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Updated: May 18, 2025
"The horse herd ... to the west." Nolan evaluated the scene with the eyes of an experienced raider. "Tsoay, Deklay, you take the horses!" They nodded, and began the long crawl which would take them two miles or more from the party to stampede the horses. To the Mongols in those domelike yurts horses were wealth, life itself.
The morning after encountering the great herd, we camped at a well thirty miles north of the Turin monastery. Three or four yurts were scattered about, and a caravan of two hundred and fifty camels was resting in a little hollow.
On the 16th of November, after twenty-three days of continuous travel, we reached Yakutsk; and there, in the house of a wealthy Russian merchant who threw his doors open to us with warm-hearted hospitality, we washed from our bodies the smoke and grime of Tunguse tents and yurts; put on clean, fresh clothes; ate a well cooked and daintily served supper; drank five tumblers of fragrant overland tea; smoked two Manila cheroots; and finally went to bed, excited but happy, in beds that were provided with hair mattresses, fleecy Russian blankets, and linen sheets.
He had been gone for six days on a shooting trip when we came into the beautiful valley where his yurts were pitched, but his wife welcomed us with true Mongolian hospitality and a great dish of cheese. Our own camp we made just within the forest, a mile away. For a week we hunted and trapped in the vicinity, awaiting Tserin Dorchy's return.
Two thirds of the room was taken up by a "kang," or plaster furnace, raised some three feet above the floor, and on this our beds were spread. But that was my last sight of a house for many a day; henceforth there was nothing but tents and "yurts." Our stop the next night was at a small Mongol settlement of several yurts. One of these was vacated for me.
No one who has not travelled for three long months through a wilderness like Kamchatka, camped out in storms among desolate mountains, slept for three weeks in the smoky tents, and yet smokier and dirtier yurts of the Koraks, and lived altogether like a perfect savage or barbarian -no one who has not experienced this can possibly understand with what joyful hearts we welcomed that red church steeple, and the civilisation of which it was the sign.
The land rolled in placid waves to the far horizon on every hand. It was like a calm sea which is disturbed only by the lazy progress of the ocean swell. Two yurts, like the sails of hull-down ships, showed black against the sky-rim where it met the earth. The plain itself seemed at first as flat as a table, for the swells merged indistinguishably into a level whole.
The Chinese is an unwelcomed alien in Mongolia, and he knows it. A strip of waste, treeless land, bare of everything save a group of "chortens," that look like small pagodas, and a few yurts and sheds, separates Mai-ma-chin from the Russian settlement which occupies the highest part of the ridge, dominating everything in a significant way.
News travels quickly in Mongolia and during the next week men and women rode in from yurts forty or fifty miles away to see that magazine. I will venture to say that no American publication ever received more appreciation or had a more picturesque audience than did that copy of Harper's. The absent Tserin Dorchy returned one day when I was riding down the valley with his wife.
There are only two mud houses and half a dozen yurts which seem to have been dropped carelessly behind a ragged hill. After leaving Ude, we slipped rapidly up and down a succession of low hills and entered upon a plain so vast and flat that we appeared to be looking across an ocean. Not the smallest hill or rise of ground broke the line where earth and sky met in a faint blue haze.
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