Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
shedding them in July.
The city hadn’t found a place in my foreign vision of Mongolia, yet half the country’s population lives in Ulaanbaatar. Many people have recently moved in from the steppe to trade products they once produced such as meat and wool. The city itself moved twenty-eight times before settling at its current location in 1778. What was once a mobile monastery is now a metropolis of solid foundation, no more, or less, nomadic than London or Beijing.
No one hung about for long on the lively main street. I felt hidden among people, of whom there would soon be few, and beneath buildings, of which there would soon be none.
Evening brought hard rain and wide-mouthed puddles. The competitors reconvened at an Indian restaurant in the city’s southeast, where I sat on a stool next to a gray-haired man named Paddy, an amateur race jockey with a family of four. His Irish accent was a lullaby to my rigid English ears. On my other side was a wooden pillar supporting the sloped ceiling, whose lack of conversation I became grateful for as dinner droned on. The thirty competitors spewed out Derby secrets as they slurped Indian cuisine. I learned a great deal about Indian food and about riding 1,000 kilometers.
“That’s dal, a lentil dish. . . .”
“So, always take the tracks around the mountains—it’s the best route. . . . Phwooof, you won’t handle the spice in this curry.”
Paddy and Chloe, a rider from New Zealand, answered all my questions generously. Maybe they had visions of my clumsy frame falling from a pony the very next day.
As food circulated, I tuned into an American voice—that of a blond girl I’d noticed in the briefing room, where she had sat at the front, arching her body back to laugh during the army doctor’s presentation. She’d drawn widespread attention at the afternoon’s end when an Australian competitor fainted and she remarked, “Well, we’re not all going to make it to the start line.”
Here she was at dinner talking about her Derby coach. A coach? Specifically designed for one of the world’s least-known sporting events? Brought to the dinner table in oral form? I shot looks at bright-eyed Kiwi Chloe.
By now I knew the American’s name—Devan Horn—and was fast separating it from my associations with Devon, the gently rolling English county.
“If I don’t finish the race in six days, I’m not going home,” continued Devan, adding that she would “imprison” herself on the steppe if she didn’t meet her goal. Should we hang our heads low, or decree her abominable? It sounded hard enough to finish within the ten-day limit.
No one was sure whether this Devan actually had a chance of winning or if her talents were limited to the oratory game. I diverted my attention to Chloe’s unassuming discussion of jodhpurs.
“Mine are Lycra.”
“Mine are full chaps,” chipped in Paddy.
What to say? “Mine have padding on the inside seams.”
Devan leaned across the table, replanting herself in the conversation. “Wow, padding? Watch out. You’re gonna get a huge welt pretty quick . . .”
I looked across at her, miffed.
“. . . like this size,” she finished.
Perhaps she was looking out for me. But her lips were pursed as she gestured a shape the size of a mango, emphasizing the enormity of my incoming welt. I retired from dinner and bedded down by my books to dream of rotting legs.
Devan’s tactic was admirable and, dare I say, age-old. On the campaign trail, Genghis Khan’s soldiers lit campfires, mounted dummies on spare horses, and trailed branches and bushes—all to create the impression their numbers were far greater than they actually were. I don’t know if Devan’s intimidation was intentional. It certainly lent me some fear. And if fear had propelled me through the July preparations, it might now be my undoing.
On the bus out to the steppe, where we would spend two days pre-race training, I felt I had landed myself a comrade. Natacha (“My name is spelled with a C not an S, actually”) had grown up in Paris and, like me, had a handful of brothers. At nineteen, we were among the youngest competitors attempting the race. Our hasty friendship rested on these shared facts. She chattered with a darting, expectant expression as the city fell away out the window.
I had tried not to let anyone know my age. I was young, and young is foreign. Never trust a teenager. It was novel for me to be socializing with adults on equal terms, especially under the pretense that I could compete with them. The sport of horseback riding values experience more than youthful daring; athletes reach their peak later than they might do in other sports. Over the years, the average age of Mongol Derby competitors had been thirty-five. I feared no one would want to ride alongside a nineteen-year-old, although I’d heard that by the age of fourteen, Genghis Khan had killed one of his half brothers in a fight over hunting spoils—a horrid story, but a promising one too.
As Natacha talked on, I fell asleep. When I woke from my snooze, the bus had left the road to rumble across grassland. About 150 kilometers southwest of Ulaanbaatar, we drew into our training camp, a series of tents and a marquee lying beneath a crescent-shaped ridge. The ridge overlooked a vast plain draped in mist, beyond which mountains kept their distance. At night, as we lay in our little tents, the mist would increase, as if asking me to notice my dread.
That afternoon, though, we spilled from the bus and rushed to the tents like ducks to bread. I left my belongings on a patch of grass and glanced about. At the corners of my vision two horses were grazing. Green stretched in all directions, met at the horizon by blue sky. This seemed more of a space than a place, shapeless and free. I kept looking around expecting the ocean to roll in.
If there is one piece of furniture crucial to imagining the Mongolian steppe, it’s the ger, meaning “home” in Mongolian. Usually pronounced “gaire” without the long vowel (almost grr), it is the Mongolian equivalent of the Russian yurt: a white, circular felt tent that looks like a giant muffin crossed with a hot-air balloon. A ger is no bigger than your thumb in front of your face. Each one has a tin chimney sticking out of the center. There are no windows, for these are homes to turn you in on yourself, to let you forget the unkempt spaciousness outside them. Gers are cool in summer and warm in winter, when cow dung heats the central stove. A thin chimney takes smoke from the stove out of the top of the ger. For some shamans, this chimney is symbolic of the “world tree,” a link between the alternate realities of the underworld and the upper world.
Genghis (or, more correctly, Chinggis) Khan is also known as the “unifier of the people of the felt-walled tents” in Mongolian. Gers rarely change in size: this is not cottage versus castle. Before the communist takeover, the last ruler of Mongolia sipped tea in a ger as humble as everyone else’s.
A few times a year, nomadic families in Mongolia pack up their gers and move through the land in search of better pasture. Contrary to popular perception, nomads have fixed circuits—they are not drifters, and will return to similar places each year.
I imagine gers require less effort to move than brick houses, since they’re collapsible within the hour, and the families I would meet on my journey rarely had more than three. After their passing, apparently you would hardly know they’d been. The respect for nature, or baigal—“what exists”—is such that many Mongolians on the steppe wear shoes with soft, curved soles to spare the stalks of the tiniest plants and to avoid hurting the earth.
It is the first day of training. I stick a tentative