The intrepid author of this delightful book has an appetite for adventure but he also has an ear and a humor for offbeat conversations and heartfelt emotions, expressed in whatever language. As he wends his way by rusty boat, by decrepit railroad, by dilapidated Nivas (the Russian equivalent of a Jeep), a beat-up Russian Antonov prop-jet, and eventually by a selection of nearly wild horses in the gorgeous Western saddle he bought in London and had shipped to Ulan Bator, capital of The People's Republic of Mongolia (the geographic "Outer Mongolia" as opposed to "Inner Mongolia" which remains a part of China), he first crosses the lands of the Turks and the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Slavs, and he unravels the routes of nomadic peoples who date from prehistory, until he comes face to face with the Mongols, by the thirteenth century one of the most compelling of all time.
Along his pilgrimage he also looks into the soul of a vanished Soviet Union, the broken heart of its aftermath, the sense of bewilderment and loss. Yet looking back the Slavs who populated the Balkans and parts of Poland and Russia derive their name from "slave", which often they were. How did so many ethnicities erupt from the Altai and Central Asia, conquering each other, enslaving each other, making off with each other's women and children and water and flocks? The Soviets adhered to tradition.
We are transported to an oasis at Utrar in Kazakhstan, in the valley of the Syr Darya, the onetime Oxus of Alexander's days. Timur (Tamerlane), caught cold and died here in February of 1405 and the water, currently siphoned off for cotton, was depleted, the earth dry and crusty, by the seventeenth century, so everything is obsolete in Central Asia, even drought and sorrow. I have also been there, in fact just a year after the author, and I know. Stanley Stewart is essentially following the trail of William of Rubruck, a Catholic friar who set out ostensibly to found a Christian community among the Mongols, centered at the court in Karakorum or Qaraquorum, on the grassy steppes.
Stewart's own route through Mongolia takes him on the reverse of my travels (see "Mongolia" in "The World Over: A Carol Miller Anthology"), flying from Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to Bayan Ölguii at the foot of the Altai, at the western extreme of a long stretch of absolutely vacant earth, in a variety of its most subtle expressions--rolling desert, bowls of gravel enclosing small lakes, flat earth, cupped earth, ragged knolls, snow-capped peaks--sheltered by an autonomous sky, bound to nothing at all. The author puts it beautifully: "The emptiness made the baroque clouds seem crowded and fussy."
Ölguii still maintains one of the country's few concessions to the notion of a town, that is, a settled community, that evolved under the Soviets to a ramshackle urbanity. It received me in 2003 with its humble but interesting, badly-lit, museum, a rutted and dusty main street open to a shuffling lone cow, and an enormous area at the edge of town devoted to an assortment of abandoned containers converted to a sprawling market of Russian and Chinese goods and Communist era military gear, uniforms and commemorative decorations, but I was just there in passing, waiting for the Antonov to fly out on its last trip before winter set in. I was spared Stewart's miserable stay in the dreadful, totally ragged hotel, though he did see native Kazakh Muslim herdsmen who still adhere to the medieval tradition of falconry, using the massive golden eagles of the Altai as their hunters. He describes the grasslands that I had just flown over, the occasional furry herds of Bactrian camels, the rivers, the ravines, spare clusters of windblown trees, but especially the skies. I have seen remarkable night skies in Kenya and Belize but I concur with Stewart, the Gobi is incomparable, more glittering, more enveloping, and irredeemably vast.
He discovers a Mongolia that still remains, as it always was, credulous and superstitious, "more inclined to believe than to enquire", and therefore free to make the transition from animism and a corrupted Tibetan Buddhism to Marxism and back, with little disruption. There were those, however, a very few, who became "modern" in the concept of Voltaire: inquisitive, iconoclastic and skeptical. Still, Mongolians believe they could only really relate to other Mongolians, that they could cultivate lasting ties with no one else. And so life, in Mongolia as elsewhere, is reduced to the algebra of "you" and "us", and human existence is forever defined in the withdrawing from any others, who unless a temporary emergency unites them, will always be enemies: another color, height, faith, figure. He also learns one essential fact of the nomad, that his life is as strictly regulated as any other. It is determined by the availability of pasturage for his animals. He might be any other working man on a commute.
Yet the Mongolian capital at Karakorum was once the center of the known world. And precisely in Karakorum the author's lilting, often hilarious commentary slags, when concerning ecclesiastical issues, in a confused or only partially informed description, mostly extracted from Friar William's text. He is shaky on the subject of Nestorianism, a supremely important Eastern branch of Christianity originated in the precepts of fifth century Byzantine Patriarch Nestorius, over which he glosses. He also glosses over the legacy of the Mongol advance of the thirteenth century, which so ravaged, and thus revamped, down to the roots, every place it touched.
Not just anyone can relate to this book. It has to be a lover of open, vast spaces and curious people, it needs to be someone patient and persistent and resistant to harsh conditions, to sleet and dust, nearly overlapping freezing and heat, all within seconds. An 18-wheel Russian trailer-truck that appears out of nowhere, 500 miles from the nearest road. A rollicking wedding. Endless flocks of sheep and a diet of their innards. Life in the round tent called a ger. The vodka, and the inebriating, ubiquitous fermented mare's milk drunk by the bowl. But I've seen it, I know Stanley isn't
making it up.
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Top reviews from other countries
Belinda J. Walker
Delightful, informative and often hilarious
Reviewed in Australia on January 13, 2019
Brendan Jordan
Was looking for this for a while so delighted to find on Amazon
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2016
