Trailing Genghis

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The story of the Mongols, in the words of a medieval historian, is simple: "They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed." For the first half of the 13th century, the Mongols of Gen-ghis Khan ravaged China, ripped through the lands of Islam and knocked on the gates of Vienna. Their immense empire stretched from Beijing to Baghdad to Moscow. Then, without warning, the Mongols went home, leaving little behind but their reputation as the most feared conquerors in history.

More than 750 years later, veteran travel writer Stanley Stewart journeyed to their homeland in search of the modern-day descendants of those marauding hordes. As he recounts in his highly enjoyable travelogue, In the Empire of Genghis Khan, he eventually found the Great Khan's heirs. And they were usually drunk.

Of all the great empires, the Mongols left the scantiest legacy. The Greeks gave us literature and philosophy, the Romans architecture and law, the British railroads and cricket. The Mongols, true to their nomadic temperament, built nothing and walked away as if their empire were a mere winter camp. They are history's ultimate one-hit wonders. But as Stewart discovers, they have taken this eclipse well. Mongolians can be a barrel of laughs, especially at weddings, which devolve into violently fun drinking sessions in which "giving your new in-laws a good thumping" is expected. The author, perhaps influenced by the omnipresent Genghis Khan vodka, clearly approves.

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Stewart's sense of humor stands him in good stead during a forbidding journey that begins in Istanbul and then carries him through bleak Russia, bleaker Kazakhstan and into the finality of Mon-golia, a swept land that "made the sky ... seem crowded and fussy." Inspired by what he perceives as the Arcadian freedom of the nomads—the word Mongo-lian, he writes, "evokes the scent of grass and of fallen leaves, some atmosphere of twilight and horses"—Stewart plans to journey the 1,600-kilometer breadth of Mongolia by horse, not a good idea unless your last name is Khan. Those he encounters along the way are sure he's crazy, and Stewart, wrestling with ill-tempered Mongolian horses and occasionally incompetent guides, is tempted to agree. But he ultimately achieves his goal, carried along by the endless promise of the Mongolian landscape, the plains and hills that wipe away time and leave only the eternal present, "so wonderful to me that I could think of nothing else."

Stewart's mining of Mongol history is fascinating. Who knew, for example, that Khan's son supposedly considered massacring China's entire population? But the author's real strength is in sketching the characters he encounters: a Dickens-loving Russian pimp, a shy newlywed, a Mongolian librarian of Chekhovian futility. Far from the taciturn nomads one might expect, Mongolians are voluble talkers ravenous for news: Stewart disappoints his attentive hosts only when he fails to relay sufficiently lurid gossip.

By the end of his journey, Stewart discovers that his wanderlust is distinctly un-Mongolian. They are nomads, but their wanderings are circumscribed by traditions that have hardly changed for a millennium. It is Stewart who stands out as a badachir, a lone itinerant always searching for more. The Mongolians, who gave up the world, have long since accepted their fate.