Harry Alverson Franck

Across the broken valley at a gallop came two mounted men who turned out to be Mongol soldiers, picturesque certainly, but not otherwise particularly inviting. As they rode, they waved their rifles wildly in the air, and were apparently bellowing to us orders which the raging wind carried away before the sounds reached us. When they drew near, their uniforms proved to be the usual costume of the lower-class Mongol—heavy red knee-boots, pagoda-like fur hats, and a faded, quilted kind of bath-robe gown covering the rest of their iniquities; but on their chests and backs were sewed two cloth patches a foot square on which were several upright lines of Mongol writing, announcing their official capacity. But for these we might easily have mistaken them for bandits, for both their manner of riding down upon us and their air toward us when they had arrived suggested that they had captured booty and prisoners for ransom rather than that they had merely come to escort us to town.

One of them, it appeared from their actions, must get into the car with us; the other would have to ride in with the horses. Like children who very rarely have the chance of an automobile-ride, they quarreled and argued for a long time, while the biting wind snapped and lashed at us, as to which was entitled to the privilege, meanwhile flourishing their aged rifles with a carelessness that made even such time-honored weapons dangerous. At length one of them won the point and climbed unceremoniously aboard, mopping his muddy feet on our robes, stretching himself out at ease partly on our knees, partly on our most breakable baggage, and poking us, perhaps unintentionally but none the less unpleasantly, in the ribs with the business end of his loose-triggered rifle, while the loser sourly turned away with the horses and the expression of a six-year-old who had been deprived of his toys and driven from the playground.

We forded half a dozen stony little streams, for the going had become abominable in ratio as we approached Urga; we were waved hither and yon across the valley by other rifle-shaking, vainly shouting soldiers, and finally brought up at an ordinary little round felt hut with a smoking stovepipe protruding from its top. It must have been much more comfortable inside this than out in the bitter wind, for those within showed no haste in braving the outer temperature. Finally, however, two or three Mongols crawled through the low door and demanded our huchao, our Chinese permit to make the journey. There was an interminable argument over this, mainly inside the yourt, which we had not been invited to enter. Then two more bullying soldiers with poorly controlled rifles tumbled into the car and ordered us to drive on.

Before a yamen that might have been mistaken either for a run-down temple or a well kept stable we were again halted and commanded to dismount. This place, it turned out, was not yet Urga, but the former Chinese merchant section of Mai-Mai-Ch’eng (“Buy-Sell-Town”) some miles away from the sacred city, in which trading was until recently forbidden. Here a veritable mob of soldiers and petty officials poured out upon us, led by an exceedingly insolent youth in a rich, silky, but much soiled light-blue gown topped off by a kind of archbishop’s miter. He demanded our weapons. We dug them and the bit of ammunition we carried out of our baggage, protesting in vain that as this was all to be examined at the next yamen, and armed guards were to conduct us there, this extra labor of disentangling our overloaded car was unnecessary. But it was plain that there were at least two motives for putting us to this gratuitous trouble: the insolent Mongol youth did not wish to lose an opportunity to show his authority to the full, particularly toward men of a race which seldom fell into his hands; and the whole posse was eager to meddle with our belongings as much as possible. They passed our revolvers and my companion’s rifle from hand to hand, each trying his own method of manipulating them. Fortunately—at the time we felt it was unfortunate—we had not loaded them, or several tragedies might have ensued before their curiosity was satisfied and we were allowed to conclude our journey. Then the overbearing youth in charge decided that he must search our persons for weapons, though we had given our word that we carried none. The implied insult would not have mattered so much had not his hands looked as if he had been handling Gobi fuel incessantly from childhood without a pause even to wipe them, and had his manner been less that of the protected bully venting an unaccountable spleen against the whole white race. But cleanliness and common courtesy, we soon learned, are the two qualities most foreign to the crowd now ruling Outer Mongolia.

The quarrel as to who should have the privilege of the automobile-ride into Urga was at length decided in favor of all who could pile themselves into and about the car and baggage. How the machine escaped a broken back under the burden was a mystery which even Detroit probably could not have explained. Then there came a delay while the blue-gowned youth found and adjusted a fanciful pair of goggles, in all likelihood filched from the baggage of some previous victim, and without which of course the two- or three-mile ride ahead would have been unendurable. We groaned away at last, rifles and our own weapons covering us on every side, first through a half-ruined town of mud alleys between endless palisades of upright logs of the pine family, then across a stony, barren, wind-swept space with several axle-cracking little streams to be forded. Between bumps we caught glimpses of the several distinctly isolated sections of Urga, its golden temples and black dogs, its one lofty building, and the Tibetan texts in stone on the flank of its sacred mountain across the valley. Then we were suddenly turned into a noisome back yard peopled with shoddy-clad and unwashed soldiers and prisoners, the latter engaged in worse than menial tasks under the bayonet-points of the former; the gate to the outside world was closed and barred, and a new set of examiners fell upon us.

If a gang of young East Side New York rowdies should suddenly get the complete upper hand in the city, I can imagine them going through the belongings of their victims along Fifth Avenue in quite the same way as now befell our own. At a word from a superior who would himself scarcely have inspired a lone lady with confidence on a dark night, there sprang forward from all sides a dozen young men who seemed to have been specially chosen for their gangster-like appearance. In their shoddy uniforms of some nondescript dark color, they looked like a cross between low-class Russians and the scum of the Mongolian plains—which is about what they were, in other words Buriats. The pleasure they took both in putting us to annoyance and in prying minutely into our affairs quite evidently purged their task of any stigma of labor. I have passed many frontiers in my day, but never have I beheld an examination in the slightest degree approaching in thoroughness this one. Every single article, large or small, in our valises, bedding-bags, even our lunch-sacks, was picked out one by one, carefully, not to say stupidly, scrutinized, taken apart if that was physically possible, and finally tossed into a heap on the filthy bare ground of the yard. Clean linen must be completely unfolded, stared at minutely on both sides, and crumpled up into a mess from which only a laundryman could rescue it. We were not surprised that such articles aroused the suspicion of the examiners; anything resembling clean linen was quite evidently strange to them. Nor was there any intentional offense meant, perhaps, in mixing our bread and our tooth-brushes with the offal in the yard, for no conscious line of demarcation between these seemed as yet to have been drawn in the minds of the examiners. They did consciously resent our own higher plane of cleanliness, however, when it was called to their attention. I was attempting to rescue my dismembered sleeping-bag from a worse fate by picking it up from the ground where it had been thrown after examination, when one of the rowdies snatched it out of my hand and deliberately tossed it into an especially choice source of contamination.

My shaving-stick was opened with extreme caution, as a possible infernal machine. My safety-razor caused a considerable argument, until a gang-chief ruled that it was not a deadly weapon. The man who picked up an ordinary can of pork-and-beans tore off the label and attempted to unscrew the top in his efforts to examine the contents, and was with difficulty induced to spare me the labor of attacking it with a can-opener. I rescued my exposed films just as they were about to be unrolled, and came very near bodily injury for my interference before our interpreter could get in touch with some one of authority and more or less human intelligence. Thus it went, for more than an hour, through every simplest article we had brought with us. Nor did a single examination of each suffice; whenever anything unusual turned up, which, thanks to the ignorance of the examiners, was often, all of them must satisfy their monkey-like curiosity by thoroughly studying it. It was not that we objected to having our baggage inspected, even with unusual thoroughness—though legally we Americans were not subject to any interference by the local authorities of Mongolia—but at least it would have been a kindness to give the job to men who had some inkling of the paraphernalia of civilization and some hazy notion of why tooth-brushes and offal are not commonly mixed.

In the end they kept our weapons and cartridges, our American passports, and all our papers, down to letters of introduction and scribbled memoranda, which had not escaped their erratic attention. They demanded that the tool-box be removed from the car and the spare tire opened, as possible hiding-places. That these were the only ones they thought of was due to their ignorance of automobile mechanism. The Russian Jews had more influence than we, however, and after long and vociferous wrangling this order was rescinded. In contrast to the deliberation with which they had been examining it, they insisted that we snatch together our heaped-up property and thrust it pell-mell, filth and all, back into our bags and valises. Long blanks must then be filled out, in Russian, with our personal biographies. These went to an inner office, while we still shivered like hopper-screens in the wintry air outside; and at length a man came out to announce that they must also keep my kodak and films. This required a complete reËxamination of all my baggage, for my word as to the number of films I carried could not of course be trusted. Finally we were taken into the sanctum of the Okhrana or the Ghospolitakran, as it is variously called in popular parlance—the “State’s Internal Guard” would perhaps answer as a poor and inadequate translation in English. This is a genuinely Russian form of secret service and espionage within the country, devised under the czarist rÉgime and continued by its receivers, the Bolsheviki, who had recently imposed it upon Mongolia. The plain bare room of European style contained a rough table and a few chairs, a surly Mongol nearer twenty than thirty, in native garb except for a faded slouch felt hat, who proved to be the ostensible head of the secret service, and an older Russian “adviser” in grayish semi-uniform and quite modern glasses. The “adviser” looked as if he had been familiar with the common forms of courtesy in earlier days, but evidently he had either forgotten them or dared not mix them with his “Red” allegiance, for his behavior was as studiously uncivil as that of the Mongol was naturally rude. We had stood for a long time, with empty chairs plentiful, when the pair deigned to notice our existence. A handsome, courteous little Buriat, greatly contrasting with the rest of the crew, explained our cases at length, with special emphasis on the seizure of my kodak. Uncouth soldiers, Mongol, Buriat, and Russian indiscriminately, lounged in and out, most of them carelessly juggling guns with fixed bayonets, glaring ominously at us from time to time, and picking up and examining any of the official papers on the table which happened to catch their fancy. It is said that there are no ranks in the “Red” army; certainly there was no outward evidence of discipline among the detachment of it in Urga, or among their apt Mongol pupils.

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

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, and though 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 the Okhrana where 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 the yamen of justice, with an efficient interpreter, in the morning.

For all the absurdity of the whole affair there was a sense of relief in 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 the yamen. 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. The yamen of justice was a two-story frame building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese when they 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 cheap tissue-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-hair brush 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 the yamen; 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.