The Long Walk (22 page)

When the bowing on both sides had been completed in silence, the greybeard got down from his camel. We bowed again and he returned the greeting. He spoke in his own language and we shook our
heads. Mister Smith whispered to me, ‘Try him in Russian, Slav.’ The old man heard and turned his attention to me.

‘May your feet carry you well on your journey,’ I addressed him in Russian.

A long pause followed.

In Russian, haltingly and with an obvious searching for words in an unfamiliar tongue, came the answer: ‘Talk more, please. I understand you well but I speak little Russian. Once I speak
this language but not for many years.’

I talked slowly, he listened intently. I said we were going south (that was obvious anyway), that we had crossed a river some hours before. I didn’t know what else to say. There was such a
long silence when I finished that I thought the parley was over. But the old gentleman wanted to satisfy his curiosity and, as it turned out, was grappling with his rusty Russian in order to phrase
his questions. The conversation, in the fullness of time, proceeded thus:

You have no camels? – We are too poor to have camels.

You have no mules? – We have no mules either.

You have no donkeys? – No donkeys.

Having established us on the lowest stratum of society, he went on to question me about our journey. The word Lhasa came up. He pointed to the south and mentioned the names of a number of
places. The information was valueless because we had no maps and just did not understand what he was talking about.

‘It is a very long way,’ he said, ‘and the sun will come round many times before you reach this place.’

The question he had been itching to ask came at last. He looked at Kristina. Her hair, bleached several shades lighter in the sun, was in sharp contrast to the dark tan of her face, in which the
blue eyes frankly returned the old man’s gaze. He asked how old she was, if she were related to any of us, where were we taking her. I answered as I had done that other old man to the
north.

This leisurely catechism had taken over half-an-hour and the patriarch had appeared to enjoy it immensely. I suspect he was proud of the opportunity of showing his younger kinsmen how he could
converse in a foreign tongue. He turned from us and spoke in his own language to the others. They smiled among themselves and bustled about the packs on the animals.

From the packs they brought him food and smilingly he distributed it between us. He was meticulously fair in ensuring that each of us had exactly the same share. At one stage he saw that he had
given big Kolemenos one fig more than the rest of us. Politely he took it back. He handed round nuts, dried fish, some partly-cooked swollen barley grains and biscuity, scone-sized oaten cakes. We
all bowed and I, as the spokesman, thanked him in the finest phrases I could lay tongue to. I thought the meeting was over, but the Mongols made no move. They were waiting for a signal from their
leader but he seemed to be in no hurry to part from us.

He volunteered the information that his party were bound for a ‘big market’ not far away to the east to buy some goods. He went over to his camel, busied himself for a while and came
back smoking a rolled tobacco leaf held in shape by a reed tied around the middle. He held out to me a flat-pressed wad of about fifteen whole tobacco leaves. I thanked him and made to put the
leaves in the pocket of the jacket I was carrying over my arm. He put out a restraining hand. ‘Please smoke,’ he said.

I explained that I was unable to make his kind of smoke with the whole leaf and that we had no paper to roll cigarettes. He went over to the camel again and returned with the inside double sheet
of a newspaper. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘Please smoke.’ I looked at the paper and saw it was the Russian
Red Star
printed the first week in May. The American, standing
close beside me, saw it too. ‘Take care of that, Slav,’ he murmured. I needed no telling.

From the top of the paper I carefully tore off a strip so as not to cut into the reading matter. From one of the tobacco leaves I rubbed up some shreds in the palm of my hand, rolled my
cigarette and fished out my piece of flint, my steel rod and a thumbnail-sized scrap of
gubka
tinder. I held the tinder tight against the flint in the thumb and forefinger of my left hand
and struck with the steel in my right hand. The tinder took spark first go. I blew on it until it smouldered red and applied it to my cigarette. The Mongols watched in open admiration of my
skill.

‘What do you call that fire-maker?’ asked the patriarch.

‘The Russians give it the name
chakhalo-bakhalo
in some places,’ I told him.

The sound tickled him. He repeated it twice. I puffed happily at my cigarette, the Mongol leader at his cigar. As the glowing end crept towards the middle he moved the knotted reed band along
ahead of it. We finished our smokes standing in the group there beside the road. It was time to break up.

Our host thrust his right hand down to the level of his left hip, withdrew it and bent his ear down to the object he was holding. I craned forward. He was holding a watch, a big silver watch,
attached by a short length of heavy silver chain to his belt. He was immediately aware of our interest. We all crowded round and he allowed me to hold it and examine it. It was an old key-winder,
made in Russia, and might have been fifty years old. Certainly it was a pre-Revolution product. In flowing Russian script on the watch face was the name of its maker and by some odd quirk of memory
the name has always remained with me. It was Pavel Bure – some Czarist craftsman probably long dead.

‘When the Russians were fighting each other,’ the old gentleman explained, ‘some of them ran away to my country many years ago.’ It explained not only the possession of
the watch – a gift, a payment for services or an article of exchange – but also his ability to speak Russian.

We parted with many expressions of felicitation for our respective journeys and many kind wishes for the continuing health of our feet. It was perhaps our most interesting encounter in Mongolia
but we were to find that all these people, whatever their station in life, had those typical qualities of courtesy, complete trust, generosity and hospitality. The help we received was according to
the means of the giver, but that help was always cheerfully given. Another delightful quality was their naive and frank curiosity. Unfortunately, the language barrier ruled out conversation with
the people we subsequently met, although we became adept at putting over simple ideas by gesture, talking the while in our own languages because it was easier and less embarrassing than employing
only silent mime.

When the caravan had disappeared from view we whipped out the
Red Star.
There was little news in it, but we read every line because it was the first newspaper we had seen since those
sheets, six months and more old, which were issued back in the camp for cigarette making. It did not tell us what we were most anxious to discover, the eventuality confidently forecast from the
beginning by every prisoner I ever met in Russian hands – whether Russia and Germany were at war. There were some dull internal political items, the aftermath of May Day celebrations and the
usual promises by industry and agriculture to exceed their production targets. One odd paragraph, which seemed to dispose of the idea of an immediate clash between the two great Continental powers,
recorded the dispatch of a big consignment of wheat to the Germans.

Having read the paper we tore it up and shared it out, using each piece to wrap the apportioned tobacco cut in chunks with the knife. We travelled on over undulating country until we met a
stream about seven o’clock in the evening, where we camped, set a fire going against the night cold, ate a meal and enjoyed luxury, smoking and yarning together.

By the end of our first fortnight in Mongolia our methods of advance had been modified from those employed in Siberia. No longer was it necessary to post night sentries. The urge to keep on the
move persisted; it had become a habit of our existence. But we were not now bedevilled by fears of imminent recapture, we could make contact with the people of the country, we could ask for food or
work for food. We did long day marches from the cool hour before dawn until the late evening setting of the sun, but we had adopted the hot country custom of resting in shelter for the two hours of
fiercest heat at midday.

The country ahead presented a prospect of a series of round-topped low hills which we skirted when we could and surmounted when we had to. Some of the hills were clothed in heather, which always
grew more profusely on the northern slopes. There were few trees except near the villages and the waterways but hardier bushy vegetation – among which I recognized a type of berberis with
juicy, oval red fruit, and the wild rose – was fairly widespread. The population was sparse and the villages, sited near water, were widely separated. A very small part of the vast land
through which we travelled was cultivated.

Our first thought on reaching the crest of a hill was always to look for the next river. This Outer Mongolian journey was in essence a succession of forced marches through great heat from water
to water. Streams and rivers meant solace for the feet, water to slake thirst, water to bathe in. The navigable waterways, too, brought us food on a few occasions, and the incidents, not
unnaturally, remain in my mind.

The first time we struck lucky was when we came across a laden sampan held fast on a mudbank. The boatman jabbed first one side and then the other with his bamboo pole, but though he heaved and
grunted the craft only swung a little across the current and remained fixed. Kolemenos said ‘Let’s give him a hand,’ so we waded out to the boat ten yards or so from the bank.
Kristina watched from the grass as the Chinese handed us a spare bamboo. We rammed the pole under the bows and started levering, while the boatman thrust away above us with his own pole. After a
few minutes of pleasantly hard work we got her off. The Chinese was delighted. His cargo was melons, nearly the size of footballs. As the sampan glided off he bombarded us with the fruit.

Between us and the bank on which Kristina waited as we splashed happily ashore was a belt of a few yards of thick mud marking the limit of the river in the rainy season. The top was patterned
with deep cracks where the sun had formed a drying crust, but underneath was squelching grey-brown mud which came up to the calf. Zaro had just thrown Kristina a melon and was standing laughing in
the mud when he suddenly let out a yell. We called out to ask him what was the matter, but before he answered I felt a wriggling movement under my own feet. I bent down and groped. Twice the thing
eluded me after I thought I had a good grip and then I found the head and gills and hoisted it, lashing violently about my hand and wrist, into the sunlight. It was nearly a foot long, round and
thick-bodied, superficially like an eel. I recognized it as a species of loach which the Russians call
viyuni.

‘Can you eat it?’ the American asked. ‘Yes,’ I said.

That started a hilarious half-hour of mudlarking, at the end of which we were ready for a distinctly unusual evening meal. Like eels, they were tenacious of life and we had to cut off the heads
before we could prepare them for cooking. We washed the slime off in the river and found them to be a velvety jet black. We roasted them on hot stones and while I cannot remember exactly their
taste, I do remember that it could not be mistaken either for fish or eel. The word we used at the time to describe the taste was ‘sweet’. The flesh was hard-packed and filling.

The rare meal was rounded off with succulent melon slices. Marchinkovas had the brainwave of taking two hollowed-out halves of melon to use as gourds for drinking. The idea was good but in
practice did not work out. As the skin dried it cracked. He threw the two halves away next day.

M
AINTAINING A
schedule of around twenty miles a day hard slogging for days on end made us welcome an occasional break.
These days when we eased off were never wasted. One reason for stopping a few hours was to repair and remake worn-out moccasins and tend cut and swollen feet. The other reason was the necessity of
earning our food – we could not always expect to be handed food out of charity.

In the second month of our Mongolian Journey we arrived at a village of straggling smallholdings. To European eyes a strange feature would be the absence of fences or indeed any boundary
markings. Possibly the life of these villages was largely communal and no fences were needed. We approached a stone-built, flat-roofed shack of a house, in front of which, in a hard-beaten, cleared
space, we could see a bullock gyrating slowly and patiently round an upright thick stake driven into the ground. It was mid-morning and we had already covered ten or fifteen miles. As we walked we
swung our long cudgels. We were a little hungry, a little thirsty, but by no means in desperate straits.

We stopped quite near to watch the bullock and decide what work he was doing. Between the beast and the house were four people – the Mongol farmer squatting, lazily lifting his cap to
scratch his bald pate, a lusty-looking boy of fourteen or fifteen armed with a stick with which he encouraged the bullock now and again as it trudged past him, and two women, one of whom might have
been the boy’s mother and the other his grandmother. The women took no notice of us, but the farmer got up off his haunches and with the boy came over to us and bowed. We returned the
greeting. The farmer talked and we talked, but it got us nowhere, and we all, bobbing and smiling, sat down together on the hard earth. The bullock, freed of the boy’s attentions, stopped
work. By then I could see what was happening. The beast was threshing rye. It was tethered to the central stake by a rope of plaited rushes or osiers. At the outer limit of its tether were spread
out in a circle sheaves of ripe rye with the ears outermost. As the bullock trampled the sheaves the grain dropped to the ground where it was gathered by the womenfolk.