Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
We climbed up the best-looking yurt in the village over which hung a dead disembowelled dog, with a wreath of green grass around his neck and slid down the chimney into a miserable room filled to suffocation with blue smoke, lighted only by a small fire on the earthen floor, and redolent of decayed fish and rancid oil.
I ventured to the top of the chimney hole once, but I was nearly blown over the edge of the yurt, and, blinded and choked by snow, I hastily retreated down the chimney, congratulating myself that I was not obliged to lie out all day on some desolate plain, exposed to the fury of such a storm.
"He replied: 'You are right, mother, therefore do you, Khassar, have the bow ready: Belgutei, you also be on your guard: you, Chadshikin, see to the horse; and you, Utsuken, remain by my side. My nine Orloks, you go in with me; and you, my three hundred and nine bodyguards, surround the yurt.
Opposite the door stood a chest rather a nice one on top of which was a tiny god with a candle burning before it, and a photograph of the Hutukhtu." We had dinner in the yurt, and the boys slept there while we used our Mongol tent. There was no difficulty in erecting it even in the wind and rain, but it would have been impossible to have put up the American wall tent.
The lama, a well-appearing, elderly man, seemed completely fitted out with wife and children and yurts and herds. He was plainly a person of substance, and the head of quite a settlement. The yurt where I was received was very spacious, and was furnished precisely as Huc described sixty years ago.
We shared their joys and sorrows and nursed their minor ills. First to seek our aid was the wife of the absent hunter, Tserin Dorchy. She rode up one day with a two-year-old baby on her arm. The little fellow was badly infected with eczema, and for three weeks one of the lamas in the tiny temple near their yurt had been mumbling prayers and incantations in his behalf, without avail.
Whenever any one enters the yurt, you are apprised of the fact by a total eclipse of the chimney hole and a sudden darkness, and as you look up through a mist of reindeer hairs, scraped off from the coming man's fur coat, you see a thin pair of legs descending the pole in a cloud of smoke.
Beside the temple were a hideous foreign house and an enormous yurt evidently the former residences of "God's Brother"; in the corners of the compound were ornamental pavilions painted green and red. Except for these, the court was empty. Suddenly there was a stir among the lamas, and we dashed away like frightened rabbits, dodging behind the gateposts until we were safe outside.
On the following night we reached a small log yurt on a branch of the Gizhiga River, which had been built there by the government to shelter travellers, and Friday morning, November 25th, about eleven o'clock, we caught sight of the red church-steeple which marked the location of the Russian settlement of Gizhiga.
Our journey was monotonous and uneventful, and on the second of April, late at night, we left behind us the white desolate steppe of the Paren, and drew near the little flat-topped yurt on the Malmofka, which was only twenty-five versts from Gizhiga.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking