My Mongol greeters and I entered the yurtu through the felt-flapped opening which, as in all Mongol edifices, was on its southern side. I was motioned to take a seat on the “man’s bed” of the establishment, the one on the north side of the yurtu, where I could sit facing the good-omened south. (Beds for women and children were ranged around the less-auspicious other sides.) I sank down on the felt-covered cushions, and my host pressed into my hand a drinking vessel that was simply a ram’s horn. Into it, he poured from a leather bag a rank-smelling and bluish-white thin liquid.
“Kumis,” he said it was.
I waited politely until all the men held full horns. Then I did as they did, which was to dip fingers into the kumis and flick a few drops in each direction of the compass. They explained, well enough for me to comprehend, that we were saluting “the fire” to the south, “the air” to the east, “the water” to the west and “the dead” to the north. Then we all raised our horns and drank deeply, and I committed a bad breach of manners. Kumis, I would learn, is to the Mongols a drink as beloved and sacrosanct as qahwah is to the Arabs. I thought it was awful and, unpardonably, I let my face express my opinion. The men all looked distressed. One of them said hopefully that I would grow to like the taste in time, and another said I would like the exhilarating effect of it even more. But my host took my horn and drank it empty, then refilled it from a different leather bag and handed the vessel back to me, saying, “This is arkhi.”
The arkhi had a better smell, but I sipped at it cautiously, for it looked just like the kumis. I was gratified that it tasted much better, rather like a wine of medium quality. I nodded and smiled and asked the source of their beverages, for I had seen no vineyards in the vicinity. I was astonished when my host said proudly:
“From the good milk of healthy mares.”
Except for their weapons and armor, the Mongols manufacture two things, and only two, and those are made by the Mongol women, and I had just encountered both of them. I was seated on felt-covered pillows in a felt-covered tent, and I was drinking a beverage made from mare’s milk. I think the Mongol females are not ignorant of the arts of spinning and weaving, but scorn them as basely effeminate, for these women are veritable Amazons. Anyway, the woven fabrics they wear they buy from other peoples. But they are most expert in beating and matting together the hairs of animals into felts of every weight, from the heavy yurtu coverings to a cloth that is as soft and fine as Welsh flannel.
The Mongol women also disdain every kind of milk except the equine. They do not even give their children to suck from their own breasts, but nourish them from infancy on mare’s milk. They do some uncommon things with that fluid, and it did not take me long to overcome my repugnance and become an enthusiastic partaker of all the Mongol milk products. The most prevalent is the mildly intoxicating kumis. It is made by putting fresh mare’s milk into a great leather sack, which the women beat with heavy clubs until butter forms. They scoop off the butter and leave the fluid residue to ferment. That kumis then is pungent and sharp to the tongue, with an aftertaste rather like almonds, and a man who drinks enough of it can get estimably drunk. If the sack of milk is beaten longer, until both butter and curds are separated, and the very thin remaining liquid left to ferment, it becomes the more agreeably sweet and wholesome and effervescent sort of kumis called arkhi. And a man can get drunk on that without drinking a very great deal of it.
Besides making use of the butter acquired from the milk, the Mongol women make an ingenious use of the curds. They spread them in the sun and let them dry to a hard cake. That substance, called grut, they crumble into pellets which can be kept indefinitely without spoiling. Some of it is set aside for the wintertime, when the herd mares give no milk, and some is put into pouches to be carried as emergency rations by men going on the march. The grut has only to be dissolved in water to make a quick and nourishing thick drink.
The actual milking of the herd mares is done by the Mongol men; it constitutes some kind of masculine prerogative and is forbidden to the women. But the subsequent making of kumis and arkhi and grut, like the making of felt, is women’s work. In fact, all the work in a Mongol bok is done by the women.
“Because the only proper concern of men is the making of war,” said my host that day. “And the only proper concern of women is the tending of their men. Uu?”
It cannot be denied that, since a Mongol army goes everywhere accompanied by all the warriors’ wives, and extra women for the unmarried men, and the offspring of all those women, the men seldom have to give attention to anything but the fighting. A woman unaided can take down or put up a yurtu, and do all the necessary chores of keeping it supplied and maintained and clean and in good repair, and keeping her man fed and clothed and in fighting humor and cosseted when he is wounded, and keeping his war gear in ready condition, and his horses as well. The children also work, collecting dung or kara for the bok fires, doing herdsman and guard duty. On the few occasions when a battle has gone against the Mongols, and they have had to call up their encamped reserves, the women have been known to seize up weapons and go themselves into the fray, and give good account of themselves.
I regret to say that the Mongol females do not resemble the warrior Amazons of antiquity as portrayed by Western artists. They could almost be mistaken for Mongol males, because they have the same flat face, the broad cheekbones, the leathery complexion, the puffed eyelids making slits of eyes that, when visible, are always redly inflamed. The women may be less burly than the men, but they do not appear so, because they wear equally bulky clothes. Like the men, accustomed to riding for most of their lives, and riding astride, they have the same shambling horseman’s gait when afoot. The women do differ in not wearing a wispy beard or mustache, which some of the men do. The men also have their hair hanging long and braided behind, and sometimes shaven on the crown like a priest’s tonsure. The women pile their hair up on top of their head in an elaborate fashion—and perhaps they do this just once in a lifetime, because they then varnish it in place with the sap of the wutung tree. And on top of that, they fix a high headpiece called a gugu, a thing made of bark, decorated with bits of colored felt and ribbons. Her cemented hair and her gugu together make a woman some two feet taller than a man, so cumbrously tall that she can enter a yurtu only by bowing her head.
While I sat conversing with my hosts, the woman of the yurtu several times came in and went out, and she had to bend like that every time. But the bending was not a genuflection, and she showed no other signs of servility. She simply bustled about at her work, fetching fresh flagons of kumis and arkhi for us, taking out the emptied ones, and otherwise seeing to our comfort. The man who was her husband addressed her as Nai, which just means Woman, but the other men said courteously Sain Nai. I was interested to see that a Good Woman, although she works like a slave, does not behave like a slave and is not treated as a slave. A Mongol woman does not, like a Muslim woman, have to hide her face behind a chador or hide her whole self in pardah or endure any of the other female humiliations of Islam. She is expected to be chaste, at least after marriage, but no one is appalled if she uses immodest language or laughs at a bawdy story—or tells one, as this Sain Nai did.
She had, unbidden, laid a meal for us on the felt carpet in the middle of the yurtu. And then, equally unbidden, she squatted down to eat with us—and was not forbidden—which surprised and delighted me almost as much as the meal did. She had served a sort of Mongol version of the Venetian scaldavivande: a bowl of boiling-hot broth, a smaller bowl of red-brown sauce and a platter of strips of raw lamb. We all took turns dipping pieces of meat into the scalding broth, cooking it to our taste, dipping it into the piquant sauce and then eating it. The Sain Nai, like the men, dipped her bits of meat barely long enough to warm them, and ate them nearly raw. Any doubts about Mongol women being as robust as their men were dispelled by the sight of that one tearing at the hunks of meat, her hands and teeth and lips all bloodied. One difference: the men ate without talking, giving all their attention to the food; the woman, in the intervals between her devourings, was most voluble.