Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} In Search of An Exhilarating Journey on Horseback Across the Steppes of Mongolia by Tim The great escape. At a recent talk I gave about my travels, the male organiser pinned a map of the world on the wall behind me, and handed me a pen. He asked me to trace a red line to demonstrate the routes I had travelled for the benefit of the audience. I made a feeble dot. I hadn't really travelled anywhere at all, not in that sense. I don't go on expeditions. The only journey I had taken was to get there; once I had arrived, I had stayed. The Victorian lady traveller Mary Kingsley would have understood. Like many women, she refused to reveal that she had travelled only 70 miles inland, a trek of a few days, in her bestselling book Travels in West Africa, published in 1897. She feared that the lack of a long red line across the map would diminish her reputation. She might have compared herself to her contemporary Paul Du Chaillu, who boasted of having made an 8,000-mile journey through the same area, in the course of which he shot 2,000 birds, 1,000 quadrupeds, and suffered 50 attacks of fever. Kingsley fell sick once. When it comes to far-flung adventures, women have always travelled differently. We tend to hang out, chat, gossip (a much maligned word) and get to know a certain spot and people well. Gertrude Benham, who travelled in Africa and Europe in the early 20th century, liked to swap embroidery and knitting with the locals. Women dabble and linger, while men strike out, eager to reach the next night's camp. For these testosterone-fuelled travellers, miles covered are the measure of a journey's worth. Long red lines across maps - the Cape-to-Cairo kick, or the increasingly popular - tend to be drawn by breathy young men called Miles and Rupert in their gap year. Women do not clock up the pedometer in quite the same way. Take recent travel books by men and women about exactly the same place - Louisa Waugh's Hearing Birds Fly: A Year in a Mongolian Village, winner of the Ondaatje Award, for example, and Tim Severin's In Search of Genghis Khan: An Exhilarating Journey on Horseback Across the Steppes of Mongolia. Or compare Charlotte Hobson's Black Earth City, about a year in the Russian heartland city of Voronezh, with Colin Thubron's In Siberia, about a 15,000-mile manly expedition. For the most extreme male, travel isn't only about number-crunching but obstacle-conquering - mountains to be climbed, hostile terrain to be overcome. The "because it's there" syndrome is common; every hillock is seen as an affront to masculinity. Not even the most adventurous women display quite the same senseless bravado. Mountaineer Julie Tullis, who became the first woman to join the British Everest Expedition in 1985, and who died the following year climbing K2, said, "The challenge is to myself and not the mountain." She is remembered in different ways, too. Male travellers have tended to demonstrate their dominance by renaming a territory in honour of their daring. For centuries, the male traveller's psyche has been planted all over the atlas of the world, in Franklin Island, Livingstone Mountains, Stanley Falls. I cannot think of a single place named after a woman traveller. It is not the landscape we seek to change, but ourselves. Even if it's something as simple as being bronzed and bikinied on the beach (rather than besuited and sweater-wearing on an inner-city street), becoming someone different is, for me, at the heart of foreign travel. At home, I may be someone's mother, daughter and sister, and you can guess a great deal about me just from the way I dress and the sound of my voice. You could even have a good stab at guessing what sort of school I went to. But abroad, all these signs and their attendant responsibilities count for nothing; only a very anglophile Spaniard will learn much about me from my accent. And the further away I travel, the less all these signs indicate. By the time I reach Bhutan, I could claim to be living on a sink estate or a country estate (neither of which is true), and I doubt anyone would challenge me. We can even look completely different. I once joined an Italian circus and toured Italy, donning a gold-sequinned G-string, a pair of putty-coloured fishnet tights, a huge white ostrich-feather headdress, and not much else. But I could never have joined a British circus. It would have been far too embarrassing to be dressed like that in front of family and friends. Women have always enjoyed dressing up. In the early 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu abandoned an unhappy marriage and adopted Turkish dress (rose-coloured damask drawers, gold damask waistcoat, gold embroidered shoes and a large turban with a gold tassel), in which she toured the harems. This transformation - the chance to be someone completely different - was particularly appealing to women whose life choices were far more restricted than my own. Victorian women of some means abandoned their embroidery in a corner of a darkened parlour to take on a more powerful and fulfilling role. In 1886, Gertrude Bell was one of the first women to gain a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. But although she passed her final papers with first-class honours, she was not awarded a degree; women were not permitted to graduate. In the Middle East, however, it was another story. There, her expertise in Arabic language and culture, which eventually led to her drawing the boundaries of modern-day Iraq, was recognised. With great excitement, she told her father, from Syria, "In this country they all think I was a Person! And one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is, 'Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?'" Later, she asked her cousin, "Are we the same people, I wonder, when all our surroundings, associations, acquaintances are changed? Here that which is me, which, womanlike, is an empty jar that the passer-by fills at pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I have never heard of." Women travellers may have had a small taste of Freedom (which Bell always spelt with a capital "F"), but there were borders to their transgressions. They could change their clothes and learn a new language, but in all other ways they must remain respectable middle-class, middle- aged spinsters. Male travellers were never corralled in the same way. It was quite acceptable - obligatory almost - for a male traveller to have discreet intimate relations with local women (and occasionally men). From 19th-century explorer and translator of the Kama Sutra, Richard Burton, onwards, men who take an exotic lover on their travels are objects of admiration. Shirley Valentines, on the other hand, are objects of pity. Lady Jane Digby, forsaking her elderly husband Lord Ellenborough, wandered from lover to lover until, aged 50, she fell in love with and married Sheik Abdul Medjuel el Mezrab, a Bedouin. She wrote home to her mother in 1856, "I am different. How different I hardly realised." Too different; she was effectively exiled from Britain for ever. Things are not that different today. When I revealed a brief fling with an islander in my book on Pitcairn, it led one judge of the Thomas Cook travel book award to call for my disqualification from the prize. If such moral conditions were applied to male writers, you would always end up with all-female shortlists. But there are bonuses to being a woman traveller. Writer Jan Morris, who had a sex change in Casablanca in the 1970s, says, "I have had the peculiar experience of travelling both as a man and as a woman, and I have reached the conclusion that the female traveller has had it easier than the male. Women generally offer no threat to anyone. Women are more likely to be helped. You have friends everywhere. You're very rarely alone." Men, women travellers have long declared, are simply not necessary to guarantee a good journey. Emily Lowe, who travelled with her mother throughout the 1850s, enjoyed boasting, "We two ladies . have found out and will maintain that ladies alone get on in travelling much better than with gentlemen . The only use of a gentleman in travelling is to look after the luggage, and we take care to have no luggage." Women have always been clear that the most reliable and useful travelling companions are a pen and paper, on which long letters can be written to loved ones. "Wish you were here" is a useful phrase, if not always a sincere one. When the Victorian traveller Isabella Bird married late in life, after crossing the Rockies on horseback and sailing to the Sandwich Islands, she made her terms clear. "It is an understanding that if I again need change, I am to be free for further outlandish travelling," she reassured her publisher. When she was asked at a party if she would like to go to New Guinea, she replied, yes, but that she was now married, and it was not a place one could take a man to. At the time, Isabella was secretly planning her next trip, to Persia. When her husband died a few years later, she immediately set sail - alone. In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads. As a child, award-winning travel writer Stanley Stewart dreamed of crossing Mongolia on horseback. This is the story of how that dream was fulfilled by following in the footsteps of a 13th-century Franciscan friar. Eight centuries ago the burst forth from Central Asia in a series of spectacular conquests that took them from the Danube to the Yellow Sea. Their empire was seen as the final triumph of the nomadic ‘barbarians’. But in time the Mongols sank back into the obscurity from which they had emerged, almost without trace. Remote and outlandish, Outer Mongolia became a metaphor for exile, a lost domain of tents and horsemen, little changed since the days of Genghis Khan. In this remarkable book, Stanley Stewart sets off in the wake of an obscure 13th century Franciscan friar on a pilgimage across the old empire, from Istanbul to the distant homeland of the Mongol Hordes. The heart of his is a thousand-mile ride on horseback, among nomads for whom travel is a way of life, through a trackless land governed by winds and patterns of migration. On a journey full of bizarre characters and unexpected encounters, he crosses the desert and mountains of Central Asia, battles through the High Altay and the fringes of the Gobi, to the wind-swept grasslands of the steppes and the birthplace of Genghis Khan. Vivid, hilarious, and compelling, this eagerly-awaited book will take its place among travel classics – a thrilling tale of adventure, a comic masterpiece, an evocative portrait of a medieval land marooned in the modern world. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. In recent years, Mongolia has received unprecedented literary attention. Stanley Stewart's third travel book, In the Empire of Genghis Khan , puts Stewart in the company of Tim Severin, Nick Middleton and Benedict Allen, telling of his journey across Mongolia on horseback, in the hoofprints of the famous Mongol emperor. Stewart's narrative is moulded in the style of older travel classics, as both an epic journey and an historical quest, and the 2001 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award has been given to him for the book, making Stewart only the second writer--after Jonathan Raban--to win the "Booker of travel writing" twice. Interestingly, Stewart is a very different writer to Raban, with his prose being most distinctive when dwelling on Mongolia's wild geography--here, its lyricism and scope make it a joy to read. Insightful when discussing Mongol culture and history, and sensitive to the concerns of the nomadic way of life, his only flaw in this book is in trying to drag too much humour out of his subjects, which occasionally makes him a less than sympathetic companion to the isolated people that he meets. Nevertheless, In the Empire of Genghis Khan is beautifully written and Stewart's style wins through. Travelling with local guides and meeting hundreds of Mongolian nomads, his book introduces us to a little-known world of vodka-drinking shamans and summer festivals in the steppe. In the course of his exciting, demanding journey, he paints an intimate portrait of a world that most of us find difficult to imagine, and of a way of life that will probably vanish during our lifetimes. -- Toby Green. ‘One of the best travel books of the year.’ Sunday Times. ‘Humane and funny. an excellent book with sharp, compassionate observations on the lives of people struggling with the weight of history.’ Spectator. ‘Stewart is a sensitive, observant traveller, and a gifted writer. in this entertaining, colourful and moving book he reveals both the sad absurdity of this beguiling land and the heartbreaking pathos of its modern history.’ Sara Wheeler, Literary Review. IN THE HOOFPRINTS OF Genghis Khan. 1996-04-14 04:00:00 PDT MONGOLIA -- WITH 100 horses in tow, we feel like a brigade of the great Khan's Golden Horde chasing a huge thundercloud up into the Hangai Massif, west of Karakorum, the ancient imperial capital of Mongolia. The excitement of this first, very long day of riding almost turns into disaster when my horse, utterly exhausted, comes close to drowning while crossing a storm-swollen river. Spirals of mist rise from the sacred waterfalls of Orhon as we set up camp surrounded by a profusion of spring wild flowers. My saddle is wooden, covered in thin red felt and encrusted with small, finely carved silver studs. The horse's mane is cropped short and bristly. No larger than a European pony, each animal has a thick neck, a big, clumsy-looking head and a gawky frame. No Western horse dealer would look twice at them, yet they have the reputation of being the toughest horses in existence. It is said that they can survive hostile conditions which would kill any other breed. I notice small dark stripes just above the hocks which provide strong evidence of their link with the original wild horses of the Mongolian steppes. These are named after a Russian explorer, Colonel Nicholas Prjevalski, who traveled through Mongolia in the 1870s. Horses similar to the ones we are riding carried Genghis Khan's mounted armies to victory in their blitzkrieg campaigns of conquest at the beginning of the 13th century, when the Mongol cavalry overturned the established world order. At the height of its power, the Mongol Empire stretched from the China Sea, across Russia, Siberia and Central Asia, and into the very heart of Eastern Europe. In 1990 a tidal wave of nationalism swept aside the crumbling Soviet puppet state of Mongolia, elevating Genghis Khan to the status of a god. Fifty thousand people gathered in the main square in Ulan Bator, the capital city, to celebrate his birth; resplendent warriors on horseback replaced government soldiers at the National Day celebrations. And in a touch of irony, Genghis Khan became a symbol for the fledgling democratic party. For seven months of the year, Mongolia experiences a bitter and bleak climate of subzero temperatures and constant winds. With 1.5 million square kilometers of steppe, mountain and desert squeezed between Russia and China - a land-locked country of 2 million people and 5 million horses - it is hard to imagine how Mongolia has managed to survive the long periods of political annexation behind such formidable physical barriers. Taiga forests border Siberia to the north, the mountains of the High Altai and Tien Shan rise to the west and south, and a huge arc of the - which has been dubbed the "boneyard of the Lost World" - fills the south and east of the country. But it is these barriers which yield clues as to why Mongolia's giant neighbors 800 years ago had every reason to fear for its very existence, although at the time little was known about the nomadic communities that inhabited these regions. Genghis Khan was by all accounts a remarkable man. Born in the Hentiyn Nuruu mountains north of Ulan Bator in the late 12th century, his given name was Temujin - "the ironsmith" - and he was the eldest of five children. Bitter fighting between clans left him fatherless at the age of 9. His mother, Ho'elun, was from a rival clan and was subsequently rejected and left to fend for herself and her children. Temujin and his siblings grew up to be extremely self-reliant, Temujin particularly, earning a reputation as a cunning and ruthless warrior. His eventual rise to power was swift and brutal - a reign which would traumatize generations to come. You are unlikely to meet such visions of terror today, but the spirit of those warriors lives on in the rich horse culture of the steppe. Agricultural collectivisation during 70 years of Communist rule curtailed much of the true nomadic lifestyle, but it has failed to diminish the Mongolians' deep sense of hospitality and community. There are striking similarities between the arat horse herders of Mongolia and the Plains Indians of North America - no more so than in their horsemanship. Mongols learn to ride before they can walk, and display a unnerving sense of balance and poise. Tim Severin notes in his book "In Search Of Genghis Khan" that the arats "seemed impervious to the hammering, jarring trot of the small horses we rode, and sat in the wooden saddle, or rather stood in its short stirrups, for hour after hour as if on self-leveling suspension." The pain and discomfort are reduced only marginally by using a framework saddle with leather cushions. The alternative method, relaxing limply, only ends up with the rider being shaken vigorously like a crushed-ice cocktail. But with infinite hardiness and comic vitality, the arats have honed even this method to a fine art, frequently after becoming very drunk at a friend's yurt - the traditional Mongolian nomad's portable hide covered home - and relying on their mounts to find the way home across the dark and windy steppe. Arriving at the door of a yurt after some hours on horseback, the greeting is time-honored: a round of snuff from a tiny jade bottle and a bowl of mare's milk, known as ayrag. The arats swallow three or four liters of ayrag in a sitting and hold great store in its nutritional properties, as well as its protection against the sun's rays when rubbed into the skin. There is always a large barrel or leather skin in the corner of the yurt full of half- fermented ayrag, which explains its slightly sour taste. Ayrag is usually followed by an intoxicating derivative called shimiin arkhi, condensed from boiling mare's milk collected in a green bottle which, once opened, has to be emptied. The Mongols have a long history of being habitual drinkers, whether they were humble herdsmen or Great Khans. Indeed, Genghis Khan's son, Ogodei, ignored numerous pleas from his brother, Chaghatai, to cut down on his drinking and eventually died from alcoholism - as did his successor, Guyuk. Returning down the steep slopes of Burkhan Khaldun, a 10,000-foot sacred mountain in the northern province of Khentei, after several toasts to the memory of Genghis Khan, I fail to steer my horse clear of some marmot burrows. Her stumbling and my subsequent inebriated flight keep our herders amused for many days. I arrived in Mongolia a vegetarian but soon found it impossible to sustain. The Mongols don't eat horsemeat like their neighbors in Kazakhstan, preferring instead an endless diet of boiled mutton with salted noodles or rice, washed down with Chinese brick tea. One of the greatest honors in Mongolia is to be presented with lean mutton sliced from the cheekbone and wrapped delicately in globulous fat from the stomach. The remains of last night's mutton is invariably thinly sliced and dropped into your tea the following morning. They look with bemusement when we collect huge wild mushrooms and fry them in butter and garlic. Rarely do they express interest in sharing any of these supplements. recorded similar impressions on his journeys to the court of Kublai Khan, during which he paid particular note to one of the most effective tools of the Mongol Empire: the orto system. Driver charged in deadly crash reportedly was having sex Mountain lion with fresh kill closes popular SF Bay Area trail Heat wave: 34-degree difference between 2 Bay Area towns, 6 miles apart Mount Tam is haunted by a deadly WWII plane crash. We hiked to its remains. Prosecutors have had it with the alleged Jan. 6 rioter who put his feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk Empress by Boon breathes life back into vacant, storied Chinatown restaurant Sam Darnold, Adam Thielen, Heyward and all the other anti-vax pro athletes deserve to be booed. Inherited from earlier cultures, the Mongols created a chain of horse relay stations stretching 5,000 miles across their empire. At each there were local horses on standby, ready for use by those who carried the imperial seal or paiza. Many stations would also offer guides and lodging, carts and draught animals. The resources needed for this operation were enormous, even for a people accustomed to owning large numbers of horses. It has been calculated that, in Mongolia alone, the orto system must have needed a reserve of 3 million horses. The source of its greatest pride however, was the facility it offered to the high-speed dispatch riders who carried imperial messages over distances that no regular system of post riders has ever achieved before or since. Unlike the American Pony Express riders, who handed over their mail bags from one sector to the next, the Mongol couriers were expected to ride the full distance themselves, tightly strapped in leather belts to keep them upright in the saddle and rarely stopping for food or rest. This system was in use up until the 1920s - a unique and very efficient means of strategic communication across a vast empire. One of the objectives of our journey is to revive and adapt this system. Whenever we reach a settlement or summer yurt camp, we have fresh mounts waiting, so that at any time we are traveling with several spare horses and a groom who can double his daily distance in pursuit of them. The arats are neither cruel nor particularly affectionate to their horses. They regard their animals simply as working tools which have to be properly maintained for herding life to continue. When it comes to treating sick horses they have little use for modern veterinary medicines or techniques. If a horse develops an abscess in a hoof, they stand the injured foot in the hot ashes of the campfire. A sore back is swabbed with a simple solution of salt and water; when one of our horses goes lame, it is necessary to "bleed" the animal. Although this practice has long since disappeared from western veterinary medicine, it proves highly effective on our team of remounts. Crossing the spine of the Khangai Massif, we ride westwards, skirting the northern rim of the Gobi Desert, into the colder and drier wind sweeping in from the High Altai and Pamirs. In the small province of Mandalgobi, we come across granite monoliths, some of which are carved with Tibetan mantras and meditating Buddhas. In a nearby settlement stands the remains of a monastery, a testament to the brutal anti-religious purges conducted in the 1940s by Choibalsan, Mongolia's Stalinist dictator. Now old and wizened, the head lama is a survivor of those dark years. He and his six junior lamas occupy a small hut, eagerly awaiting funds and permission to rebuild the monastery as part of the mounting revival of Buddhism in Mongolia. Our journey had started from the gates of Erdene Zuu Lamasery near Karakoram. Surrounded by 108 stupas - a kind of Buddhist chapel - and built on the site of the Great Khan Gatherings or quriltais, the monastery in its heyday housed no fewer than 10,000 lamas. Before we set out, we had joined the lamas on the back of trucks and motorbikes for the short ride to a local horse festival on the nearby steppe. Young foals were caught and blue silk "scarves" tied around their necks to honor the sky god, Tengri. There was a country fair atmosphere, a chance for arats of all ages to show off their lasso skills and partake in the "three manly sports" - wrestling, archery and horse racing. Despite the name, women participate in both archery and horse racing. Only wrestling is an all-male preserve, though this was not always the case. Marco Polo told of one formidable Mongol lady who earned her fortune and a considerable reputation by daring all comers to wrestle. Many men accepted the challenge, but none succeeded in beating the woman, forfeiting a portion of their herds as penalty for losing the bout. In July, regional champions perform at Naadam, the annual National Day celebrations in Ulan Bator, but it is here, in the small horse herding communities, that the spirit of Genghis Khan remains a strong and enduring presence.< The Voyage by Tim Severin. In Search of Genghis Khan : An Exhilarating Journey on Horseback Across the Steppes of Mongolia by the Award-Winning Author of The Brendan Voyage. Tim Severin. Published by Macmillan Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1993. Used - Softcover Condition: Fair. Paperback. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. The Brendan Voyage (Century Travellers) Severin, Tim. Published by Arrow Books Ltd, 1990. Seller: Reuseabook, Gloucester, GLOS, United Kingdom Contact seller. Used - Softcover Condition: Used; Good. Paperback. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Aged book. Tanned pages and age spots, however, this will not interfere with reading. Grubby book may have mild dirt or some staining, mostly on the edges of pages. More buying choices from other sellers on AbeBooks. The Brendan Voyage. Severin, Tim. Published by Arrow, 1979. Used - Softcover. Befriedigend/Good: Durchschnittlich erhaltenes Buch bzw. Schutzumschlag mit Gebrauchsspuren, aber vollst�ndigen Seiten. / Describes the average WORN book or dust jacket that has all the pages present. New Mongols, Same Horses. IN SEARCH OF GENGHIS KHAN By Tim Severin. Photographs by Paul Harris. 241 pp. New York: Atheneum. $25. TIM SEVERIN'S engrossing book "The Search for Genghis Khan" is, as far as I can tell, the first account by a Westerner since the Middle Ages of what it is like to ride Mongol horses with Mongol nomads across the bleak and harshly beautiful expanses of Mongolia, a country twice the size of , situated in what geographers once called "the Dead Heart of Asia." Previously a Soviet client state (until recently it held the dubious distinction of being the world's second-oldest Communist country), Mongolia operated under a severe and sometimes bloody Stalinist regime. Today, in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, new parties have arisen to challenge the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, forcing its officials to declare that it "has never been and is not a Communist Party." In fact, now the party would like to be seen as welcoming the resurgent nationalistic interest in Genghis Khan, the Mongol warlord who, along with his successors, established a world empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. This is something of a switch. For over 30 years no one in Mongolia had been allowed to mention Genghis Khan's name. "It would have been tactless," Mr. Severin writes, "for the Mongols to remind their Russian mentors that the 13th-century Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his successors had crushed the Russians on the battlefield, sacked Kiev, and imposed Mongol rule on large areas of Russia for nearly 300 years." Times change. In the summer of 1990, officials who wanted to retain their power in the coming elections by appealing to nationalist fervor suddenly saw reason to celebrate Genghis Khan. One stunt for showing their ties to the warlord was a horseback expedition across the steppes and deserts of the land that is sometimes called, dismissively, Outer Mongolia. Mr. Severin managed to get himself invited along for the ride. Tim Severin, who lives in , is interested in re-creating humanity's great journeys and writing them up in books. In past expeditions, he has "tracked the steps of Marco Polo by motorcycle" ("Tracking Marco Polo"); "crossed the North Atlantic in the replica of a medieval leather boat to test if Irish monks like St. Brendan the Navigator might have reached the shores of North America 1,000 years before Columbus" ("The Brendan Voyage"); built an eighth-century Arab ship and sailed her "from to China to examine the origins of Sindbad the Sailor" ("The Sindbad Voyage"); sailed the seas plied by Ulysses in a Bronze Age ("The Ulysses Voyage"); and "retraced the long march . . . of the First Crusade from a castle in to the Holy Sepulcher in " ("Crusader"). Though he is used to dealing with recalcitrant bureaucracies, Mr. Severin despaired of ever traveling freely in Mongolia, whose Government pursued a purposeful policy of inaccessibility to foreigners. Then, in 1987, Unesco, the world organization for culture and science, announced a plan to study the historic Silk Roads that linked East and West. A northerly branch of this system of roads happened to pass through Mongolia. So Mr. Severin submitted a proposal to follow the journey of a medieval Chinese sage, Chang Chun, who traveled from Beijing to meet Genghis Khan. After a series of setbacks, Mr. Severin obtained a visa for Mongolia and arrived in Ulan Bator, the dreary modern capital, where he met a man named Ariunbold, "a well-placed, well-polished bureaucrat of the central administration" and the secretary to the Mongolian National Committee for Unesco Silk Roads Project. Mr. Ariunbold, it seemed, had plagiarized Mr. Severin's Chang Chun plan and altered it to propose that a team of Mongol horsemen should start from Mongolia's center and retrace the medieval courier route to France. "The blatant plagiarism," Mr. Severin reports, "did not bother me unduly." Here, he thought, "was the most wonderful opportunity for me to travel freely inside Mongolia . . . in the company of Mongols who were committed to rediscovering their own history." Mr. Severin did indeed get to ride astride a sturdy Mongolian horse and in the company of a number of guides and gracious nomadic herdsmen. And the scenery was, for the most part, splendid. Mr. Severin describes, for instance, traveling across "a great expanse of rolling downland. Everything was on an overwhelming scale. The occasional boulder stood as high as horse and rider, and lordly falcons well over two feet tall sat on the ground and glared at us as we passed." It was here that Mr. Severin witnessed a scene that epitomizes today's Mongolia. The nominal leader of the expedition, Mr. Ariunbold, was thrown to the ground and dragged several feet while trying to saddle a reluctant horse. The horse was restrained, and "realizing that it could not break free, showed its objection by lying down." Mr. Ariunbold "walked to the head of the prone horse and, with all the strength he could muster, he leaned across and slashed the free end of the rope spitefully three times across the animal's face." Mr. Severin "could sense shock waves of disapproval coming from the herdsmen beside me." After 20 such lashes, the horse rose. "From the way everyone else avoided looking at Ariunbold as he climbed into the saddle," Mr. Severin writes, "I could tell that we were not alone in thinking that he had behaved atrociously." AS Mr. Severin notes elsewhere, he "was at a crucial moment in modern Mongol history." The Mongols were "trying to find their true national identity," and "Genghis Khan . . . represented a source of pride." In this context, Mr. Ariunbold "had shown himself to be barbaric. . . . Genghis Khan would have disapproved. Never, he had ordained, was a Mongol to strike a horse on the head." From Mr. Severin's writing and from the intriguing shots taken by the London photographer Paul Harris, it seems people still live much as they did in the time of Genghis Khan, especially in the remote places. Indeed, one of Mr. Severin's most striking discoveries happens when he finds himself in a dreary valley, examining the body of a dying marmot, and is pulled back by a concerned companion who warns him about "marmot sickness," an extremely contagious disease. The symptoms, he learns, are "high fever, shivering, swelling glands . . . tearing pain, giddiness . . . and delirium." Mr. Severin, a historian, realizes that the disease is "very similar to the sufferings of the plague victims described by writers in the 14th century when an estimated 25 million people in Europe perished from the Black Death." The shock of finding that the Black Death still survives "in the very heart of the continent, far from any seaport," makes him wonder if the disease that killed one-third of Europe might in fact have been introduced to the continent by Mongol invaders. (The standard theory is that "it had been brought by diseased rats aboard ships.") "The first Western reports of the Black Death actually came in 1347," he writes. "It broke out among the troops of the Kipchak khan, ruler of one of the fragments of the disintegrating Mongol empire. His army was besieging the port of Kaffa when it was ravaged by the plague. In one of the first recorded instances of biological warfare, the khan ordered his siege artillery to fling infected corpses over the city walls." In "The Search for Genghis Khan" Mr. Severin presents this provocative theory modestly (he says he is not alone in proposing it). And throughout the book he proves himself an easygoing traveling companion. He is also a fine reporter and a literate writer who has produced a fascinating and rewarding blend of history, adventure and contemporary reporting.