dried plums, caravan-carried from the far-off Middle Kingdom, and lumps of sugar brought down from Russia in some trader’s pack. Millet fills one cup, water another; each symbolizing some ancient seizin. A wick, sunk in oil, flares in the centre, and casts a flickering, uncanny light upon the deities. Spread on a low seat, six inches above the felt rug on the floor, are rows after rows of boba, the gray Mongol biscuits, in shape like the thick soles of a sandal. As a centre-piece between the stacked loaves rests the brown roasted sheep’s head. It is the feast of the New Year that this unusual volume of offerings betokens. The old year of the Horse passes with the rise of to-night’s new moon. The leap-year—that of the Ram—will then begin. All the families in the eimucks of Mongolia will feast on the grosser part of the offering which now lies in its ranked regularity undisturbed. For the present the priest takes light refreshments while waiting for his midnight rite.

“Will you have some of the tea that has been brewed for you by the old mother while you were looking at the altar?” asks Alexsimevich.

It has been made, not from the loosely-packed leaves, but from the hard tea-bricks. A chunk of this has been cast into the great iron bowl over the brazier when the fagot-fed fire has melted the ice and has brought the water to a boil.

Solemnly you are presented a wooden bowl of tea, which you receive in both hands, and as solemnly sip. The evening meal is cooked and eaten, your sugar reciprocating the lama’s tea.

As the evening wears on, amid the smoke of cigarettes and brass-bowled pipes, the lama brings out quaint paper slips of Buddhist prayers.

“You are interested?” He will write for you a charm. “O mani padmihom,” he tells you. “The Buddhist prayer.”

“Oh, thou jewel in the lotus-flower, hail!” says the interpreter.

It is mighty, this ancient Buddhist prayer, which is murmured by so many millions from Japan to Persia, from Malay to Siberia. It is symbolic, esoterically, of much. The jewel is the soul, the lotus is Buddha, the prayer, a wish that the spirit be in them which was in Saka-muni, their Lord. On endless rosaries this prayer is told. It is on the lips of priests and women, it is carved around the stones which travelers throw upon the obos, the “high-places” of Old-Testament record. It is murmured by the pilgrims as they prostrate themselves. The disciplined body, the praying tongue, and the mind intent on sacred things, all incline the soul to the acquirement of merit.

The lama draws now with his quick hand, trained to the Tibetan script of the Urga monastery-school, sketches of his temple, Zoulzacha Soumé, of his people’s summer tent of cloth, and winter hut of felt. He writes out the Mongol numerals, and explains the cycles of years, in answer to questions regarding the New-Year festival. He describes the puzzling element-and-animal system, by which the chére mari, or earth horse, is 1907, the chére khoni, or earth ram, is 1908, and so on through a sixty-year epoch.

He quotes Mongol proverbs come down from old priests and rulers: “One may buy slaves, but not brothers,” and, in the spirit of Macchiavelli, “You can govern a State by truth as well as you can catch a hare with an ox-cart.”

Now it is nearing moonrise. From his rolled purse the priest draws a small slip of paper ruled into a half-inch checker pattern, in every square of which there is a symbolic group of letters. The lama consults this. Then he brings from the chest beneath the altar a long narrow box in which are strips of faded paper thick as parchment. On these in red and black are traced quaint characters, written, as is our script, from left to right. The priest selects a dozen of his long sheets and puts them carefully on his couch. He touches the box to his forehead and restores it to its place. Then he turns and speaks to the interpreter.

“The lama must make ready for the night of the New Year,” you are told; and as you look, off comes the red sash and yellow robe. The young priest stands up in his vivid blue jacket and walks to the entrance of the gir. From a cupboard he takes a towel, and from the fireplace, ashes. Pouring warm tea into a wooden bowl, he scrubs hands and face with the vigor of an athlete after a run. Then back to the cupboard he goes, and off comes the blue jacket for a clean new silken one. A rich yellow robe is donned. A bright silver knife is slung upon a new red sash which girdles his waist; and smart and erect as an officer of the Guards, the lama steps over, prostrates himself before his deities, then goes out into the night to his temple service.

“Creeds are many, but God is one,” murmurs Alexsimevich.

It is regrettable that the rule of lama celibacy prevents the arrangement of the usual kidnapping marriage-ceremony between this young priest of Zoulzacha, and Amagallan (blissfulness), the belle of the Odjick encampment. It is early in the first moon, Sara, of the year of the Ram, and holiday still reigns in Mongolia. Doubtless she, too, is a sooty Cinderella at other times; but to-day she is a reigning princess, dressed in the best that a father, owner of a hundred sheep, can furnish. A bright new blue coat, lined with fine white lamb’s-wool, is belted around her rather ample waist with a red sash. Her boots are of evident newness. But the triumph, the chef d’œuvre, is her pointed red hat made of the brightest Chinese silk. It is topped with a gold and black knot and is garnished with gold braid. The flaps, turned up at the sides and the back, are of a long silky dark-gray fur. A broad red ribbon fastened behind is brought forward and rests on her breast. She has a feminine eye to its brilliant contrast against the blue dress. Two long tassels of pearls, set in coral-studded silver earrings, frame a rosy, laughing face; for Amagallan is exhilarated with the consciousness of being very well-dressed.

The presence of two young herdsmen in dark red and blue, and one lama of the first degree,—and consequently not estopped from the race, like a full-fledged priest,—bears testimony to the effectiveness of the costume and the girl. The wiles with which she distributes a smile to one, a dried Chinese plum to another, and a mild frown to a third, reveal even more the universal woman. Amagallan is not at all averse to adding to her string three masculine Russians. There are only two foreign nations in Mongolia, Chinese and Russians. Into the latter class come all stray visitants—Americans, Buriats, and Troitzkosavsk teamsters. The girl stands up now and greets this American with a frank hand-shake. She invites him to sit down with the rest. Since there is scriptural permission to eat meat offered to idols, the fact that the evening’s feast has stood at the feet of Buddha need not deter one from partaking of the little dumplings, gray cheese, and dried fruits. Amagallan hands them out on one of those sole-shaped biscuits, which serve as plates until one has eaten what is on them, after which they go down themselves. A fat sheep’s-tail is sliced for your benefit, while a coarse lump of dusky-looking sugar is an ultimate delicacy, eaten as candy. Muddy brick tea follows, of course. The Mongol bread is good, but it takes resolution to do one’s duty by the gray cheese, the resin-like desiccated milk, and the sheep-fat just seethed.

A chatter of conversation goes on, the neighbors drift in and out, and those of our gir, as the evening wears on, make excursions to the other huts and exhibit and drink more muddy tea for politeness’ sake. The hostess in each tent shakes your hand before feeding you. The formality makes you temporarily one of the tribe and family, to be treated with courtesy and hospitality. Thus you are taken into the social life of a simple affectionate people.

We meet in one hut a traveling friar who has tramped sturdily from Tibet, pack on back and prayer-beads on arm, begging, praying, selling relics claiming to cure rheumatism, and the eye-diseases which the smoky huts induce. He carries on a pole an image of Gumbo and others of the dokchits, together with a hodge-podge collection of rosaries, strips of silk, bells, beads, pipe-picks, etc. These are jingled during parts of his prayer, where it is necessary to keep the god attentive.