CHAPTER IXHOLY URGA
The holy city of Urga squats out on what would be an ordinary Mongolian plain were it not for the rows of hills or low mountains which roll up on either side of it. The landscape is the same yellow-brown, smooth as the fur of the fox, the city, its wide shallow valley, and the rolling hills on the right hand are as utterly devoid of trees or even a suggestion of brush, as the Gobi. Only along the edge, and covering the upper portion, of the range to the west and south, sacred to the “Living Buddha” whose two palace compounds sit at the foot of it, is there any vegetation except the thin brown grass of mountain heights. The soil does not welcome it, for one thing. Even the forests capping the long low sacred mountain, though planted centuries ago and strictly protected, while dense enough, have attained little more than scrub growth. About forty-five hundred feet above the sea and no great distance from the Siberian border, Urga is no tropical haven. They tell me that in summer its middays are sometimes uncomfortably hot; but though it was only the middle of September when we arrived, all the clothing we had brought with us was none too much to shut out the penetrating mountain cold. Five days before, Peking had been sweltering; here the entire population wore heavy quilted garments, from which hardly a bare foot peered among the most poverty-stricken even on the days when a brilliant sun in a glass-clear sky made delightful autumn weather; before the month ended, howling gales of hail and snow swept across the city and blotted out the surrounding hills, to leave them covered with white as far as the eye could see.
The city is built in several towns or sections of distinctly different characters, separated by bare, stony, wind-swept spaces. Besides the old Chinese merchant town back up the valley, and the straggling buildings which partly flank the nature-laid road to it, there is the official town ofyamensand the like, with two great temple compounds closely allied to it, then the now main business and residential section where virtually all non-Mongols live, and farther on, a little higher up theslope of the hills, a whole city completely given up to lamas, with the great sanctuary of Ganden, only high building in Urga, bulking far above it. Then, across the flat valley and several little streams, more than a mile away against the background of the sacred mountain, is the dwelling-place of Bogda-Han, the “Living Buddha,” flanked at some distance by his summer palace on one side and on the other by clusters of buildings housing the things and the men who serve him. Lastly there are scores ofyourts, the low round felt tents of Mongolia, scattered at random outside the permanent city, particularly to the north, the homes of true nomads who will not be without the comforts of their portable houses even though they live in the holy national capital.
For that matter, many of the dwellers in the city itself still cling to the customs and architecture of the plains from which they came. Mongol princes and saints, of whom there is a generous number in Urga, cabinet ministers and judges, may have a rather Russian type of frame house within their compounds, but the chances are that they do their actual living in their felt tent beside it. Theyourtsare said to be uncomfortably warm in summer, whence the tendency of those who are wealthy by Mongol standards to copy European dwellings; but when the first early frosts come they like the low crowded tent, with its intense dung-fire heat, its sense of coziness, even the smell of the sifting smoke of their pungent fuel, that has come down to them from their hardy nomadic forefathers. The story is told of some high-placed Mongol to whom fell a fine big room in one of the government buildings of the expelled Chinese, who complained that it was as bad as living outdoors and demanded either that another small low room be built for him within it or that he be allowed to conduct his official business in his tent.
Urga is as wholly made up of walled compounds as any Chinese city; but here the walls, instead of being of stone or baked mud, are of upright pine logs, bark and all, some ten feet high and set so tightly together that only here and there can one peer through a crack. Between these frowning palisades, broken for block after block only by identical gates which are a cross between a wooden arch and a Japanesetoriiwith three uncurved crosspieces, and painted a dull red, run, not streets, but haphazard passageways deep in dust, mud, or mere stony soil, according as nature left them—grim defenseless lanes full of the offal of man and beast, of putrid carcasses and gnawed bones, and always overrun with groups of those surly, treacherous big black wilddogs of Urga, ready the instant they feel they have mustered sufficient force to pounce upon and drag down the passer-by. Inside, the compounds are bare and unswept yards, for filth means nothing to the Mongol, and the planting of a flower or a shrub is far beyond his stage of civilization. A house or two, even three, perhaps as many felt tents, a tethered horse, a heap of dried dung fuel, and the inventory is complete. A small stream, its banks heaped high with filth and garbage, lined with foraging dogs and squatting Mongols, crossed by half a dozen precarious bridges culminating in the red one sacred to the “Living Buddha,” which is barred against every-day traffic, meanders disconsolately through the gloomy town. For there is a gloominess, an ominousness about Urga which even the great gleaming gold superstructures of its many temples and shrines, so brilliant as to cow the eye on days of clear sunshine, do not dispel.
A few streets of the central town, to which commerce is confined, are flanked by shops of a hybrid Chinese-Russian character, the great majority of which are inwardly establishments quite like those of China, though often scanty of goods and with a discouraged air in these days of oppressive rule. Then there are numerous open-air markets more worth visiting for their picturesqueness than for their wares. In one wide dusty space Mongolian ponies are put through their paces for prospective purchasers; camels or oxen may be had near-by on certain days; then, there are several blocks lined with displays of furs, mainly of sheep and goats in this season, but now and then offering wild pelts at reasonable figures. Shop after shop is filled from floor to low shack roof with the gaudy boots worn indiscriminately by all Mongols; little portable booths or stands overflowing with every manner of silly and useful trinket, chaotic collections of second-hand hardware spread on the ground, more or less itinerant purveyors of used garments and of the heavy silver ornaments that go with Mongol dress, each strive in their turn to attract and detain the stroller. Almost all these merchants, from horse-dealers to hawkers of lama rosaries and alleged photographs of the “Living Buddha,” are Chinese; the Mongol is frankly a nomadic herdsman and scorns any other occupation. Even in the purulent meat and vegetable market stretching along the carrion-lined stream just outside our window there were but few native venders. The more lowly members of the tribe might consent to slash up and distribute the still bleeding carcasses of cattle and sheep which Urga consumes in surprising daily quantities; even out on the plains that is a necessary and respectable task. But as theMongol considers it unholy to cultivate the ground, the huge carrots, the turnips larger than cocoanuts, the squashes, potatoes, cabbage, lettuce,kaoliang, millet, and corn-meal all came from the truck-gardens of Chinese in inconspicuous hollows about the city and were sold only by them. Millet andkaoliangand rock-salt were about the only non-flesh wares appealing to the natives, anyway, for boiled meat, each mouthful slashed off before the lips with a sheath-knife, as among thegauchosof South America, is almost an exclusive diet with them the year round.
There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its architecture and streets which gives this feeling. The poor, and most of the despised foreigners, may or must go on foot, but the true Mongol, male or female, young or old, layman or lama, is by nature a horseman. Even the women, in their incredibly heavy ornaments and cumbersome garments, sit the tight little wooden saddles covered with red cloth as if they were part of the jogging animal beneath them. Children ride as easily and as soon as they can walk. Horsemen are so numerous and so fundamental in the Mongol scheme of things that the pedestrian has only secondary rights in the soft-footed streets of Urga. It is not so much his natural rudeness, nor even his inbred scorn for the horseless, which makes the Mongol so apt to ride down the walker unless the latter sidesteps. Probably it has never occurred to him, any more than to his horse, that all other movable beings should not necessarily always make way for him.
Besides the omnipresent Mongol pony there are strings of haughty camels from, or off again to, the desert; there are oxen and their crudest of two-wheeled carts, and now and again a yak, or a cross between this and the native cattle, identified mainly by its thick bushy tail. It is not only this quaint long-haired animal from the roof of Asia which reminds one of the close relationship between Mongolia and its distant neighbor, Tibet. The lengthwise Tibetan script stands beside the upright Mongolian on the façade of more than one building and on many a monument; not a few of the friendly-looking, darker-tinted natives of the lofty land behind the Himalayas, recognizable also by their different garb, the right arm and shoulder protruding from the cloak, may be met in the market-places; when the visitor begins to poke his nose into religious matters he finds that Tibet is much closer to him than he suspected.
Though there are sights of an inanimate nature in Urga that are well worth seeing, it is especially the unique and striking costumes of her people which cause bitter resentment for the confiscation of a camera. The Mongols are as fond of gaudy colors as the Andean Indians, though somewhat less given to barbaric combinations of them. Of a score of laymen often no two wear robes of the same hue; red, purple, blue, green, and all the combinations and gradations between them may be seen in any gathering outside religious circles. Men who pride themselves on their liberality toward the outside world show a fondness for ugly slouch-hats of a cheap quality that quickly fades to a nondescript hue. But these are so few as to be conspicuous among their orthodox fellows, who display a variety in head-dress which I have not the energy to attempt to describe. Suffice it to say that these are all striking, both in color and form, and that the overwhelming favorite seems to be the pagoda-shaped thing with a ball, generally of colored glass, on top, and side-wings of fur. This is common to both laymen and lamas and is said to have been originally copied from a sacred peak of central Asia.
But it would be unchivalrous to expect the men, even of an Oriental race in which the women form the bottom layer of society, to outdo the other sex in effective decoration of the cranium. Until I came to Mongolia I had been laboring under the delusion that in my various wanderings about the globe I had already run across the final word in woman’s head-dress. I humbly apologize, and hereby bestow the leather medal upon the ladies of Urga, without the least fear of ever again having to modify my decision. In intricacy, ugliness, fearsomeness, unportability, wastefulness, absurdity, not to say pure idiocy, their contraption surely outdistances all competitors, at least in our own little solar system.
It starts, so I have been assured by those of wider experience and reputation for veracity, often at virtual baldness, which under the circumstances, or under such a head-dress, is not surprising. Over this goes a skull-cap of silver in elaborate designs, weighing, if the eye be permitted to judge what the fingers may not touch, several pounds. I am no ladies’coiffeur, and I may be getting the cart before the horse, but it is my strong impression that the hair comes next, most of it the hair of some one else, naturally, or at least hair which has ceased to derive its direct nourishment from its wearer. In color and texture, too, it has a way of recalling the tail of a horse, though this may be mere coincidence. First of all the hair forms a wig; then it flares outand is wound, in single strands that give it a cloth-like texture, round and round two horns that are thin and flat but wider and longer than those of the water-buffalo, which the lady with these appendages protruding well beyond her shoulders considerably resembles. Across the horns, front and back, at close intervals, run inch-wide bars of silver—replaced by wood or other substitutes in poverty-stricken cases—while from the ends, perhaps as a concession to the timid spectator who cannot rid himself of the fear of being gored, are suspended braids or cords reaching to the waist. A lady of reasonable tastes might conclude that this is enough, but there are innumerable opportunities for adding other silver and colored decorations, and naturally one needs a hat over one’s hair, so that milady of Urga piles on top, at the jaunty angle of a first-year sailor, one of the fur-sided, pagoda-shaped helmets favored by the men, thereby crowning herself in a manner befitting the rest of her costume. Let not the hasty reader get the impression that this ponderous and deeply cogitated head-dress is confined to the consorts of princes and saints, nor relegated to festive occasions and popular hours. The old woman who sold half-decayed fruit opposite our window wore the whole contraption, and all available evidence goes to show that it is as seldom removed as is the fly-trap hat of the Korean male. Indeed, it would be impossible to reconcile daily hair-dressing with the early hours at which many a fully clad woman appears. One easily surmises that this unbelievable millinery was copied from the cattle that have been the Mongols’ constant and chief companions for many centuries; but why hang the horns on the woman? Is it to keep before the mind that she, too, is a dangerous creature, or is it a means of training her in patience and the uncomplaining endurance of lifelong impediments, like the crippled feet of the women of China?
In ordinary circles the rest of the female costume of Mongolia would attract attention, but under the national head-dress it is almost inconspicuous. It includes big puffed sleeves, for instance, not unlike those of the Western world a generation ago, but filled with something that makes them hard and solid, and lifts the puffs some six inches above the shoulders. Unseemly exposure of the person is not a Mongol fault. Though personal habits of an indescribable nature are constantly in evidence among both sexes and all classes, there is never anything even remotely reminiscent of the freedom of a bathing-beach in more civilized lands. The woman’s thick, quilted, colorful jacket-gown covers her from tonsils to instep; her long sleeves serve her, Chinese fashion, as gloves; though it is known that she wears heavylumber-jack trousers quite like those of her husband, even her trim ankles, if she has them, are never in evidence, for she thrusts her feet into the same mammoth boots which are universal beneath all ages, ranks, callings, and degrees of sanctity.
The Mongol boot, as I may have said before, is knee-high, of soft leather, usually red and most elaborately decorated, the toe turned up like the prow of Cleopatra’s barge, and it is made much too large for the foot, in order that many layers of thick socks may be worn in wintry weather. The extraordinarily slow pace of life in Urga is partly due, beyond a doubt, to the necessity of stalking about like a hobbled prisoner in such boots; but then, they were never made for walking, which is not a natural Mongol means of locomotion. The favorite one is the single-foot pony, with a kind of Indian rawhide reins, stirrups so short that the rider seems to be kneeling, and a tight little red saddle. It is an old joke in Urga that a Mongol would make an excellent cook—if he could ride about the kitchen on horseback. As the women as well as the men ride astride, with the easy abandon of born cowboys, it is perhaps as well that most of them cling to their marvelous head-dress, for without it there is little to distinguish between the sexes.
It is said that almost half the population of Urga are lamas. Certainly there are thousands upon thousands of them, swarming everywhere, in the market-town as well as in their own temple-topped sections, sometimes on horseback, more often plodding through the slovenly streets in their ponderous boots. Their round clipped heads, in contrast to the long cues of laymen, are often bare in any weather. It is visually evident, without asking questions, that they wear no trousers under their long quilted robes, which are similar to those of the marriageable men, yet easily distinguishable from them. Their gowns, originally saffron-yellow or brick-red in color, are well suited to the mahogany tint which the cold of high plateaus gives the Mongol cheeks; but they are so invariably dulled by grease, filth, and rough desert living as to suggest that this is considered the most holy and fitting state for seekers after a pseudo-Nirvana. Cleanliness certainly has no relation whatever to godliness in this unedifying religion of creaking prayer-wheels and barbaric hubbub; laity and lamas alike seem frankly to scorn it. Now and again one saw a prince who had just donned his winter garments, or a group of high lamas rode by in gleamingly new saffron or red robes, the yellow streamers from theirhigh hats trailing behind them, clad in the most spotless of beautiful silks. But there is evidently something unmanly about such a condition, for those even of the highest class seem to make haste to reduce themselves to the common dirty drab, as some of our youths “baptize” a new pair of shoes. From high to low the Mongols are an unlaundered people, like so many dwellers in semi-desert lands, apparently never subjecting their clothing to any cleansing process—so filthy in fact that even the Chinese call them dirty!
Yet these big brawny Mongols of the Gobi, beside whom the Chinese look delicate and harmless, bring history home to the beholder in a striking fashion. It was easy to imagine these fearless nomad horsemen banding together under a Jenghiz Khan and sweeping down upon the rich but weaker people to the southward; once in Mongolia, that breeding-ground for many centuries of new virility for the human race, as it were, it was no longer hard to understand why the timorous but diligent Chinese should have spent such incredible toil to fling a wall across their whole northern frontier, in the vain hope of shutting themselves off from these dreaded barbarians, scorning civilization but ever ready to loot it of its fruits. Now and again I met a prince—not a pampered weakling of a run-down stock, like so many who bear that title in the West, but big powerful fellows who could ride their horses day after day like centaurs, sleep out on the open plain, and master their great herds with the pole-and-noose lasso as easily as any of their herdsmen subjects—handsome Mongol princes with a truly regal poise and dignity, for all the countless grease-spots on their silken gowns, whom one could readily picture in the rôle of another Jenghiz Khan.
Speaking of those halcyon days of the Mongols seven centuries ago, there seems to be but little differentiation in the minds of historians between them and the Tartars; but in Mongolia to-day there is a wide gulf between these two peoples. What is known as a Tartar in Urga at least, where a few score of them dwell, is no longer a warrior but has degenerated into a tradesman, a close bargainer wearing mainly European garb, with a little velvet cap always on his head, topped off by one of fur when he sallies forth into the street. He is a Mohammedan, too, and the Mongol certainly is not. Once he seems to have been at home in central Mongolia; now he lives far to the West, scattered through the regions about Bokhara, Kashgar, and Samarkand. In much greater numbers and influence in Urga to-day are two other semi-Europeanized peoples,—the surly Kalmucks from western Mongoliaand Sungaria, and the Buriats, Mongol by race but grown half Russian during generations under the rule of the czars in an annexed province, and by long intermixture with their more Caucasian fellow-subjects.
But though Urga so nearly coincides with that Karakoram which was still the capital of Jenghiz Khan when his vast conquests ended, one feels even there that the power of the Mongol is broken, that with his debauching idolatry and his all but universal taint with one of the most abhorred of diseases, he will never again have the initiative and the energy to band together into a menace to more advanced civilizations. He will do surprisingly well, in fact, if he succeeds in his new attempt to govern himself. The traveler cannot but be struck by the astonishing scarcity of children in Mongolia, especially if he has just come from Japan and China, until he learns that fully a third of the population of the country as a whole are lamas, and notes the prevalence of missing noses among both sexes and all classes in the streets of Urga. The most educated Mongol, in our Western sense, with whom I came in contact declared that within a century his race will completely have disappeared. While there is probably undue pessimism in so flat a statement, there are many signs that the people which once subjugated nearly all Asia and stopped only at the Danube in Europe is to-day on the same swift downward path as the American Indian they in so many ways resemble.
As befits a holy city, Urga is overrun with temples, shrines, monasteries, and all the myriad paraphernalia of lamaism, that degenerate, repulsive, yet picturesque offshoot of Buddhism, centered in Tibet but clinging with a tenacious hold to all Mongolia. Take away everything concerned with her religion, and the Mongol capital would shrink to a mere filthy village. Most conspicuous of its structures is the shrine or temple of Ganden, towering not only above the lama town about it but over the whole city. A stony and sandy hollow separates this monasterial section from the secular one, but when one has climbed the further slope of this he finds himself wandering through just such another maze of narrow, dunghill streets shut in by high wooden palisades. Here it will be doubly wise to carry a heavy stick, for not only are the savage black dogs that everywhere dot the landscape in and about Urga particularly numerous and ravenous in this log-built labyrinth, but they are accustomed to seeing only lamas in their dirty robes, and foreign garb quickly attracts their unwelcome attention.At least in theory there are no women in lama-town, and as lamaism is not a religion calling for congregations, even native laymen are conspicuous in this section by their absence.
As the stroller comes out upon an open space on the summit of the low, broad hillock, he finds before him not only the great central edifice of Ganden, built in Tibetan fashion of a square stone wall many feet thick, with deep window-embrasures of fortress-like size, topped by three overhanging stories in wood, but also many lower yet no less ornate buildings flanking and surrounding it. From these, in all likelihood, proceed barbarous sounds of drum-beating, the hammering of big brass disks, a cabalistic chanting, and yet more awe-inspiring noises the source of which he cannot identify. Huge cylinders on the high corners of Ganden, many of its absurd outer ornaments, and much of the superstructure of the lower buildings are covered with gold, upon which the cloudless sun gleams richly. If it is “school” or service time, only a score or so of ragged, besmeared beggars, most or all of them lamas, will be in sight, scattered along the outer walls or in the gateways of the religious structures. One of the largest of these is built like a mammoth Mongol tent, with a saucer-shaped roof, and inside, if a lone Caucasian wanderer has the courage to march through the gate and step into the open doorway in the face of hundreds of scowling bullies in once-red robes—for the “orthodox” yellow of more genuine Buddhism is much more rare in Urga—he will behold a veritable sea of lamas, squatted back to back on wide low wooden benches more or less covered with soiled cushions, in rows so close together that a cat could scarcely squirm between them, and stretching so far away in every direction that one must stoop low to see beneath the idolatrous junk suspended from the low rafters, even as far as the dais in the center of the building. Here sits what I suppose we would call an abbot, leading the services or instructing the gathering in the fine points of lamaism. For this is a kind of seminary, a lama university to which sturdy red-robed males come from all over Mongolia and beyond, to perfect themselves in the intricate hocus-pocus of their faith, in which a bit of Buddhism is swamped by the grossest forms of demonology and ridiculous superstitions. The students are of no fixed age; burly men in the forties and sensual-faced old fellows who are soon to feed the dogs are almost as numerous as impudent youths already soiled and begrimed in true lama fashion. For hours at a time this huge gathering rocks back and forth on its haunches, intoning supplications under the lead of the abbot, sometimes chanting its litanies to the accompaniment of a “music” so barbaric as to send shivers up the unaccustomed spine, meanwhile moving the hands in distorted gestures prescribed by the ritual. Their devotions consist mainly of the endless repetition of the same brief prayers, mumbled over and over until the monotony promises to drive the listening stranger to sleep or to distraction. The notion is that this never ceasing iteration of the same scant theme will withdraw the minds of the devotees from worldly things and fix their attention on that nothingness which is the goal of the seeker after Nirvana; it needs but a slight acquaintance with lamas, however, to show that the real effect is to make them mere mumbling automatons, with minds as narrow and as shallow as their monotonous invocations.