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Updated: June 18, 2025
Tomorrow we shall start and there in Urga we shall talk about further arrangements." Taking my leave, I went out of the yurta. On arriving at my quarters, I found Colonel Kazagrandi in great anxiety walking up and down my room. "Thanks be to God!" he exclaimed and crossed himself.
There is a community of about five hundred Russians in Urga, mostly traders and officials, and a fifth as many soldiers protecting them. The look of the Russian quarter takes you across the sea, for many of the houses are of logs set in a grass yard, the whole surrounded by a high board fence, almost a stockade in strength.
At long intervals, two hundred miles, these stations are found all the way to Urga and always in the charge of Chinese, serviceable, alien, homesick. It must be a dreary life set down in the desert without neighbours or visitors save the roving Mongol whom the Chinese look down on with lofty contempt.
The people living at Urga build fences around their dwellings to protect their property from the thieves who are in large proportion among the pious travelers. From Urga to the Siberian frontier the distance is less than two hundred miles; the Russian couriers accomplish it in fifty or sixty hours when not delayed by accidents, but the caravans require from four to eight days.
Until we left Urga the second time Mongolia, to us, had meant only the Gobi Desert and the boundless, rolling plains. When we set our faces northward we found it was also a land of mountains and rivers, of somber forests and gorgeous flowers. A new forest always thrills me mightily.
"Have you heard about him?" he asked, as his brows knit in thought. After a few seconds he raised his narrow eyes and said: "Only one man knows his holy name; only one man now living was ever in Agharti. That is I. This is the reason why the Most Holy Dalai Lama has honored me and why the Living Buddha in Urga fears me.
But the Chinese are like the tide, coming in noiselessly, gently, filling each hole and crevice, rising unnoticed higher and higher until it covers the land. Will it sweep away the elephant? One should spend weeks, not days, in Urga, but alas, time pressed and I had to be "moving on." Just how to move on was a question, for the ponies and buggy with which I had crossed Gobi could go no farther.
The Danish merchant E. V. Olufsen was to have traveled out with me and also a learned Lama Turgut, who was headed for China. Never shall I forget the night of May 19th to 20th of 1921! After dinner Baron Ungern proposed that we go to the yurta of Djam Bolon, whose acquaintance I had made on the first day after my arrival in Urga.
The wheels are sometimes filled with thousands of slips of paper upon which is written a prayer or a sacred thought, and each revolution adds to the store of merit in the future life. The Mongol goes farther still in accumulating virtue, and every native house in Urga is gay with fluttering bits of cloth or paper on which a prayer is written.
Our arrival in Urga was in the most approved manner of the twentieth century. We came in motor cars with much odor of gasoline and noise of horns. When we left the sacred city we dropped back seven hundred years and went as the Mongols traveled.
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