The Gobi : Searching the sands of the Mongolian People’s Republic for spirit of 13th-Century conqueror Genghis Khan

The Mongolian plane’s wheels bounced three times on the Gobi Desert gravel, sending up a cloud of red sand and stones. Droning as it taxied a short distance, the propjet stopped at a compound of yurts.

Minutes before, from the air, the campsite had looked like a collection of white pinheads stuck into a vast burnt sienna wasteland.

Now, at ground level, a capricious wind welcomed us to the Mongolian People’s Republic, also called Outer Mongolia, where the pebbly terrain stretched to a green ribbon in the sky at the horizon.

I felt a rush of excitement, hoping that in this seemingly barren desert I would find traces of Genghis Khan’s hordes from the 13th Century.

A Kirghiz--squarely built woman--wearing traditional boots and a dusty del (robe) greeted us with a white-toothed smile and started to make a fire in the wood stove sitting in the middle of our large dome-shaped yurt.

Although it was a windy 50 degrees, I said: “ Nyet, spahsebah .” (No, thank you.) Somehow, the thought of a fire in June on the Gobi was not appealing.

My daughter, Donna, and I tossed our few possessions onto two of the yurt’s four beds (our luggage had been left at the hotel in Ulan Bator to lighten the plane’s load).

We examined the cheerful interior of our circular 20-foot diameter yurt, and checked to make sure the door faced south, as all proper yurts since Genghis Khan’s time have done to protect against evil spirits and the north wind.

Donna decided to sleep on the left side, traditionally the woman’s; I took the right. Had Zhuulchin, Mongolia’s travel agency, abided by ancient laws, a Buddhist altar would have stood opposite the door. Instead, there was a red wooden table and a mirror.

The room was a kaleidoscope of color: Everything--stools, storage compartments, beds and 82 slender spokes supporting the felt roof--was meticulously painted with warm colors in small, graceful scrolls.

A cotton fabric of green patterns lined the inside bottom section of the yurt, hiding an expandable wood lattice framework covered with two layers of thick pressed-felt pads. On the outside, a white canvas cover served as protection against sand and wind. In winter, three more felt layers would be added for warmth.

The yurt was a replica of those used in the 13th Century when the Mongols swept over Asia, conquering half of the known world from the China Sea to the Danube.

Our yurt was different in two significant ways: It would never be pulled on a wide-wheeled cart by 100 yoked oxen, as ancient yurts had been, and an electric bulb hung on a wire from the roof’s stove-pipe opening.

As far as the eye could see to the Gurvan Saikhan foothills, there seemed to be no habitation other than in our ail (compound) of 40 yurts for nomadic tourists, small stone buildings for showers (cold), toilets (clean), a dining hall, a store housed in a trailer, 10 workers’ small wood houses and a tiny generating plant.

After the plane took off in another long stream of dust, the only sound in the vast solitude was that of wind blowing in my ears.

When I walked away from the compound to explore the Gobi, I had to lean into the wind, turned turbulent, sweeping out of China 100 miles south.

I listened for the spirits in the wind calling my name as they had called to the khans and to Marco Polo when he crossed the Gobi on his way to China.

He wrote about hearing the spirits talking: “And sometimes you shall hear the sound of musical instruments, and the sound of drums.” On the vast steppe I thought it would not be unnatural to hear spirits in the wind. And who is to say that I did not hear a yatza and limbe (Mongolian harp and flute)? Or was the sound still in my head from music I had heard the night before in Ulan Bator?

Although the sun was reassuring I felt a sense of loneliness, but adjusted to it by observing small details that revealed surprises among grass so fine and sparse that I hesitated to walk on the blades.

Scattered like miniature amethyst jewels, wild irises nodded against the wind amid a litter of limestone, crystal, basalt and jasper gravel on the desert floor. Bleached animal skulls and bones every 10th mile or so reminded me that 35 miles away, in the Altai foothills, dinosaur bones and eggs had been discovered in 1922.

Knowing nothing about paleontology, I guessed that the weathered bones I found were unlikely to be 75 million years old. I came to a rutted track obviously made by modern vehicles. Had it also been used centuries ago by Genghis Khan’s couriers?

It faded in the gullies and hillocks in the direction of the Great Wall of China at Pa-ta-ling, north of Beijing, causing me to summon a vision of long caravans on an ancient route carrying silk, gold, spices, ivory and silver from Cathay’s merchants to czarist Russia.

But the only inhabitants along the road were families of cow mice, fat enough to prove they found adequate food. They reminded me that I had not eaten since I left Ulan Bator, seven hours before.

After a lunch of coarse bread, cucumbers, rice and mutton stew, we climbed into a Russian GAZ 69 jeep with Borchi, an energetic young Mongolian. I asked him, “Do you think that track was used by ancient caravans, maybe Genghis Khan’s horsemen?”

Borchi waved south, “Road from Peking, now Beijing, to here, to Urga, now Ulan Bator, maybe to Turkey.”

“Moscow too?” I asked.

“Maybe. Caravan need nine months to cross Gobi.”

Borchi drove like a man with a tight deadline toward the Yol Valley 20 miles west. Gradually the semiarid steppe faded as we climbed into graceful foothills sprinkled with barberry, wild strawberries and onions and timid patches of wild azaleas. Suddenly, like a stage curtain going up on a new scene, we were in a canyon.

Borchi parked the GAZ and, smiling conspiratorially, pointed to a surfaced underground stream thick with ice.

“Never melts,” he proclaimed, with the pride of a Frigidaire engineer. We turned up the collars of our jackets and hiked through the spectacular canyon where several large ice-covered ponds defied more preconceived ideas about the Gobi’s ecosystem.

In the shadow of rock cliffs, with geometrical striations of white limestone, the ice fields are tenacious through swings of temperature from below freezing to above 100 degrees.

The surreal shapes in the narrow canyon, with vivid encrustations of orange lichen on rocks and a green grass floor, seemed to have been designed by the extravagant hand of an erratic artist. A path twisted treacherously around sharp edges of towering rock walls. Every sound bounced back, not as an echo but dully amplified. It had probably been a lair for thieves who lived by plundering caravans.

Wild Camels Silhouetted

Yet it was a place of mysterious, cold beauty. When we returned to the GAZ, Borchi was splitting pieces of limestone. Some showed traces of green. “Jade!” he said.

From the Yol Valley we drove back into the heat of the Gobi where a mirage shimmered in the distance, with wild camels silhouetted in the waves. We stopped to watch a large flock of grazing sheep and from a distance an aging arat (herder) came riding a shaggy brown Bactrian camel.

The Mongolian patiently posed for photographs while watching his flock disappear over a rise of land. With long, thin Manchurian chin whiskers, the herder looked serenely regal, like a proud descendant of Genghis Khan, in spite of his mixed ensemble of a much-worn padded purple robe, boots, tennis hat and old aviator goggles.

He condescended to accept our gifts of cigarettes and penknife, mounted his camel that was reined with a wood peg in the nostrils, and trotted off after the sheep.

Several kilometers along the dusty track we passed a wild stallion and three mares grazing, then Borchi turned north through the short grass. “See Mongols,” he explained. Six rough miles over eroded ravines supporting only low shrubs and white spikes of caragana took us to a gray yurt.

Incongruously, a motorbike was parked near a pair of hobbled camels. A family with a shy chubby child seemed to be expecting visitors.

Fulfilling our fondest wish, they invited us into the yurt and served tarag , a delicious yogurt of goat’s milk, and small sugarless cookies.

Pictures Displayed

Fuel for the stove came from a bucket of khorgal (dried camel dung), which burns blue with odorless smoke.

Bed rolls were laid on the ground, and in place of an altar along the north wall, family pictures were displayed. The grass inside the yurt was still green, arousing suspicion that their movable house had been set up in the very recent past, possibly for us.

The romantic idea that nomads roam the Gobi, herding their animals as they did through intermittent periods of freedom and terror during Genghis Khan’s era, is dispelled by knowing that 73% of the total livestock is socially-owned property.

The road to communism really began after the Khan and Tamerlane dynasties ended in 1707, when the tribes of Outer Mongolia were brought under the hated Manchurian control.

The Mongolians revolted against this feudalism in 1911 during the Chinese Revolution, reestablishing the short-lived Mongolian theocratic monarchy that lasted through the People’s Revolution in 1921, until 1924 when the last living Buddha died.

By 1959, 99% of the individual arat economies had been organized into socialist production under independent communist rule.

Although in physical appearance the Mongolian people are obviously related to the Chinese, their hearts and minds are more closely aligned with the Soviets, who lend financial and engineering assistance. Years of hardship, torture and heavy taxation under Chinese domination have not faded from memory.

Very Little Change

Only a few Mongolians are traditional nomads, herding and living in movable felt yurts. For them it’s a simple life with little competitive stress.

Other than the presence of utility wires, it seems that in 700 years not much has changed on the Gobi since the Golden Horde rode back and forth here plundering as well as bringing law and periodic stability.

We wondered how a conquest of half the known world could leave so few traces, so four days later we flew west to Karakorum. We wanted to see where Genghis Khan had established his sumptuous capital and prosperous commercial center.

From there his laws and commands to all points of the vast empire had been carried in sealed tubes by couriers riding the swiftest ponies, covering as many as 200 miles a day.

Again our plane landed on the desert. From the oasis-spa of Hujert we rode on a fertile plateau with many cultivated acres of wheat.

At the end of a dirt track we reached Karakorum where the Great Khan’s standard of nine white yak tails had guarded plundered treasures of gold and silver, and granaries of rice, mullet and wheat. The people of his court had worn jewels and lavish silks, and lived in gold-encrusted yurts.

A short walk took us to the Endene-Zuu monastery standing in solitary splendor surrounded by a wall with 108 stupas, memorials to sanctified lamas of the 16th Century.

Field of Wildflowers

To gain entrance into the kind of atmosphere Genghis Khan would have known, we had to bang on the great wooden door until we were finally admitted into another century.

Four well-preserved temples faced a wide field dotted with wildflowers. The brilliantly white temple of Lavran seemed serenely beautiful, with horizontal bands and ovals of green and gold.

On every square inch inside the temples were displays of red and gold statues, and silk hangings arranged according to Buddhist protocol.

No lamas spend years here praying for enlightenment, yet the temples are kept in good repair and seem indomitable, as if waiting for the return of the faithful. But we had come to find Karakorum.

We expected to find something. Perhaps the remains of a famous fountain that had dispensed from separate pipes several wines and mare’s milk. Or an enshrined bed the khan had slept on. Or a few white yak tails.

What we found was a magnificent view and a single large stone, carved in the shape of a tortoise that seemed to be laughing. Time had eroded what the Chinese had not destroyed.

Even though all that remains on the site from which Asia and beyond had been ruled was this solitary stone figure, the journey through the magnificent Gobi to reach it was reward enough.

For travelers who want more than spectacular scenery there are replicas of Mongol equipment, costumes and splendid period displays in the Ulan Bator Museum.

Only History Remains

To be sure, only history remains of a once-mighty empire, and that’s enough for many Mongolians, who still refer to Genghis Khan as Borchi did when he said: “Our mighty Khan rode here.”

My 23-day tour was scheduled by General Tours, P.O. Box 862, Cooper Station, N.Y. 10276, toll-free (800) 221-2216. The trip included visits to Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal and Ulan Bator, plus three nights in the Gobi Desert. The cost, from Los Angeles, runs from $4,169 to $4,419. Single supplement is $450.

A shorter 19-day tour is available from the Russian Travel Bureau (an American company), 225 East 44th St., New York 10017, (800) 847-1800. This operator eliminates Tashkent but includes an overnight journey on the Trans-Siberian Express from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, and two days in the Gobi. The price, from Los Angeles, is $4,099 to $4,229, with single supplement of $290.

Anniversary Tours, 330 7th Ave., New York 10001, (800) 223-1336, offers an 18-day tour that includes one night in Tokyo, overnight in the Gobi, the Trans-Siberian Express from Ulan Bator to Khabarovsk and overnight in Nagata, Japan. Prices: $4,350 to $4,550, with single supplement of $600.

Most tours to the Gobi are scheduled from May to September when the weather is warmest. But warm clothes are still needed during the summer months, as well as sun-block lotion.