The great empty 2

Ulaanbaatar is a Soviet city of cranes, backpackers (see below), nothing-looking shops that turn out to be quite nice supermarkets. Although the winters are ferocious, a freezing welter of pollution, while I was there the city was balmy, pleasant, with no hint of the enormity that surrounds it. Until one night. Then, when I was leaving the guesthouse, there was a portent of what lay beyond the hills, above our heads. Thunder moved constantly in the air and large, isolated drops of rain fell here and there. To the north and the south, above Sukhbaatar Square, dark clouds lay like stones under a stream, but they were falling down. Only to the west was the sky still ripped open with blue but it did not look healthy, while the east was the awful yellow of a sandstorm. For a few minutes, it felt like the colours of the rainbow were going to collide. And at that moment, a twill of sirens, and a crowd was running towards where police cars were mounting onto the square. Within seconds hundreds of Mongolians were there, hastily being pushed back by police in their white shirts, tiny, filthy boys dodging everybody. It was the return of the nine Nadaam standards – replicas of the horse-hair banners carried into battle by Chinggis Khan – which were being carried back to the parliament building. Nine horsemen in the loopy red and blue of the Mongolian honour guard were trotting across the square with a back-up of maybe two dozen more, and behind them came the crowd, jostling, crashing into children, under this topsy-turvy sky. And here’s the thing: they were picking up the horseshit that was tumbling down and they were keeping it. Fact.