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STANLEY STEWART
In the Empire of Genghis Khan
A Journey Among Nomads
A Cinzia,
con amore.
There in the vast steppe, flooded with sunlight, he could see the black tents of the nomads, like dots in the distance. There was freedom … there time itself seemed to stand still as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed …
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is no such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspire that dream.
Henry David Thoreau
Contents
4 A Detestable Nation of Satan
When I was a child my grandmother used to call me a Mongolian. In memory the word evokes the scent of grass and of fallen leaves, some atmosphere of twilight and of horses.
My grandmother lived at the top of an Irish village with views southwards to the Mountains of Mourne. In the evenings, in the long dusk that my grandmother called ‘daylegone’, I played on a raised pavement that ran along the churchyard wall, beneath an arch of lime trees. They were solitary and elaborate adventures involving horses and culprits. My stallion pranced through swathes of freshly mown grass and piles of autumn leaves. We leapt the wall in a single bound.
When it grew dark my grandmother would call me home, her voice looping in the lingering twilight like a rope. I resisted as long as I could, galloping between the trees in the thickening gloom, against the tug of her voice. When she stopped calling I sat in thrones of leaves gazing to the south where the Mountains of Mourne shouldered the horizon. The mountains were dark and mesmerizing, the frontier to the wide world of County Down. My father said that beyond the mountains lay the sea.
When the long lasso of my grandmother’s voice came again my horse was already melting away between the graves. I turned home, and presented myself in the back hall with skinned knees and leaves in my hair. As my grandmother bent over me to brush and straighten my clothes, she always said the same thing. ‘Like a Mongolian,’ she sighed. ‘Just like a little Mongolian.’
I never heard anyone else speak of the mysterious Mongolians, and I had no idea who they were. I recognized the word was an admonition of sorts but I sensed it also contained a note of praise. I liked its unruliness and its ambiguities, and I wanted to live up to the idea of recklessness that it seemed to imply.
Long
