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Updated: June 25, 2025
Although the natives take such care for the repose of the spirit in after life, they have a strong distaste for the body from which the spirit has fled and they consider it a most undesirable thing to have about the house. The stigma is imposed even upon the dying. In Urga a family of Mongols had erected their yurt in the courtyard of one of our friends.
Some one was constantly going out or coming in over the fire, and the reindeerskin coats scraping back and forth through the chimney hole shed a perfect cloud of short grey hairs, which sifted down over and into everything of an eatable nature underneath. Our first meal in a Korak yurt, therefore, at Kamenoi, was not at all satisfactory.
Viushin soon had a teakettle over the fire, and in twenty minutes we were seated like cross-legged Turks on the raised platform at one end of the yurt, munching hardbread and drinking tea, while about twenty ugly, savage-looking men squatted in a circle around us and watched our motions.
In the careless freedom of his magnificent horsemanship a Mongol seems as much an untamed creature of the plains as does the eagle itself which soars above his yurt. Independence breathes in every movement; even in his rough good humor and in the barbaric splendor of the native dress. But the little matter of cleanliness is of no importance in his scheme of life.
The river valley, too, presented quite a different picture than when we had seen it last. Instead of open sweeps of grassland dotted with an occasional yurt, now there were hundreds of felt dwellings interspersed with tents of white or blue. It was like the encampment of a great army, or a collection of huge beehives.
After four more dreary hours, spent in wandering about through grey drifting clouds, exposed to a bitter north-west wind, and a temperature of just 32°, we finally arrived in a half-frozen condition at the yurt. It was a low, empty hut, nearly square in shape, built of variously sized logs, and banked over with two or three feet of moss and grass-grown earth, so as to resemble an outdoor cellar.
The yurt, as it is called, is perfectly adapted to the Mongols and their life. In the winter a stove is placed in the center, and the house is dry and warm. In the summer the felt covering is sometimes replaced by canvas which can be lifted on any side to allow free passage of air.
Our party now numbered nine men two Americans, three Russians, and four Koraks and a wild-looking crowd it was, as it squatted around the fire in that low smoke-blackened hut, drinking tea and listening to the howling wind. As there was not room enough for all to sleep inside the yurt, the Koraks camped out-doors on the snow, and before morning were half buried in a drift.
Crossing a low ridge on the west side of the "Propashchina," we reached another small stream known as the Viliga, at the foot of the Viliga Mountains. Along this there extended a narrow strip of dense timber, and in this timber, somewhere, stood the yurt of which we were in search.
He did not clear with Miss Plock in the dispensary, nor with Mr. Fert in Personnel, nor with Miss Yurt in Wage Readjustment, nor with Miss Bort in Sick Leave Subdivision, nor with Miss Vibe in Special Problems, nor with Mr. Pfister in Sick Claims, nor with Miss Grope in Employee Grievances, nor with Miss Rupnick in Company Grievances, nor with Miss Guggward in Allowance Reductions, nor with Mr.
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