Mongolia notes
Reportage, 2009
So, I was in Mongolia again. It really does feel like the edge of the earth, and the city (Ulaanbataar, or UB) and its surrounding empty countryside feel rough-hewn, almost unfinished. The city isn’t pretty, but the empty lands around it seem either full of the promise of escape or comprise a constricting vacuum, depending on your perspective.
“So twice five miles of fertile ground; with walls and towers were girdled round”. Given its ‘far from the madding crowds’ aspect, Mongolia attracts all kinds of strange travelers. Marco Polo never made it here. He went instead to see Kubla Khan in what is now Beijing. But you feel that the land itself has that mythic quality which comes from descriptions of yearning travelers in far-off lands wondering if they will ever come here. The present-day Mongolians, at least the older generation, live in a fevered dream of Mongol past when their ancestors rampaged across Eurasia as the Golden Horde; or sacked cities of cowering peoples of the plains.
The place is in a state of shivering stasis: half-finished buildings dot the cityscape like gnawed-out carcasses because the country is nearly bankrupt; the roads are dusty and the cars are driven in a manic craze, like stampeding horses through the broken streets. Outside the city, the wind whips flying refuse into torn spires on the flat grassy land, wherever a piece of plastic has managed to adhere to rock. So on that piece, other pieces stick, till you have these stalagmites of debris rising from the steppes. Sheep and goat skulls litter the landscape, like contemporary fossils .. Real fossils can also be found in multitudes, out in the deep Gobi.
In other places pious Buddhists have created little piles of rock by throwing one pebble for every circumlocution of the existing pile. So pebble by pious pebble, huge mounds have come to be, again in the middle of a vast emptiness. So also have little pieces of myth and history created the semblance of a nation.
