IN MONGOLIA

Hokitika Guardian, 22 June 1929, Page 2

IN MONGOLIA

~ SHIPS OF THE DESERT. In spite of the full, luminous stars overhead, there is an almost impenetrable gloom over the Mongolian plain. Only if you fall out for a few minutes from the line of march, nnd sit cross-legged for a rest, can you see the vague outlines of loaded camels looming against the stars, writes “0.L.” in the Christian Science Monitor. File after file they go by—lß camels to the file, and in some instances more than 150 camels in the caravan.

It is hard to see that they are even loaded, in that v concealing darkness, for the cargo of the caravan is brick tea, in small, square, heavy packages that lie snugly against the sides of the camels. Yet each is carrying a weight of 3701 b. This is the biick tea of- ageless tradition, which for centuries has been carried ifl the manner of tradition by the Caravans from China that march and camp and march again for hundreds of miles, into the heart of t'fie wastes of Mongolia and beyond, to the oases of Central Asia.

The tea is of the coarsest grade, ; the sweepings and refuse of the warehouses in the far Yangtse valley, compressed into bricks, but coarse though it is, it has several recognised grades. Each, brick is stamped with a mark which is instantly recognised by any unlettered Mongol who cannot read a word of writing, and has a value so fixed that it is as good as currency. It is as likely as not that if the caravan wishes to buy a sheep from some Mongol encampment, the price will be quoted in bricks of tea. night marching. There is only one sound as the caravan drags by. A man, with shoulders humped wearily and waddling stride because of the baggy, heavy, stiff sheep-sikns that he wears with the wool inwards, plods at the head of each file; but as there are 18 camels between him and' the man behind, there is no conversation. It is true that the soft, padded hoofs of the camels strike an irregular rhythm, on the harsh gravel and hard clay of the desert; but that is hardly a noiseonly a swelling of the vague hush of night. The sound, the one sound of the desert is the pulsation of camel

ijbells through the darkness. Swaying •y : from the neck ,of the last camel • in • each file is a cylindrical bell—a massive thing more than a foot in length and the' metal clapper in it, as the camel slouches forward, beats out a broken, throbbing discord. Night marching in the desert, where a man can peer only a few paces ahead into a shifting, unseen world, dulls the senses in a stupefying manner. I have known men to sleep ort their feet. Suddenly, somewhere in the caravan, a bell seems to choke.* Two or three dissonant beats, and it is silent. The silence, interrupting that rhythmic melody of -the march, is like a crash of warning.

Somewhere, 'a leading cord has broken—the cord, attached to a wooden peg in the nose of each camel, by which he is fastened to the load of the camel in front. Instantly the released camel hplts, to snuffle on the ground in search of something to eat. The camels behind him also halt, and the bell on the last camel is no longer heard. From somewhere in the rear a long-drawn shout' quavers through the air—chtl'ch-10-o-o!—brolr-en!—and the man whose camels have dropped out of the line runs back to repair the snapped cord and attach them again. THE CARAVAN MASTER. The master of the caravan, the tried veteran on whose wisdom and skill in finding (Water afad pasiture depend the welfare of the camels and the safety of the men, rides wedged securely on an uncouth wooden saddle, padded with sheepskins, on a small, shaggy, desert-bred pony. Half the time he is asleep, nodding and lurching as the sober pony picks its way througty the night. He has no compass, much less a map, and often lie will even be unable to point to the North Star. Yet if you ask him where is the north, he will wake from his dose, and point true north, with an arm as accurate as the needle of a compass. Then, shifting the direction in which he is pointing a few degrees north of west, he will say, “And to-night we mqrch like that.” He may have been nodding for hours. The night’s 1 march may be over a plain devoid of landmarks, where even the faint undulations of the sky line cannot be distinguished unless a man stoops so as to get the • rim of the world marked against the stars. Yet suddenly the caravan master will rouse himself, whack his heels against the hairy ribs of the pony, and lumber off into the gloom. A few minutes later his shout comes hack. The leading “camel puller” swings off the line of march to find him. Without a word exchanged, he goes straight up to the caravan master, turns sharp to the left, and goes on until his 18 camels are strung out in an evenly spaced line. Then he turns back on his tracks, “snapping the whip” with his camels, until once more he stands near the caravan master, with his camels now at right angles to the rest of. the appioaching caravan. END OF THE MARCH. Then he tugs at the nose-string of the leading camel, crying Sok Sold The camel, gurgling and squealing,

slumps forward and down to , a kneeling position, while those behind it follow suit. In the meantime the leader of the second file has made the same evolution, with the same drillground precision, but on the other side of the caravan master. The third file . ranges itself alongside the first, the fourth alongside the second, and so on, until the whole caravan rs grouped in two rectangular “parks” with an empty space between them. The men divide into pairs, working down the strung-out linos of camels, slipping the loads to the ground. Then they make the camels stand up, led them out into the space between the mathematically ranged loads, and make them kneel again, their backs to the space where the tent will be pitched, and their heads pointing down-wind. The march has come to an end some time in the long middle stretches of the night. At the first glimmer of dawn the camp rouses and the rested camels, now ready to feed, are turned out to graze on bitter desert shrubs. The stranger wakes to find that the caravan master, with uncanny skill, has camped close to what may be the only well within miles. He sees also the reason for the apparently blind marching through the night. If 150 camels had been made to march through the day, and turned loose at night to find grazing for themselves, many by dawn would have wandered out of sight. By letting them graze from dawn from thiough the day, a couple of men, taking turns, can easily keep an eye on them.' It takes times for the stranger, even if he speaks the language, to fall into the swing of caravan life. The caravan men themselves are men of an ancient tradition, to whom has been handed down from father to son, from past master to apprentice, a code that is not of our age at all, but of the Middle Ages. Indeed, it goes back further than that, to the roots of human striving and human endeavour on that barran sage of Central Asia; back to the earliest migrations of the most primitive tribes, and the first instincts of barter, trade, and tlie transport of goods. It' is often a harsh code, and always qn unforgiving one. A mfin is left to suffer and work until he can stand on his own feet. There is little qf help or of kindness that the code enjoins; and there are many things that' it forbids. !

Yet .1 found friends, and generous friends, among these nien who from boyhood had been “on the Gobi,” as they call it, crossing Mongolia back and forth. In' the 130 and more days that I spent among them, ranging from the \ thunderstorms and dust storms of‘summer,, through the golden autumn into the blizzards and wind-driven snow of winter, we marched and camped from _the northern edge, of ChinaJ all through Mongolia to Chinese Turkestan, until, in a world smothered in snow, we looked over a far depression of the desert and saw the first oasis of Central Asia, that we had travelled 1600 miles to reach.

We had travelled, in company, the hardest of all the roads in Mongolia—not the roads of the grasslands of Northern Mongolia, but the Gobi—hidden road, the desert road to Turkestan. Part of the “magic’» of that road is in its stern discipline, and part in the true freedom that comes by discipline. It is hard for me to explain what I mean; but there is . a key to it, in a phrase that Burton wrote —Burton wlio went to Mecca, and was the finest traveller of his age. “Voyaging is victory,” said he.