OUR MAN IN MONGOLIA

Gore Vidal

In August, Moscow's weather is like that of Edinburgh; the cool wind has begun to smell of snow while the dark blue sky is marred with school-of-Tiepolo clouds. Last August the rowan trees were overloaded with clusters of red berries. "Rowanberries in August mean a hard winter," said the literary critic as he showed me the view from the Kremlin terrace. "But after the hard winter," I said, sententious as Mao, "there will come the spring." He nodded. "How true!" As we pondered the insignificance of what neither had said, a baker's dozen of ornithologists loped into view. Moscow was acting as host to a world ornithological congress. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds. Since they are staying at our group's hotel, we have dubbed them the tweet-tweets.

The critic asked, "Have you read Gorky Park?" I said that I had not because I have made it a rule only to read novels by Nobel Prize winners. That way one will never read a bad book. I told him the plot of Pearl Buck's This Proud Heart. He told me the plot of Gorky Park. "It's a really good bad book," he said. "You know, everyone's making such heavy weather about it here, I can't think why. It's wonderfully silly. An American gunman loose in Moscow!" He chuckled. "It's so surrealist." I said that they should publish it as an example of American surrealism, with a learned commentary explaining the jokes.

As we chatted, two Russian soldiers walked by us. One was in uniform; the other wore blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "The United States Military Academy, West Point." The literary critic smiled. "Could an American soldier wear a Kremlin T-shirt?" I explained to him, patiently, I hope, the difference between the free and the unfree worlds. Abashed, he changed the subject to, where was I going next? When I said, "Ulan Bator," he laughed. When I wanted to know what was so funny, he said, "I thought you said you were going to Ulan Bator." When I told him that that was exactly where I was going, to the capital of the Mongolian People's Republic (sometimes known as Outer Mongolia), he looked very grave indeed. "It is said," he whispered so that the ubiquitous KGB would not overhear us, "that the British and French embassies have a spy at the airport and that anyone who looks promising is approached—oh, very furtively—and asked if he plays bridge. You did not hear this from me," he added.

At midnight the plane leaves Moscow for Ulan Bator, with stops at Omsk and Irkutsk (in Siberia). The trip takes ten hours; there is a five-hour time difference between Moscow and Ulan Bator (U.B. to us fans). Moscow Aeroflot planes have a tendency to be on time, but the ceilings are too low for claustrophobes, and there is a curious smell of sour cream throughout the aircraft. Contrary to legend, the stewardesses are agreeable, at least on the Siberian run.

Our party included an English-born, Nairobi-based representative of the United Nations Environment Program—White Hunter, his name. A representative of the World Wildlife Fund-International who turned out to be a closet tweet-tweet— and was so named. And the photographer, Snaps. We were accompanied by the youthful Boris Petrovich, who has taught himself American English through the study of cassettes of what appears to have been every American film ever made. We had all met at the Rossya Hotel in Moscow. According to the Russians, it is the largest hotel in the world. Whether or not this is true, the Rossya's charm is not unlike that of New York's Attica. In the Soviet Union the foreigner is seldom without a low-level anxiety, which can, suddenly, develop into wall-climbing paranoia. Where are the visas? To which the inevitable Russian answer, "No problem," is ominous indeed.

Now our little group was being hurtled through the Siberian skies to a part of Outer Mongolia where no white—or, for that matter, black—Westerner had ever been before, or as one of our men at the American Embassy put it: "You will be the first American ever to set foot in that part of the Gobi Desert." I asked for my instructions. After all, those of us who believe in freedom must never not be busy. When I suggested that I might destabilize the Mongolian government while I was there, one of our men was slightly rattled. "Actually," he said, "no American has ever been there because there isn't anything there." My fierce patriotism was seriously tried by this insouciance. "Then why," I asked, "am I going?" He said he hadn't a clue. Why was I going?

It all came back to me on the night flight to Ulan Bator. The World Wildlife Fund has taken to sending writers around the world to record places where the ecology is out of joint. My task was a bit the reverse. I was to report on the national park that the Mongolian government is creating in the Gobi in order to keep pristine the environment so that flora and fauna can proliferate in a perfect balance with the environment.

As I stared out the porthole window at my own reflection (Or was it Graham Greene's? The vodka bottle seemed familiar), my mind was awhirl with the intense briefings that I had been subjected to. For instance, is the People's Republic of Mongolia part of the Soviet Union? No. It is an independent socialist nation, grateful for the "disinterested" aid that it gets from the other socialist nations. When did it come into being? Sixty years ago, when the Chinese were ejected and their puppet, the Living Buddha, was shorn of his powers and the twenty-eight-year-old Damdiny Siikh, known as Ulan Bator (Red Hero in Mongolian), took charge of the state, with disinterested Soviet aid. Meanwhile, back at the Kremlin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin was not entirely thrilled. Classic Marxism requires that a state evolve from feudalism to monarchy to capitalism and then to communism. As of 1920, whatever had been going on in Mongolia for two millennia, it was not capitalism. The people were nomadic. Every now and then, in an offhand way, they'd conquer the world. Genghis Khan ruled from the Danube to the Pacific Ocean, and some 1,200 years ago, according to one account, Mongol tribes crossed from Asia to North America via the Bering Strait, making the Western Hemisphere a sort of Mongol colony. Lenin put on his thinking cap and came up with the following concept: "With the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage." So it came to pass. In sixty years an illiterate population has become totally literate, life expectancies have increased, industries and mining have taken the place of the old nomadic way of life, and there is a boom in population. "Sixty percent of the population," said Boris Petrovich, "is under sixteen years of age." Tweet-tweet looked grim. "So much the worse for them," he said. Boris Petrovich said, "But, gosh, they need people here. Why, they've only got one and a half million people to one and a half million square kilometers. That's not enough people to feed themselves with. " As the environmental aspect was carefully explained to Boris Petrovich, his eyes lost their usual keenness. "Should I," he asked me, changing the subject, "buy Lauren Bacall's book?"

Jet lag and culture shock greeted us at the airport, where blue asters had broken through the landing strip. But no one was asked to play bridge, because we were whisked aboard an Air Mongolia plane and flown five more hours to the provincial capital of Gobi Altai, the southwestern province of Mongolia. At the foot of the Altai range of mountains is the town of Altai. Here we spent the night in a two-story hotel on the main street, whose streetlamps did not turn on. Opposite the hotel is the police station. At the end of the street is a new hospital of raw cement.

We were given dinner by the deputy chairman of the province, the Soviet director of the park, and the deputy minister of forestry (under whose jurisdiction is the near-treeless Gobi), as well as two ministerial officials assigned to the United Nations Environment Program. Toasts were drunk as dishes of mutton came and went. Money is no longer flowing from the U.N., White Hunter pointed out. The Reagan administration is cutting back. The Soviet Union is making a fair contribution to the fund, but—such is the Soviet sense of fun—the money is in unconvertible rubles. This means that the Soviet contribution can be spent only in the Soviet sphere. Hence, the Gobi park.

Although Mongolia smells of mutton fat, the Mongols smell not at all, even though the Russians go on about the great trouble they have getting them to bathe. Men and women are equally handsome: tall, narrow-waisted, with strong white teeth. Some wear the national tunic with sash and boots; others wear the international uniform of blue jeans. "Why," I asked one of our Mongolian colleagues, "are there no bald men here?" He was startled by the question. "The old men shave their heads," he said, as if this was an answer. Even so, there are no bald men to be seen anywhere. Our group came to the conclusion that over the millennia bald babies were exposed at birth.

As the evening ended, I had a sense of what the English call deja vu. I had been in this company before. But where? It came to me: in my grandfather's state of Oklahoma, on one of the Indian reservations. Physically, the Mongolians are dead ringers for the Cherokees, whose nation my grandfather represented as an attorney in an effort to get some money for the land that the American government had stolen from them. All in all, the Russians are doing rather better by their Mongols than we are doing by ours.

I proposed a toast to Kublai Khan, "China's great Mongol emperor, who opened up a peaceful discourse between East and West." The Mongols at table were amused. The Russians less so. "You know," said one of the ministerial, "we are making a number of movies about Mongolian history." I did not ask if any of these films would deal with the 250-year Mongol occupation of Russia. The Russians still complain of their suffering during the Mongol occupation. "Now," said the ministerial, "we are making a movie about American Indians." When I asked what the theme was, I got a vague answer: "Oh, the.. .connections. You'll see."

The next day there was rain in the Gobi. Something unheard of, we were told. In fact, there had been a flood a few days before, and many people were said to have been drowned. Due to bad weather, the plane would not take us to the encampment. So we set out on a gray afternoon in jeeps and Land-Rovers. There is no road, only a more or less agreed-upon trail.

As we left Altai, we saw a bit of the town that Snaps and I had not been allowed to see earlier that morning, when we had set out to record the Real Life of the Mongols, who live in what the Russians call yurtas and the owners call gers: round tents, ingeniously made of felt, with a removable flap across the top to let out smoke. In winter the fire is lit in the morning for cooking; then it goes out until sundown, when it is lit again for the evening meal. Apparently the yurtas retain warmth in winter and are cool in summer. At Altai, every hundred or so yurtas are surrounded by wooden fences, "to hold back the drifts of snow in winter," said a Russian, or "to keep them in their particular collective," said a cynical non-Russian. Whatever, the wooden fences have curious binary devices on them: "king's ring and queen's ring," I was told by a Mongol—and no more.

Every time Snaps and I were close to penetrating one of the enclosures, a policeman would indicate that we should go back to the hotel. Meanwhile, the children would gather around until Snaps snapped; then they would shriek nyet and scamper off, only to return a moment later with many giggles. The older people quite liked being photographed, particularly the men on their ponies, whose faces—the ponies'—are out of prehistory, pendulous-lipped and sly of slanted eye. In costume, women wear boots; not in costume, they wear high heels as they stride over the dusty graveled plain, simulating the camel's gait.

The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable with Francesca French is an invaluable look at central Asia in the '20s and '30s by two lady missionaries who traveled the trade routes, taught the Word, practiced medicine. "The Mongol's home is his tent, and his nomadic life is the expression of a compelling instinct. A house is intolerable to him, and even the restricting sense of an enclosing city wall is unbearable." One wonders what today's Mongols think, cooped up in their enclosures. "They hate the new housing," said one official. "They put their animals and belongings in the apartment houses, and then they stay in their yurtas." Others told me that, in general, the people are content, acclimatized to this bad century. "The Mongol lives in and for the present, and looks neither backward toward his ancestors nor forward to his descendants."

"Snaps, one word is worth a thousand pictures," I said. "Which word?" he asked. "That would be telling," I told him. But now comes the time when I must come to Snaps's aid and through the living word transmit to the reader's eye the wonder that is Mongolia when the monsoons are almost done with and the heat has dropped after July's 113 degrees Fahrenheit, when lizards cook in the Gobi.

We are in a jeep, lurching over rough terrain. The driver is young, wears a denim jacket, grins as he crashes over boulders. Picture now a gray streaked sky. In the distance a dun-colored mountain range, smooth and rounded the way old earth is. We are not yet in the Gobi proper. There is water. Herds of yaks and camels cross the horizon. But once past this watered plain, the Gobi Desert begins—only it is not a proper desert. Sand is the exception, not the rule. Black and brown gravel is strewn across the plain. Occasional white salt slicks vary the monotony. All sorts of shy plants grow after a rain or near one of the rare springs. Actually, there is water under a lot of the Gobi, in some places only a few feet beneath the surface. For those who missed out on the journeys to the moon, the Gobi is the next-best thing.

"The word Gobi," authority tells us (Geographie Universelle, P. Vidal de la Blache et L. Gallois) "is not the proper name of a geographical area, but a common expression used by Mongols to designate a definite order of geographical features. These are wide, shallow basins of which the smooth rocky bottom is filled with sand, pebbles, or, more often, with gravel." Vautre Vidal tells us that, properly speaking, the Gobi covers a distance of 3,600 miles, "from the Pamirs to the confines of Manchuria." But in Mongolian Gobi, together with that part of the Gobi inside China to our south and west, is the Gobi's heart, once crossed by the old silk route that connected the Middle Kingdom with the West.

We arrive in darkness at Tsogt, a small town on whose edge is the fenced-in administrative center of the park. We slept in spacious yurtas, worthy of the great Khan. In the dining yurta a feast of mutton had been prepared. We were joined by several Russian specialists connected with the park. One was a zoologist, given to wearing green camouflage outfits with a most rakish hat. Another had spent a winter in New York City, where "every square meter costs one million dollars. "

Next day, at second or third light, we were shown a fuzzy film of all the fauna that the park contained, from wild Bactrian camels to wild bears to the celebrated snow leopard and, of course, the ubiquitous goat. But once the Gobi is entered, there are few herds to be seen, and only the occasional tweet, usually a kite or a variety of low-flying brown-and-white jay. As befits a World Wildlife Funder, Tweet-tweet was becoming unnaturally excited. Snaps, too, was in his heaven. Bliss to be in Gobi, almost.

After the film we boarded a plane that I had last flown in in 1935, and flew south across the Gobi, which I had last seen in the pages of the old Life magazine, circa 1935, as portrayed by Margaret Bourke-White. Time kept warping until I noticed that Snaps was furtively vomiting into his camera case; others were also queasy. When I suggested that air be admitted to the cabin, I was greeted with 1935 stares of disbelief. So we returned to base. We were then loaded into jeeps and crossed a low mountain range to the park itself.

On a high hill with dark mountains behind, the Gobi stretches as far as anyone could wish, its flatness broken by the odd mountain, set islandlike in the surrounding gravel. I got out of the jeep to commune with the silence. The driver started to pluck at small dark-green clumps of what turned out to be chives. We ate chives and looked at the view, and I proceeded to exercise the historical imagination and conjured up Genghis Khan on that famous day when he set his standard of nine yak tails high atop Gupta, and the Golden Horde began its conquest of Europe. "Hey"—I heard the Americanized voice of Boris Petrovich—"did any of you guys see The Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor?" A chorus of noes did not faze him. "Well, why not?" It was Tweet-tweet who answered him. "If you have gone to the theater seriously all your life," he said sternly, "there are plays that you know in advance that you will not be caught dead at." But Tweet-tweet had not reckoned with the Russian sense of fair play. "How can you say that when you wouldn't even go see her in the play? I mean, so she was crucified by the reviewers. . . " Thus, put in our place, we descended into Gobi. Thoughts of Taylor's fleshy splendor had restored Genghis to wraithdom and dispersed the Horde.

We stopped at an oasis, a bright strip of ragged green in the dark shining gravel. Water bubbles up from the earth and makes a deep narrow stream down a low hill to a fenced-in place where a Mongol grows vegetables for the camp. The water is cool and pure, and the Mongols with us stare at it for a time and smile; then they lie down on their bellies and drink deeply. We all do. In fact, it is hard to get enough water in Gobi. Is this psychological or physiological? The Mongol gardener showed me his plantation. "The melons don't grow very large," he apologized, holding up a golf ball of a melon. "It is Gobi, you see." I tried to explain to him that if he were to weed his patch, the vegetables would grow larger, but in that lunar landscape I suspect that the weeds are as much a delight to him as the melons.

As we lurched across the desert to the Yendiger Mountains, we passed an empty village where nomads used to winter. Whether or not they are still allowed in the park is a moot point. No straight answer was available. We were told that certain sections of the park are furrowed off—literally, a furrow is plowed and, except for the park rangers, no human being may cross the furrow unless he wants to be detained for poaching. Are there many poachers? A few. ..

At the deserted village, each jeep took a different route toward the dark mountains in the distance. En route, the jeep that I was traveling in broke down four times. Long after the others had arrived at camp, our group was comfortably seated on a malachitegreen rock, sipping whiskey from the bottle and watching the sun pull itself together for a Gobi Special Sunset, never to be forgotten. Tweet-tweet said that in the Galapagos Islands Tom Stoppard had worked out a numeric scale with which to measure the tasteless horror of each successive night's overwrought sunset. But I defended our Gobi Special. For once, Mother Nature was the soul of discreet good taste. Particularly the northern sky, where clouds like so many plumes of Navarre had been dipped in the most subtle shade of Du Barry gray, while the pale orange of the southern sky did not cloy. True, there was a pink afterglow in the east. But then perfection has never been Mother Nature's bag.

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The jeep functional, we drove between dark brown rocks along the bottom of what looked to be an ancient riverbed until we came to a turn in the ravine, and there was the campsite. In a row: one yurta, a dozen pup tents, a truck that contained a generator. "This is the first electricity ever to shine in this part of Gobi," said the Soviet director. As the Mongol lads strung electric lines from tent to tent, Snaps, with narrowed eyes and camera poised, waited. "You never know," he whispered, "when you'll get a shot of electrified Mongol. Tremendous market for that, actually."

We were told that close to camp there is a famous watering hole where, at sundown, the snow leopard lies down, as it were, with the wild ass. But we had missed sundown. Nevertheless, ever game, our party walked halfway to the hole before settling among rocks on the ridge to fortify ourselves with alien spirits against the black desert night that had fallen with a crash about us. As we drank, we were joined by a large friendly goat. Overhead, the stars (so much more satisfactory than the ones beneath our feet) shone dully: rain clouds were interfering with the Gobi's usual surefire light show. I found the Dipper; it was in the wrong place. There was a sharp difference of agreement on the position of Orion's Belt. Shooting stars made me think, comfortably, of war. I showed Boris Petrovich what looked to be one of the Great Republic's newest satellites. "Keeping watch over the Soviet Union," I said. "Unless," he said, "it is one of our missiles on its way to Washington. But, seriously," he added, "don't you agree that Elizabeth Taylor was a first-rate movie actress? You know, like Susan Hayward."

First light seized us from our pup tents, where we had slept upon the desert floor, inhaling the dust of millennia. As I prepared for a new day of adventure, sinuses aflame, there was a terrible cry, then a sob, a gasp—silence. Our friend of the evening before, the goat, was now to be our dinner.

We checked out the watering hole, which turned out to be a muddy place in the rocks; there were no signs of beasts. Again we were on the move, this time southeasterly toward the Mount Mother system. The heat was intense. We glimpsed a wild ass, wildly running up ahead of us. Some gazelles skittered in the distance. The countryside was almost always horizontal but never pleasingly flat. To drive over such terrain is like riding a Wild West bronco. As we penetrated deeper into the preserve, vegetation ceased. What thomwood there was no longer contained greenery. Thomwood— with camel and goat dung—provides the nomads with their fuel. We were told that poachers are more apt to steal the wood in the preserve than the animals.

Suddenly, all of our jeeps converged on the same spot, close to the steep dark-red Khatan Khairkhan, an island of rock rising from a dry sea. The drivers gathered around a circle of white sand some six feet in diameter. Three spurts of icy water bubbled at the circle's center. Again, the happy smiles. Mongols stare at water rather the way northerners stare at fires. Then each of us tried the water. It tasted like Badoit. Camel and wild-ass dung in the immediate vicinity testified to its excellent, even curative, mineral qualities.

Halfway up the red mountain, we made camp at the mouth of a ravine lined with huge, smooth red rocks. Glacial? Remains of a sea that had long since gone away? No geologist was at hand to tell us, but in the heights above the ravine were the Seven Caldrons of Khatan Khairkhan, where, amongst saxaul groves and elm trees, the waters have made seven rock basins, in which Tweet-tweet and White Hunter disported themselves while Snaps recorded the splendors of nature. The author, winded halfway up, returned to camp and read Mme de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cleves.

That night our friend the goat was served in the famous Mongolian hot pot. Red-hot rocks are dropped into metal pots containing whatever animal has been sacrificed to man's need. The result is baked to a tee. As usual, I ate tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread. We drank to the Golden Horde, now divided in three parts: Outer Mongolia, which is autonomous, thanks to the "disinterested" Soviet Union's presence; Inner Mongolia, which is part of China and filling up with highly interested Chinese; and Siberia, which contains a large Mongolian population. Since functioning monasteries are not allowed in China or Siberia, practicing Buddhists come to Ulan Bator, where there are a large school, a lamasery, and the Living Buddha. This particular avatar is not the result of the usual search for the exact incarnation practiced in ancient times. He was simply selected to carry on.

Even rarer than a functioning lamasery in Mongolia is Przhevalski's horse. These horses exist in zoos around the world, but whether or not they are still to be found in Gobi is a subject of much discussion. Some think that there are a few in the Chinese part of the Gobi; some think that they are extinct there. In any case, the Great Gobi National Park plans to reintroduce—from the zoos—Przhevalski's horse to its original habitat. We drank to the Przhevalski horse. We drank to the plane that was to pick us up the next morning when we returned to base. "Will it really be there?" I asked. "No problem."

At dawn we lurched across the desert beneath a lowering sky. At Tsogt there was no plane. "No problem." We would drive four or five hours to Altai. Along the way we saw the marks that our tires had made on the way down. "In Gobi, tracks may last fifty years," one of the Russians said.

At the Altai airport low-level anxiety went swiftly to high: the plane for Ulan Bator might not take off. Bad weather. The deputy minister of forestry made a ministerial scene, and the plane left on time. There was not a cloud on the route. We arrived at dusk. The road from the airport to the city passes beneath not one but two huge painted arches. From the second arch, Ulan Bator in its plain circled by mountains looks very large indeed. Four hundred thousand people live and have their being beneath a comforting industrial smog. As well as the usual fencedoff yurtas, there are high-rise apartment houses, an opera house, a movie palace, functioning streetlamps, and rather more neon than one sees in, say, Rome. Although our mood was gala as we settled in at the Ulan Bator Hotel, low-level anxiety never ceased entirely to hum. Would the visas for the Soviet Union be ready in time? Had the plane reservations for Moscow and the West been confirmed? Would we get back the passports that we had surrendered upon arrival?

The next day, our questions all answered with "No problem," we saw the sights of Ulan Bator. A museum with a room devoted to oddshaped dinosaur eggs, not to mention the skeletons of the dinosaurs that had laid them. Every public place was crowded. A convention of Mongol experts was in town; there was also a delegation of Buddhists, paying their respects to the Living Buddha, who would be, his secretary told me, too busy with the faithful to receive us that day. Undaunted, Snaps and I made our way to the Buddhist enclosure, where we found several temples packed with aged priests and youthful acolytes with shaved heads. As the priests read aloud from strips of paper on which are printed Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, their voices blend together like so many bees in a hive while incense makes blue the air and bells tinkle at odd intervals to punctuate the still-living texts. In a golden robe, the Living Buddha sat on a dais. As the faithful circled him in an unending stream, he maintained a costive frown. Outside, aged costumed Mongols of both sexes sat about the enclosure, at a millennium's remove from cement block and Aeroflot.

The United Kingdom's man in Ulan Bator, James Paterson, received us at the British Embassy. Outside, a suspicious policeman stands guard with a walkie-talkie, keeping close watch not only on the ambassador and his visitors but on the various Mongols who paused in front of the embassy to look at the color photographs, under glass, of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Mongols would study the pictures carefully and then, suddenly, smile beatifically. How very like, I could practically hear them say to themselves, our own imperial family— the Khans of yesteryear!

Paterson is tall and tweedy with a charming wife (in central Asia all of us write like the late Somerset Maugham). "I am allowed to jog," he said. "But permission must be got to make trips." Since he knew that I was asking myself the one question that visitors to U.B. ask themselves whenever they meet a non-Communist ambassador (there are four, from Britain, France, Canada, and India)— What on earth did you do to be sent here?—he brought up the subject and laughed, I think, merrily. He was raised in China; he was fascinated by the Mongol world—unlike the French ambassador who, according to diplomats in Moscow, used to go about Ulan Bator muttering, "I am here because they fear me at the Quai d'Orsay." When I asked Paterson where the French ambassador was, I was told, "He is no longer here." Tact, like holly at Christmas, festooned the modest sitting room, where a much-fingered month-old Economist rested on the coffee table.

A reception was given us by the minister of forestry. He is a heavyset man with gray hair and a face much like that of the old drawings of Kublai Khan. He hoped that we had enjoyed the visit to the park. He hoped that there would be more money from the United Nations, but if there should be no more, he quite understood. White Hunter found this a bit ominous, as he favors further U.N. funding of the park. Tourism was discussed: a new guest complex would be built at Tsogt. The plans look handsome. Room for only eighteen people—plainly, a serious place for visiting scientists. Elsewhere, hunters are catered for.

Tweet-tweet spoke eloquently of the Wildlife Fund's work around the world. "Under its president, Prince Philip," he intoned. The Mongol translator stopped. "Who?" Tweet-tweet repeated the name, adding, "The husband of our queen." The translator could not have been more gracious. "The husband of whose queen?" he asked. Tweet-tweet went on to say that if it were not for the politicians, there would be world peace and cooperation, and the environment would be saved. I noticed that the minister's highly scrutable Oriental face, so unlike our veiled Occidental ones, was registering dismay. I interrupted. "As one politician to another," I said, "even though I have just lost an election, having polled only a half-million votes"— roughly a third of the population of Mongolia, I thought, in a sudden frenzy of demophilia—"I am as peace-loving as, I am sure, His Excellency is." I got a wink from the minister, and after dinner a powerful pinch of snuff. Even in Mongolia, we pols must stick together in a world made dangerous for us by well-meaning Tweettweets.

The next day all was in order; there was indeed no problem. The ten-hour trip took place in daylight. As we stretched our legs in Omsk, White Hunter noticed a handsome blond girl beyond the airport railings. He turned to Boris Petrovich. "What are the girls like here?" Boris Petrovich shook his head. "Well, I was only here once, when I was on the junior basketball team. We played everywhere." White Hunter said, "You mean you didn't make out?" Boris Petrovich looked shocked. "Well, gosh, I was only sixteen."

I told him that in the United States many males at sixteen have not only passed their sexual peak but are burned-out cases. Boris Petrovich's eyes glittered. "I'll bet there are some movies on that," he said. "You know, that soft-pom stuff on cassettes."

Before our party separated at the Moscow airport, we agreed that the Great Gobi National Park was a serious affair and not a front for Soviet missiles or, worse, a hunters' paradise with Gobi bears and snow leopards as the lure. Snaps was thrilled with the Buddhist pictures; less thrilled with the Gobi, "of an ugliness not to be reproduced"; pleased with the pictures of the people, though we had failed to penetrate a single yurta. White Hunter had hopes that the United Nations would raise enough money to keep the park going. Tweet-tweet was satisfied that wildlife was being tended to. Meanwhile, Boris Petrovich darted between the two groups—one headed for London, one for Rome.

As I was leaving the reception area, he made a small speech about the necessity of good Soviet-American relations, the importance of world peace, the necessity of cooperation on environmental matters. Then he lowered his voice. "I have a question to ask you." He looked about to see if we were being overheard. Thus, I thought to myself, Philby was recruited. Swiftly, I made my decision. If I were to sell out the free world, I must be well paid. I would want a dacha on the Baltic, near Riga. I would want... "How tall," asked Boris Petrovich, "is Paul Newman, really?"