Chapter 26

The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the uninhabited frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia, where Mongol authorities examine passports and very often turn travelers back

Chinese travelers on their way to Urga; it is unbelievable how many muffled Chinamen and their multifarious junk one Dodge will carry

The Mongol of the Gobi lives in ayourtmade of heavy felt over a light wooden framework, which can be taken down and packed in less than an hour when the spirit of the nomad strikes him

Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by pouring water on sheep’s wool

A receipt, in Russian, was finally given us for our confiscated belongings, and about four in the afternoon, ten hours since we had eaten and five after our arrival, we were at last allowed to drag our shivering frames away in quest of lodging. There are no hotels in Urga, and visitors must appeal to the hospitality of one or another of the stray Europeans living there, of whom, excepting of course the numerous Russians, there seemed to be a single sample of each nationality. I was just sitting down to a belated lunch in the home of Norway’s handsome contribution to this international group when a red-clothed native of the better class dropped in, hat and all. He was a young man of unusual attainments for Mongolia, it seemed, educated at the University of Irkutsk, speaking Russian perfectly, and famous as the only Mongol known who spoke English. In the last accomplishment, however, he had not advanced beyond the bashful stage, and consented to display it only when there was no one to interpret his Russian or his Mongol. He was attached to the foreign office, though soon to leave for Moscow as a member of the Communist Congress there; and he had come, mainly out of personal friendship for my host, to warn me of trouble ahead. A telegram, he told the Norwegian in Russian, had just been received from a station out on the Gobi, announcing that two Americans in a motor-car carrying four persons had killed a Mongol on their way to Urga. He had no intention of making unkindly insinuations against me or my companion, he said, but we were the only Americans who had arrived within a fortnight, the only foreigners who had come within a week, and ours was the only car that had reached Urga for two or three days, as well as the only one in a long time with only four occupants. Moreover, we had carried arms.

Absurd as the covert charge was—for our revolvers had lain unloaded in our baggage throughout the trip—it was not wholly a laughing matter. My compatriot had frequently fired his rifle at antelope along the way, and there was a very slight possibility that a bullet had carried too far. But worse almost than any question of guilt or innocence was the possibility of becoming entangled in the intricacies of a Mongol court of justice. Its point of view would be quite unlike that of our Western judiciary; certainly haste would not be one of its attributes. All at once the rights of extraterritoriality, to which I was legally entitled in Urga even though forcibly deprived of them, seemed no mere forced concession but the only way of being fairly judged in such a predicament in a land and society so utterly alien to my own. Within an hour or so, the Mongol thought, they would come to arrest us, andthough he spoke optimistically of the final outcome, he could not recommend even four or five days in prison as a pleasant week-end. I had already heard something of Urga’s place of detention, the earth cellar of theOkhranawhere we had been examined, in which a score of Russians and as many Mongols were even then huddled together, without a suggestion of daylight, beds, blankets, human conveniences, or anything that could honestly be called food, with nothing but the cold, damp ground to lie on and a scanty bit of garbage to eat and drink. Judging by the cavalier manner in which we had been treated as unaccused and ostensibly free beings, it was not hard to imagine what those rowdy soldiers about the place would do to us as prisoners. I did all possible justice to the lunch before me, for at least if we were to join the community in the icy cellar I wished to be partly filled up and thawed out before beginning the experience.

A hasty council was convened of the few Americans—all visitors—and the more Western Europeans in town. The seriousness with which these treated the situation was anything but reassuring. Their patent distrust and unexpressed dread of the sinister powers then ruling Urga recalled stories of the terror that filled men’s lives in the worst days of the French Revolution. It was plain that it was not a mere matter of proving our innocence, if the authorities chose to make this a “frame-up” to be rid of unwelcome visitors. In the end it was decided that the best plan would be to forestall the authorities, to go at once to the minister of justice before some of his less intelligent underlings received and carried out the warrant for our arrest.

We reached him indirectly through his adviser, who was fortunately a friend of my host. In the late afternoon light of his wholly European study this polished and intelligent man in our ordinary garb looked entirely like a Russian; it was not until next day that his more swarthy tint and the quilted silk robe he wore to office showed him to be a Buriat. He admitted that the telegram in question had been received, and that the warrants would probably be ready within an hour or two—and no doubt served, I reflected, in this leisurely moving world, just in time to drag us out of our beds in the middle of the cold night. But as I had taken the trouble to come and show myself, the Buriat went on, and to explain my movements to his personal satisfaction, he would suppress the warrants for the time being, if all four of us would appear at theyamenof justice, with an efficient interpreter, in the morning.

For all the absurdity of the whole affair there was a sense of reliefin having gained at least a respite, and before dinner was over I had almost forgotten the matter. But when I woke once during that otherwise deathly still Urga night, the howling of two or three of her man-eating dogs had a curiously ominous, almost terrorizing, sound. Only a fortnight before, fifteen men, a former prime minister among them, had been shot in a near-by gully and their bodies fed to these dogs, in the cheery Urga fashion. Those had been Mongols, to be sure, but a score of Russians were even then shivering out the night in the cellar-prison, charged with a hand in the same conspiracy, and from thinking of shooting Russians for treason to actually shooting a stray Caucasian of another nationality for some other alleged crime would be no impossible leap for these “Red”-led, self-satisfied nomads. I had to remind myself several times what a fool I was before I turned over and fell asleep again.

Few things are ever as serious the next morning as when they happened the night before, and I could laugh at my midnight anxieties when I sat down to breakfast. It took some time to get our scattered party together, and a suitable interpreter was not easily picked up, so that it was nearer eleven than ten by the time we found a Russian speaking both English and Mongol and set out for theyamen. But we need not have let a little thing like that worry us. Promptness is neither customary nor welcome in Mongolia; moreover, there are no two timepieces in anything like agreement in all Urga, so that an hour or two one way or the other can always be excused, in the unlikely event of any excuse being expected, on the ground of incompatibility of clocks. What does an hour mean, anyway, in a land where time is merely a vacuum? An American who was just then flirting with the Mongolian Government for an important concession made an appointment with the minister of foreign affairs for ten one morning, and was there on the dot. When he had waited an hour and a half he beckoned to a sub-official and asked whether the minister would be unable to see him that morning, in which case he had other matters requiring his attention.

“Oh, yes,” replied the functionary, “he will see you; but it is not yet ten o’clock.”

However, to come back to our own affairs; we made our way across the stony, dusty, wind-howling open space between the business and the official sections of the holy city in time to avoid any risk of being charged with tardiness. Theyamenof justice was a two-story frame building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese whenthey held the suzerainty over Outer Mongolia, as the flaring roofs, sky-blue façade, dragon-decorated brick screen against evil spirits, palings of crossed sticks to the number of outriders due the prince who once occupied it, and the like, told us without any necessity of inquiring. Two typical Mongol soldiers, resembling Oriental rag dolls that had lain out in the garden for weeks and then been lost for a few days in the coal-bin, lumbered to their booted feet from a fantastic sentry-box in order, as is the habit of their class nowadays, to impress us with their equality and authority by gratuitously delaying us for a few moments, and at last we reached our destination. This was one of the barn-like rooms of the unpretentious building. Near the door rose to the ceiling a big cylindrical Russian brick stove. Around the other three sides of the room ran a raised platform, knee-high and a man’s height in breadth. The reed matting and cushions covering it recalled Japan, but there was nothing Japanese in the way in which the dozen officials stepped upon it from the unswept floor in their heavy boots, all more or less covered with the filth of the streets, and calmly tramped about it or squatted on their haunches. All these functionaries were dressed in Mongol fashion; that is, in long robes of dull red, blue, green, purple, violet, or similar conspicuous color, half obliterated with grease and dirt, topped off with some one of their many fantastic national head-dresses. The latter were never removed, nor were we foreigners expected to take off our hats. In fact there seem to be no social politenesses among this rude nomad people. They neither shake hands, unless they are meeting or aping foreigners, nor bow, like the Chinese, nor use any other gestures of greeting or parting; they stalk into foreigners’ houses in hats and boots; their whole conduct is as if none of the little courtesies and formalities of more highly civilized communities had ever occurred to them, which is probably the case.

The place had electric lights, and from one of the walls hung an ancient European type of telephone, which was frequently jangling or enduring the shrieks of one or another bureaucrat, but which never seemed to bring or transmit any information. Most of the functionaries, big sturdy men who would have looked more at home herding cattle on the plains, squatted near little tables or desks, a foot high, some smoking long pipes with tiny bowls and much silver decoration, others rocking idly back and forth, while their greasy pigtails, swaying to and fro, increased the soiled line they had already drawn down the backs of their gowns. A few were working; that is, writing in their national script, so different from Chinese, on long strips of cheaptissue-paper folded lengthwise and opening like an accordion. Their pens were the camel’s-hair brushes common to the Far East, however, of which each man carried two in a silver scabbard hanging from his girdle; their ink was taken from a little flat stone on which they rubbed their pens sidewise, and their writing-desks were thin squares of board held on their left hands. A big dinner-bell in a corner of the room served to call attendants, or to summon prisoners for the next case to be tried. For justice was being dispensed, leisurely but steadily, all the time we were there. In the center of the raised platform, opposite the door and in the chief place of honor, squatted an imposing man who might easily have been taken for an unusually burly Chinaman, in his darker gown, his mandarin cap with a colored button, his oily cue, and his rimless ear-piece glasses. He was fat, and he was fully aware of his own importance in the Mongolian scheme of things. From time to time a group of prisoners was brought in by one of the coal-bin soldiers, always armed with a fixed bayonet. The accused, all ragged, shivering, and visibly hungry, looking as if they had been living for weeks in an underground dungeon and had been periodically beaten half to death, were forced to kneel on the bare floor and bow their heads down to it several times as an obeisance to the haughty judge. If they failed to do so promptly, they were prodded or thumped to their knees by the soldier. The trial consisted merely of the judge’s questioning the cringing prisoner, during which his honor smoked, stretched himself, and spat copiously on the floor in front of the kneeling culprits. When he was done, he growled out something which may or may not have been a sentence, and the prisoners were led away again. Of the score or more tried while we were there none was released.

Meanwhile other business, such as our own, went serenely on along the side platforms. Some of the scribes or officials wrote on their little boards, some asked questions of an official nature, more chatted and smoked as freely as if they were in a café. Curious individuals dropped in now and then. There was, for instance, a little dried-up Jew with long straggly red whiskers, and a furtive look in his eyes, as if he had been the last survivor of a dozen pogroms. For more than an hour he sat inconspicuously in a corner near the door, holding his aged slouch-hat in his hands, ignored by the contemptuous Mongols, lacking the courage to address them on whatever matter had brought him.

Our own case moved as we would have had it, except in speed. When testimony must be written down in Mongol script with a camel’s-hairbrush on the poorest of paper and the least convenient of desks by an official whose chief code of conduct is never to let any one or anything hurry him under any circumstances, even a simple affair is not quickly disposed of. There was a long argument as to how to turn our extraordinary names into the native hieroglyphics; there were other lengthy discussions during which I found ample time to study not only the scene within the room but the big felt tent of fanciful decoration with a mat-cloth door, in which the minister of justice lived out in the back yard, a true Mongol nomad still, like many of his highly placed fellows. The whole case should really have collapsed like a house of cards, for another telegram had arrived which not merely reduced the crime from the killing of a Mongol man to slightly wounding a Mongol boy in the wrist, but showed that, by the records of our stopping-places, we were at least a day’s travel away at the time; furthermore, the deed had been done at short range with a revolver—on that point the information was insistent—and the most cursory examination of our pistols, in the hands of the secret service department, would have demonstrated that they had not been fired on the way. In fact, it looked rather doubtful whether even the slight crime alleged had been committed; perhaps it was some boyish tale made up to gain sympathy for a scratched wrist. Officially “the incident was closed” almost before we reached theyamen; but that did not hinder us from being three hours there, nor did it make it possible to have the thing written up in its legal form and “deposited in the archives” forty-eight hours later, when the clearing of our reputations was essential to the making of certain other requests with which we were forced to trouble the authorities.

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