I had no idea there was going to be a question and answer session. The spirit turned out to be a chain-smoker.Īfter three more Marlboros, Amarjargal's husband turned to ask me what I wished to know. After a couple of moments, he lit another. Her husband lit a cigarette and handed it to her. The single repetitive note slowly built to a frantic pace, then suddenly subsided as a spirit entered her, taking over her body. Seated in front of her husband, who seemed to act as both manager and roadie, she began to strum a mouth harp. It had a screen of hair that concealed her eyes and much of her face, and was adorned with eagle feathers. While her husband lit cones of incense, Amarjargal donned the shaman's headdress, known as an umsgol. Amarjargal's day was packed, but she agreed to make time to perform a “beckoning,” a calling upon the spirits, for me. In the 21st century, the dramatic changes of the modern world in such a traditional society have inspired a revival of shamanism. Even as the country became Buddhist in the 16th century, the herdsmen found solace in its reassuring rituals and its promise of contact with the spirit world. Shamanism has a tenacious hold on the Mongolian imagination. Inside was the shaman, Amarjargal, a woman in her 50s. On a ridge above a silver stream we found the shaman's camp. We traveled westward, crossing a low pass to a wide plain where sunlight and cloud chased each other across the dun-colored grasses. “The 1930s,” he said, looking at me with rheumy eyes. ![]() Capitalism had arrived with a thud in 1990. It had spent 70 years as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Mongolia was the second communist nation. I was hoping he would reflect on the country's history. I asked him to tell me what he thought were Mongolia's best years. Our host, warming his toes by the stove, was 90 years old. Inside the ger, a young woman served us bowls of fermented mare's milk, known as airag, a kind of sour milky beer that is Mongolia's chief tipple. The milking of both yaks and horses is a tricky business, requiring a firm hand and cool nerves the consensus in Mongolia is that women do a better job at it. Later, on the banks of the Tuul River, where a pair of whooper swans glided beneath willows, we stopped at a ger where a bowlegged woman was milking a restive mob of Mongolian horses. Their domestication on these steppes created powerful nomadic empires prompted the building of the Great Wall by the Chinese, who were anxious about invasion and carried the armies of Genghis Khan to the walls of Vienna in the 13th century. ![]() Horses are the central fact of Mongolian history. I suddenly felt I was peering into the Bronze Age. ![]() Then I spotted the horses, a tawny-colored group, females and foals under the command of a single stallion. In Khustain Nuruu National Park, a handmade roadside sign warns of crossing deer Alistair Taylor-Young
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