In Search of Genghis Khan by Tim Severin

Author:Tim Severin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

10 - Cattle-herders

On the brow of the pass, which we reached at 11 the next morning, stood the biggest obo we had yet seen. There must have been about 40 tons of small rocks and stones heaped up in a great pile by passers-by thankful to have toiled up to the end of their climb. Adding a stone to an obo or walking in a circle respectfully around it assisted the remission of sins and led towards a better reincarnation, according to Buddhist belief. Years of human effort and piety were represented in that untidy mass of rock, which continued to accumulate, and its sheer size and permanence made a mockery of the scheme once fostered by Party activists that all obos in Mongolia should be dismantled and levelled as they were objects of empty superstition. Also you could see why the place was so significant to travellers that they had wished to raise a monument there. We had come to a natural dividing line in the land. After we had ridden our horses in a clockwise circle around the cairn, we paused to rest the animals and, looking back, saw how we had crossed a country of deep narrow valleys and forested mountains. Ahead there were no more trees. From where we stood the land descended in a series of gradual folds with the higher slopes covered only with rough grazing or bare screes of broken shale. Here and there layers of harder rock thrust out as jagged ledges or made coxcombs on the skyline. Below us the pasture on the valley floors was much paler than before, insipid and dotted with round boulders. This was a landscape harsher and more barren than the better-favoured central Hangay, and in the furthest distance where the hills ended lay the beginning of the Great Mongolian Desert.

As if to emphasise the more austere character of the countryside, the first ger we reached after we had ridden downslope for 3 or 4 miles was a truly melancholy place. A man and his four small children were living in very reduced circumstances. There was no colour in the ger, no decoration, only a functional collection of pots and pans, a stove and a few blankets on the bedsteads. The children were quiet and spiritless. They stood staring at us as though in mild shock, showing little animation. ‘Their mother died recently,’ the Doc explained in a low voice. ‘The family unit is still together, but they are living through very difficult times. Unless the father finds another woman quickly, he will not be able to continue this way of life. He will have to leave the children with their grandparents and go to the city to get work, or maybe stay in the local somon centre as a labourer. A herdsman must have a wife to share the daily tasks. Without a woman to help, he cannot make his living.’ It was a bleak statement of the knife-edge existence of the poorer arat.

We found that we were passing from the land of the Horse-herders to the land of the Cattle-herders.

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