fish or eel. The word we used at the time to describe the taste was ‘sweet’. The flesh was hard-packed and filling.
The rare meal was rounded off with succulent melon slices. Marchinkovas had the brainwave of taking two hollowed-out halves of melon to use as gourds for drinking. The idea was good but in practice did not work out. As the skin dried it cracked. He threw the two halves away next day.
15.
MAINTAINING A schedule of around twenty miles a day hard slogging for days on end made us welcome an occasional break. These days when we eased off were never wasted. One reason for stopping a few hours was to repair and remake worn-out moccasins and tend cut and swollen feet. The other reason was the necessity of earning our food — we could not always expect to be handed food out of charity.
In the second month of our Mongolian Journey we arrived at a village of straggling smallholdings. To European eyes a strange feature would be the absence of fences or indeed any boundary markings. Possibly the life of these villages was largely communal and no fences were needed. We approached a stone-built, flat-roofed shack of a house, in front of which, in a hard-beaten, cleared space, we could see a bullock gyrating slowly and patiently round an upright thick stake driven into the ground. It was mid-morning and we had already covered ten or fifteen miles. As we walked we swung our long cudgels. We were a little hungry, a little thirsty, but by no means in desperate straits.
We stopped quite near to watch the bullock and decide what work he was doing. Between the beast and the house were four people — the Mongol farmer squatting, lazily lifting his cap to scratch his bald pate, a lusty- looking boy of fourteen or fifteen armed with a stick with which he encouraged the bullock now and again as it trudged past him, and two women, one of whom might have been the boy’s mother and the other his grandmother. The women took no notice of us, but the farmer got up off his haunches and with the boy came over to us and bowed. We returned the greeting. The farmer talked and we talked, but it got us nowhere, and we all, bobbing and smiling, sat down together on the hard earth. The bullock, freed of the boy’s attentions, stopped work. By then I could see what was happening. The beast was threshing rye. It was tethered to the central stake by a rope of plaited rushes or osiers. At the outer limit of its tether were spread out in a circle sheaves of ripe rye with the ears outermost. As the bullock trampled the sheaves the grain dropped to the ground where it was gathered by the womenfolk.
I turned to Kolemenos. ‘That’s a slow way of threshing. Let’s give the old boy some help.’ Kolemenos nodded. ‘Show me how.’
We went over and gave the sheaves a few tentative clouts with our sticks. The grain, bone-dry, showered down. I looked over to the farmer. He was grinning broadly and watching closely. I went over to the others. ‘Let’s do the job. It won’t take long.’ Everybody agreed quite willingly, and Kristina, armed with a light staff she used as a walking stick, came too. We stationed ourselves round the circle and set to. The boy, laughing, unharnessed the bullock and led him away. When it was almost done, the farmer spoke to the two women and they went into the house. He stood near me and I ran grain from one hand to the other and then held out to him a thick bunch of cornstalks. He ran his hand along it and shook it and when he saw it had been beaten clean of seed, showed evident pleasure.
I made gestures to inquire of the man whether he had a sifter for separating the chaff from the grain. He called to the boy, who went to the house and came back with a sieve, the meshes of which were formed from the tail-hairs of a horse. We cleaned up throughly, sieved the grain into baskets and then poured it into sacks. The boy led the way to the house as I humped one of the first filled bags.
The interior of the house was interesting. Two-thirds of it was living space, the remainder storage space. There was no partition and little else that could be called civilized refinement. As I stepped inside one of the women was working a primitive flourmill comprising a pair of well-fashioned circular stones set on a yard-high wooden bench. Pivoting from a hole in a roof-beam was a length of bamboo, the other end of which fitted loosely into a hole near the rim of the upper millstone. Grain was fed through a central hole in this top stone and the woman ground it by swinging the bamboo round and round. The other woman was busy over a stone fireplace in the middle of the floor, the fuel for which, judging by the smell, was dried animal dung. There was no chimney. The smoke curled out through a hole in the roof.
The boy had a sack, too, which he took over to a tall wooden bin, roughly the shape of a barrel, iron- hooped. As we tipped our sacks into the bin I looked round. On a wooden peg driven into the wall were three or four sheepskin coats for winter wear. Bunches of what looked like dried herbs hung from the roof. On the floor were a couple more bins and some tall unglazed brown earthenware jars narrowing at the necks. One of them had a small piece of cloth over the top. I later found the jars held water and milk.
When the operation was over the farmer disappeared. The boy stayed with us. I said to the others in Russian, ‘The women are cooking something in there.’ There were hopeful glances at the smoke spiralling up out of the hole in the roof. About half-an-hour passed and then we heard the characteristic creaking and groaning of wheel-hubs on ungreased axles. Round the corner of the house came the farmer leading his bullock yoked to a four-wheeled cart piled high with sheaves.
Mister Smith broke the dismayed silence which had fallen on us. ‘Gentlemen, the joke is on us. We have some more work to do before we dine.’
Zaro jumped to his feet. ‘Come on, all of you. Let’s see how quickly we can get through it.’ He pulled Kristina up by her wrists and led the way over to the cart.
We worked until well on in the afternoon and became more proficient as a team the longer we went on. I found it was easier on the back and no less efficient to beat out the grain against the tethering stake. As I was the only one of the crowd who had any previous experience of such agricultural pursuits, I was agreeably surprised at the results of our combined labours. So, understandably, was our Mongol friend trotting happily behind each sack as it was toted from the threshing ground to the bin.
The women came out to us then with our reward. One of them carried a shallow straw pannier piled with oaten cakes held with an outstretched arm against her right hip. The older woman brought one of the tall jars I had seen in the house. It was filled with whey. The boy ambled along behind with what looked like three glass tumblers, but when he came close enough for me to examine them I saw they were what was left of bottles from which necks and shoulders had been cleanly removed, probably by the application of heat followed by cold water. The cakes, still warm, were delicious and filling, but the first draught of whey was tainted by paraffin which had been in or near the drinking receptacles. We switched over to our communal metal mug.
This was a period when I had a great craving for salt. I used to dream of the taste of it. It occurred to me then that I would lose nothing by asking the farmer for some. In dumb show I made my request. I pointed to him and to myself. I held my left hand out and made the motion of taking a pinch of salt with my right. I conveyed the hand to my mouth, drew in my cheeks to demonstrate the sharpness of salt upon the tongue, smacked my lips and smiled. The man comprehended immediately. He turned towards the house and beckoned me to join him. Inside he spoke to the women and it was quite a long palaver. Finally the older woman took the tight-fitting lid off a small wooden bowl and produced the salt. It was brown and the crystals were large. She handled it with a care that indicated it was a rare and precious commodity as she spilled out a quantity which would barely have filled a matchbox on to a square of sacking stuff and wrapped it up. I bowed, smiled and thanked them all for the gift.
As we moved off down the track leading through the village I was intrigued with the primitive mechanics of the square-sunk well, from which open-topped sections of wooden conduit led away for irrigation. From two opposite sides heavy planks reared up six feet above ground level to hold the winding spindle. But there was no familiar winding handle. The rope took two turns around the spindle; one end disappeared into the well and the other led off to a point ten feet clear of the well where it was secured to a thick, well-rounded post socketed deeply into the ground and extending vertically above ground a height of eight or nine feet.
About four feet above ground and well below the point at which the well-rope was made fast, a stout wooden bar was slotted through the post, making of the whole contraption a capstan for which the motive power was, as usual, the patient bullock moving in a circle. Provision was made, too, for employing the other hard-labour
