The Horse of Gengis Khan

Mysterious Mongolia Leaves Its Imprint in the Life of a Parisian Traveller

PAUL MORAND

ERIK LA BONN crossed the Great Wall of China at P'ing Fu and headed in the direction of the Long K'on pass. Mongolia lay unfolded before him, flat as a board, into which, twisting like a corkscrew, the little caravan was entering. This caravan was made up of horses, mules, two blue carts drawn by mules, carriers, teamsters and the traveller himself. Erik La Bonn was an eccentric young wanderer, as independent as his long nose proclaimed him to be, and passionately devoted to the open road. He. was on his way from Peking back to Europe on horseback, for he was much less afraid of perishing from the cold than suffocating in the heat of the TransSiberian railroad coaches. For days he had thus been on the march, all alone, singing Parsifal to himself at the top of his lungs, his long legs dangling from the flanks of his Mongolian pony; and since his was not a costume such as one might expect to be worn on a trip like this, but a city-cut overcoat, tight at the waistline, long trousers, a starched, stand-up collar and a grey derby hat (which he wore on principle) he caused a great deal of astonishment among the Chinese he met and, of course, was taken for a very high personage.

THE caravan crossed rivers which proved great obstacles, being so sinuous that they had to be forded as often as fifteen times. Finally, they entered the Gobi Desert. They met Bactrian camels, whose thickening fur already heralded the approaching winter; soldiers on furlough, without pay, and who had eyes like wolves', merchants, sitting in their traps, accompanied by their wives, placidly drawing puffs of smoke through their waterpipes, missionaries of the Foreign Bible Society, sharpers who displayed great dexterity in the shell game at which the Mongolians stand ready to lose their souls and their dollars. One evening, being a little bored with these sights, which were always the same, Erik La Bonn had pushed ahead of his escort to visit a hunting pavilion, half way up a hill, which had been built for the great emperor Kien Lung. He lost his way and found that he was alone in a desolate valley strewn with stones and boulders. For days, to be sure, there had not been any trees, but never until this moment had he felt the vast and naked grandeur of Asia. Even the beaten path had disappeared: It seemed that after several smaller paths had become entangled with it and spread it out in several different directions, the path had stopped of its own accord on the edge of a void—on the very brink of an underworld.

La Bonn did not know what fear was. Fie carried no weapons on his travels, except mustard, with which, as he used to say, he defended himself during the day against the vile taste of the native cooking, and he sprinkled it on his bed at night to keep the vermin away. He had been told that bandits only held the rich Nomad families for ransom and hardly ever molested Europeans, so that he really dreaded nothing but the tenacity of the beggars and the smell of the Mongolian women. He stopped: around him nothing but debris of porphyrous rock, shafts of abandoned coal mines, and a blinding sun which set the dry autumn air on fire. Suddenly, some twenty or thirty yards away, he noticed a striking object lying on the ground; at first he took it to be a mirror. He went up to it and found it to be the skull of a horse. There was no sign of a skeleton. This skull was so white, so highly polished by many rains and winds, so perfect in substance, so strangely shaped, with its sloping indentation of the nose and the empty, horrible looking hollows of the eyes,—so religious almost in its stripped barrenness, that it seemed to date from the very first years of the existence of this earth. Erik La Bonn alighted from his horse and took the object into his hands; it was terribly heavy. For a long time this modern Hamlet, having placed the skull on his knees, lost himself in thoughts. Were these the last remains of some caravan which, overtaken by the fierce, salty winds, had perished there of thirst? Was this the last vestige of the mount of some departed Mongolian prince, in a red robe, repulsive and goitrous, a standard bearer or klan chieftain perhaps, sent to guard one of the outer bastions of the Great Wall? Or perhaps the sole surviving witness of some great battle, fallen here, cornered by the wolves? A horse! La Bonn thought of the days of Sung, when the horse was king, celebrated by all the poets, immortalized by the best artists, and to be found, either in clay effigies or in its natural state, in every tomb. The horse, without which none of the great migrations could have taken place! This immense, stony valley was only deserted now because its former inhabitants, the Mongols, the Huns and the Turks, had been able, thanks to their horses, to gain and conquer China, India and Europe. Gengis Khan had been the master of the world then, but the master of Gengis Khan was his horse.

SOFTNESS of the skin is a sign of youth, but the polish on the skeleton is proof of its great age. From the horse's skull, which had taken on the lustre of ivory, the flesh had, no doubt, dropped centuries ago. La Bonn let his imagination run riot, and, exalted by his solitude and the nimbus of such grand relics, he lost sense of time and space and fell asleep. He dreamed that he had found the head of Gengis Khan's horse and that he could never part with it again.

He was at last torn out of his dream by the arrival of his escort which joined him just about as night was falling and which he found prostrated on the ground as he awakened. The sight of that skull filled those men with a holy terror. He had his precious find lifted into the cart, and the march was resumed. The howls of wild dogs could already be heard; the smell of goatskins and smoke, carried over to them by the wind, proclaimed that a village was near. And in fact, a long wall of dried mud was outlined against the horizon, punctuated by dim lights. They were approaching Jehol, "The Town of Complete Virtue".

He had to stop at a fourth rate hotel—one of the kind that are called pork-taverns in China—because it was market day and all the other hostelries were filled. Goatskins were drying in the open air; their smell hardly obscured the stench of manure and sewage which ran openly down the middle of the onlv street. Pelts from Dzingary were being lifted onto the backs of camels by great big devils in blue tunics; a Chinese checker in yellow coat and hat traced characters in Chinese ink on the reverse sides, directing the pieces to a port on the Pacific Ocean, en route to America.

The servants prepared the bed in the guest room. La Bonn was waiting for his dinner to be cooked, which consisted of millet cakes. He had affixed the horse's skull outside of his room; it was soon surrounded by a crowd of curious people who contemplated it awestruck and with fright. Women with flat and otherwise deformed feet came to have a look at it; beggars' dogs with a scowling expression, their hair standing on end, yellow lamas with shaven heads remained to mill about the strange fetish of the white man.

IT was plain that the indifferent and skeptical Chinese had been left far behind, that one was in the midst of those superstitious and wild Mongolians, sons of a country particularly given to magic and all sorts of devilish practices. Soon the crowd became so large that the courtyard of the inn was completely filled. The pork bladders, which served as lamps, were lighted. At just about that time the clandestine opium vendors and the managers of the Jehol theatre sent a delegation to make a complaint that the resorts of pleasure were empty and to request that the stranger go to his room and kindly remain there.

The next day, after having left his calling card at the governor's—leaving one's calling card is regarded in the Orient as a propitious rite and is a rigid requirement of good form—Erik La Bonn went to the temple. This was another monument of dried mud, of no definite epoch, located outside the town, in the midst of a dirt and refuse dump. There Buddha smiled. La Bonn was received by a priest who was half doctor, half sorcerer, clad in yellow silk; quite a pleasant person. In the usual roundabout fashion La Bonn put several questions to him. He had him asked if in these parts any particular faith or belief was attached to animal bones, more specifically a horse's skull. The answer that he received was that every kind of skeleton was a dangerous abomination because the greedy souls of a body are always hovering about it in order to reincarnate themselves. A horse's skull had often enriched its finder, but caused his male progeny to perish. Women pregnant more than five months should stand in fear of it. However, everything depended on the day on which the object had been found.

Last night. . ?

That was one of the very worst days, said the lama. One of the most dreaded on the whole calendar. Although prayers might yet be said, before nightfall, still there was little hope. There was really nothing else to do but to fly before the invisible, to fool the demons, or to burn the skull. La Bonn shrugged his shoulders at all this nonsense and gave orders to have his find attached to his saddle. And from then on the horse's skull never left that place.

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Thus he travelled through central Asia. An invisible protection seemed to emanate from the skull: Bandits never came near the caravan; nowhere was hospitality refused. La Bonn was allowed to wash in the sacred hot springs, and when he reached the country of the great pastures he always had his share of fresh meat and almost every night he found a wooden bed under those strange tents of the nomadic Mongolians, quarters made of such thick felt that they were as hot inside as one of those Norwegian cookers in which food can be boiled without fire. When he met lamas, bent on pilgrimages to Thibet, they honoured him by offering him tea. Every evening La Bonn hung the skull outside of his tent on a pole driven into the ground.

The reception was not only cordial in Mongolia, but was equally friendly in Turkestan, in Kokand and Bokkara. The religions, the customs and the colour of the skins changed, but the horse's skull continued to receive the respect of everyone. The population became gradually Moslem, welcomed La Bonn as no European had been received since the arrival of the Bolsheviks. Even the customs inspectors let him pass duty-free.

One evening La Bonn arrived at the Gave de PEst in Paris with the skull of Gengis Khan's horse under his arm. Sentimental effusions, accompanied by verbose lyricism, gushed from him whenever he talked about it. However, he spoke of it seldom, for those people who were slaves of petty habits, jostled about in narrow streets, boxed up in ugly, tall houses, have not the least understanding for the beauties of the steppes and the life of thenomad. La Bonn could not find an apartment and so had to content himself with a small hotel room in the Ouartier Latin. In it there was a Louis Philippe bed—much too large—and a mirrored cabinet, so that he could hardly open his wardrobe trunks. First he put the skull under the dressing table, then on the mantelpiece. This relic, as majestic and provoking as it had been when he found it back there in the glistening dunes of the Gobi Desert, had become nothing more than a piece of refuse from a butcher shop, in Paris, a skeleton for a ragpicker: the dust had made a shabby object of it, turned it a grey colour. But La Bonn did not have the nerve to get rid of it, nor even confess that its possession embarrassed him considerably.

An Englishwoman, Lady Cynthia D., heard about the horse of Gengis Khan and became exceedingly interested in the subject. As a matter of fact, she was only interested in the young Frenchman, but she begged La Bonn to entrust to her that which remained of the Mongolian courser-, she said that she would hang the skull over her head. Through the eyes of the skull she put blue ribbons which came out by the nostrils, thus robbing the dramatic relic of its last mystery. La Bonn had to restrain her from gilding it. Two days after she had hung the horse's head over her bed, Lady Cynthia was lying down when a great noise was heard in her room. People entered and found her bathed in her blood. The cursed thing had detached itself from the wall and had split the head of the young Englishwoman in two. She only recovered after a great amount of suffering. She did not want to hear anymore of the horse's head nor of its owner, and after this accident the horse of Gengis Khan went back to the Ouartier Latin. La Bonn kept it for some time, but on the eve of a journey entrusted it to a retired deepsea captain, who was an invalid. This simple man—although grown more imaginative since he had been compelled to lead a sedentary life—had waxed enthusiastic over La Bonn's tale and had asked for the privilege of keeping the skull during the absence of his friend. The much-travelled La Bonn then began to receive strange letters from the captain which became disquieting, and finally totally demented. He was just preparing to return when he learned that the old mariner had been found one morning suspended from the window fastening. On the table, in plain view, was the horse's head. La Bonn hoped that the captain's heirs would inherit it and took pains not to give a sign of life. But on the very next day after his return he received a call from a notary who informed him that he had been made the captain's sole heir, and that the skull w'ould be returned to him so soon as the seals had been broken. Then these things happened. A little later La Bonn gave it to a painter for a still life, but the latter's studio burned down. He gave it to a raffle, but the number that should have won it was never presented. People began to know the history of the skull. The servants did not dare enter the room anymore on account of the "haunted head", as they called it. It seemed indeed that all the mishaps which the heavens had spared La Bonn and which, -without dropping, had remained suspended over his head, and the strange immunity which he enjoyed, were suddenly interrupted as soon as the skull left his hands. He did not dare destroy it for fear of some curse befalling him. He could no longer risk giving it away for fear of participating in a crime.

"Alas! You, the last remains of the companion of the greatest conqueror the world has ever known," thought La Bonn; "perhaps there is nothing you fear more than rest? Perhaps you are anxious to escape from among these sedentary lives where I have put you, to regain your freedom? And is that the reason why you perpetrate all these crimes? Perhaps what you like in me is a taste similar to your own, for a life which is a continuous journey, a passion for moving on to always new countries, and climates which are never the same?"

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It was night, and La Bonn, thus soliloquizing, looked from his bed at the horse's skull which the light of the moon was illuminating with a soft silver glow which had nothing earthly in it and seemed to resemble the colour of infinite space.

La Bonn knew the moment had come. It would be now or never. He put an overcoat on over his pyjamas, took the skull on his shoulders and went down to the street; it weighed a great deal. Soon it was necessary to carry it in both hands. Finally La Bonn reached the bridge de l'Alma. A cold wind was blowing, which reminded him of the great winds of the steppes. The Seine curved gently as it flowed past the Trocadero, the two towers of which were outlined against the sky, darker than the night. After ceasing to be royal a little further up, as it passed in front of the Louvre, the Seine now abandoned itself to romantic gracefulness as it flowed on to Passv. Erik La Bonn placed the skull on the railing of the bridge. He was thinking of the great Siberian streams, of the torrents of the Chinese river Altai, of the Mongolian tributaries swallowed up by the salty and thirsty sand . . . How small the Seine was, how shallow for such an adventure,—such an end! But is there ever an end of anything?

The electric lights lit up the river and gave it a rose colour, like those face lotions they sell in beauty parlours ... La Bonn thrust the skull out into the black void . . . There was a silence. Then a splash. Evidently its great weight will make it sink straight to the bottom . . . But no ... A miracle! The skull floated! Yes, that heavy object actually floated, carried along by the current like a piece of paper. La Bonn saw distinctly how it took the middle of the stream, then gently sheered off to the left, following the bend of the river.

Gengis Khan's horse, that gem of the Mongolian steppes, had started out again. Where would it go? Perhaps it would be stopped tomorrow by some obstacle, by a fisherman, by the hands of a child? Or perhaps, free to gain the open sea, it would become a strange sea-horse. Would it ride about the dungeons of the sea,—with the taste of salt,—the same taste as that of the great Mongolian desert, which still clings to the memory that it was once a sea.