STANLEY STEWART

In the Empire of Genghis Khan
A Journey Among Nomads

Dedication

A Cinzia,

con amore.

Epigraph

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

Maps

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Prologue

1 Our Lady of the Mongols

2 The Voyage Out

3 The Kazakhstan Express

4 A Detestable Nation of Satan

5 The Birthday Party

6 Some Other World

7 The Naadam Wrestlers

8 The Shaman’s Journey

9 On the Edge of the Gobi

10 Riding to Zag

11 Fishing with the Librarian

12 The Company of Old Men

13 The Wedding Battle

14 Another Country

15 In Search of Genghis Khan

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

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 before I had any clear sense of Mongolia as a place, the word belonged to 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 and the commitment of cities was a kind of betrayal. I longed to travel to Mongolia, and once there, I wanted to cross the country by horse, a ride of a thousand miles.

This ride was the central ambition of the journey. In Mongolia children learn to ride before they can walk, and the country offered the rare opportunity to make a journey by horse without feeling you were engaging in some unnecessary eccentricity. It was a question of loyalty, to the careless boy in the Irish twilight. This was the journey of his choosing.

Swept up by these grand designs, I had rather overlooked the fact that I had only ever ridden a horse once in my life. It was in Wyoming where a perceptive rancher had given me a horse so quiet it tended to fall asleep in mid-stride. It was enough to convince me that I was a horseman. Occasionally well-meaning friends would touch upon the question of my riding experience. Gently they tried to point out the difference between a ranch holiday and a thousand miles of Mongolia, but I didn’t let them put me off.

In the hurried days before departure I decided to buy my own saddle. Mongolians ride on wooden saddles, and I felt that was probably a technique that you needed to start young to have any hope of surviving. I decided on a Western saddle, with a reassuring pommel to hang onto should the horses prove frisky. In Herefordshire in a splendid equestrian supplier’s I spent a happy afternoon choosing my rig. In the horsey atmosphere of the place I got rather carried away and bought a confusing array of ropes, a halter, a grooming brush, a splendid hoof pick, a felt pad, saddle-bags, a pair of spurs, a hip flask, stirrup leathers, a pair of chaps, and a curious tool rather like a cheese knife whose purpose I never discovered. My pleasure was spoiled only by the scepticism of the young assistant who was obviously struggling to square the challenge of my proposed expedition with the naiveté of my questions.

On the way back to London I stopped at Hereford Cathedral to see the Mappa Mundi. The map hangs in a modern suite of exhibition rooms whose subdued light, after the bright slabs of sun in the cloisters, felt like the dim uncertainties of the past. It dates from the late thirteenth century when the Mongol Empire was at its height.

Over the centuries most of the original surface pigment has flaked away – the bright green seas, the blue rivers – leaving only its weathered base, the colour of old leather. In the religious hush of this place, it felt like a ritual artefact, a piece of ancient hide covered with symbols and obscure passages of text, a geography of spells and wonders.

In thirteenth-century Europe geographical knowledge had sunk to its lowest ebb, and the Mappa Mundi is not so much cartography as storytelling, a compendium of all the tales and marvels gathered from the Bible, from classical authors and from medieval myths, deployed across the continents. The alarums of Matthew Paris, penned just over forty years before, found their unreliable echo here in the frights of Asia. While Europe is full of reassuring cities represented as small line drawings of castles and spires, the rest of the world is portrayed as a landscape of fabulous characters. It was a rattle-bag of tall tales and obsessions, of hopes and fears about the dark beyond one’s own borders.

In Africa there are unicorns and men who ride crocodiles like horses. In the exhilarating provinces of the Upper Nile are the Blemyes whose heads were in the middle of their chests. Beyond are the Satyrs, the Hermaphrodites, the Troglodytes, and a splendid race with protruding lower lips which they deploy like umbrellas to shield themselves from the fierce equatorial sun.

With east at the top, according to the convention of the time, Asia occupies the upper half of the map. India was packed with legendary birds like the Alerion and alligators lurking on the banks of the Hydaspes. Dragons swarm across the island of Ceylon while dog-headed men patrol the regions east of the Carpathians.

My journey to Mongolia lay past the eastern end of the Black Sea where Jason’s Golden Fleece was pegged out like a drying hide. To the north lay Scythia, the barbarian hinterland of the ancient Greeks, where two rather belligerent looking fellows could be seen threatening one another with knives. To the west are the Grifones, part of the nomadic traditions of these regions. They were said to use the bodies of their enemies as horse-trappings; a human skin can be seen thrown over a stallion as a saddle. Beyond the Oxus lies Samarkand, a rare city in these parts, looking like an Elizabethan sketch for the Globe Theatre. On the far bank of the Jaxartes are the Essedenes respectfully devouring their deceased parents, a practice they believed preferable to leaving them for the worms to eat. On a blunt peninsula enclosed by a turreted wall, a long and rather garbled account in dog Latin identifies it as the place where Alexander imprisoned the sons of Cain, a fearsome tribe who will break out at the time of the Antichrist. Not far away, on the island of Terraconta, was the race descended from Gog and Magog, ‘a monstrous brood’, the enemies of God, who would one day invade his kingdom.

I stood on tiptoes to examine my destination on the outer edges of Asia. In the top left corner of the map, at the furthest extremities of the known world, where Mongolia should be, between the borders of China and the dark Outer Ocean, the parchment grew darker and the figures fainter in zones that seemed to fade into twilight. A sketch showed men with horses’ hooves: the land of the Hippopodes.

Since the days of ancient Greece it has been the conceit of settled people confronted with the horsemen of the steppes that their extraordinary equestrian prowess was not quite human, that the riders were in fact part horse. If any rumour of the Mongols had reached the map-makers perhaps it was here with a race so fleet, so unruly and reckless, that they pranced like horses.

That was my destination, pale markings at the far end of Asia, on an atlas of the imagination.

Chapter One OUR LADY OF THE MONGOLS

On the evening flight to Istanbul the plane bucked in rogue winds. Dark clouds piled up from the east. Tipping beneath the wings, Asia looked black and thunderous.

By the time I got into the city it was past midnight. Istanbul seemed deserted. In the dark I was struck by how European the steep lanes of Sultan Ahmet looked – the tall narrow houses, the fanlights above the doors, the wrought-iron balconies, the curtained windows. I crossed the empty gardens of the old Augustaeum where the two great rivals of Istanbul, the Sultan Ahmet Mosque and Haghia Sophia, the victor and the vanquished, face one another across the rose beds. Sultan Ahmet was all grace and delicacy, an architectural dancer poised on the balls of its feet. Birds swam around the minarets in tall currents of light. At the other end of the square Haghia Sophia, once the greatest church in Christendom, sulked in the embrace of old plane trees.

I found the hotel in the tangle of cobbled streets falling towards the walls of Byzantium and the Sea of Marmara. I woke the bekçi, asleep on a bench in the lobby, by knocking on the window. A tall lugubrious fellow, he led me silently upstairs, showed me the room with a slow melodramatic sweep of his arm, then drew the door carefully behind him as if he was closing the lid of some precious box.

The first night is always the strangest. I went to the window and looked down on the Turkish streets. Among the litter opposite, a cat was marking its territory. Raising my gaze, above the rooftops, I could see ships lying at anchor where the Sea of Marmara narrows to the mouth of the Bosphorus. I wondered if any of them were Russian; I hoped to find a Russian freighter to take me on the first leg of the journey, across the Black Sea to the Crimea. But my mind was still full of London. I slept fitfully in the narrow bed and dreamt of packing in the familiar rooms of my own house. I woke once with the sudden idea that I needed to remember to put in carrots for the horses. Beyond the ghostly window the muezzins were calling.

I had breakfast on a roof terrace overlooking the sad florid walls of Haghia Sophia. Suddenly London was gone, and the world had a different focus. In the room I spread maps on the bed and telephoned the shipping agents to get the names of boats due to depart in the next week for Sevastopol.

In spite of the fact that Istanbul has been a Muslim city for the past five centuries, Europeans still have a proprietorial feeling about the place. For almost 2000 years it was one of us. Byzantium was a Greek city, and Constantinople, its successor, was the new Rome. In its archaeological museum the splendid Alexander sarcophagus and a relief sculpture of Euripides are the star turns in rooms packed with classical antiquities. It is the only city in the world to bestride two continents, but for a long time its heart was in Europe. Then, when we were busy elsewhere, it slipped out of the European orbit and became Istanbul, a Turkish city ruling an Asian empire, capital to both the Ottoman Sultanate and the Islamic Caliphate. To the European visitor, modern Istanbul can seem like a wayward uncle who wandered off to Araby and returned years later with a beard, a pair of satin trousers, a water-pipe habit, and a young wife dressed in a black sheet.

In antiquity Constantinople’s position exaggerated the usual anxieties about nomadic barbarians. Rumours of the mounted Scythians who roamed the Don steppes on the far side of the Black Sea echoed the Greek legends of centaurs, creatures who were half-man, half-horse, whose untamed desires were a threat to civilized order. But the city was little troubled by nomadic invasion. By the time the Turks descended on Constantinople in the spring of 1453 their own pastoral origins were all but forgotten. They had picked up Islam, the manners of the Persian court and the habit of cities generations ago.

Though the Mongols never took Constantinople, the city contains one curious remnant of the Mongol Empire, a thirteenth-century Byzantine church known as Mouchliotissa, or Our Lady of the Mongols. The church is a unique link to the Greek capital before the Turkish conquest as it is the only Byzantine church that was not converted into a mosque. I had faxed the Patriarchate from London to ask about Mouchliotissa and had received a most courteous reply from the Metropolitan of Laodicea, a city of the Byzantine Empire that was in ruins before Columbus set sail for America. He invited me to call on him when I arrived in Istanbul. He would arrange for a visit to the church. His fax concluded with the blessings of the Patriarch for my journey, and I basked momentarily in the idea that I was setting off for Outer Mongolia with an ecclesiastical blessing more ancient and more grand than that of the Pope.

The Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Vatican of the Eastern Church, remains in Istanbul as if the Turkish conquest of 1453 were a temporary aberration, unlikely to last long enough to make it worth moving house. Though Greeks continued to live and worship in Istanbul for centuries after the Turkish conquest their numbers were in continual decline. In the twentieth century, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Turkish nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism have seen a dramatic exodus of Greeks, and today less than 4000 remain in a city with a population of 12 million. Yet the Patriarch continues to inhabit his city as if nothing had happened. Though he presides over a worldwide flock of Orthodox Christians, his congregations here in Istanbul, his own seat, have withered away. This anomaly lends the Patriarchate a curious make-believe air, like the last Emperor in China’s Forbidden City, a court ruling over a vanished kingdom.

On a bright morning I hailed an old hadji in a woolly cap and a silk waistcoat and took a river taxi up the Golden Horn. The Patriarchate stands in Fener, once a Greek district, now a poor Turkish quarter with a strong fundamentalist character. Ringed by high walls, and guarded by sentries, it is a place beseiged. Muslim fundamentalists, who have a knack for creating artificial enemies, regularly target the Patriarchate as if its elderly clerics posed some threat to the religious fidelity of a nation of 60 million Muslims. Graffiti are scrawled on its walls, and last year a bomb was thrown into the courtyard from a neighbouring minaret, narrowly missing the fifty-year-old doorman and the 1500-year-old library.

I was welcomed by George, a secretary, who apologized that the Metropolitan was late. Despite the fact that his diocese had been Muslim for over five hundred years, the Metropolitan apparently was run off his feet. I settled down in George’s office to wait. A tall heavy-set man, dressed like everyone else inside these ancient walls in long black robes and a thick beard, George looked like an august ecclesiastical dignitary. It was a surprise to learn he was a high-school senior from Minneapolis.

The dramatic decline of the Greek community in Istanbul has made it very difficult for the Patriarchate to fill job vacancies, even within its own walls. Their appeals to the wider Greek world had brought George, a Greek-American boy from Minnesota, to work here in his year off between high school and college. They had got lucky with George’s appearance. He had the tall face, the deep-set black eyes and the dark brow of an archbishop. They gave George his robes, he grew a big beard – he looked like the kind of guy who could do this over a weekend – and suddenly he looked more like a patriarch than the Patriarch did. George might have stepped out of an eleventh-century mosaic. But despite the impressive air of religious gravitas the high-school senior kept breaking through.

Istanbul was not George’s kind of city. Diplomatically he tried to express enthusiasm for the antiquities, for the Bosphorus, for the food, but his American horror at the chaos and the general decrepitude of the place was impossible to keep in check. He was homesick for the Midwest. I asked what he missed most. He chewed his pencil. I was expecting him to opt for the communion of his family or the fellowship of his home church.

‘Cheetos,’ he said after a time.

‘Cheetos?’

‘Yeah, you know. Those cheese-flavoured things.’

The Cheetos were not just a blip. In George two distinct personalities co-existed uneasily. He told me he was planning to be an Orthodox priest then almost in the same breath complained about how difficult it was to meet girls in Istanbul. Candidates for the Orthodox priesthood who are already married are generously allowed to keep their wives, he explained, but those who are unmarried at the time of induction are obliged to remain celibate. In September he would begin three years in an American seminary, not the best place to pick up girls. George was desperate for a love interest. There may have been sound ecclesiastical reasons for this but it tended to come across as the kind of hormone rush common to most nineteen-year-old males.

As delicately as his patriarchal persona would allow he enquired about my time in Istanbul, steering the conversation gently towards social activities. I knew what he was after – where was a good place to pull in Istanbul – but the clerical office, the robes, the icon above his desk, made it difficult to broach the subject openly.

The telephone rang. It was a school friend from America. In an instant the bearded cleric fell into the patois of an American high school.

‘Hey, Bobby. How’s it going?’ said George. ‘Hey man, I got to get outta here. It’s been nine months. This place is driving me crazy.’

He listened for a time, then he asked, ‘How’s that girl from St Paul’s?’

There was a pause. George was chewing the corners of his beard.

‘You know, the one with the halter top. Debbie. We met her at the Dairy Queen.’

There was a much longer pause. George’s face darkened as he listened. There had obviously been a few developments in the life of Debbie of the Dairy Queen.

After a time George shrugged. ‘Hey, who’s worried?’ he said. ‘There are other girls.’

They chatted for a while about basketball and the Chicago Bulls then George hung up. He seemed to have shrunk a little inside his robes.

‘Hayal Kahvesi,’ I said. ‘It’s just off Istiklal Caddesi, near Taksim.’

‘What’s that?’ George’s thoughts were still with Debbie’s halter top.

‘It’s a café,’ I said. ‘You can get a beer, listen to live music. It’s a good place to meet people.’ The thought of George turning up among the hip modern crowd of this trendy café in his robes flashed through my mind.

‘Dress is casual,’ I said.

The Metropolitan of Laodicea never arrived. He called from his mobile to apologize that he had been held up and to say that he had arranged for the priest of Mouchliotissa to take me to the church. Father Alexandros turned up presently, out of breath, and dressed like an undertaker. He was a handsome fellow in his mid-forties with dark luxuriant hair, long eyelashes, and the mandatory beard. He had been a pharmacist but when the Patriarch began to run short of priests he prevailed upon Alexandros, a family friend, to give up aspirins and Night Nurse for incense and holy water.

Alexandros used to live in Fener before the Greeks fled the district to safer parts of Istanbul during the anti-Greek riots in 1955. We climbed through the narrow streets of his childhood, packed with nineteenth-century Greek villas squeezed in among old bits of Constantinople: ancient city walls, the ruined vaults of a monastery, the charred shell of the Palace of the Wallachians, the rubble of a Greek school. At the top of a lane so steep it had become stairs, he pointed out his old house, a peeling ochre mansion, divided into tenements and bedecked with laundry. A swarm of children came out through the gate to hold our hands, tugging us through the garden where Alexandros had played as a child, now full of junk and oily puddles, to a view, over a broken wall, of the Golden Horn.

‘Clematis,’ Alexandros said. ‘There used to be clematis on this wall.’ He poked his hand into a hole between the old bricks. ‘I hid marbles here.’ But he brought out only a handful of dust.

Our Lady of the Mongols stood in the next street behind high red walls. The round drum of the dome presided over a courtyard of sun and old roses where a caretaker was sweeping leaves. Alexandros opened the tall west doors and the ancient ecclesiastical odours of incense and candle wax and polished wood came out to envelop us. In the narthex the glass of the framed icon of the Virgin was covered with lipstick kisses.

The church has lost various of its parts over the centuries, and what remains makes for a rather charming confusion of arches and vaults meeting at odd angles. Dusty chandeliers were suspended on long chains from the high ceilings like cast-offs from a medieval banqueting hall. Byzantine icons were deployed about the walls, the faces of saints and prophets peering out from the antique gloom of the paintings. By the icon of St Barbara was a metal crutch, left behind by a lame man who had been miraculously cured. Elsewhere votive miniatures were suspended from threads in front of the more powerful icons, in the hope of a similar miracle. Legs were popular, as were ears and feet. But the faithful did not restrict themselves to requests for new body parts: Toy cars, models of new houses, and little aeroplanes represented prayers for material success and foreign holidays. One hopeful and rather brazen petitioner had hung a photograph, clipped from a glossy magazine, in front of an icon of St George. The photograph showed a shapely young woman in a bikini. I wasn’t sure if this represented the aspirations of a man seeking help with his love life or of a woman on a diet.

The church was founded by Princess Maria, an illegitimate daughter of Michael VIII, a Byzantine emperor who tended to dole out daughters to potential allies like subsidies. It was the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Mongols were pressing on his borders. He had already dispatched one daughter to the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of the districts to the north of the Black Sea. Maria had been engaged at a tender age to Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan and the governor of another of the four provinces of the Mongol Empire, the Il-Khanate of Persia.

The engagement was a long one and by the time Maria turned up for her wedding in Tabriz, the groom was dead. But Hulegu had graciously left his fiancée in his will to his son, Abaqa, and Maria was duly married to the man she expected to be her stepson. She spent fifteen years as Queen of the Mongols until, in 1281, Abaqa was assassinated by one of his brothers. Carefully sidestepping the advances of the assassin, who saw her as a part of his inheritance, she returned to Constantinople where her father, by now running out of daughters, promptly tried to marry her off again to yet another Mongol khan. For Maria this was one husband too many. Mongol romance had persuaded her of the merits of chastity. She became a nun and founded, or possibly rebuilt, this church sometime in the 1280s.

At the time of the Turkish conquest, some two centuries later, when icons of the Virgin all over the city were said to weep tears, Constantinople’s churches were converted to mosques. Even Haghia Sophia, for nine centuries the fairest church in Christendom, had minarets erected round the ancient dome like minders. Only Our Lady of the Mongols escaped this wholesale conversion. No one is quite sure why. It may have been that the parishioners were able to argue that a church built by the wife of a Mongol prince, inspirational figures to their distant cousins the Ottoman Turks, should be left in peace. Whatever the reason the firman or decree of Fatih, the Turkish conqueror, granting it unique leave to continue as a church, still hangs inside the west door. Our Lady of the Mongols is the only Byzantine church in the city that has continued its Christian career undisturbed.

While I browsed among the icons, Father Alexandros fussed about the old church like a conscientious housekeeper, straightening candlesticks, emptying the collection boxes, dusting the ledges of the iconostasis. He was very proud of his old church, and delighted that a foreigner was taking an interest in it. He kept breaking off from his chores to show me some detail of the place he was anxious I should not miss. He took my arm and led me across to the beautiful eleventh-century mosaic of the Virgin. ‘Theotokos Pammakaristos,’ he said, inclining his head as if he was introducing us. Through the grime of centuries the eyes of ‘The All-Joyous Mother of God’ were sad pools of light. He showed me Fatih’s firman written in loping Arabic script. Later he led me down a short flight of stairs into the crypt to sprinkle me with holy water from the well. On the fresco on the end wall the Madonna and Child hovered, as faint as ghosts. The church’s connection to the Mongols meant nothing to him; the point of Mouchliotissa for the Greek community was its connection to Byzantium.

The Syrian caretaker brought us tea in the courtyard where we sat in a long slab of sun on a ledge along the southern wall. I asked Father Alexandros about the future of the Greek community in Istanbul. ‘There is no future,’ he said blankly. ‘Greeks have been here for almost three millennia but in my lifetime I am seeing the end of it. Most of my friends have emigrated. My children will emigrate, to Athens, possibly to America.’ He was stroking the stone of the ledge as he spoke. The ancient mortar crumbled beneath his fingers. ‘This city is my home, home to our people, but it has abandoned us. Unless you are a Turk, it is impossible here. Greeks have no future in Constantinople.’

When the first tempest of Mongol conquest appeared to have abated in the middle of the thirteenth century, the princes of Christendom longed to know more about these Eastern apparitions who had come so close to overrunning Europe. A series of missions was dispatched, most led by Franciscan friars, to report on the Mongols and to enquire about the possibility of their conversion to Christianity. From the Pope down, European leaders nurtured the rather bizarre hope that the Mongol horsemen could be harnessed as allies to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land.

Two of these friars wrote accounts of their journeys, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. The latter produced the more interesting book, full of wry and colourful observations about the Mongol hersdmen who had so suddenly found themselves ruling most of the known world. His mission predates Marco Polo’s more famous journey to Cathay by almost twenty years; even Polo’s great English commentator, Sir Henry Yule, was obliged to admit that Friar William had written ‘a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo’s chapters’. But William suffered the fate of many worthy authors: a bad publisher. His book never achieved the circulation of Polo’s accounts.

We tend to think of Friar William now as an early explorer, and like the best explorers he had no idea where he was going, how he was going to get there, or what he should do once he arrived. When William left from Istanbul in the spring of 1253, he was setting off, like Jason and the Argonauts, into barbarian darkness. His journey took him from Istanbul across southern Russia and what is now Kazakhstan to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. It was the route I wanted to follow and I saw him, across seven centuries, as a travelling companion.

William set sail from Istanbul on one of the trading vessels that carried cotton, silk and spices from Constantinople to the ports on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Karaköy, round a watery corner from the Golden Horn, I found the modern equivalents of William’s ship, the Russian and Ukrainian freighters which ply the same route. The fall of Communism has given a new impetus to Black Sea trade, and Turkey has become a conduit for Western goods, from tinned tomatoes to Johnnie Walker whisky. Russians and Ukrainians, now as free to travel as Levi’s and Coca-Cola, come to Istanbul to savour the bright lights and to buy in bulk. They travel by freighter, the only kind of vessel able to cope with their excess baggage.

My telephone enquiries had been inconclusive and I had come to the docks to see if I could rustle up a passage. In pole position was a huge cruise liner called the Marco Polo. Had William had a more aggressive publisher this floating palace might have been named after him. Beyond Marco’s luxurious namesake the shipping degenerated spectacularly. There were a few European freighters, shouldering the docks like naval toughs, then a couple of Turkish ships, painted gunmetal grey. At the far end of the dock I came to the Russian and Ukrainian freighters, the shipping equivalent of MOT failures, held together by rust stains and a grimy coating of oil.

The last ship was the Mikhail Lomonosov, an ageing rust-bucket that seemed to be kept afloat by its mooring ropes. It had a limp deflated appearance that one did not like to see in a ship, as if someone had let the air out of its tyres. It listed. It sagged. It exuded black smoke from unpromising quarters, like the portholes.

I called up to a man in a naval smock leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway. He replied that they were sailing for Sevastopol on Monday, in two days’ time. He waved me aboard and I stepped gingerly onto the gangway, unsure if the ship could take my weight.

Dimitri introduced himself as the second mate. He had one of those narrow Slavic faces, very pale and very bony, that are permanently knotted in expressions of anxiety. I asked about cabins, and he summoned the accommodation officer by barking into a pipe in the bulwark behind him. The accommodation officer took me below, showed me a cramped cabin full of sacks of onions, which he assured me would be cleared out, and then took a hundred dollars off me in exchange for a grubby receipt written on the back of a beer mat.

The speed and the casualness of the transaction startled me. Back on deck I lingered by the gangway with the second mate, hoping to learn more about this ship which now contained such a large proportion of my publisher’s advance. In spite of his dour appearance, he seemed eager to talk. He spoke the casual staccato English of ships.

‘Did you get receipt?’ he asked.

I showed him my beer mat. He nodded. Beer mats were obviously accepted currency on the Mikhail Lomonosov.

‘You can’t trust anyone on this ship,’ he said. He leaned forward to spit over the rail. ‘This is my last voyage. I can’t take it any more. Do you know how many times I make this trip? Sevastopol, Istanbul. Istanbul, Sevastopol.’

I told him I had no idea.

‘Four hundred forty-seven,’ he said. ‘It is no life. This is my last voyage. Four hundred forty-seven. It’s enough, I think. It’s making me crazy. If I don’t get off this ship, I will kill someone.’

I took what comfort I could from the fact that he had ruled out murder as a career option.

A bell rang twice from somewhere within the ship, and he turned to go. ‘We sail at six o’clock, Monday evening. Don’t be late.’

The following day, a Sunday, I went to morning mass at Our Lady of the Mongols. I felt a few prayers for the voyage wouldn’t go amiss. When I arrived the service had already begun but Father Alexandros broke off in mid-chant to usher me personally into a seat. As I looked uneasily about the church I realized why I had got the special treatment. I was the congregation. It is a measure of the decline of this ancient church here in its Patriarchal city that the only worshipper it could muster on a warm spring Sunday was a lone Irish Presbyterian.

There is not a lot to do in Presbyterian services except doze off in your pew while a flushed preacher warns of the fire and brimstone that awaits you just the other side of retirement. A couple of hymns, the collection plate, and we all went home. For Presbyterians even a common Anglican mass was a complicated affair involving a disturbing degree of participation – responses, collective prayer, not to mention the endless standing and kneeling at unpredictable moments. Now suddenly I was the crucial component of the most arcane ritual that the Christian church has to offer, here in the last remnant of Byzantium.

The only other people present were a neanderthal-looking altar boy who kept peering out at me through a door in the iconostasis as if he had never seen a congregation before and an elderly cantor, a cadaverous figure in a black robe. With a scythe and a grin the cantor could have doubled as the Grim Reaper. He stood to one side at a lectern chanting interminable passages in ancient Greek in a thin beautiful voice. In the pauses where the congregation were obviously meant to respond, he looked across at me from beneath lowered lids. I looked at the floor or examined the dome with a critical intensity. Amen was the only word I understood and whenever I heard it I joined in heartily to make up for all the important stuff I must have been leaving out. Otherwise I signalled my involvement by throwing in as many signs of the cross as I could manage – not exactly a Presbyterian thing, but I had seen people do this in films.

Later in the courtyard the Grim Reaper took his leave with a slow funereal nod while Father Alexandros and I lingered to have coffee with Nadia, the Syrian caretaker, as if it was already an established ritual between us.

I didn’t allude to the fact that there had been no congregation. It was like some dysfunction that one politely ignored. With the same courtesy Alexandros didn’t mention my own lamentable performance as an Orthodox worshipper.

‘How long will you stay in Istanbul?’ Alexandros asked.

‘I leave tomorrow.’

‘Do you fly back to London?’

‘No, I am going on to Outer Mongolia,’ I said, as if it formed part of some natural tour of the region. As I listed the stages of my route – across the Black Sea, then overland across the Crimea, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – he tried to disguise his shock behind a polite clerical façade.

He put his empty cup down on the ledge between us. ‘And what do you hope to find in Mongolia?’ he asked. Despite his best efforts, I felt a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.

I expanded on the fascination of nomads, speaking rather too fast, overdoing the enthusiasm as I tried to convince him. I might have been speaking about the dark side of the moon. Alexandros was the epitome of the polished metropolitan figure: a Greek, a man of the city from the race that had created the city state, a man whose ancestors may have inhabited this city, one of the world’s oldest and greatest, since before the birth of Christ. He seemed to shudder involuntarily at the notion of nomads, people who lived in tents, people who built nothing. Confronted by his civilized sophistication, I was struggling to convince even myself that the Mongolians were not barbarians who had taken a historical wrong turn when they decided to stick to sheep rather than join the ranks of the committed settlers determined to create something that would outlast their own lifetime.

‘I have little opportunity to travel,’ he said at last.

He looked up at the old church. ‘I must look after Mouchliotissa. If we don’t keep the church alive, the Turks will take it from us. When the church disappears there will be nothing left of Constantinople, or of us.’

It was the irresistible tug of the city, the lasso of his own identity moored among these ancient stones.

When Friar William was invited to preach in Haghia Sophia on Palm Sunday of 1253, the great church was already very old. Built in the 530s by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, it belongs to the architectural tradition of the Roman basilica, and thus indirectly to the pagan world of the Greek temple.

The brilliance of Haghia Sophia is the transition from the earthbound exterior to the soaring lightness of its interior. From the outside the great church is monumental and brooding, the original form much confused with buttresses and minarets added after the Turkish conquest when it began a new career as a mosque. Inside it takes flight. It is transfiguration in architecture. You may run your hands over the massive outer walls, a millennium and a half, stained and crumbling beneath your fingers, but the ethereal magic of the nave is less palpable. The air is gold- and rust-coloured, like some exhalation of the old mosaics and the red marble. Moted columns of light fall from the high windows onto the wide expanses of the floor. The walls, the columns, the distant vaults, might have been weightless; the great dome, Procopius wrote over fourteen centuries ago, seems to be suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Robert Byron compared the old basilica to St Peter’s in Rome. Haghia Sophia is a church to God, he wrote, St Peter’s merely ‘a salon for his agents’.

It is a daunting place to begin a journey to the nomadic steppes. I spent hours in Haghia Sophia wandering the upper galleries beneath the conch vaults gazing down into the great canyon of the nave. I had come to see it as my world and I lingered here as a kind of farewell. As the slanting afternoon light crept through the galleries, amid lengthening shadows, I listened to the crescendo of the great city outside as its inhabitants began their journeys home. In the golden embrace of Haghia Sophia, I suddenly saw the journey to Mongolia as a Byzantine might have done, a journey into emptiness, into some fearful void. I understood the ambitions and the richness of cities. The desire to carve the aspirations of the human heart into some permanent form was central to my own world. In Haghia Sophia that impulse had produced sublime transcendance.

On this day at the beginning of June, on the other side of Asia, the Mongolians would be packing up and moving to summer pastures, leaving nothing to mark their passage but the shadows on the spring grass where their tents had stood.

Chapter Two THE VOYAGE OUT

At the docks my fellow passengers, a queue of burly figures beneath amorphous sacks, were making their up the gangway of the Mikhail Lomonosov like newsreel refugees.

Below in the cabin the resident onions had been cleared away leaving a faint astringent odour and a litter of red skins. The accommodation master appeared with my cabin-mate, a fifteen-year-old boy from Sevastopol. Kolya had been visiting his mother who was working in Istanbul. He was a thin boy with a mutinous complexion and an agitated manner. His gangly limbs jerked and rattled with adolescent impatience.

Kolya and I conversed in a bizarre amalgam of English, Turkish and Russian, prompted by various phrase books and a vocabulary of gestures and mime. It made for surprisingly lucid conversation. At first I tried to chat to him about kid’s stuff – his age, his school, his mother, ice-hockey – but he brushed these dull enquiries aside. He was keen to know the legal age limit for smoking and drinking in England, what kind of guns the police carried in London, and if the Queen was still in the business of beheading. His Istanbul had been somewhat different from mine. He had never heard of Haghia Sophia but he knew where to buy imitation Rolex watches and could quote the prices in three currencies. Like everyone else on this ship, he was a small trader, bringing home goods to sell in Sevastopol. He showed me his wares, – T-shirts, switchblades, pornographic magazines.

He sat on the edge of his bunk, drumming his legs in a nervous rhythm, blowing smoke rings towards the porthole. Kolya was in a hurry to grow up, to find the fast-track to the adult world of hard currency, illegal trading, and women. I was more than he could have hoped for as a cabin-mate, a representative of the glamorous and decadent West, that happy land of rap stars and Playstations. Hoping to cement our relationship, he looked for a way to make himself useful to me. I was a lone foreigner on a ship of Ukrainians and Russians, and he began to cast himself as my protector.

His mother appeared at the door of the cabin to say goodbye. A tall blonde Venus in a fur-collared coat, she was an exotic dancer making a Ukrainian fortune in one of Istanbul’s nightclubs. In the narrow passage Kolya was momentarily tearful – a boy like any other saying goodbye to his mother – but once she was gone he was quick to shake off this unwelcome vulnerability. He began to count the fistful of dollars that she had tucked into his pocket. Then he bolted out the door as if he had another ship to catch. Fifteen minutes later he was back, carrying a shopping bag from the free-port facilities on the quayside. Inside was a hard plastic case. Opening it, he lifted out an automatic pistol.

‘A hundred dollars,’ he said, breaking the seal on the box of ammunition.

‘What is it for?’ I asked, ducking as he swung the gun round the cabin.

‘Protection,’ the boy said. His eyes shone.

He had bought a shoulder-holster as well, and sought my help in buckling it round his thin shoulders. Then he slipped the gun into the new leather, and put on his jacket to hide the weapon. Smiling, the child stood before me, armed and dangerous, ready for the voyage home.

We sailed at nine. Below in the cabin, I felt a series of shudders run through the ship, and went out on deck to find us slipping away from our berth. Swinging about in the entrance to the Golden Horn, where a stream of cars was crossing the Galata Bridge, we turned up the Bosphorus away from the old city. The world’s most splendid skyline, that exquisite silhouette of minarets and domes, was darkening on a lemon-coloured sky. Haghia Sophia, round-shouldered above the trees of Gülhane, was the colour of a shell, a delicate shading of pinks and greys. Swaying in the wash of currents, ferries pushed out from the docks at Eminönü, bound for Üsküdar where the lights were coming on along the Asian shore. On the foredeck, I made my way through the cables and the piled crates to stand in the prow of the ship as we slipped northward through the heart of the city.

The austere face of the Dolmabahçe Palace, the nineteenth-century successor to the Topkapi, rose on our left. Its restrained façade belies a kitsch interior, a confection of operatic furnishings too ghastly to detail. It was here that the last Sultans watched their enfeebled empire slither to an ignominious end in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the palace was given over to the harem, whose membership seemed to grow as the number of imperial provinces declined. Sex, presumably, was some consolation for political impotency.

The Bosphorus is a pilot’s nightmare. In the twisting straits ships veer back and forth between the two continents, dodging the powerful currents and each other. We passed so close to the mosque at Ortaköy on the European side that I was able to look down through grilled windows to see a row of neatly synchronized bottoms, upturned in prayer. Half a mile on I could see what was on television in the stylish rooms of the old renovated Ottoman houses on the Asian shore. Accidents are not uncommon, and people tell amusing anecdotes about residents of the waterside villas being awoken in the middle of a foggy winter night to find a Russian freighter parked in the living room. Since the late seventies no less than twelve listed yalis or Ottoman houses have been run down by ships, invariably captained by tipsy Russians.

A spring wind had blown up, the Kozkavuran Firtinasi, the Wind of the Roasting Walnuts, which comes down to the Bosphorus from the hills of Anatolia. On the Asian shore we passed the twin-spired façade of the Ottoman cavalry school where cadets were taught some shadow of the horsemanship that had brought their ancestors from Central Asia. Beyond I could make out the ragged outline of Rumeli Hisari, its crenellated walls breasting the European hills. On the slopes below is the oldest Turkish cemetery in Istanbul. Both here and at the cemetery at Eyüp, there is a marvellous literature of death, ironic and light-hearted. I had been reading translations of them at breakfast. They are a fine lesson in how to say farewell.

‘A pity to good-hearted Ismail Efendi,’ reads one epitaph, ‘whose death caused great sadness among his friends. Having caught the illness of love at the age of seventy, he took the bit between his teeth and dashed full gallop to paradise.’ On another tombstone a relief shows three trees, an almond, a cypress, and a peach; peaches are a Turkish metaphor for a woman’s breasts. ‘I’ve planted these trees so that people may know my fate. I loved an almond-eyed, cypress-tall maiden, and bade farewell to this world without savouring her peaches.’ As we passed, the cemetery showed only as an area of darkness.

Soon the city was slipping astern. The tiered lights fell away on both shores and Europe and Asia drifted apart as the straits widened. I stood in the bow until we passed Rumeli Feneri and Anadolu Feneri, the lighthouses on the two continents flanking the northern entrance to the Bosphorus, blinking with different rhythms.

In antiquity the Black Sea was a watery frontier. When the Ionian Greeks crossed its wind-driven reaches in search of fish and wheat, they came upon a people on the far shores who might have stepped from one of their own mythologies. The Scythians were a diverse collection of nomadic tribes with a passion for gold and horses. To the Greeks they were barbarians, the repository of their anxieties and their prejudice.

Herodotus gives us a compelling account of them. His descriptions show remarkable similarities with Friar William’s account of the Mongols two thousand years later, a reminder if one was needed of the static nature of nomadic society and the pervading anxieties they aroused in settled populations. They were a people without towns or crops, Herodotus tells us, clearly unnerved. They lived on the produce of their herds of cattle and sheep and horses, migrating seasonally in search of fresh pasture. They slaughtered their sheep without spilling blood, drank fermented mare’s milk and smoked hemp which made them howl with pleasure. They were shamans who worshipped the elements and the graves of their ancestors. In battle they formed battalions of mounted archers. Their equestrian skills were unrivalled, and they sought the trophies of their enemies’ skulls for drinking-cups.

The ship lifted on the sea’s swell, its bow rising to the dark void ahead. A new wind was blowing, the Meltemi. It was a north-easterly blowing from the Pontic steppe across 500 miles of sea. In Istanbul they say the Meltemi is a cleansing wind, dispelling foul airs and bad feelings.

Historically, the people of cities have had an ambivalent response to the unsettled landscapes of the steppe which seem to harbour ideas both of Arcadia and of chaos. Settled peoples were forever torn between the notions that nomads were barbarian monsters who threatened civilized order, and intuitive innocents who retained some elemental virtue that had been lost to them. ‘Nomads are closer to the created world of God,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Arab historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, ‘and removed from the blameworthy customs that have infected the hearts of settlers.’ He believed that they alone could escape the cycles of decadence that infected all civilization. Only regular blasts of their cleansing winds allowed civilization to sustain its own virtues.

Kolya came to fetch me from my post in the ship’s bow, motioning for me to follow him as if he had something urgent to show me. Downstairs in our cabin he produced a bottle of champagne and four plastic cups. Then he disappeared and returned a moment later with two women.

Anna and Olga were the occupants of the neighbouring cabin. They were a dramatic illustration of the way that Slavic women seem unable to find any middle ground between slim grace and stout coarseness. Anna was a striking figure in tight jeans and a short sleeveless top. Olga, in cardigan and heavy shoes, wouldn’t have stood out among a party of dockers. Kolya, already a slave to female beauty, had only invited her to make up the numbers.

He was an energetic host, a fifteen-year-old playing at cocktail party. He poured the champagne, produced packets of American cigarettes and a bag of pistachio nuts, and chatted to everyone, the life of the party. I felt like a debutante being launched into the ship’s society. When the women asked about me Kolya explained I was going to visit the Tartars, and that I was a good friend of a priest called William who had been to visit them already.

Olga was silent and morose while Anna did all the talking. She had spent three weeks in Istanbul and was now travelling home to Sevastopol. The purpose of her visit was unclear. She tried to make it sound like a holiday but her cabin, like all the cabins on this boat, was so crowded with canvas sacks and cardboard boxes tied with string she could barely get the door open. The collapse of Communism had made everyone a salesman. But Anna, I suspected, had been trading more than tinned sardines. The Black Sea routes carried a heavy traffic of young women bound for the red-light districts of Istanbul. Many were part-timers making three or four trips a year to boost the family income.

We drank the champagne and when it was finished Kolya fetched another bottle, which I tried in vain to pay for. The boy was our host, magnanimous and expansive. He made toasts, he told dirty jokes that made the girls laugh, he kept his jacket on, buttoned up to conceal the gun. Olga soon drifted away to shift some crates and Anna now basked alone in our attention. She had become flirtatious. With the boy she already enjoyed a maternal familiarity, alternately hugging him and slapping him in mock remonstration, and now she extended the same attentions to me, pinching my shoulder and propping her elbows on my knees.

Kolya was showing off his collection of T-shirts adorned with American slogans. ‘California is a State of Mind’, one announced. ‘Better Dead than in Philadelphia’, another said. When he presented one to Anna, she leapt up to try it on. Standing with her back to us in the cramped cabin she removed her top. The boy gazed at her naked back and her bare breasts swelling into view as she stooped to pick up the T-shirt, then he shot a hot questioning glance at me. She swung round to model the gift. It seemed a trifle small. Her nipples pressed through the thin fabric just below a caption that read ‘Flying Fuck: the Mile High Club’.

When we had finished the second bottle Kolya took us off to the nightclub. I had not suspected the Lomonosov of harbouring a nightclub but Kolya was obviously a veteran clubber on the Black Sea routes. We descended a narrow stairway to a windowless dungeon in the bowels of the ship. Coloured lights in putrid hues of pink and blue glazed the shabby velvet sofas and plastic tables gathered round a small dance floor. The room smelt of stale beer and bilge water. Disco Muzak was leaking out of tinny speakers. Kolya ordered and paid for a round of drinks with umbrellas in them. I had given up trying to restrain him.

Throwing back her cocktails, Anna was now in full party mode. A tall bearded Russian, billed as Rasputin, had taken to the tiny stage with a synthesizer that replicated every instrument known to lounge lizards. She insisted I dance with her, tugging me by the arm out onto the empty dance floor. She had two basic steps, neither related to the music. The first was licentious: she ground her hips provocatively against me, insinuating one of her legs between mine. The other was a cross between the Moulin Rouge chorus line and a kung-fu exercise with a series of high kicks and spectacular twirls. It was a nerve-wracking business. The transition from simulated sex to the martial arts was so drunkenly abrupt that I was in real danger of having my head kicked in between romantic clinches.

All the following day at sea, Kolya followed me around the ship like a pint-sized bodyguard, his jacket bulging. Below in the cabin he spent most of his time loading and unloading the pistol. I tried to keep myself out of the line of fire.

In the dining hall Kolya, Anna and I ate together at a corner table. Meals on the Mikhail Lomonosov were dour occasions. Breakfast was an ancient sausage and a sweet cake. Lunch and dinner were indistinguishable – borscht, grey meat, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs. The passengers ate in silence, large pasty figures earnestly shovelling food in a room where the only sound was the awkward undertone of cutlery.

At breakfast we sat together like a dysfunctional family, bickering over cups of tea. We drifted into a curious relationship in which I was cast in the role of the grumpy and distracted pater. My failure to respond to Anna’s advances had upset them both. She behaved as if I was a shiftless husband who had humiliated her. In a filthy mood, Anna cut short the boy’s mediating advances by scolding him for his table manners, for his swearing, for his untucked shirt, for his lack of attention to her. Then she scolded me for not exercising more control over him. I retreated monosyllabically behind newspapers. It hardly seemed credible that we had met only twelve hours before. We chaffed at the confinement of our respective roles as if we had inhabited them for a lifetime.

Though he had conceived some loyalty to me as cabin-mate and foreigner, I was a disappointment to the boy. I knew nothing about rap stars, I lacked the flash accessories he associated with the West, and I took a firm and decidedly negative line about his chief pleasure of the moment: the revolver. With Anna he had a tempestuous and ambivalent relationship, alternately straining at her maternal leash and embracing her bursts of affection. Argument seemed to strengthen some perverse bond between them. When they made up, Kolya brought her bottles of Georgian champagne and fake Rolexes, then snuggled into her lap amid the sacks of cargo in her cabin in some uneasy limbo between a childish cuddle and a lover’s embrace.

He took the fact that I had not slept with Anna as a personal slight. When we were alone he would try to convince me that I should have sex with her. His pleas were both an injured innocence and a sordid knowledge beyond his years. At one moment he might have been the whining child of divorced parents, hoping for a reconciliation. At another, he was an underage pimp trying to drum up business.

In spite of Kolya’s disapproval of fraternizing with the staff, I had accepted an invitation from Dimitri, the second mate. He inhabited a small cabin on the port side of the ship where he had laid out afternoon tea: slabs of jellied meat, salted herrings, hard-boiled eggs, black bread, and glasses of vodka. Despite his long tenure on the Lomonosov the cabin had an anonymous air. There was a hold-all on the bed, two nylon shirts on hangers, and an officer’s jacket hanging on the back of the door. He might have been a passenger, uncharacteristically travelling light. His mood had not improved since the first evening I met him when the ship was docked in Istanbul.

‘In the Ukraine, in Russia, shipping has no future,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘There are no opportunities. When I first went to sea, the Soviet Union was a great naval power. Its ships sailed the world. It is unbelievable what has happened to us. You will see in Sevastopol. The great Black Sea Fleet. The naval docks look like a scrap yard.’

He poured the vodka and sank his teeth into a boiled egg.

‘Do you know what this ship was?’ he asked.

I shook my head. The eggs, like rubber, made speech difficult.

‘It was a research vessel,’ he said emphatically as if I might contradict him. ‘I have been seventeen years on this boat. Before 1990 we used to sail all over the world – the Indian Ocean, South America, Africa. We carried scientists – intelligent people, interesting people, engaged in important research. Professors from Leningrad, from Moscow, from Kiev. You cannot imagine the conversations in the dining room. Philosophy. Genetics. Hydrography. Meteorology. You couldn’t pass the door without learning something. And nice people.’ His voice softened at the memory of the nice professors. ‘Very nice people. Polite. People with manners.’

He crammed a salted herring between small rows of teeth. His expression seemed like an accusation of culpability, as if perhaps I was taking up space that might have been allocated to a wise professorial figure with interesting conversation and good table manners.

‘Look what has become of us. Carrying vegetables and what else back and forth across the Black Sea like a tramp boat. It is difficult to believe.’

I didn’t ask how this had happened. I knew he was going to tell me anyway.

‘Money,’ he exploded. ‘The country is bankrupt. Oh yes we all wanted freedom. We all wanted the end of Communism. But no one mentioned it would bankrupt the country. There is no money for research any more. There is no money for anything. So here we are.’

His rage subsided long enough for him to refill our glasses. ‘I have not been paid in five months,’ he said quietly.

I asked how he managed.

‘I have a kiosk, in Sevastopol.’ His voice had dropped; he was mumbling. He seemed ashamed of this descent into commerce as if it was not worthy of him, a ship’s officer. ‘We sell whisky and vodka, sweets, tobacco. I bring them from Turkey. Otherwise we would starve.’

In the Ukraine, as in the rest of the constituent parts of the old Union, the quest for a living has become everything. From education to the nuclear defence industry, all the great public institutions are obliged to hustle for things to sell like pensioners flogging the remnants of their attics on street corners in Moscow. For Dimitri any hope of advancement had shrunk with the maritime fleet. He had been second mate on the Lomonosov for the last twelve of his seventeen years of service, and still the first mate showed no signs of departure or death.

Economic pressures and the tedium of their endless passages had made the Mikhail Lomonosov a ship of malcontents, riven by jealousies and intrigues. The officers all hated one another. Dimitri hated the cargo master, the cargo master hated the chief engineer, the chief engineer hated the first mate, who hated him right back. Everyone hated the captain whose position allowed him access to the lucrative world of corruption.

Dimitri piled more sausage onto my plate. His anger had been spent, and he seemed apologetic about drawing me into his troubles, as if they were a family matter, unseemly to parade before a foreigner.

‘Do you know who Mikhail Lomonosov was?’ he asked.

I confessed I didn’t. I had seen his portrait hanging in the dining hall, an eighteenth-century figure in a powdered wig and a lace shirt.

‘You are not a Russian. How would you know? But the passengers on this ship. None of them know who Lomonosov was.’ He was beginning to grow agitated again, in spite of himself, chopping the air with his hand. ‘He was a great Russian, a scientist, a writer. He founded Moscow University. He set up the first laboratory in Russia. He was also a poet, a very great poet. He wrote about language and science and history. The scientists who travelled on the ship all knew his work. They discussed him. But these people, these traders, they are ignorant. They do not know their own history. They can tell you the price of every grade of vodka but they know nothing about Mikhail Lomonosov. No one cares about these things any more, about science, about poetry. Only about money, and prices in Istanbul.’

In the evening I went to visit him on the bridge during his watch. He was alone. The hushed solitude of the place and the instruments of his profession – charts, radar screens, compasses – had lightened his mood. On the chart table the Black Sea was neatly parcelled by lines of longitude and latitude. Near the bottom Istanbul straddled the Bosphorus. At the top Sevastopol was tucked carefully round a corner on the western shores of the Crimea. A thick smudged pencil line joined the two. Overdrawn countless times, it marked the single unvarying line to which his life had been reduced: 43° NE.

Below in the nightclub Rasputin was singing a Russian version of My Way. Despairing of me, Anna had transferred her attentions rather theatrically to the singer, and was now gyrating suggestively in front of the tiny stage. The purple lighting did Rasputin no favours. His eyes and cheeks were malevolent pockets of darkness.

I found Kolya alone at a corner table nursing a double brandy.

‘Anna seems to be enjoying herself,’ I said taking a seat.

He looked at me without speaking then turned his eyes back to the dance floor and the figure of Rasputin in its purple haze.

‘He is not exactly Sinatra,’ I said.

‘He is a shit,’ Kolya said.

The boy seemed to have diminished on his stool, sinking deeper into himself. He simmered with resentment. He felt Rasputin was displacing him in Anna’s affections, that the arbitrary tides of the adult world had shifted without any reference to him. He glowered at the singer from his corner table like a child gangster.

I retired and when Kolya arrived later in the cabin, he was sullen and uncommunicative. We played cards in a difficult silence. Half an hour later, Anna arrived with Rasputin, trailing all the forced merriment of the nightclub. She seemed to need to show off her acquisition to me and to Kolya in some act of petty revenge.

They sat together on the bunk opposite. Anna stroked his thigh. They chattered together in Ukrainian. The boy watched them coldly. Rasputin tried to draw him out with bantering exchanges. The nightclub had closed and the two were trying to press Kolya for his usual hospitality. Anna had delved into one of Kolya’s bags and produced a bottle of vodka which she proposed they drink. Rasputin held it up and made to open the screw top, looking teasingly to Kolya for his response. He was laughing open-mouthed, a barking ridicule emerging from between rows of long yellow teeth. Then he closed his mouth suddenly, and his expression changed. Anna and Rasputin were suddenly rigid.

I looked round at Kolya. The boy was pointing his gun at the singer. He swore at him, under his breath, as if he was speaking to himself.

‘Put the gun down, Kolya,’ I said.

He did not respond. For what seemed like long minutes no one moved. We were transfixed by the gun.

‘Put it down, Kolya.’ I forced myself to stand up. Kolya’s gaze flickered toward me for a second then returned to Rasputin. His face was flushed. I felt my heart pounding and my legs felt watery. I stepped between the two.

‘Get out,’ I said to Rasputin.

The singer seemed about to protest, but Anna silenced him. She stood up and pulled his arm. I herded them out of the door then closed it after them.

Kolya had lowered the gun. He picked at the barrel absentmindedly, childishly, with his middle finger. He pursed his lips, affecting a casual expression, as if the sudden terror that still stiffened the air in the room had nothing to do with him.

‘You’re an idiot,’ I told him. I wanted to shout at him; my own tension needed an outlet. He sat chewing his lip, gazing at the floor, then threw the gun on his bunk.

‘You’ll have to get rid of it,’ I told him. He said nothing. ‘The singer will tell the Ukrainian customs about the gun. They will search you. He might even be telling the captain now. You need to get rid of it. Immediately.’

He sat staring at the floor. Then with the surly grace of a child who had been ordered to clean his room, he picked up the gun, opened the porthole and dropped it into the sea. Then he lay down on his bunk and sobbed into his pillow.

Perched on the southern shores of the old Soviet Union, Sevastopol was a window on more tolerant worlds. There is a Mediterranean feel about the place, some tang of the south, some promise of escape, a lightness borne on the sea air and reflected in the pinkish hue of the stone façades. Built by Black Sea traders who had seen Naples, it has touches of architectural grandeur and a southern desire for colour. Side streets were full of flower boxes and haughty cats. Flights of stone steps connected avenues of plane trees and trolley buses. Vines trailed between the mulberry trees in walled gardens. In the midday sun cafés spilled onto the pavements, and people grew animated and gregarious.

It is easy to understand why the Crimea was the envy of the rest of the Soviet Union. Dour people from Moscow used to come to Sevastopol and Odessa just to look at the vegetables. In those days the Politburo holidayed on the Black Sea. In this easy southern climate it was a simple matter to believe that things were going well. Every other year the first families of the East, leaving their overcoats and their worries at home, gathered at a resort near Yalta just along the coast – the Brezhnevs, the Honeckers, the Zhivkovs, the Ceausescus, and the Tsendbals – to compare growth rates and grandchildren.

Though virtually unknown outside his own country, Tsendbal’s survival eclipsed them all. For forty-four years, as general secretary and then president, this obscure figure ruled the People’s Republic of Mongolia, the world’s second Communist state and the oldest of Russia’s allies. To keep tabs on him, the KGB had managed to marry him off to one of their agents, the boorish Filatova, a Russian from Soviet Central Asia. The Crimea was one of her passions and the Tsendbals came to the Black Sea at least twice a year. If any folk memories of the Mongol Hordes lurked in the Crimean subconscious, Tsendbal must have confused them. The heir to Genghis Khan was a small mousy man, the epitome of the faceless bureaucrat, obsequious to his domineering wife and his masters in the Kremlin.

In the afternoon I wandered through the park where Crimean War monuments were deployed between the flower beds. Todleben, who organized the defence of Sevastopol in 1855, towered serenely over strolling naval cadets in hats so ridiculous they might have been dressed for a children’s party. At the far end of the park a fat man reading a newspaper sold me a ticket for an empty Ferris wheel.

Ten years ago Sevastopol was the most closed of the Soviet Union’s closed cities, and spies in every Western nation would have considered a ride on this Ferris wheel as the pinnacle of their careers. Now the operator hardly cared enough about the presence of the former enemy to look up from the sports pages. With a series of creaking shudders I rose above the city. Beneath me, in the long protected harbour, lay the great Black Sea Fleet. It looked like a vast naval scrap yard full of rusting hulks. Economic collapse appeared to have done for the fleet what the naval strategies of Nato failed to do – keep much of it in harbour. Russia and the Ukraine had argued over the disposition of the ships when the latter declared its independence, though neither of them can afford to maintain its share of the naval loot.

Back at my hotel the lobby was dominated by a flashing sign that read El Dorado. Beneath it a cabal of young venture capitalists in baseball caps worked the slot machines. Upstairs in my room the television offered two Russian channels. On the first, old Russia survived. Rectangular men in grey suits were making interminable speeches. On the other channel, new Russia was in full cry. Encouraged by a deranged game-show host, housewives were performing a striptease. The applause levels of the audience determined which one would win the kind of washing machine I remember my mother throwing out in the 1960s. It was not difficult to guess which channel was winning the ratings war.

The finest part of Sevastopol is the esplanade along the seafront which stages the evening passeggiata. A series of neo-classical buildings – naval academies, customs houses, municipal offices – lines the long promenade where the inhabitants stroll arm in arm taking the sea air as swallows dive between the rooftops. Like the promenaders most of the buildings appeared to have lost the security of state employment and now struggle to make ends meet. Corner rooms in the old academies have been rented out as bars and restaurants. As the soft southern night fell, noisy discos mushroomed between the Corinthian columns where visiting leaders, including the Tsendbals of Outer Mongolia, once reviewed the naval fleet that was the pride of the Soviet Union.

At this season the Crimea was full of poppies. In the winding defile that climbed towards the interior, the kind of treacherous geography that betrayed the Light Brigade, poppies wreathed the outcrops of pink rock. Above on the plateau, ramparts of poppies enclosed fields where armies of stout women were cutting hay with scythes. Then the bus passed into a country of orchards where poppies trickled down the aisles between the trees to gather in pools among apple-green shadows.

I felt relieved to be on the move, to be consuming landscapes. The boat and its complex relationships had engendered a sense of confinement, some cloying and unsuitable feeling of responsibility. Now I was performing the traveller’s trick, the trick of departure, the vanishing act that marks the stages of a journey. For the traveller every encounter is conditioned by departure, by the impending schedule of trains, by the tickets already folded in his pocket, by the promise of new pastures. Departure is the constraint and the liberation of journeys.

On this bright morning fresh landscapes opened in front of me. Gazing out the window of the bus I delighted in the flash of fields and houses, the blur of poppies. I watched whole towns sweep past, adrift among wheat fields, then fall rapidly astern. At Simferopol I would get the train and tomorrow evening I would be on the Volga, seven hundred miles to the east. I felt the elation of movement. On this bus fleeing eastward, I felt I was staging my own disappearance, vanishing into Asia, leaving only a handwritten sign on the window of my former life: ‘Gone to Outer Mongolia, please cancel the papers’.

Since the time of the Scythians, the pastures of the Crimean interior had lured successive waves of Asian nomads onto the peninsula from the southern Russian steppes. When the Mongols arrived here in the thirteenth century it became an important component of the western province of the Mongolian Empire known as the Golden Horde whose capital lay at Sarai on the Volga. The Russians mistakenly called these eastern invaders Tatars, one of the many tribes that had been subdued by Genghis Khan in the early years of conquest, and the name stuck. In the west this became Tartar when Louis IX, William’s benefactor, transformed it by way of a Latin pun on ex tartarus, meaning ‘from the regions of hell’ recorded in classical legend.

Friar William landed at Sudak on the southern shore of the Crimea on 21 May, 1253. His plan was to visit a Mongol prince, Sartaq, rumoured to be a Christian, whose camp lay three days’ ride beyond the River Don. On the advice of the Greek merchants in Sudak he opted to travel by cart, filling one with ‘fruits, muscatel wine and dry biscuits’ as gifts for the Mongol officials that they would encounter along the way. He set off with four companions: his colleague, Friar Bartholomew, a man whose age and bulk made him even less suited to this epic journey than William himself; Gosset, ‘a bearer’; Homo Dei, a Syrian interpreter whose knowledge of any useful language was fairly shaky; and Nicholas, a slave boy that William had rescued in Constantinople.

But William’s journey was to take him a good deal further than he had planned. He was embarking on an odyssey that would lead him eventually to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum, at the other end of Asia, well over four thousand miles away. If he had hoped to be back with his fellow monks in time for Christmas, he was to be disappointed.

At Simferopol I found the train to Volgograd guarded by an army of formidable carriage attendants, big-breasted women who stood by the doors like bouncers. They had beehive hairdos, thick necks and the kind of shoulders born of a career spent wrestling baggage and the heavy windows of Russian trains. Even their make-up was intimidating – scarlet lipstick, blue eyelids, raspberry-rouged cheeks, and malevolent bits of mascara gathered at the corners of their eyes. But once the train started, they underwent a transformation, from security guards to matrons. They abandoned their jackboots for carpet slippers, and began to fuss with the curtains. Taking pity on a hapless foreigner, my carriage attendant brought me a mug of tea from her samovar and I spread out a picnic of bananas, smoked cheese, a sausage, and Ukrainian pastries.

I shared my compartment with a burly Russian with mechanic’s hands and a simian haircut growing low on his forehead. He lay down on the bunk opposite and was asleep before we cleared the industrial suburbs of Simferopol. He slept with one eye slightly ajar. From beneath its lowered lid it followed me round the compartment. As he fell deeper into his slumbers his limbs began to convulse, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits.

On the edges of the Azov Sea we crossed out of Crimea on a littoral of islands. For a time the world was poised uneasily between land, water and sky. Causeways linked narrow tongues of marsh where lone houses stood silhouetted against uncertain horizons. A fisherman passed in a boat no bigger than a bathtub, his head bowed over nets, like a man at prayer. Watery planes tapered beneath landscapes of cloud until the sea and the sky began to merge, the same placid grey, the same boundless horizontals.

Beyond Melitopol we sailed over prairies tilting beneath towering skies. This was nomad country, the Don steppe, traversed by winds blowing out of the heart of Asia. The first Greek traders who ventured across the Black Sea were alarmed to find themselves here on the edge of another sea running north and east on waves of grass. The southern reaches of grasslands that stretch intermittently from Hungary to Manchuria, these prairies lent themselves for millennia to a culture of movement.

Maritime metaphors adhere to these landscapes with the tenacity of barnacles. Chekov grew up at Taganrog east of here along the shores of the Sea of Azov. He remembered as a boy lying among sacks of wheat in the back of an oxcart sailing slowly across the great ocean of the steppe. William wrote in a similar vein. ‘When … we finally came across some people,’ he wrote, ‘we rejoiced like shipwrecked sailors coming into harbour.’ Pastoralism survived on these prairies until the beginning of the twentieth century when the fatal combination of the modern age and Communism brought the world of the Scythians to a close. The tents and the horses retreated as lumbering tractors ploughed up the grasslands for wheat, and the prairie was colonized by villages and farmers.

The afternoon was full of country stations and haycocks. Peasant women lined the platforms with metal buckets of fat red cherries which they sold by the bowlful to the passengers through the windows of the train. As we pulled away they slung their buckets on the handlebars of old bicycles and diminished down dirt roads between flat fields of cabbages and banks of cream-coloured blossoms. Pegged like an unruly sheet by a line of telegraph poles, the prairie flapped away into unfathomable distances.

In the early evening I stood in the corridor at an open window, breathing in the country air as we passed through invisible chambers of scent: cut hay, strawberries, wet stagnant ditches, newly-turned earth, wood smoke. In a blue twilight we came to the estuary of the Dneiper, as dark as steel and as wide as a lake. Trails of mist unravelled across its polished surface. Dim yellow lights marked another horizon. It was impossible to tell if they were houses or ships.

All that remains of the great nomadic cultures that once roamed these regions are the tombs of their ancestors. William describes the landscape as being composed of three elements: heaven, earth and tombs. Scythians tombs, known as kurgans, litter these steppes like humpbacked whales riding seas of wheat. Beneath great mounds of stone and earth their chiefs were buried with their horses and their gold, their servants and their wives. The tombs were the only permanent habitation they ever built. Grave robbers have plundered the tall barrows for centuries, carrying off the spectacular loot of Scythian gold – ornaments, jewellery, weapons, horse trappings, all decorated in an ‘animal style’ with parades of ibex and stags, eagles and griffons, lions and serpents. But it was horses not gold that were the most compelling feature of these burials.

Horses attain a mythical status in nomadic cultures, and have always been crucial to their burials and their notions of immortality. Sacrificed at the funerary rites, they joined their masters in order to carry them to the next world. In a famous passage Herodotus described the mounted attendants placed round the Scythian tomb chambers. An entire cavalry of horses and riders had been strangled, disembowelled, stuffed with straw and impaled upon poles in an enclosing circle ready to accompany the dead king on his last ride. For centuries it was treated as just another of Herodotus’ tall tales until the Russian archaeologist N.I. Veselovsky opened the Ulskii mound in the nineteenth century and found the remains of three hundred and sixty horses tethered on stakes in a ring about the mound, their hooves pawing the air in flight.

The nomadic association of horses with immortality had even reached China, beyond the eastern shores of the grass sea, as early as the second century BC. In the mind of the Chinese emperor Wu-ti, military humiliations at the hands of the Xiongnu, the Huns of Western records, and fears about his own immortality had become strangely entwined. He seemed to embrace the convictions of the nomads who threatened his frontiers. From behind the claustrophobic walls of imperial China, he envied them their sudden arrivals, their fleet departures. Their horses, he believed, would be his salvation, and he set his heart on acquiring the fabled steeds of far-off Fergana in Central Asia. Known to the Chinese as the Heavenly Horses, they were said to sweat blood and to be able to carry their riders into the celestial arms of their ancestors.

Throughout his reign, Wu-ti lavished enormous expense and countless lives on expeditions to bring thirty breeding pairs of these divine steeds home to China. Only when they finally arrived was he at peace. He watched them from the windows of his palace like a smitten lover, tall beautiful horses grazing on pastures of alfalfa, their flanks shining, their fine heads lifting in unison to scent the air. ‘They will draw me up’, he wrote in a poem, ‘and carry me to the Holy Mountain. (On their backs) I shall reach the Jade Terrace.’

Chapter Three THE KAZAKHSTAN EXPRESS

In Volgograd the lobby of the hotel was steeped in gloom. A clock ticked somewhere. Blades of blue light from the street lamps outside cut across the Caucasian carpets and struck the faces of the marble pillars. A grand staircase ascended into vaults of darkness. In the square a car passed and the sweep of headlamps illuminated statues of naked figures like startled guests caught unawares between the old sofas and the potted palms. It was only ten o’clock in the evening, but the hotel was so quiet it might have been abandoned.

When I rang the bell at the reception desk, a woman I had not seen lifted her head. She had been asleep. A mark creased her cheek where it had been pressed against a ledger. She gazed at me in silence for a long moment as she disentangled herself from her dreams.

‘Passport?’ she whispered hoarsely, as if that might hold a useful clue to where she was.

My room was on the fifth floor. I was struggling with the gates of the antique lift when an ancient attendant appeared silently from a side doorway. He wore a pair of enormous carpet slippers and a silk scarf which bound his trousers like a belt. From a vast bunch of keys, he unlocked the lift and together we rose through the empty hotel, to the slow clicking of wheels and pulleys, arriving on the fifth floor with a series of violent shudders. When I stepped out into a dark hall, the gates of the lift clanged behind me, and the ghoulish operator floated slowly downwards again in a tiny halo of light, past my feet and out of sight. I stood for a moment listening to the sighs and creaks and mysterious exhalations of the hotel, and wondered if I was the only guest.

My room had once been grand. You could have ridden a horse through the doorway. The ceiling mouldings, twenty feet above my head, were weighted with baroque swags of fruit. The plumbing was baronial. The furnishings, however, appeared to have come from a car-boot sale in Minsk. There was a Formica coffee table with a broken leg and a chest of drawers painted in khaki camouflage. The bed was made of chipboard and chintz; when I sat tentatively on the edge, it swayed alarmingly. A vast refrigerator, standing between the windows, roared like an aeroplane waiting for takeoff.

I was tired, and in want of a bath. There appeared to be no plug but by some miracle of lateral thinking I discovered that the metal weight attached to the room key doubled as the bath plug. As I turned on the water, there was a loud knock at the door.

Outside in the passage stood a stout woman in a low-cut dress, a pair of fishnet stockings, and a tall precarious hairdo. But for her apparel she might have been one of those Russian tractor drivers of the 1960s, a heroine of the collective farm, muscular, square-jawed, willing to lay down her life for a good harvest. In her hand, where one might have expected a spanner, she carried only a dainty white handbag.

She smiled. Her teeth were smeared with lipstick.

‘You want massage?’ she said in English. ‘Sex? Very good.’

Prostitution is the only room service that most Russian hotels provide, and the speed with which it arrives at your door, unsolicited, is startling in a nation where so many essential services involve queuing. There was some lesson here about market forces.

The woman smiled and nodded. I smiled back and shook my head.

‘No thank you,’ I said.

But Olga didn’t get where she was by taking no for an answer. ‘Massage very good. I come back later. I bring other girls.’ She was taking a mobile telephone out of her bag. ‘What you want? Blondes? I have very nice blondes. How many blondes you want?’ She had begun to dial a number, presumably the Blonde Hot Line. I had a vision of fair-haired tractor drivers marching towards us from the four corners of Volgograd.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘No, thank you. No massage. No sex. No blondes.’

I was closing the door. The woman’s bright commercial manner had slipped like a bad wig. In the gloom of the passage she suddenly looked old and defeated. I felt sorry for her, and for Russia, reduced to selling blondes to cash-rich foreigners.

‘Good luck,’ I said. ‘I hope you find someone else to massage.’

‘Old soldiers.’ She shrugged. ‘Only war veterans come here. It’s not good for business. They are too old for blondes. And they are always with the wives.’

I commiserated with her about this unseemly outbreak of marital fidelity.

‘Where you from?’ she asked. She brightened at the mention of London.

‘Charles Dickens,’ she cried. Her face suddenly shed years. Dickens, with his portrayals of London’s poor, had been a part of every child’s education in Russia under the old regime. ‘David Copperfield. Oliver Twiski, Nikolai Nickelovitch. I am in love with Charles Dickens. Do you know Malinki Nell. Ooooh. So sad.’

Suddenly I heard the sound of the bath-water. I rushed into the bathroom and closed the taps just as the water was reaching the rim.

‘What is your name?’ Olga was inside the vestibule. She seemed disappointed with an unDickensian Stanley. ‘You should be David. David Copperfield. In Russia they make a film of David Copperfield. He look like you. Tall, a little hungry, and the same trouble with the hair.’

‘What’s wrong with my hair?’ I asked.

‘No. Very nice hair. But you should comb.’ She was looking over my shoulder at the room. ‘They give you room with no balcony. Next door, the same price, a better room with balcony. They are lazy. Hotel is empty. What does it matter?’

When I turned to glance at the room myself, she teetered past me on her high heels and sat on the only chair. She seemed relieved to have the weight off her feet.

I stood in the doorway for a moment then decided I didn’t have the heart to throw her out. Dickens had already made us comrades.

‘Have a glass of vodka,’ I said.

I unpacked my food from the train and she took charge of it, pushing aside my Swiss army knife and fetching a switchblade out of her bag. She kicked off her shoes and carved the sausage, the dark bread, and the cheese, peeled the oranges and the hard-boiled eggs and poured out two small glasses of vodka.

We talked about Dickens and Russia. For seventy years Russians had read Dickens as a portrait of the evils of Western capitalism. Now that they had capitalism themselves, the kind of raw nineteenth-century capitalism that the revolution had interrupted, Dickens had come to Russia. The country was awash with urchins, impostors, fast-talking charlatans, scar-faced criminals, rapacious lawyers, deaf judges, browbeaten clerks, ageing prostitutes, impoverished kind-hearted gentility, people with no past, and people with too much past.

‘Russia is a broken country,’ Olga sighed, failing to see the Dickensian ingredients of a sprawling Victorian pot-boiler all about her.

Her mobile rang. She grunted into the mouthpiece a few times then put it away again. ‘Business,’ she said, squeezing her feet back into her scuffed stilettos. She begin to pack up our picnic.

‘Don’t leave the cheese out,’ she said.

She let out a long sigh as she hoisted herself to her feet. ‘I am tired,’ she said, straightening her dress.

‘Goodbye Master Stanley. If there is something you are needing, you see me okay. Ask at reception. They all know me.’

Then she teetered away up the hall into the dark recesses of the hotel.

Russia’s tragedies are on a different scale from other nations’, as if disaster has found room to expand in its vast distances. Of total losses in World War Two, some fifty million people, over half were Russians. One sixth of the population are said to have perished in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Volgograd, under its old name of Stalingrad, was the scene of one of the most horrific battles. In 1942 the German Sixth Army laid siege to the city for four months, bombarding it relentlessly, reducing the city to rubble and its population to cannibalism. In a campaign that speaks more about sheer determination than military sophistication, the Russians turned the Germans and drove them back across the Don. But the cost was staggering. A million Russian soldiers were casualties in the defence of Stalingrad, more than twice the population of the city, and more than all the American casualties in the whole of the Second World War. Their memorial is almost as colossal as their tragedy.

I took the tram to Mother Russia. Her statue overlooks the Volga on the northern outskirts of the city. Long before I reached her, I could see her sword raised above a block of tenements. It vanished for a time then her vast head came floating into view beyond the smokestacks of a derelict factory. Her size confused my sense of distance and scale, and I got down from the tram three stops too soon.

Long slow steps climbed through a succession of stone terraces framed by stone reliefs of grieving citizens. On the last, where a granite soldier with a sub-machine-gun symbolizes the defence of the city, sounds of battle are piped between the trees and a remnant of ruined city wall. To one side stands a rotunda where 7200 names, picked at random from the lists of dead, are inscribed in gold on curving walls of red marble. A tape-loop plays Schumann’s Traümerei; the choice is meant to indicate that Russians held no grudge against ordinary Germans.

On the hill above, Mother Russia bestrides the sky. As tall as Nelson’s Column, and weighing 8000 tonnes, the statue depicts a young woman, a Russian version of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, striding into a new world, in too much of a hurry to notice she was still in her nightdress. Her upraised sword is the length of a tennis court. Her feet are the size of a London bus. She is striding eastward, across the Volga, glancing over her shoulder to check that Russia is following.

I reclined on her big toe, warm in the afternoon sun, and gazed across the Volga at an empty lion-coloured prairie beneath a fathomless sky. The city stretches for some 40 miles along the western bank without ever daring to cross the river, as if recognizing that the far bank was another country. There are no bridges. If the Black Sea was the nomadic frontier to the Greeks in antiquity, in modern times in Russia the focus for that uneasy boundary has been the Volga. Within its long embrace lies Mother Russia; beyond was the Wild East, the untamed land of the Tartars. Volgograd was founded in the sixteenth century as a fortress, built to protect Russians settlers from their nomadic incursions. If the Volga is the quintessential Russian river, it is due in part to its character as a frontier, poised between the national contradictions of West and East, of Slav and Tartar.

Scratch a Russian, the old proverb goes, and you will find a Tartar. Over the centuries the Mongol Golden Horde which dominated the Russian princes from their tented capitals here on the Volga became absorbed into Russia’s complex ethnicities. The Tatar Autonomous Region lies north along the Volga around its capital Kazan. The Kalmyks, a Mongolian people, have their own region to the south. The Cossacks, another Tartar band, are part of Russian folklore. In these parts every Russian town has its Tartar district where the lanes become narrower, the people louder and life less ordered. Beneath the feet of Mother Russia, brandishing her sword at the eastern steppes, is a Tartar tomb, the Mamaev Kurgan, centuries older than the city.

From Mother Russia’s big toe, one is reminded of the political context of the ambivalent relationship between Russian and Tartar. The statue striding towards the Volga is a symbol of the reverse of a historic tide. By the eighteenth century the balance of power had tilted irrevocably away from the peoples who had migrated from Central Asia and who had sapped Russia for centuries with their demands for tribute. By the age of Peter the Great, Russia was coming to dominate the nomadic hordes of the steppes, and had embarked upon an eastward expansion that would eventually reach even distant Mongolia. They built towns, roads, schools and factories; they sought to bring settled civilization to the regions beyond the Volga. Only by controlling these turbulent regions could they feel secure. Marching toward eastern horizons, the colossal statue seeks to mask the scale of Russian anxieties. Their imperial ambitions were a plea for order, for the safe predictability of sedentary life.

Friar William reached the Volga in the middle of August. The problem with his mission was that no one knew what to do with him. Mongol princes to whom he presented himself invariably resorted to handing him on to their superiors. In the Crimea he had been given an audience at the camp of the Mongol governor, Scacatai. When asked what message he brought to the Mongols William replied simply, ‘Words of Christian faith.’ The governor ‘remained silent, but wagged his head’, then said he had better speak to Sartaq, a senior figure, camped beyond the River Don.

While William waited on arrangements for his onward travel he had a brief breakthrough on the evangelical front when he persuaded a resident Muslim to convert to Christianity. Apparently the fellow was much taken with the idea of the cleansing of his sins and William’s promise of Resurrection from the Dead. The scheme came unstuck at the last moment however when the man insisted on first speaking to his wife who informed him that Christians were not allowed to drink koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk that is the chief tipple in nomad tents. In spite of William’s assurances that this was not the case, the fellow decided he wouldn’t risk it.

Sadly the belief, then current in the West, that Sartaq was a Christian turned out to be an ill-founded rumour. He was happy to receive gifts from Christian envoys, William reports on reaching his camp, but when the Muslims turned up with better gifts, they were immediately given precedence. ‘In fact,’ William confesses, ‘my impression is that he makes sport of Christians.’ Unsure how to deal with his visitors, Sartaq sent the friars on to his father, Batu, who was encamped on the Volga.

Batu was already migrating toward his winter pastures in the steppes to the east of the Volga, when the friars caught up with him. ‘I was struck with awe,’ William wrote on seeing his encampment. The vast sea of tents had ‘the appearance of a large city … with inhabitants scattered around in every direction for a distance of three or four leagues.’ At its heart stood the great pavilion of Batu, its tent flaps open to the sunny and auspicious south.

William’s first audience with Batu proved an interesting moment in east-west relations. When they were led inside the tent by their escort they found the grandson of Genghis Khan seated on a broad couch, inlaid with gold, amidst an assembly of attendants and wives. For a moment no one spoke. The friars stood, slightly intimidated by the grandeur of the pavilion, while the Mongols stared. Here were the envoys of the King of the Franks: two fat monks, barefoot, bareheaded, clothed in dusty robes. Itinerant peddlers would have presented a more respectable appearance.

William was not in the best of moods. This was his third Mongol audience in less than three months; each was as inconclusive as the one before. Further irritated by being obliged to kneel before Batu, he waded straight in with the hell and damnation. He would pray for his host, the friar said, but there was really little he could do for him. They were heathens, unbaptized in the Christian Church, and God would condemn them to everlasting fire.

When William had finished his introduction, you could presumably have heard a pin drop. At this point the friar carefully edits his own account and does not record Batu’s response. But the reply of the barbarian khan, the harbinger of chaos and darkness, has passed into folklore. We find it in the records of one Giacomo d’Iseo, another Franciscan, who relates the story of the encounter as described by the King of Armenia. It was a lesson to the westerners in a civilized discourse.

Surprised by William’s aggressive manner, Batu replied with a parable. ‘The nurse,’ he said, ‘begins first to let drops of milk fall into the infant’s mouth, so that the sweet taste may encourage the child to suck; only next does she offer him the nipple. Thus you should first persuade us in simple and reasonable fashion, as (your) teaching seems to us to be altogether foreign. Instead you threaten us at once with everlasting punishment.’ His words were greeted with a slow hand-clap by the assembled Mongols.

Despite Batu’s disapproval, he invited William to sit by him and served him with a bowl of mare’s milk. He wished the friars well and would be happy for them to remain in Mongol territories, he declared, but unfortunately he could not give them the necessary permissions. For this they would have to travel to the court of Mongke Khan, Lord of all the Mongols, who resided at the capital Qaraqorum in Mongolia itself, almost three thousand miles to the east. William’s journey had only just begun.

A month later a guide arrived to escort them eastward. He seemed a trifle tetchy about being assigned two fat foreigners, and was obviously worried that they would not be able to keep up. ‘It is a four months journey,’ the guide warned them. ‘The cold there is so intense that rocks and trees split apart with the frost … If you prove unable to bear it I will abandon you on the way.’

By day some life returned to the lobby of the Hotel Volgograd. The receptionist was awake and the ancient lift operator loitered by the door. All they lacked were guests.

The Intourist office located just off the lobby exuded the solid respectability and feminine good sense of a Women’s Institute, circa 1957. It was staffed by a phalanx of charming middle-aged matrons, dressed in twinsets and pearls. I dropped by in time for afternoon tea.

In the past most tourists to the city came from the former Communist countries of eastern Europe as well as from West Germany where former Panzer officers were curiously keen to revisit the scene of one of their more spectacular defeats. Few of the former could afford the trip now, and the latter were dying off. In the absence of other tourists, travel information had rather dried up. The planetarium, boat trips on the Volga, Kazakh visas, all were a mystery to the women of Intourist. I asked about train tickets; I had spent much of the morning in the railway station trying to purchase a ticket to Kazakhstan. Offering me a scone, Svetlana, the English speaker, admitted that train travel was beyond their remit. In the genteel atmosphere of the tourist office, beneath posters of Volgograd’s factories, my enquiries began to seem impolite, and the conversation turned to a series of Tchaikovsky concerts to which the office had subscribed.

Into this civilized circle Olga descended like a one-woman barbarian horde. I heard my name, a head-turning shriek from the lobby, and suddenly there she was pushing through the glass doors of the office and limping towards us, still in the heels and hooker’s uniform of the previous evening.

‘Master Stanley,’ she called, waving and smiling with the excitement of a fond reunion. Looking up from their tea, the Intourist women gazed at this advancing apparition with horror. Then, as one, they turned their shocked expressions to me. I felt myself blushing, compounding the impression of guilt. There was a moment of dreadful silence as the irrepressible Olga stood before us.

‘Hellooo,’ I said feebly.

‘Master Stanley, I am looking everywhere for you,’ Olga said. ‘You are not in your room.’

The wide eyes of the Intourist women narrowed as they swung back from my red face to a closer inspection, from the feet up, of Olga – the torn fishnets, the bulging figure in the cheap tight dress, the fat cleavage, the heavy erratic make-up. Then they turned their gaze to one another, a circle of smug disapproval framed by raised eyebrows and pursed lips.

Amidst their condescending censure some instinct for civility finally surfaced in me, and I rose to offer Olga my seat. She did not take it. A change in the set of her shoulders signalled her recognition of the women’s disdain.

In the lobby Olga said, ‘You want train tickets?’ The hotel grapevine had already informed her of my visit to the railway station.

‘I am trying to get a ticket on the Kazakhstan Express,’ I said.

‘I can get for you,’ she announced. ‘No problem. Don’t waste time with Intourist peoples.’ She made a face towards the glass doors. She didn’t seem to like the company I kept.

Volgograd was the unlikely setting for an international festival of contemporary dance which coincided with my visit, and in the evening I went along to a performance by the Be Van Vark Kollektivtanz from Berlin. The principal piece, Orgon II + III, was based on the work of Willem Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst, whose guiding principle was that mental health depended upon the frequency of sexual congress. He went so far as to recommend the abolition of the nuclear family which he identified as a deterrent to regular orgasms.

The Berlin avant-garde held no surprises for me since the evening I had taken my mother to a performance of a Handel opera at the Riverside Studios in London. My mother was very fond of Handel and I had booked seats in the front row which at the Riverside meant that you were more or less part of the action. I had not registered that the visiting company came from the cutting edge of German performance art. It was Handel all right, but not as we knew it. When the cast fluttered onto the stage after a lilting overture I was startled to see that they wore nothing more than one or two strategic fig leaves. The performance was in the Reichian mode and for the next two hours and forty-three minutes, unrelieved by anything so old-fashioned as an interval, the cast members cavorted carnally and orgasmically in our laps. I remember it as one of the worst evenings of my life, and cursed myself for balking at the ticket prices at Covent Garden. My mother however was delighted, and never tired of telling people about the production. ‘Such energetic performances,’ she would say.

The soundtrack of Orgon II + III, so far as one could tell, was of frogs mating. The dance itself was a frenzied affair with some brilliant and very physical performances. The dancers kept their clothes on and the orgasms, if there were any, were difficult to distinguish from the triple pirouettes. The audience however seemed rather stunned. Presumably Orgon II + III was a bit much for people emerging from seventy years of social realism, when culture was devoted to happy peasants striding into a golden future of social justice, international peace and good harvests.

I walked back to the hotel through a park where orgasmically dysfunctional families were sharing ice-creams. Young people loitered around the ubiquitous kiosks which sold beer and snacks, and shoals of drunks floated between the park benches. Someone suggested after the war that the smouldering ruins of Stalingrad should be left as a monument to the defeat of Fascism. But Stalin understandably did not like the idea of his name being associated with a pile of rubble, so large sums were diverted to the city’s reconstruction. The results are pleasant if uninspiring. The town is given to wide avenues interrupted by parks and war memorials. There are red sandstone apartments with balustraded balconies, built in the fifties as a reconstruction of the past, which look like they will last for ever, and yellow concrete tenements with damp stains, built in the sixties as a vision of the future, which look like they might not see the weekend.

I went for dinner in the grandiose restaurant in the hotel. In Stalin’s day it had presumably hosted power lunches of the Party hierarchy. These days it is as spectacular and as empty as a mausoleum. I sat by a tall window overlooking the square. The service left plenty of time to admire the marble columns, the gilt chandeliers, the vast ornate mirrors, and the tables laid with silver and fine linen. The waiter appeared to be the lift operator’s elder brother. It took him five minutes to cross the vast hardwood floor with a glass of rust-coloured water on a silver tray. He was deaf and I had to write the order in large letters on a napkin. He scrutinized this for some time, then, turning away without a word, embarked on the long journey towards the kitchen.

I was savouring the pleasure of dining alone when Olga appeared from beyond a fat pillar and sank into the seat opposite.

‘I have ticket,’ she said, lifting the precious article from her bag. ‘You go Saratov on the morning train, then changing for Almaty train.’

I thanked her enthusiastically but she waved her hand.

‘I wish I was going with you,’ she said, propping her elbows on the table and searching her molars, with a toothpick, for some remnant of her dinner.

‘To Kazakhstan?’ I asked. It was not a destination beloved of many Russians.

‘To Saratov. My village is there. On the other side of the river.’

I had not thought of her as coming from elsewhere, especially a village. She seemed so ingrained in this city with its opportunities for compromise and anonymity.

‘What is it like, your village?’ I asked.

‘Krasivoje,’ she said. ‘Beautiful. The apple trees have the flowers now. There is the Volga. It is like a …’ she searched for the word, pointing at the ceiling.

‘A chandelier?’ I suggested.

She shook her head impatiently.

‘A tobacco-stained ceiling?’

She frowned. ‘No, no.’ She flipped her hand to indicate something further.

‘The sky? Ah-ha. Paradise.’

‘Like paradise,’ she said. Her face had softened. ‘My son is there, with his babushka.’

She looked at me and I realized I had been promoted. A son was not an admission for potential clients.

‘How old is he? I asked.

‘Eight,’ she said. ‘I send money. But I will not bring him to Volgograd. Never to this city.’ She shook her head emphatically as if it was the city and not the human heart that was responsible for her downfall.

The advance notices for the Kazakhstan Express had not been encouraging. Everything I had heard or read about this train described it as a nightmare. The Intourist women in the Hotel Volgograd politely changed the subject when I mentioned it. The guidebook to Russian railways pleaded with readers to avoid it altogether. Even Olga was uneasy about the Kazakhstan Express.

Prostitutes, pimps, drug-pushers and thieves were said to have all the best seats; the sixty-hour journey to Almaty was standing room only for those without underworld connections. The passengers were described as drunk and belligerent, and the conductors locked themselves in the guard vans to avoid the knife fights. Robbery apparently was more common than ticket collecting. Passengers, it was said, were regularly gassed in their sleep and stripped of their possessions. Reports of the Mongol hordes in thirteenth-century Europe could hardly compete with the reputation of the Kazakhstan Express.

Arriving from Moscow, the Kazakhstan Express crept into Saratov station a couple of hours late, a shabby exhausted-looking train with windows too grimy to allow any view of the interior. The reassuring women attendants of Russian trains clocked off at the end of their shift and were replaced by Kazakh conductors, short stocky men with tattoos and pencil moustaches.

First impressions were encouraging: I boarded and passed down the corridor without a single confrontation with a knife-wielding thug. Predictably my bunk was already occupied by someone else who had paid a bribe to the conductor but after some negotiation I managed to secure a place in another compartment at the end of the carriage. It had the air of a bordello. Scarves had been hung over the windows flooding the place with a subdued reddish light. Women’s undergarments were strewn about like decoration. There was a heavy odour of cheap scent and the table was crowded with hairpins, combs, make-up, cigarettes and two empty bottles of Georgian wine. Amidst the debris three women lay on the bunks, slumbering odalisques, snoring gently in the sprawling postures of sleep.

I climbed onto one of the upper bunks and set about secreting my valuables about my person. The limited banking facilities on the journey ahead meant that I was carrying bundles of cash. I lashed thick wedges of roubles around my midriff and filled my boxer shorts with American dollars. The reputation of the train and the atmosphere of the compartment reminded me of a story that I had heard recently about the Trans-Siberian Express. A friend had been obliged to share his compartment with a demure-looking woman who was a librarian by day and a hooker by night. From Moscow to Vladivostok, she had entertained a succession of clients on the upper bunk. I peered over the edge of my bunk at my travelling companions. With their scarlet lipstick and false eyelashes, they had obviously dispensed with the librarian disguise. I wondered briefly if Russia was turning me into a deranged puritan, seeing debauchery at every turn.

We rattled across the Volga and rode away into the late afternoon through an endless plain of wild flowers. Lines of telegraph poles shrank to nothing where dirt roads tipped over the edge of the flat horizons. Villages marooned in all this space were shambolic entities. Everything looked home-made. The houses were made from scavenged planks while the tractors appeared to be assembled from wheelbarrows and old sewing machines. A town hove into view, announced by box cars and grain silos. Ancient cars lumbered through its streets, raising slow clouds of dust between concrete tenements and vacant lots. A row of smashed street lamps dangled entrails of loose wires. In these regions public utilities had a short life. Drunks used street lamps for target practice, and young entrepreneurs stole the glass and the bulbs for the black market. Then we were in the country again, turning through bedraggled meadows where brown and white cows lifted their sad heads as the train passed.

The women awoke together at six o’clock as if a bell had rung. Nodding in my direction, they lit cigarettes and set about filing their nails. Precedence among them was denoted by the number of their gold teeth. I wondered if it was the reputation of the train which had persuaded them to deposit their savings in dentistry. The eldest, a butch blonde, had a mouthful while the youngest, a pretty woman in satin trousers and sunglasses, relied on a single gold incisor to ensure her financial security. They settled down to read the Russian tabloids. Devoted to everyday tales of corruption, sex and violence, the gory covers displayed montages of corpses, American dollars, blazing guns, and a man with tattoos thumping a half-naked woman. I glanced over one of their shoulders at an inside page dominated by a photograph of a man’s naked bottom with a spear planted deep in the right buttock. Mercifully this was in blurry black and white.

With evening the Kazakhstan Express settled into a swaying domesticity, the antithesis of the dark criminality that the train was rumoured to represent. Up and down our carriage the compartments had been colonized by their passengers. Bags were unpacked, blankets unrolled, shoes stowed beneath the seats, and food, newspapers and general clutter spread over the tables and the seats. The handrail in the corridor had been commandeered as a communal clothes line for towels and flannels. People changed into slippers and old sweaters, lit pipes and opened brown bottles of beer. Reclining on the lower bunks, unbuttoned and unconcerned, they might have been installed on familiar divans in their own homes. An old-fashioned neighbourliness took hold of the carriage with people popping in and out of one another’s compartments to share stories and sausages, or standing outside in the passageway like villagers at their front gates, gossiping, admiring the view, sharing cups of tea from the samovar.

Reports of barbarism invariably tend to exaggeration. The evil reputation of the Kazakhstan Express dated from the dark years of 1992 and 1993 when crime in the former Soviet Union surged into the vacuum created by the collapse of government authority. But a railway police force and the stubborn resistance of the ordinary passengers, who had set upon thieves like lynch mobs, had brought an end to this lawless period. Though it still has its problems, I can report that the Kazakhstan Express was a good train of decent people. The three women in my compartment were not prostitutes but traders transporting dresses to Almaty. In the evening they arranged a small fashion show for our immediate neighbours who applauded the latest Moscow fashions with innocent enthusiasm.

Night fell and the lamps came on in the compartments. Somewhere in the past hour or two we had crossed into Kazakhstan untroubled by border inspection. I stood by an open window in the passage and watched the moon sailing in and out of view as the train curved back and forth. A scarf of smoke from the engine flapped away over a great silver emptiness.

The village street of the carriage passageway was almost deserted now. Two windows along an elderly gentleman in heavy cotton pyjamas and slippers was reading a book by one of the carriage lights. He was a tall ramshackle figure with a bony face and unruly thatch of hair. He looked like the village eccentric. In the dim light he pressed his face so close to the page, he might have been smelling the print. He looked up and saw me watching him.

‘Pushkin,’ he murmured. His nose was a beak, and his hair falling over his brow gave his face a startled appearance.

‘Do you know Eugene Onegin?’ he asked in French.

I said I did, then went on to tell him that I had named my cat Pushkin. The old man’s face darkened at this frivolity, and his long hands encircled the book protectively.

‘Russia’s Shakespeare,’ he said under his breath, as some reprimand to my cat.

‘Onegin was a traveller,’ the man went on. His voice held some note of accusation. He peered at me as if I too was indistinct print he was trying to decipher. There was something strange about his eyes. They looked at me individually, first one then the other. ‘He was never satisfied,’ the man said. ‘He needed always a new horizon.’ The clatter of the rails crescendoed as we passed over a stretch of bad track. The train bucked and we swayed in unison against the windows. Over the noise words surfaced like pieces of wreckage – ‘Un romantique … unable to form attachments … a nomad … emotional dilettante … only wanted what he had lost …’ – until the roar of the wheels overwhelmed us completely and the man drifted away, still mouthing complaints about the lovelorn Onegin.

I retired to my bunk. The women were already asleep. All night the long whistle of the train echoed through my dreams, a mournful solitary note, a traveller’s complaint, trailing uneasy notions of movement and displacement.

The morning brought further emptiness. The landscape had been reduced to cruel simplicities – a white sky and a flat scaly plain over which clouds and their shadows sailed without distraction. In places the tough hide of the desert was softened by a spring glaze of green, a brief interlude between the twin extremities of winter and summer. The only buildings seemed to be government projects which appeared occasionally in the distance, a cluster of tin-roofed cement barns, a collection of silos, yards of antiquated tractors, a ploughed field as big as Wiltshire, then nothing again. How the Mongols must have loved these regions. Riding towards Europe, they could do a thousand miles out here without having to cross a ditch, or deal with the impediment of cities. Friar William was less happy. It took him almost seven weeks to cross the deserts of Kazakhstan.

‘The most severe trial,’ William reports. ‘There was no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.’ What little habitation they encountered belonged to Mongols newly arrived in this recently conquered wilderness. All were keen to know about the sheep, cattle and horses in France and whether the Pope was really five hundred years old.

In the next compartment was a Russian family of three lumbering ursine figures – Father Bear, Mother Bear and Little Bear, a girl of eight. Father Bear was a colonel in the army. He took an interest in me, and emerged every time he saw me in the corridor to tell me things in passable English. He told me about the workings of drilling equipment on distant oil wells, about camel breeding, about the navigational systems of space craft, about the train schedules on our line. You name it, Father Bear was an expert on it. Through the open door of the compartment I could hear him droning on to his wife. Marriage to Father Bear had made the long-suffering Mother Bear a professional listener. She listened for hours at a stretch to his interminable discourses as we drifted through this flat emptiness, including a good hour and a half on the subject of baling equipment.

They invited me for lunch. The main course was a three-foot dried fish which they kept beneath one of the seats. Father Bear was telling me about Russian motorcars, of which he had an unaccountably high opinion. We passed a vast factory, one of the government projects abandoned in this bleak place. The empty buildings showed windows of sky.

‘Look,’ Father Bear said. ‘Perestroika. Gorbachev’s restructuring.’ And he launched into a lengthy rant about the last Communist leader. The intense hatred for Gorbachev in Russia is a puzzle to most Westerners, particularly in the light of the directionless governments which succeeded him. Having abandoned dictatorship Russians seem to have gone straight for the basest features of democracy. Yeltsin’s appeal was based on his image as the man in the street. He reflected the Russian character with all its virtues and faults – tenacious, romantic, put-upon, alcoholic. He was prostonarodny, a difficult Russian term to translate, which means earthy or folksy. Gorbachev by contrast was a pedagogue, never happier than when he was lecturing the nation about its shortcomings. Most curious was the universal loathing for Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. Father Bear believed that she was personally to blame for the country’s decline. She had dismantled Communism, he said, in order to buy her hats in Paris.

We rattled on across the flat unrelenting steppe. The grass was thinning, revealing patches of earth like pale raw-looking skin. Beyond Celkar the sand started to take over, and the grass was reduced to tufts in the drifting dunes. Bactrian camels strayed listlessly into the middle distance, their humps still sagging after the long winter. Crusted eddies of salt now wound across the baked sand, and the air seemed to have acquired a bitter acrid taste.

‘Salt from the Aral Sea,’ Father Bear announced, tasting his lips. ‘It is dying.’

At midday we passed through Aralsk, once an important fishing port on the Aral Sea. We gazed out at an emaciated town. Many of its bleaker buildings were boarded up and whole districts were abandoned. In the drifts of sand at the far end of empty streets we could see the rusting hulks of fishing boats tipped on their sides beneath the skeletal forms of cranes where the docks had once been.

A monument to the folly of centralized planning, the death of the Aral Sea is one of the great ecological disasters of our age. Like so many Soviet tragedies, it began with Stalin who decreed in the 1920s that the Soviet Union must become self-sufficient in cotton. The vast spaces of Central Asia were to be the arena for this grand project, and in particular the basins of the two great rivers which fed the landlocked Aral Sea, the Amu Dariya and the Syr Dariya, the ancient Oxus and Jaxartes. Vast irrigation networks, constructed to feed King Cotton, bled the rivers into the surrounding desert, and the level of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world, began to fall. The problem was compounded as the population of Central Asia grew and the thirst for water increased with modern facilities. The Karakum Canal was constructed, carrying off almost a fifth of the waters of the Amu Dariya, so that southern Turkmenistan could be brought into the cotton belt.

By the 1980s the inflow into the Aral was one tenth of the rate of the 1950s; by 1993 the sea had shrunk to half its original size. It largest port, Muynak in Uzbekistan, was now almost sixty miles from the shore, and the dunes around the town, like those at Aralsk, are littered with the carcasses of dead ships. By 2020, a sea the size of Ireland may have disappeared altogether.

The dying sea has blighted the entire region. The fish stocks have disappeared and an industry that once supported 60,000 people is now dead. The climate of the area has changed dramatically with rainless days multiplying four-fold. Winds have carried the thick salt deposits left on the dry lake-bed hundreds of miles into the surrounding country, devastating agriculture and causing a litany of health problems from respiratory illness to throat cancers. The irrigation methods in the cotton fields, with high levels of evaporation, have led to further salination, while the chemical fertilizers used on the fields have been washed back into the two rivers, the chief source of drinking water for the region.

For millennia the Kazakhs were a nomadic people, moving with their flocks according to the waxing and waning of the thin pastures of their vast land, following a lifestyle perfectly suited to its marginal vegetation and arid climate. The arrival of the Russians spelt the end of pastoralism. The railway brought hordes of settlers, towns were built, and farms disrupted the pasture lands and the delicate patterns of migration. Gradually the Kazakhs abandoned the nomadic life for the lure of cash incomes and permanent houses. The grandsons of herders became employees on state farms, and the proud world of the Kazakh Hordes withered to an unnecessary eccentricity. The ecological disaster of the Aral Sea has been the vengeance of nature on a system of sedentary agriculture that ignored geographical realities.

But Father Bear didn’t see it that way. To him the death of the Aral Sea was simply the fault of the Communists. When I mentioned the nomadic traditions of these regions he frowned, and misunderstood my comment as another example of the difficulties Kazakhstan had endured.

‘Nomads,’ he shrugged. ‘People without education. They cannot plan for the future.’

‘Perhaps they are satisfied with the present,’ I said.

‘Where are they now?’ he asked, gazing out at the empty prairie, as if the lack of horsemen and sheep out the train window was an argument in itself.

I mentioned Mongolia and the fact that the most of the population there still adhered to a nomadic lifestyle.

‘Mongolia,’ he snorted. ‘Why speak of barbarians?’

Chapter Four A DETESTABLE NATION OF SATAN

In 1238 the bottom fell out of the herring market in Yarmouth. Ships from the Baltic ports, which normally converged on the port to buy fish, never arrived and the sudden glut sent prices tumbling. Fishermen and merchants went bankrupt, and even in the Midlands you could buy fifty pickled herrings for as little as a shilling.

In the same year a strange mission appeared at the court of Louis IX of France; later they came on to London where they were received by Henry III. They declared themselves the envoys of a mysterious eastern potentate, known to Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountains. From a fortress in the Elburz Mountains of northern Persia, this reclusive figure dispatched young fanatical disciples to kill his political enemies. The disciples were known as hashashin, or hashish eaters, from which our word assassin is derived. With their cloak and dagger methods the Ismaili Assassins had wielded considerable political power throughout the Middle East for almost two centuries. But now suddenly a new threat had arisen, from a people whose leaders were too distant and too unpredictable for assassination squads. The Ismailis had come to Europe to seek alliances against the advancing threat of the Mongols.

It is a measure of the narrowness of European horizons in the early decades of the thirteenth century that they remained in almost total ignorance of the cataclysmic events then unfolding in Asia. Under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, the Mongols had embarked upon a series of conquests that were taking them across the breadth of the continent. Ancient dynasties collapsed, empires crumbled, great cities were levelled and their inhabitants butchered while Europe slumbered on, unaware that the Mongol horsemen were advancing ever westward.

In a reverse of the usual historical pattern, the history of the Mongol campaigns was written by the vanquished not by the victors. The apocalyptic language that has come down to us reflects the terror and the prejudices of the defeated. Invariably the Mongols are forces of darkness, barbarian hordes, the scourge of God, a pestilence that was destroying civilization. It is this tradition, the stories told by his enemies, that has cast Genghis Khan as one of history’s great villains.

To Mongols Genghis was a great and sophisticated leader, disciplined, incorruptible, politically astute. A lawgiver of considerable wisdom and foresight, an efficient administrator and a master of military strategy, he managed to unite the Mongol tribes for the first time in generations. It was this rare unity that allowed them to turn their eyes outward to the rich but degenerate cities that lay beyond their grassy homelands. Early conquests came with surprising ease, and in the terrible momentum that began to build, the Mongol Empire was born.

Genghis Khan could hardly be expected to respect cities or their inhabitants. He was a man of the steppes, a nomad who viewed settled societies from a position of cultural and moral superiority, with suspicion, with horror, and ultimately with pity. To nomads, men and women who lived in cities suffered a kind of debasement, while farmers who spent their lives on their knees tilling the soil were hardly of more regard than a flock of sheep. Their destruction did not bother the Mongols any more than the slaughter of the Incas bothered the Conquistadors, or the fate of Africans troubled the early slave traders. By the standards of medieval Asian warfare Genghis’ methods were not especially brutal. His terrible reputation is a measure of his success, and of the monopoly that the vanquished cities have enjoyed over the historical sources.

The tone was set with the siege and destruction of Bukhara. ‘They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed,’ a historian of the period wrote. Yakut, the famous Arab geographer, who fled from the city of Merv as the Mongols advanced, reported that its noble buildings ‘were effaced from the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper’. Pausing only to water and pasture their horses, the Mongols swept onward and one by one the great cities of Transcaspia and Oxiana, of Afghanistan and northern Persia were sacked: Samarkand, Khiva, Balkh, Merv, Herat, Kandahar, Ardebil, Qazvin, Tabriz, Qum. Typical of their fate was that of Nishapur in the Persian province of Khurasan, the home of the poet, Omar Khayyám. Not a dog or cat was spared. The only monuments left standing in the city were pyramids of human skulls.

Pushing westward the Mongols swept through the Caucasus and into the Ukraine and the Crimea. They wintered on the Black Sea, among the mound tombs of their nomadic predecessors, the Scythians, before galloping northward early in 1223 to defeat three Russian armies. Then they rode home, across the width of Asia, as casually as commuters, for a quriltai, a great gathering of Mongol chieftains. The world had had its first taste of a military campaign which for speed and mobility was not equalled until the modern mechanized age. The idea that the Mongols were merely a flood of horsemen overrunning entire lands by sheer force of numbers has been rightly debunked. They were a disciplined and highly organized force, usually outnumbered by their enemies by more than two to one, whose success depended on their extraordinary mobility as well as on sophisticated military strategies; both Patton and Rommel studied the tactics of the Mongol general Subedei. Mongols were born in the saddle, and their conquests represent the greatest cavalry campaigns in history. Time and again columns of Mongol horsemen appeared as if from nowhere, having crossed vast distances and impossible natural barriers at speeds that easily outpaced their enemies’ intelligence. This was blitzkrieg, seven centuries before the invention of the tank or the aeroplane.

In the summer of 1227, in the middle of conquering China, Genghis Khan died after a severe attack of fever. It is believed he was about seventy years of age. On his deathbed he was said to have gathered his sons and to have handed them a bunch of arrows, instructing them to break them. When they could not, he handed them each arrow separately. His lesson was that they must remain united. Separately, like the arrows, they were weak. He bequeathed his empire to Ogedei, his third son, who would rule as Great Khan. Under him, his second son, Chaghadai, would govern Central Asia; Batu, his grandson, whom Friar William met on the Volga, would rule the Russian steppes which became known as the Golden Horde, and his youngest son, Tolui, was given the Mongol homelands. Thus all of Asia was parcelled out like a series of pastures in accordance with traditional Mongol grazing rights. The eldest son (in this case grandson, as Genghis’s first son had predeceased him) received the pastures furthest from home while the youngest was granted the ‘heartlands’.

The body of the Great Khan was taken home to Mongolia and buried in the Khentii Mountains near the place of his birth at a spot he had chosen himself. All of the bearers of the funeral cortege, and all those who encountered it on its way, were put to death to guard the secret of its location. To this day no one knows where his tomb lies.

At the time of his death, Genghis’ empire was four times the size of Alexander’s and twice the size of the Roman Empire. But the Mongols were still far from their zenith and under the new khan, Ogedei, the campaigns of conquest continued apace. By 1234 the whole of northern China had been subdued. Famously and no doubt apocryphally, Ogedei had considered massacring the entire Chinese population, some forty-five million people. ‘They are of no use to us,’ a Chinese historian reported him as saying. ‘It would be better to exterminate them entirely, and let the grass grow so we can have grazing for our horses.’ Wiser counsel prevailed when they were reminded of the taxes they might expect from all those hardworking Chinese.

Having dealt with the traditional enemy, the Mongols now turned westward once more to new horizons, intending to push the frontiers of the empire well into Europe. In the winter of 1237–8 they crossed the frozen Volga and launched what would prove to be the only successful winter invasion of Russia, a campaign that so alarmed the people of the Baltic that they cancelled their annual trip to Yarmouth with dire consequences for the English herring market.

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