Swords From the East (79 page)

The second stage of the duel is fought with stones, of which each has a bag. If the bags are exhausted without serious injury, the duellists draw nearer and throw spears tied to the ends of ropes so they can be pulled back and thrown again. Meanwhile the two horsemen are circling around and constantly getting closer.

In the final stage the antagonists ride up to each other and fight hip to hip with great swords, after the fashion of Richard the Lion-Hearted. The duel always goes to a decision, my Chinese friend told me.

(Has anyone ever seen a Central Asian tribesman with a "short blunderbuss," or short gun of any kind?)

Dr. Beech mentions a medieval castle that he saw on the border between China and the tribes country "which was totally unlike Chinese architecture."

Possibly the Chinese friends of Dr. Beech-the Chinese enjoy a good story and are prone to exaggeration-were describing one of the tribes of the mountain Kirghiz, who are good fighters and better horse-thieves. By the way, the Kirghiz tribes are not confined to the steppe around the western Thian Shan. Their auls stretch north and east, well across the borders of Mongolia and into Siberia. E. H. Wilson, the naturalist, was ten years in the country around Chengtu and mentions no Aryan-looking tribes.

Dr. Beech is now in this country. Perhaps someone in the Camp-Fire knows him, or his experiences, and can get word to us from him.

Perhaps some tribes of Aryan descent are to be found in the interior of China, between the Kuan Lung Mountains and the headwaters of the Yang-tie (the Sung Pan Ho and the Ta Ho rivers).

Mongolian Archery

A reader named Frank Huston, well informed in archery, asked a series of bow-related questions of a number of Adventure authors. Of Harold Lamb he asked "how the Mongolian archers compared with the English longbowmen, both as to range and accuracy." Here is Lamb's reply:*

New York City

I was greatly interested in your remarks on archery, British and Mongolian. As it happens, one of my tales, just in the process of completion, deals with the fortunes of an English archer among the Mongols in the early thirteenth century.

In reading the annals of the Mongols-or rather the histories of other nations that deal with the Mongols, for they left few written records of their own-I've gleaned only fragmentary ideas of the use of the bow by the Mongols. It was their favorite weapon, and was of vast importance in winning victories. They used-in the time of Genghis Khan-a heavier bow than the Chinese, the Persians, or Turks. Fighting invariably from horse back, they were able to outmaneuver and out-range their adversaries. More than once they dealt decisively with elephants; the quilted armor of the Chinese did not serve to stop their shafts; or linked mail of a single thickness.

I gathered that the Mongols were accurate to a considerable distance with their short, powerful bows; they had a habit of bringing down chosen warriors of the enemy with shots in the eye and throat. I remember one incident where a khan of the Tatar Horde sent as presents before battle a very heavy bow and silver arrow to his enemy, a Turk (for which read Persian or Kankali or Kurd, at pleasure), with the remark that such bows were very strong and such arrows shot a long way. The Turks could not handle the weapon.

History does not record the English archers ever opposing the Mongols in or around the Holy Land. It is most probably the case that an English yeoman with the longbow could send a shaft further and more accurately than a Mongol (all Mongols were archers). It is doubtful if he could send shafts more swiftly from the bow, or work greater execution at close quarters. And as for comparing them mounted, a reasonably good archer of the Horde could set his horse to a gallop, discharge three arrows at a mark-such as a spear stuck upright in the plain-unstring his bow, use it as a whip, string it, and shoot another three shafts, behind his back after he passed the mark.

All of which brings us to the conclusion that at the butts the English yeomen would outshoot the Mongols; also that a regiment of the same English archers would have small chance of holding their own against an equal number of Mongols in open warfare. Remember when the Mongol Horde ran up against the Russians, Poles, Teutons, Huns (Hungarians) at the Danube?

Disputing Racial Theory

One of you wrote us a long letter, enclosing an article from the Dearborn Independent, but since, contrary to Camp-Fire custom, he did not wish his name printed with his letter, neither name nor letter is printed. However, I sent it to Harold Lamb of our writers' brigade, who as you know is an old crony of Genghis Khan, Prester John, Tamerlane, et al., and his reply makes plain the general drift of letter and article. He's always a good man to turn to for help, for he not only knows whereof he speaks but handles everything thoroughly-in this case, having omitted one point from his first letter, he was good enough to write a second.

Berkeley, California

I've discussed the I. S. letter with several men, from anthropological, archeological, and historical angles. A couple of these chaps are authorities, more or less. Here's the gist of what we threshed out:

r. S. has the merit of being sincere, and plainspoken.

2. The theory, that the yellowrace is a product of black and white, is not proved in any way in the enclosed data, or elsewhere. In fact the contrary can easily be proved.

By the various tests (anthropologically speaking) the white man is fundamentally different from the black and is actually between the black and yellow. (Take one test, body structure: Black-long legs, short body; white, long legs, long body; yellow, long body, short legs.) Anthropologists deny that you can produce the yellow man by breeding black with white. Prove it by nature of hair, color of skin, shape of eye, skull formation, etc.

I know nothing about that, but it looks to me as if there is almost nothing behind this theory, and a well-organized trench system against it.

3. Take history. Dr. Legendre says that the Huns brought great num- hers of conquered blacks-slaves-back to Central Asia and China. The evidences are against this. Where and when did the conquering Hunnish tribes ever have direct contact with the blacks? He assumes that the present yellow peoples of China are a product of a possible white Hun race, and a possible infusion of slave blacks. The Huns (Mans, Vandals, Mongols, etc.) never crossed the seas.

Legendre also draws in Babylonia, and Egypt, to explain Chinese ancient culture, arts, etc. There's been a lot of bunk poured out about ancient Egypt. DeLacouperie and others have taken pains to trace the source of early Chinese writing to Egypt. Early Chinese ideographs are nothing more or less than modified picture-writing.

I've seen enthusiastic "scientists" take just as many pains to identify early American picture-writing with the Chinese. There are resemblances. And you can easily find resemblances to the above ideographs in the pictures drawn by a five-year-old child, and Kipling's "Just So Stories."

Same with the "Babylonian" lions, griffons. The formula is this-" There were lions in Babylon and bone lions in China; ergo and therefore the grotesque stone lions of Chinese art were derived from Babylonian art." How? Well, the Persians took Babylonian art to themselves. Chinese trade caravans came into contact with Persia-and so on.

All this is hypothesis. So with the Chinese dragon.

Undoubtedly-and this has been ascertained by the explorations of Sir Marcus Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, French missions, etc. -Chinese art owes much to Greek, and more to Aryan India. Just as the Buddhist-morality Chinese system of living owes much to Buddhist India and Tibet.

But, because certain beginnings of Chinese art can be traced to Greece and India, remotely, is no possible reason for denying that the early Chinese had a typical art and a typical culture.

(I have before me a series of reproductions of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish miniature paintings of the eleventh to seventeenth century. From the archives of the Bibliotheque Nationale. And the Persian and Turkish painters of the fourteenth century used Chinese technique.)

The point being that Legendre is "full of prunes, pink 'uns" when he says that since these borrowings can be traced, there is no native Chinese art.

You can trace one of the most typical features of Chinese architecture to the Tatars. The drooping, curving roof lines.

But it's absurd to argue that because the Tatars had tents, the Chinese had no architecture. And what of the purely Chinese inventions-cross-bow, BC 400; gunpowder, AD goo; paper, silk, astronomical instruments, clocks, etc., ad infin.?

I've never seen Legendre's book, and can't place him, except that his work seems to have appeared in L'Illustration rather than in the Revue des Missions Archeologique, etc.

Most of what he says is quite so, and has been said before. The present-day Chinese are a conglomerate of different races, speaking different dialects, even separate languages. The origin of the earliest "Chinese" is uncertain, but is placed pretty definitely in the Gobi, west of Shansi, which was then a fertile land.

And it's true that instead of being a pure-strain, awfully ancient and mysterious and cultured race, the Chinese have interbred with different conquering nations, have borrowed most of their culture and its ideas. But the net product is Chinese, not Aryan mixed with negro bastards.

It seems tome that Legendre is arguing like most Frenchmen, from theory to fact, instead of from proved fact to theory.

Take his point that the armies of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane, etc., were not made up of yellow men, that is, of Chinese and Mongols only. Perfectly true, in a way. Take the horde of Genghis Khan. It was made up, eventually, of Kankalis, Kiptchaks, Ouighurs, Naimans-Ural-Altaic tribes, or Turko-Mongols. Also of Keraits, Mongols, and Tatars, and the ancestors of the present Manchurians, Koreans, and native Siberians. The Mongols were only one tribe of nomads that eventually won leadership over the others.

These tribes, the Turko-Mongols, as we call them, fathered in a very early day the American Indian, later the Huns, then another branch, the Mongols, the Moghuls who conquered India, the Manchus who conquered China. They were always hard boiled, remarkably interesting, and warriors par excellence.

Remnants of them are found, as Legendre points out, in Bulgaria, and the Balkans today, in the Finns and Kalmuks of Russia, as well as the Circassians of the Caucasus and the Caspian region.

The origin of these horse-riding nomads who came out of Central Asia and overran more than half of the earth is one of the nicest questions of modern research. To summarize hugely-the nomad TurkoMongol is the descendant of the Scythian and the Scythian is "x" in the equation. Who was he?

Arthur Brodeur answered that question. The Scythian was the man who lived in Scythia, which is ancient Turkestan, BC Iooo. What kind of man was he? He called himself, collectively, the Tokharoi and other things, and he had a writing, which is now christened Tokharian, and resembles both Sanskrit and German. Branches of him spread into Kashmir and Tibet, and established civilizations.

Was this Tokharian, as we may call him, a nomad out of Northern Europe? Or was he a highly cultured Aryan of Persian ancestry out of the Mesopotamia basin? He seems to have been Aryan, witness his writing, his weapons. But, little is known about the gentleman, though information is coming in yearly.

Hence the persistent rumors of "white" civilization in ancient Central Asia-the early Chinese references to "blue-eyed barbarians." Our legends of "White Huns," etc. And we hear that Genghis Khan had red hair, and that Kublai Khan looked like a "white" man. Throwbacks?

Well, we have traced this Aryan, horse-riding, Sanskrit-like writing and long-sword-fighting chap back to rooo Bc and we aren't in the least sure how white he was then. Perhaps he was then more white than yellow and he certainly wasn't negro.

But when his children, a couple of thousand years later, came out of Central Asia, our fathers in Europe didn't see any family resemblance at all-in fact called them devils. They were the Huns, the Alans, the Vandals, etc.