Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

At this season the Crimea was full of poppies. In the winding defile that climbed towards the interior, the kind of treacherous geography that betrayed the Light Brigade, poppies wreathed the outcrops of pink rock. Above on the plateau, ramparts of poppies enclosed fields where armies of stout women were cutting hay with scythes. Then the bus passed into a country of orchards where poppies trickled down the aisles between the trees to gather in pools among apple-green shadows.

I felt relieved to be on the move, to be consuming landscapes. The boat and its complex relationships had engendered a sense of confinement, some cloying and unsuitable feeling of responsibility. Now I was performing the traveller’s trick, the trick of departure, the vanishing act that marks the stages of a journey. For the traveller every encounter is conditioned by departure, by the impending schedule of trains, by the tickets already folded in his pocket, by the promise of new pastures. Departure is the constraint and the liberation of journeys.

On this bright morning fresh landscapes opened in front of me. Gazing out the window of the bus I delighted in the flash of fields and houses, the blur of poppies. I watched whole towns sweep past, adrift among wheat fields, then fall rapidly astern. At Simferopol I would get the train and tomorrow evening I would be on the Volga, seven hundred miles to the east. I felt the elation of movement. On this bus fleeing eastward, I felt I was staging my own disappearance, vanishing into Asia, leaving only a handwritten sign on the window of my former life: ‘Gone to Outer Mongolia, please cancel the papers’.

Since the time of the Scythians, the pastures of the Crimean interior had lured successive waves of Asian nomads onto the peninsula from the southern Russian steppes. When the Mongols arrived here in the thirteenth century it became an important component of the western province of the Mongolian Empire known as the Golden Horde whose capital lay at Sarai on the Volga. The Russians mistakenly called these eastern invaders Tatars, one of the many tribes that had been subdued by Genghis Khan in the early years of conquest, and the name stuck. In the west this became Tartar when Louis IX, William’s benefactor, transformed it by way of a Latin pun on ex tartarus , meaning ‘from the regions of hell’ recorded in classical legend.

Friar William landed at Sudak on the southern shore of the Crimea on 21 May, 1253. His plan was to visit a Mongol prince, Sartaq, rumoured to be a Christian, whose camp lay three days’ ride beyond the River Don. On the advice of the Greek merchants in Sudak he opted to travel by cart, filling one with ‘fruits, muscatel wine and dry biscuits’ as gifts for the Mongol officials that they would encounter along the way. He set off with four companions: his colleague, Friar Bartholomew, a man whose age and bulk made him even less suited to this epic journey than William himself; Gosset, ‘a bearer’; Homo Dei, a Syrian interpreter whose knowledge of any useful language was fairly shaky; and Nicholas, a slave boy that William had rescued in Constantinople.

But William’s journey was to take him a good deal further than he had planned. He was embarking on an odyssey that would lead him eventually to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum, at the other end of Asia, well over four thousand miles away. If he had hoped to be back with his fellow monks in time for Christmas, he was to be disappointed.

At Simferopol I found the train to Volgograd guarded by an army of formidable carriage attendants, big-breasted women who stood by the doors like bouncers. They had beehive hairdos, thick necks and the kind of shoulders born of a career spent wrestling baggage and the heavy windows of Russian trains. Even their make-up was intimidating – scarlet lipstick, blue eyelids, raspberry-rouged cheeks, and malevolent bits of mascara gathered at the corners of their eyes. But once the train started, they underwent a transformation, from security guards to matrons. They abandoned their jackboots for carpet slippers, and began to fuss with the curtains. Taking pity on a hapless foreigner, my carriage attendant brought me a mug of tea from her samovar and I spread out a picnic of bananas, smoked cheese, a sausage, and Ukrainian pastries.

I shared my compartment with a burly Russian with mechanic’s hands and a simian haircut growing low on his forehead. He lay down on the bunk opposite and was asleep before we cleared the industrial suburbs of Simferopol. He slept with one eye slightly ajar. From beneath its lowered lid it followed me round the compartment. As he fell deeper into his slumbers his limbs began to convulse, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits.

On the edges of the Azov Sea we crossed out of Crimea on a littoral of islands. For a time the world was poised uneasily between land, water and sky. Causeways linked narrow tongues of marsh where lone houses stood silhouetted against uncertain horizons. A fisherman passed in a boat no bigger than a bathtub, his head bowed over nets, like a man at prayer. Watery planes tapered beneath landscapes of cloud until the sea and the sky began to merge, the same placid grey, the same boundless horizontals.

Beyond Melitopol we sailed over prairies tilting beneath towering skies. This was nomad country, the Don steppe, traversed by winds blowing out of the heart of Asia. The first Greek traders who ventured across the Black Sea were alarmed to find themselves here on the edge of another sea running north and east on waves of grass. The southern reaches of grasslands that stretch intermittently from Hungary to Manchuria, these prairies lent themselves for millennia to a culture of movement.

Maritime metaphors adhere to these landscapes with the tenacity of barnacles. Chekov grew up at Taganrog east of here along the shores of the Sea of Azov. He remembered as a boy lying among sacks of wheat in the back of an oxcart sailing slowly across the great ocean of the steppe. William wrote in a similar vein. ‘When … we finally came across some people,’ he wrote, ‘we rejoiced like shipwrecked sailors coming into harbour.’ Pastoralism survived on these prairies until the beginning of the twentieth century when the fatal combination of the modern age and Communism brought the world of the Scythians to a close. The tents and the horses retreated as lumbering tractors ploughed up the grasslands for wheat, and the prairie was colonized by villages and farmers.

The afternoon was full of country stations and haycocks. Peasant women lined the platforms with metal buckets of fat red cherries which they sold by the bowlful to the passengers through the windows of the train. As we pulled away they slung their buckets on the handlebars of old bicycles and diminished down dirt roads between flat fields of cabbages and banks of cream-coloured blossoms. Pegged like an unruly sheet by a line of telegraph poles, the prairie flapped away into unfathomable distances.

In the early evening I stood in the corridor at an open window, breathing in the country air as we passed through invisible chambers of scent: cut hay, strawberries, wet stagnant ditches, newly-turned earth, wood smoke. In a blue twilight we came to the estuary of the Dneiper, as dark as steel and as wide as a lake. Trails of mist unravelled across its polished surface. Dim yellow lights marked another horizon. It was impossible to tell if they were houses or ships.

All that remains of the great nomadic cultures that once roamed these regions are the tombs of their ancestors. William describes the landscape as being composed of three elements: heaven, earth and tombs. Scythians tombs, known as kurgans , litter these steppes like humpbacked whales riding seas of wheat. Beneath great mounds of stone and earth their chiefs were buried with their horses and their gold, their servants and their wives. The tombs were the only permanent habitation they ever built. Grave robbers have plundered the tall barrows for centuries, carrying off the spectacular loot of Scythian gold – ornaments, jewellery, weapons, horse trappings, all decorated in an ‘animal style’ with parades of ibex and stags, eagles and griffons, lions and serpents. But it was horses not gold that were the most compelling feature of these burials.