The country on the south side of the river was fairly flat and gave us good cover. It was criss-crossed by shallow streams and it was at one of these a couple of mornings later that Kristina suddenly said, ‘I would like to wash my clothes.’ We all agreed it was an excellent idea. Kristina walked away from us down the stream carrying her shoes and splashing her feet in the water until she disappeared from sight. We stripped off and started our laundering. All of us were infested with lice and I derived a savage pleasure from holding my clothes under the rippling stream in the hope I could reduce the army of parasites which had lived on me for all these months. We beat our clothes with stones and then trod some of the filth out of them. A couple of hours passed while the sun dried our clothes as we washed ourselves and stretched out naked in the long grass. With a shock we heard the girl call a warning of her approach and dived for our trousers and just managed to scramble into them as she appeared.
Kristina looked as though she had been scrubbing herself. Her face was shining. She had been doing something to her hair, too. The chestnut tints glinted in the sun. She had contrived to persuade it into some kind of order and had carefully plaited the long ends. Keeping a straight face and holding herself erect like a dowager at a tea-party she greeted us. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Were you expecting me?’ We all laughed at that and completed our dressing. And Mister Smith went away and picked a small posy of some pink flowers and gravely handed them to her. ‘You look beautiful, my child,’ he told her. Kristina smiled radiantly. It must have been one of her happiest days.
We were very near the border when we ran into the two Buryat Mongols. There was no avoiding the meeting. We saw one another at the same moment at a distance of not more than fifty yards and there was nothing to do but continue towards the pair. One was middle-aged, if one can judge the ages of these people, the other was definitely a young man. They could have been father and son. They stopped and waited for us to come up to them and grinned widely and nodded their heads. They bowed together as we came to a halt.
The conversation was embroidered and ornamented with politenesses and I took the pattern from them. They spoke slowly in Russian. They inquired solicitously whether our feet carried us well in our travels. I assured them our feet had carried us well and returned the inquiry. The older man was naively curious to know about us.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From the North – Yakutsk.’
‘And where do you travel to?’
‘We travel very far to the South.’
The old man looked shrewdly at me from beneath his wrinkled lids. ‘You go perhaps to Lhasa to pray.’
I thought that an excellent idea. ‘Yes,’ I replied.
But the old man hadn’t finished. He looked us over carefully. ‘Why do you have the woman with you?’
A bit of quick thinking here. ‘She has relatives who live on our way and we have promised to deliver her there.’
The two Mongols exchanged smiling glances as though approving of our protection for the girl on her journey. Then both dug their hands in their deep pockets and brought them into view clutching fistfuls of peanuts which they cheerfully handed round.
Each in turn wished us that our feet carried us well and safely to our destination. They turned away together and walked from us. We waited to see them out of sight. They had gone only a few yards when the old man turned back alone. He walked straight up to Kristina, bowed and gave her a handful of peanuts for herself. He repeated his good wishes to her and to us all and left us beaming goodwill.
When they had gone we set off at a fast pace. We were too near the frontier to take chances now.
14
Eight Enter Mongolia
PHASE ONE of the escape ended with the crossing of the Russo-Mongolian border at the end of the second week in June. It was notable for two circumstances – the ease of the crossing and the fact that we stepped out of the Buryat Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the Eastern Siberian Region of the U.S.S.R. with nearly a hundredweight of small early potatoes pulled out of a field only a few hours from the frontier. The timing of the potato field raid – at dawn on the day in which later we were to make our exit from Siberia – was particularly gratifying. I felt that, having gone into captivity with nothing, we were leaving with a valuable parting gift, even though the donors were unconscious of their generosity.
We reached the crossing point in late afternoon when dusk was deepened to premature darkness by massing black clouds heavy with rain. Far-off thunder rumbled like the uneasy mutterings of a troubled giant. The air was still, the atmosphere hot and oppressive. As far as the eye could see nothing moved. There was nothing to challenge our progress. The dividing line was marked by a nine-feet-tall red post surmounted by a round metal sign carrying the Soviet wheatsheaf, star, hammer and sickle emblems over a strip of Cyrillic initials. To east and west one more post was visible in each direction, so spaced in accordance with the contours of the country that an observer at any one post could always see two others.
I stepped round the post to see what might be inscribed on the other side of the plaque, but the reverse was blank. There was sudden laughter as Zaro called out, ‘What’s it like in Mongolia, Slav?’ He cavorted across to me with a hop, skip and a jump. The others followed with a rush. We pranced and danced, slapped one another on the back, pulled beards and shook hands. Kristina ran round, kissed each one of us in turn and cried with happiness and excitement. Mister Smith put a stop to the noisy rejoicings by pointedly swinging his potato-filled food sack on to his back and moving off. We ran after him, still laughing.
‘Let’s get away from this place,’ he said, ‘as fast as we can go. We can’t be sure how far below this border Russian influence extends. We don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we are going.’
We walked fast after that, our sacks bumping against our backs. Behind us the frontier markers were swallowed into the distance and the darkness. The American had started a train of serious thought. I estimated we had covered 2,000 kilometres – about 1,200 miles – in not much more than sixty days. It was a feat of speed as well as endurance.
Paluchowicz broke in on my thoughts. ‘How far do we have to travel now?’
I thought about it. ‘About twice as far as we’ve travelled already,’ I guessed. Paluchowicz grunted his dismay.
Here it was that we first discussed seriously where we were going. Up to now we had thought ahead no further than the escape from Siberia. Back in the camp I had talked, without any great conviction, of making for Afghanistan. It sounded a safe, out-of-the-way small country where we might be received without too many questions asked. Now we began to turn our thoughts towards India. And the key to this, I think, lay in the talk we had a day earlier with the two Mongols. Lhasa. It was a word we could use in a country where few knew our language, a sound which could be understood and would always evoke the response of a flungout hand to indicate direction. We talked mainly of Tibet in that first hour. India then seemed too far to contemplate.
The American spoke truly when he said we did not know where we were. We had no maps and there was no one to tell us. I have tried in recent years by reference to maps to plot our probable course, but the probable could err from the actual by as much as a hundred miles. Let me say, then, that I think we entered Outer Mongolia at a point which led us straight into the Kentei Shan mountains, that in traversing the range we must have borne west of due south to pass to the west of the only big city of the area, Urga, or, as it is now known, Ulan Bator. This theory fits in with the lie of the land as we found it, the hills, the cultivated plains, and the many rivers carrying loaded sampans. It would explain where the boatmen were going: Urga is at the confluence of three rivers, each of which has tributaries.
We were climbing steadily into the mountains two hours after leaving the border. Sweat oozed from us. The thunder spoke out nearer and nearer and a warm, sighing wind blew up from nowhere, rapidly increasing in strength as we plodded on.
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Around midnight the gathering storm exploded. The first overhead thunderclap came like a near-at-hand battery of long-range artillery firing a simultaneous salvo. It was an assault on the ears. Lightning streaked and blazed across the black heavens while the thunder rolled, crashed and reverberated about us. A few large raindrops urged us to look for cover but the lightning revealed only a wilderness of rocky slopes. The torrent was upon us as we groped in the tumult. The rain dropped down by sheer weight, its vertical fall unaffected by the whining wind. My clothes were soaked in a matter of minutes. Streams of water trickled down the back of my neck inside my jacket. It was the worst electrical storm I have ever experienced.
We lasted that night out, the eight of us, in a shallow crevice between two smooth rocks. Only the innermost couple enjoyed any degree of comfort. The girl, in the most favoured position, huddled unspeaking in her wet clothes throughout the unending dark hours, shivering and bewildered at the unabating fury of the storm.
It was a relief to get moving at first light. The rain sheeted down all through the day as though it would never stop. It went on teeming throughout the next night and until evening of the second day. Then the downpour ceased as spectacularly as though someone had turned a tap off in the heavens. In the morning a hot sun transformed our dreary world and steam rose in clouds from the rocks. We dried our clothes and again began to take an interest in our position.
The continuing ascent was tiring but not difficult. The fifteen to twenty pounds of potatoes each of us carried did not make the effort any easier but no one grumbled on that account. From the heights on the fourth day there was a clear view of the range running roughly east and west and splaying out to the south like a series of great probing fingers. Our accidentally-chosen route crossed the middle of three ill-defined peaks, its summit a broad, uneven-surfaced plateau. Because it was too damp to light a fire we ate only a few peanuts and some partially-dried saucer-sized rizhiki, or agaric, which I knew from boyhood experience in Poland to be edible. I was the party’s expert on edible fungi and after their first reluctant try at some succulent pink toadstools growing on a rotting log, which I recommended, the others always accepted my judgment on poisonous and non-poisonous growths.
From the southern rim of the plateau we could see to the eastward on the plain below a village of white, flat-roofed houses. Moving about in tree-shaded pasturage were animals I made out to be white goats. A group of camels, even at that range, were easily identified. The American strongly resisted the argument of Marchinkovas, Paluchowicz and Makowski that we should go off to the left and make friends with the villagers. He urged that we were still too near the border to take the slightest risk. Talking patiently and earnestly against gesturing arms and jabbing fingers, he won his point.
The negotiation of the Kentei mountains took about eight days. The last stages of the descent were notable because we were able to find wood to light a fire and there to cook the last of our stinking pigmeat. We laid a flat stone across one corner of the fire and roasted potatoes, which made a memorable meal. For dessert there were the last few peanuts.
Coming down on to the plain from the cool heights was like stepping into an oven. Off came the bulky fufaikas and we sweltered bare-armed in our camp-made fur waistcoats. Kolemenos carried Kristina’s padded jacket and she walked along with her faded purple dress-top opened at the neck. The ground was hard as cement and coated with a powdery reddish dust. The mountains outcropped in an odd succession of low, oval mounds. Our exposed arms turned bright red, blistered, peeled and finally took on a deep tan. The twenty to thirty miles a day we imposed on ourselves were infinitely tiring. The nights brought with them a body-searching chill.
The treatment of sore feet became a preoccupation. Deep cracks developed between the toes and there were raw patches where the fine dust chafed inside our moccasins. We had occasion to bless the foresight of Paluchowicz, a chronic foot-sufferer, who had collected the fat dripping from the cooking pork back in the cave in Siberia and carried it in a roughly-hollowed wooden cup shaped like half a coconut shell. This fat we sparingly applied to the cracks and sore patches.
This country, we discovered, was criss-crossed with rivers, but we marched a couple of days before we struck the first one. At noon on a sun-scorched day through a shimmering heat-haze, the promise of its cool waters sent our dragging feet lifting over the dry ground. It was a beautiful sight, about a hundred yards wide, its banks green-clothed with grass, its verges supporting flourishing growths of the long-stemmed, bamboo-jointed tall water plants we had met all through Siberia. We lay on our bellies and drank and then we sat in bliss soaking our aching feet. We washed ourselves, using fine sand as a scourer, and soaked the dust out of our clothes. We baked and ate some more of our potatoes, and lay down in the grass with a sense of relaxed well-being.
Along the river an hour after our arrival came a small sampan-type boat, high-built at bows and stern, broad-bottomed and with a flimsy canopy amidships. Athwartships, just forward of the canopy, ran a long stout pole extending beyond the boat a few feet on each side, to the ends of which were lashed two thick bundles of sticks riding an inch or two above the water. At first I thought they were fenders but afterwards I concluded they were stabilizers which, dipping into the water as the craft slewed, would keep it on an even keel. The boatman was Chinese. He was bare-footed, wore a coolie sun-hat, linen trousers ending below the knees and a loose flapping shirt with ragged sleeves torn off at the elbows. The sampan was poled along with a length of strong bamboo. The spectacle was new to all of us and we waved as the sampan glided by. The Chinaman waved back and grinned. Three or four more craft moved past in the couple of hours we rested there. Propulsion was the same for all – a long bamboo pole – although one had a stumpy mast which could have been used for a sail.
There were many other boats on many other rivers in Outer Mongolia, but the men who plied their trade in them were always Chinese. On the roads I never once met a Chinese. Road travellers seemed always to be Mongols.
Our first face-to-face meeting with natives of the country occurred after we had crossed the river and moved a few miles to the south. We were following no track but planning our progress according to the lie of the land to avoid small hills, seizing on a landmark ahead and then walking steadily towards it. Our path was cut eventually by a road lying east and west. Coming slowly from the west was a group of travellers, and it was obvious that if both they and we maintained our pace we must meet. We were less than fifty yards from the road when the Mongols drew abreast. They stopped and waited for us. They were talking busily among themselves as we came within earshot but became silent as we halted before them. They smiled and bowed, keeping their eyes on us the while.
There were a dozen or more men, one camel, two mules and two donkeys. The animals were lightly laden and were also saddled for riding. Only the camel was being ridden now. Perched comfortably on it was an old man with a wispy grey beard. The men might have been a family party, of which the old man was the patriarch. All wore the typical Mongolian conical caps with their long ear-flaps turned back alongside the crown, in material which ranged from leather to quilted homespun cloth. All wore calf-length boots of excellent soft leather and the old man’s, in green leather simply embroidered on the outside of the leg in coloured silk or woollen threads, were of specially fine quality. The bottoms of their heavy loose coats reached the top of their boots. The coats opened to show broad belts, a few of leather, the rest of some strong woven stuff. I thought it strange they should wear so much warm clothing in that hot weather.
In their belts each had a knife and all seemed to be of different patterns. One had a horn-handled long clasp-knife hanging from a silver chain. The patriarch, as befitted his venerable position, carried stuck in his leather belt a knife which was about eighteen inches long overall. It was broad-bladed and slightly curved and the sheath was banded with brass into which some design had been etched or beaten.
When the bowing on
both sides had been completed in silence, the greybeard got down from his camel. We bowed again and he returned the greeting. He spoke in his own language and we shook our heads. Mister Smith whispered to me, ‘Try him in Russian, Slav.’ The old man heard and turned his attention to me.
‘May your feet carry you well on your journey,’ I addressed him in Russian.
A long pause followed.
In Russian, haltingly and with an obvious searching for words in an unfamiliar tongue, came the answer: ‘Talk more, please. I understand you well but I speak little Russian. Once I speak this language but not for many years.’
I talked slowly, he listened intently. I said we were going south (that was obvious anyway), that we had crossed a river some hours before. I didn’t know what else to say. There was such a long silence when I finished that I thought the parley was over. But the old gentleman wanted to satisfy his curiosity and, as it turned out, was grappling with his rusty Russian in order to phrase his questions. The conversation, in the fullness of time, proceeded thus:
You have no camels? – We are too poor to have camels.
You have no mules? – We have no mules either.
You have no donkeys? – No donkeys.
Having established us on the lowest stratum of society, he went on to question me about our journey. The word Lhasa came up. He pointed to the south and mentioned the names of a number of places. The information was valueless because we had no maps and just did not understand what he was talking about.
‘It is a very long way,’ he said, ‘and the sun will come round many times before you reach this place.’