In Siberia (12 page)

‘And the Pazyryk graves?' I asked.

‘You'll reach them in two hours.' He left me on the track. ‘I
don't know their names, the people buried there. We just call them
shifri
. Our ancestors.'

Towards noon I reached the edge of the valley. It descended in a broad passage where chestnut horses grazed, until it struck a transverse ravine and spilled out into space. It hung in a natural theatre. Out of the void beyond swam wooded hills, and beyond these again there lifted a far semicircle of mountains, their summits flashed with snow. They bathed the valley in a numinous cold. I stopped involuntarily on its rim, as if at an invisible frontier. No wonder the dead were buried here. Nothing made a sound. Painted clouds were stuck up in a sky too enormous to register their drift. I was gazing south from the Altai's core to where its mountains trailed for another four hundred miles through Mongolia.

But beneath me, at irregular intervals, the valley floor was blistered by five enormous
kurgans
. They had been raised between the sixth and fourth centuries bc–underground tomb-chambers built of jointed logs and heaped overhead with earth and stones. Now their displaced rocks ringed the excavated chambers in petrified craters, and around them a scattering of lesser graves left tracings in the grass.

Two and a half millennia ago Herodotus described the Scythian royal burials in intimate detail, from the forty-day funerary journey around the dead king's dominion to the narcotic vapour-tents where the mourners howled with joy. The chieftain was laid as if immortal in his tomb, his stomach gutted and filled with aromatic plants, his sinews removed, his skin waxed. Beside him lay strangled members of his household, with a dead concubine and many horses. Around his
kurgan
rode an eerie cavalry, fifty strong: its horses and men had been disembowelled and impaled on stakes and wheels, their feet and hooves never touching the ground.

In the Altai, graves were uncovered in which the Scythian passion for gold outstripped all hearsay. Four hundred years ago rumours were already rife of tomb-robbers finding corpses sandwiched between gold sheets, and archaeologists later discovered
a king scaled in 4,000 pointed gold plaques, his head bound in a golden helmet-crown carved with fabulous beasts and landscapes.

But in all these graves only mineral and bone survived. The intimate and evanescent–the precious commonplace–had gone. Only in this Pazyryk valley, and in the grave of the Ice Princess to the south, was everyday life caught on the wing. The rain which seeped down into the crypts, or coursed along the passage left by contemporary robbers (who took only gold), froze in the cold rooms, and sealed them under a lens of ice. Cloth, wood, leather, fur, birch bark, cheese, meat, horses, humans: even their colours were kept. Experts could tell the season of burial by the contents of the horses' intestines and by the state of their coats and hooves, or by the frozen moss-packing wedged among the beams. They could diagnose osteoporosis and toothache in the humans, and count their battle-wounds. Funerary offerings–frozen where their tables had floated on the insurgent rain–still held horse-flesh in small dishes, and a chunk of goat-meat stuck with a knife.

I descended the valley to the lowest
kurgan
, over pasture too thin, it seemed, for long grazing. Insects whirred in the short meadow-grass, and my feet crushed out a dry fragrance over sage and thyme. A cataract of blood-red stones had flooded into the tomb-chamber. But in its centre two posts remained upright, notched for crossbeams which lay bleaching where they had been tossed fifty years before. The stones grated and clacked underfoot. The archaeologists, themselves now dead, had dug here in the forties. Still under suspicion of intellectual heresy, they had emerged gaunt from Stalin's camps. Even here, at the world's dawn, they had to tread warily: the discovery of refinement in a pastoral people would sound ill on Marxist-Leninist ears. The nomad, by definition, was backward, and the Soviets inherited an ancient fear of him.

In this
kurgan
was discovered the oldest carpet in the world. Now hanging in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, its velvet pile shines in vivid reds and greens, damson and faded turquoise. Stags graze along its inner borders; men and horses parade its outer rim. In the centre a geometric field of lotus-blooms is scarcely
dimmed. A thousand years older than anything similar, its provenance can only be guessed.

Other artefacts linked the Altai to Persia, India, China. Around the dead chieftain, on a 20-foot-high felt hanging preserved in the Hermitage, a horseman approaches an unknown goddess in praise or supplication. Perhaps she came from the Black Sea. Nearby, at the centre of a saddle-cloth swagged with horse-tails glows a rectangle of Chinese silk, where sacred phoenixes sing on trees in a wash of cream and gold.

A pale-wooded carriage once stood in this grave on high, fragile wheels, near a quadriga of mummified horses. In the Hermitage, it looked as if it would break at my touch. It was the ceremonial carriage of a ghost. Canopied in black felt, it had perhaps borne the chieftain's mummy on its last, forty-day cortege, during which his subjects feasted his hovering soul.

And he too survives in the Hermitage, with his 16-foot coffin nearby, scooped from a single tree-trunk, and his concubine stored in the museum basement. She has soft, chestnut hair, and looks Caucasian; while he stretches thin-boned, Mongoloid, desiccated to the texture of wood. His head is wrenched back in a kind of insensate agony, flecked by wisps of black hair.

The trappings of sacrificed horses hang beside him. Their tails are tasselled or banded stiff in gold, their necks dressed with false manes of scarlet hair. The masks in which they were buried blossom into fantastical antlers and horns. It is as if men were trying to turn horses into spirits. But the mummified beasts themselves lie curled unimportantly beneath, their heads twisted back to their shoulders, the pick-blows neat in their skulls.

Climbing the valley to the last
kurgans
, the imagined carriage teetered before me in a straight line (it couldn't corner) over the stony hillside to its grave. Under my feet the pasture was sprinkled with minute plants: scented pink stars and purple spires, wormwood, miniature buttercups. In the crater which archaeologists called Kurgan II, someone had sheltered cattle. Bright orange lichen was crawling over the stones. More than any other, the ice of this grave had yielded up everyday things: even a wooden pillow and a four-stringed harp. And pervading everything, the
Scythian animals–once clan totems–interlocked in wood and gold to form jewellery or horse-trappings, with a supple, stylised accuracy. Here too stood the six-legged frame of a vapour-tent with a bronze cauldron filled by scorched stones and cannabis seeds. The mourners, it seems, had withdrawn from a chieftain's corpse still shrouded in narcotic incense.

 

A curator had guided me through the dim-lit Hermitage corridors, until we reached the vitrines of Kurgan II. The chieftain's head had been severed from his body by tomb-robbers. It is blunt and expressionless. Then they dismembered his concubine, to tear off her jewellery.

His corpse, it seems, was recovered after battle. Three axe-blows show on the crown of its skull. His tattooed skin has been peeled from the mummified flesh like a discoloured scarf, and hangs softly lit before us. It is extraordinary. Outlandish monsters swarm over his shoulders. They entwine each arm in a spiral of flying talons, beaks, wings, crenellated jaws. They overflow his shoulders on to his chest. A big catfish noses up his right leg. They are pricked in soot. The long incision through which his muscles were removed before burial shows clear across the skin, stitched up with sinews. So does the cut by which the skull was trepaned to remove the brain.

The curator, a warm-hearted woman, points out the beasts on this hanging cloth a little sadly. They teemed there to protect him, she says, and to announce his ancestry. They transmitted magic energy.

In his culture, you might guess, the outer shone transcendent, while the inner was dispensable. In death his head and body became a shell, filled only with aromatic grasses, and that was how he entered eternity. The waxed skin, the embalmed face–these were what mattered. Herodotus wrote how the dried skins of fallen enemies were flaunted as trophies or used as handkerchiefs or quivers, and their skulls as drinking-cups. Perhaps this was a way of tampering with their souls.

We look again at the head from Kurgan II. It appears pure Mongol, but a sprout of facial hair suggests mixed ancestry. In
these embalmed faces the anthropological war between Asia and Europe sounds again. In Pazyryk, by the fifth century bc, an invading Mongoloid people was subsuming the Indo-Europeans. Under their
kurgans
the aristocracy, even the Ice Princess, have proved Mongoloid; those in the poorer graves, especially the women, are Caucasoid. This brings no comfort to the Russians.

‘I don't know what he is,' says the Hermitage caretaker. The chief's eyes gaze back; his upper lip smiles without meaning. ‘He may be anything.' She keeps the rest of him in the reserve collection, with the severed pieces of his concubine. ‘But she was beautiful!' she cries. ‘She had long Botticelli hands and feet!' The caretaker herself is stoutly voluptuous, a Renoir, and envies her. ‘A perfect Botticelli!'

We move on from glass case to case. There is nobody else here. We stare down on horses, quivers, whip handles: all the stuff of speed and flight. We both, I think, feel vaguely unhappy. These supremely mobile and elusive people have been grounded before our eyes by a sad miracle of ice and time. They, who hated cities.

 

It never fails. You arrive in a small town towards sunset. You know nobody, nothing. The main street is empty, the shops closed, the few offices almost deserted. But you tell yourself: within an hour I'll be under shelter. So you trudge into some municipal building, where a dazed-looking secretary directs you down the street to a resthouse. It doesn't exist. You try the only shop that is open, but the owner points you back the way you came. A drunk follows you, laughing. In the telegraph office–the only building open now–a sour apparatchik shrugs his shoulders. A chill wind is blowing off the mountains. Then you wander past an open door and fall into conversation with the man who peers after you. He suggests a workers' dormitory he knows, or a room with a friend or space in a defunct collective, where they allot you a camp-bed and a soiled quilt, and you find a kind of peace.

So over five days and a thousand miles I edge back north and east out of the Altai and into their companion Sayan mountains,
where the head-waters of the Yenisei gather before turning north to the Arctic. At first I hitch-hike (you pay the driver a little), then find a bus, then alight with premature relief at a railway station in Barnaul.

Railway stations are the haunt of the outcast. Petty criminals, drunks, refugees, beggars–some mad, some hobbling from industrial accidents–throng the Stalinist halls and forecourts. In the ticket-office you become a naked supplicant. The powers shout and growl behind their machines: computer, printer, abacus. The queue scarcely moves. Every ticket is individually printed, proof of identity demanded, a whole campaign. The printer crumples up the paper, the computers go blank, the sales clerk disappears. You may spend two hours waiting.

But once aboard the train, a sense of triumph wells up. Outside, the scenery drags by unchanging, but in a few hours or in a day, you know, somewhere new–a former mystery on the map of Asia–will become flesh and stone. So in my low-class carriage, where Kazakh traders heaved their crates of apples or bananas into my space, the stench of sweat and urine was a bearable price to pay for the future that was unravelling along the rails. Zarinsk, Abakan, Minusinsk…The train took thirty-six hours to cover seven hundred miles. Twice it broke down.

The towns were easy to vanish in, oblivious of the stranger. I welcomed the bare cafes with their peremptory staff, simply for being there. Bortsch,
pelmeni
, cabbage soup,
solyanka
, sausages: they catered not to pleasure, but to survival.

Somewhere on the tortuous train-ride east, I shared my compartment with a schoolmistress from Krasnoyarsk, and her twenty-seven-year-old son. As night came down and the lights dimmed in our carriage, we lay on our bunks unable to sleep. They were on their way to fish and trek in the mountains of Tuva where I was going, and pointed out the lonely hunters' fires on the hillsides, and envied them. Svetlana's family had grown up in village isolation, united in their love of wilderness. They had built their own dacha in the wilds, and had the old Siberians' disdain for newcomers.

‘But most families are newcomers now,' she said. ‘They've been
here just a generation or two. Others arrive on high-paid jobs, then go back west.' True Siberians were pioneers at heart, she added. But they were few, too few. ‘And the land's become polluted. In Krasnoyarsk everyone gets chest infections because of the dam built there, and the Yenisei is so contaminated it doesn't freeze any more. Even in the Arctic, the nickel from the Norilsk factories poisons everything for hundreds of miles. When I was a child I remember reindeer wandering into the village at night and starting all the dogs barking. They used to graze along the Arctic Sea. But now they're gone.'

The country's pollution had stirred up dreams of Siberian independence, she said, but they were chaotic and fragmented. In the nineteenth century there had been visionaries who imagined a United States of Siberia, even allied to those of America. During the Revolution Siberia had made tentative moves towards secession (adopting a flag of forest-green and snow-white), but Lenin quashed them. Since then a new mobility had interchanged its people with those of European Russia, and bound them closer. Now they could not secede from themselves. Bordered as they were by a risen China, patriotism tied even old Siberians to the Moscow they despised. Their independence, if it ever came, would only be wrenched province by province–more economic than political–and few people were interested.