those intense adventures played out each evening in the slow descent of an Irish twilight, as I tugged against the mooring of my grandmother’s voice calling me home.
It was in Iran, twenty-five years ago, that I first saw nomads. I was part of an expedition looking for the Persian Royal Road. Led by a charming charlatan who was a cross between Rommel and W.C. Fields, our small and happily deluded team spent eighteen months in the field, rattling around Anatolia and the Zagros mountains with a couple of Land Rovers, a leaky tent and a copy of Herodotus. It was the best of journeys. The landscapes were magnificent, the people hospitable and we had the alibi of historical purpose.
In the Marv Dasht plain beneath the ruins of Persepolis the Qashga’i tribes were trooping north to their summer pastures in the mountain valleys around Hanalishah. Skirting fields of new wheat, they passed like a medieval caravan, a whole society set in motion, moving northward to new grass. The layered skirts of the women flashed with gold and silver thread as they ran after straying lambs. Riding slim, leggy horses, the men trotted back and forth along the perimeter of the caravan shouting to one another in a language that had come with them from Central Asia. Camels bearing tent poles and rolled carpets and wide-eyed children swayed through veils of dust. On the edge of the village of Sivand, an old man hoeing vegetables in a walled garden straightened to watch them pass, his face darkening with an ancient antipathy.
I had never seen such glamorous people. They owned not a square inch of land but they strode across the province of Fars towards the mountain passes as if it were their private estate. Passing beneath the stone palaces of Persepolis, they were oblivious to their allure.
Some weeks later we penetrated the mountains around Ardekan where Alexander had defeated the last Achaemenian defences at the Persian Gates on his way to the prize of Persepolis. In these narrow valleys we paid a visit to a Qashga’i chief. It was June, the best month, when the grass was rich and the flocks were fat.
‘Nomad tents have big doors,’ the khan said as we arrived, referring to Qashga’i hospitality. We sat inside enthroned on splendid kilims and bolsters, looking down over a stony slope where his son was herding goats towards the green line of a river. Piled along the rear wall of the tent were embroidered sacks and chests and saddle-bags, the furniture of nomads. The khan’s daughters left their looms at the other end of the tent to bring us glasses of tea and water pipes.
We talked of politics, and the government pressure on the tribes to settle.
‘It was always thus,’ the khan said. ‘The people of the towns, the peoples of the fields, worry they cannot control us. They think of us as barbarians.’ He smiled, sensitive to the irony of this, a gracious host with elegant manners, a man whose tribal pedigree went back three centuries. ‘They want us to settle in one place. They want to make us part of the life of the towns.’
The canvas walls filled with wind and the tent creaked like a ship. On the tent poles the saddle-bags swayed.
‘The tribes were powerful once in Iran. But those days are gone. I do not know what the future holds for nomads. But I fear that we are seeing the end of a way of life.’ He gestured to the valley as if the landscape itself was in retreat. ‘We have migrated through these mountains for centuries. We came to these lands in the train of Genghis Khan.’
The Qashga’i are a remnant of one of the innumerable nomadic peoples who emigrated from the great grasslands of Central Asia. Iran was a civilization prone to exhaustion and Persian history was shaped by these nomadic incursions. When dynasties weakened, when art became decadent, when the officials grew corrupt and the aristocrats soft and cowardly, they knew the barbarians would soon be coming, a scourge and a salvation.
This pattern of untamed horsemen, bursting forth from the steppes to prey on their more suburban neighbours, was repeated throughout Asia. They came with a bewildering variety of names: the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, the Tocharians, the Xiongnu, known in Europe as the Huns. Russia was not free of the ‘Tartar yoke’ until the sixteenth century. In India the great Mughal Empire was founded by a nomadic barbarian from beyond the Oxus. In China, they built the Great Wall in the vain hope that they could keep the nomads at bay.
The high-water mark of nomadic power were the Mongols of the thirteenth century. In the course of a single generation, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, they rode out of the steppes of Central Asia to forge the largest land empire the world has ever seen. From the South China Seas to the Baltic they stepped from the nightmares of townsfolk onto their doorsteps. Suddenly the Mongols seemed to be everywhere at once, threatening to gatecrash Viennese balls, carrying off princesses in Persia, over-throwing Chinese dynasties, sacking Burmese temples, putting Budapest to the torch, launching seaborne invasions of Japan. Even in a distant England they were front-page news. Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century chronicler, sounded the last trumpet: the Mongols were coming and the End was nigh. Hysterical congregations crowded into their parish churches to pray for deliverance.
The folk traditions of the Qashga’i insist on their connection to the Mongols and the great figure of Genghis Khan as village chiefs in remote corners of northern Pakistan insist on their descent from Alexander the Great.
‘The Mongols were a race of heroes,’ the khan said. ‘Nomads who ruled the world. And what has become of them? Vanished like all the others.’
‘They have gone home to Mongolia,’ I said.
The khan looked at me quizzically. With their legendary aura it had not occurred to him that they were a real people with a real homeland.
‘Where is Mongolia?’ he asked after a time.
‘Beyond China,’ I said.
‘Have you been there?’
‘I haven’t,’ I said.
In the early evening air the whistling calls of shepherds driving the flocks towards the tents drifted from the opposite slopes like birdsong. The women had left their looms and were heading out to the milking with pails and goatskins.
‘What do you think Mongolia is like now?’ the khan asked.
‘They are still nomads,’ I said. ‘Not like here where most people are settled. Mongolia is a nation of nomads, the last in Asia.’
The khan weighed this news carefully.
‘I would like to go to Mongolia,’ he announced at last. ‘To see the people of Genghis Khan. To see their tents and their flocks, to see the way they are living.’ He was seized by the idea and the camaraderie of our shared interest. ‘We will go together,’ he declared. ‘It will be good for you – a man with no wife and no sheep. We will go to Mongolia together and visit the sons of Genghis Khan.’
Basking in the glow of this mythical expedition we shared bowls of lamb stew flavoured with apricots and talked long into the twilight about horses. In the morning the khan hitched a lift with us to Shiraz. He was going to visit the district commissioner to put the tribe’s case in a dispute about winter pastures. ‘This is how things are now,’ he sighed. ‘We must plead for what is ours, the grass on which we have pastured our flocks for generations, with a government bureaucrat.’
He had already forgotten about the journey to Mongolia.
But I had not forgotten. I have nurtured the idea of Outer Mongolia for twenty-five years. I longed to travel the width of Asia to this last domain of nomads. I saw it as a journey across the uneasy frontiers between the sedentary and pastoral worlds, between the builders of walls and the inhabitants of what the Chinese called ‘a moveable country’, people for whom settlement
