Swords From the East (78 page)

And they did it. At the time no one thought it possible; the distance was three thousand miles, it was then the dead of winter on the snow-bound steppe. They had the disadvantage of covering the coldest region of the journey in a temperature around zero and crossing the two deserts and the Alai Bagh in midsummer. They also had their herds with all their possessions to transport.

Estimates as to the numbers of the Torguts vary somewhat. Palias calculates that zso,ooo Torguts set out from the Volga; the annals of Chien-lung mentions 40,000 to 50,000 tents (more than 200,000 persons). But it is known that only 70,000 survived to reach the Ili. In other words, seven out of about seventeen souls lived through the journey.

You see, they had to fight their way; the tribes along the route, and especially to the south, were hostile, the Moslems vindictive, the Cossacks gave them two stiff battles, and their own lamas were deceitful-anxious to betray them if anything was to be gained by it.

This journey of the Giants has been called "a colossal trek." So it was-the last of the great men-movements of the world.

As to the rate of progress made by the Tatars, Ihave set it down as it happened. Thirty to fifty miles a day at times under the conditions sounds like a tall order. Yet it was done. Also the 150 miles of the Hunger Steppe, or desert, was traversed in three days. This was necessary because the "yellow" water was found to be undrinkable.

How they managed for fodder for the herds on the snow steppe I do not know. Of course the beasts died off rapidly and it is rather a miracle that a portion of the herds endured for the first half of the journey. As for the camels, they got along well enough and the ponies, it seems, dug into the snow at times for grass underneath.

On their journey they carried off a European, who appears in the story. This man was eventually released and sent back with a quota of followers, reaching the Russian border safe, after earning the confidence of the Tatars. The character of Zebek Dortshi, chief of the Red Camel clan, is puzzling, first because I have not seen elsewhere any record of a Tatar noble who betrayed his clan and the name itself has not a Tatar sound. So I have set him down as being one of the ilkhan chiefs, a man with Persian blood in him.

The cult of the bonpas among the Tibetan monks has a curious story. Magic originally had no part in the Buddhist ritual of the tsong-kapa. But the disciples of Buddhism who were establishing themselves in Tibet about rroo AD found the native devil-worship too strong to wipe out. So the home-bred conjurers, the mik-thru tse khen, were enrolled in the priesthood of the Buddhists. Eventually the devil-worshipers became the prime movers among the mountain monks. So the originally humane doctrines of the Sakyas became a most degenerate thing. Today in Lhassa there is a quarter of the town devoted to the magicians.

The Torguts are usually mentioned as "Kalmuks." The word Kalmuk is Turkish and means something like "remnant of a tree." It is a kind of nickname and today is applied to various native tribes in Turkestan and Mongolia. But the Tatar clan of the story called themselves Torgut, the Giants, and that is their rightful name.

July 20, 1923: "The Three Palladins"

Genghis Khan is almost unique among the conquerors of the world, because he came out of the desert. No armies were ready to his hand: no cities offered him the thews and sinews of war. He had had no schooling, of the book variety.

When he was fifteen or sixteen this chief was at the head of a tribe of forty thousand tents, about two hundred and fifty thousand souls, all told. He was surrounded by enemies. The northern Gobi Desert was-and is-much like our northwestern plains. A place of extremes of cold and heat, of a never-ending struggle for existence.

Out of these high prairies, just below the Arctic Circle, the Mongols rode to the conquest of China, and-as we knowthem today-the Himalayas, Afghanistan, Persia, and northern India. Eventuallyhis followers overcame the Russians, the Magyars, and defeated the Hungarians and the knighthood of Germany in Silesia.

We have gained the idea that the Mongols were a great mass of barbarians that conquered their enemies by weight of numbers and a vague kind of ferocity. As a matter of fact the Mongol Horde numbered only a hundred and fifty thousand horsemen. It had no infantry. Sometimes, of course, it had allies.

Instead of having numbers on his side, Genghis Khan usuallyhad the smaller army, and displayed strategic powers of the highest order. It is rather amusing that our histories should try to teach us that the Mongols and Tatars were unthinking barbarians when our language uses the phrase "catching a Tatar" to imply a clever trick.

To rank Genghis Khan with Caesar and Alexander would raise quite a clamor of protest. just by way of starting the debate-both the Roman and the Macedonian were generals of great empires that had been established before they were born, while the Mongol had only a tribe of herders and cattlemen to work with. Also Caesar and Alexander were products of a high civilization-both carefully schooled. Their conquests did not extend as far as those of the Mongols. (By the way, neither of them had to tackle the Great Wall of China.) The enemies they encountered were of a lower order of intelligence-always, in Caesar's case, usually in Alexander's. They did not find in their path such cities as Pekin, Samarkand, Bokhara, and Herat.

It usually happens that the feeling of the men of an army for their leader is the best possible indication of the leader's character. No man, the proverb runs, is a hero to his valet. Certainly no commander ever fooled his enlisted men.

While Caesar and Alexander were trusted and admired by the soldiers who followed them-Alexander particularly-both had to deal with mutinies at various times. Genghis Khan was beloved by his warriors. It is said that, in a battle, the Khan would give his horse to an injured man. One of his followers was frozen to death holding a fur windbreak over the sleeping king during a blizzard. In the annals of the Chinese-his enemies-appears the phrase that he led his armies like a god.

It looks as if Alexander were a greater strategist than the Mongol, but as a leader of men and as a conqueror Genghis Khan ranks ahead of him. And of Napoleon, too, for that matter. In comparing the achievements of men of other ages we have no standards except results. The empire of Napoleon fell to pieces before he died, and before that-there was Waterloo, you know. And then crossing the Alps is not quite the same as taking an army over the Himalayas.

The story of Genghis Khan is one of those things that grow on you in writing, and for the last year I seem to have gathered enough knowledge of the Mighty Manslayer to try to tell his story. As to that, it is a story that never will be told in full because the Mongols, unlike most nations, kept no annals. There are no "tombs" to be opened. So one has to proceed from Mongol myth-the few legends, anecdotes, that have come down to us-to the histories of the enemies of the Mongols. That is, to what the Persian, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, and Russian chroniclers have said about Genghis Khan.

No work for three years has been so full of interest in the doing! The tale is imaginative for the most part, but is based on events that actually took place. Prester John for instance-legendary as far as medieval Europe is concerned, but a real king in the annals of Asia.

The "pony express" of Genghis Khan in the Gobi is rather interesting for the reader who remembers the pony mail of the far West in the late sixties and seventies. I'm working up some information as far as possible on the relative speed made by the Mongol couriers. They covered more ground in a day than our express riders, but conditions were in their favor.

Mingan is one of the vague shadows of history-a prince of Cathay who acted as guide, councilor, and friend to Genghis Khan and his sons, and who, in fact, built up the wisest and most enduring part of the Mongol system of government. Ye Lui Kutsai Mingan is known to present-day historians as Yelui Chut-sai.

The Missing White Race

The missing white race of China. Now there's a subject that smacks loudly of adventure. Harold A. Lamb brings it up, and we know from his stories of Khlit the Cossack that Mr. Lamb is no stranger to the past of Asia. He and Major Quilty have been corresponding, and the following letter from Mr. Lamb is the result. Can any of you throw additional light? And if Dr. Beech is one of us I hope he'll tell us more about the strange people mentioned below.

New York City

Here's a point I'd like to pass along to the fellow members of CampFire.

Major T. Frank Quilty, Constructing Quartermaster, Columbus Quartermaster Interior Storage Depot, Columbus, Ohio, is the man who asks the question. This is the question, quoted from his letter.

According to recent investigations, the Blond White Race, or Nordies (our race), now confined to Western Europe, at one time spread across Asia as far as the confines of China. The farthest Eastern subdivision was known as the Wu-Suns or Hiung-Nu in Central Asia, referred to in Chinese annals because of their blue eyes, as the GreenEyed Devils.

Do you presume there is the slightest trace of the Nordic race left in these regions? Turkestan, according to Madison Grant (of the American Geographical Society), was at one time as blond as Sweden; the shores of the Caspian being, as regards race, as are now the shores of the Baltic. Bactria, "The Mother of Cities," has been, within historic times, a distinctively Nordic city.

A pretty big question, this. And the more you think of it the more interesting it gets. Did the white race at one time overrun Central Asia? And has it left traces which can be found today? Did the tribes of the great region from the headwaters of the Yenissei to the Indus, from the Caspian Sea to the western border of the desert of Gobi, have white forefathers?

Major Quilty says, in a second letter, that-whether Central Asia was ever dominantly Nordic-is open to debate. He adds that Bactria was found byAlexander to be inhabited by a distinctively Nordic people. And that there are-he believes-some Nordic traces still to be found in Afghanistan and in Turkestan-quite distinctively in the Mongolized Kirghizes.

Now, getting down to fundamentals, Madison Grant, who ought to know, explains that the Nordic race, unlike any other, has the long skull, light eyes, and, usually, blond hair. A tall race-that of (in ancient times) the Persians, Phrygians, Gauls, Goths, Franks, Saxons, Angles, Norse, and Normans.

It is the adventure race, as Major Quilty says, par excellence. And it's interesting to picture to ourselves the ancestors of the Vikings and Celts sweeping across the highlands of Mid-Asia, driving the round-skulled, slant-eyed, and stocky races before them.

Madison Grant says this actually happened, between 12oo and 600 ac. He mentions by way of proof the Aryan languages, Sanskrit and Old Persian, which were established in Northern India and Mesopotamia. Also the fact that remnants of an Aryan language have been found in Chinese Turkestan. (As to this, didn't the explorer Stein find, in the sand-buried cities near Khoten in Chinese Turkestan, traces of a language similar to Sanskrit?)

So much for language. Madison Grant, from the viewpoint of the scientist, adds: "Some traces of their (Nordic conquerors) blood have been found in the Pamirs and in Afghanistan. It may be that the stature of some of the Afghan hill tribes and of the Sikhs, and some of the facial characteristics of the latter, are derived from this source."

Language and history having given us, briefly-they probably have a lot more to say, if some one will print it out-their points, we'll ask the question of the explorers and adventurers.

Marco Polo says a lot about the mythical kingdom in Mid-Asia, of Prester John, the Christian. But this is no mention of an Aryan race. Marco Polo's story shows he saw, or heard of, an Asiatic people or tribe with an immensely wealthy and powerful ruler who may or may not have been a Christian.

Other medieval explorers speak of the "fair faces and tall bodies" of a semi-Tatar tribe situated about the eastern end of the Thian Shan Mountains-the Naimans, I believe. These were not the Kirghiz, mentioned by Grant.

Two other medieval priests who traveled across the caravan routes past the Pamirs and Chinese Turkestan (as it is now called)-Fra Ru- bruquis and Carpini-tell of handsome and tall tribes in the interior, but of no race which resembled Europeans. Naturally, the priests did no skull-measuring. Probably it would not have been a safe thing to try on the Central Asian tribesman of the sixteenth century!

In modern times C. A. Sheering, of the Indian Civil Service, in his trips along Tibet and the British borderland, ran across a tribe in the Southern Himalayas of the Khasia race, which, he states, "is certainly Aryan and connected with that branch of the great Aryan race which spread itself over the great Gangetic Valley." (In the Vedic times mentioned above by Grant.)

And then, out of a clear sky, comes this story of a modern missionary-Dr. Joseph Beech, president of the West China University at Chengtu, who was twenty years in China.

Dr. Beech says he saw "a tribe of good-sized men, who, for all I could see, were exactlylike the Bohemians." (Note: Madison Grant states that the modern Bohemians are of the round-skulled races, like the Asiatic Tatars.)

Furthermore, he says:

My friends told me of another tribe which, as one Chinese put it, "are just like you." I was not able to visit this people. They live in the district of Sung Pan. It is ten days' journey, or about 300 miles northwest of Chengtu.

This tribe resembling Anglo-Saxons was described to me as consisting of large, furious men, whose bravery is considered somewhat of a marvel to the Chinese. "They never run away any more than you do," my Chinese friend told me. "They love to fight."

I was told the men often fight duels on horse-back which recall the duels of the Middle Ages. The duellists start the fight with a discharge of short blunderbusses-so heavy they rest them on a wooden cross attached to the saddle-bow. I judged they were made by native workmen, and rather inefficient weapons, hurling a handful of slugs.