I am sure that I trudged out onto the crunchy, snowy surface. But, in my memory, I’ve glided out as if I was an ever-widening circle on a white pond in which someone had cast a stone. Mongolia has played tricks on me. Mongolia does that. We walked and walked. Each time I looked back at the gers, it seemed as if I had not walked far… as if I was somehow tethered to the same place… as if I had lived a circular life and returned to the same place in the space of a morning’s walk.

The sun rose from behind the mountains in the distance… the clear light.  There would be a blue sky. The Siberian mastiffs ran alongside of us. They were friendly dogs. They were covered with hoar frost and had constantly wanted into our ger. I had to remind myself that they were strong enough to kill wolves.  Sometimes they had.

All night one of the two men who lived in the camp during the winter, came in and fed our fire. Sometimes it was so hot, we had to open the door to let the icy air in. Still, I slept and slept.  Sometimes I woke up, put on my boots and walked out into the frozen night to see the stars. I had come to this ger in Mongolia. I had wanted to be in the middle of the middle of nowhere… to see the stars… to experience the permafrost as deep as endless contemplation. There were stars, but it was the utter silence that I wrapped around me like a warm blanket. I allowed myself to be that silence… just to be. I didn’t disrupt it. I moved about silently.

In the morning they sent a jeep for us. The man who drove the jeep got into a fight with one of the men from the camp. They hissed and rolled around in the snow like wild animals. Just as quickly the fight was over. There was blood in the snow bank. The dogs played. We left.

Back in Ulaanbaatar, we watched people as we walked… drank coffee. I studied the people in national dress looking for clues. I observed Mongolian women… fierce, proud, stately, elegant, independent. They dressed in long suede and fur coats and strode along the cold streets. I saw a waitress in a red skirt… decided that before I left China I would find one… just to take a little of the quality of Mongolian women with me and make it a little part of my own.

I thought about Kubli Khan. I tried to conjure him as I had walked out on the steppe, as I ate my meat at dinner, before I fell asleep each night. Genghis Khan is a messiah in Mongolia, but it was Kubli Khan who held my interest… Kubli, Genghis’ great grandson.  It was Kubli Khan who had left Mongolia unprotected to live in Beijing when the Mongolians overran China. Sometimes I had sat at the top of Coal Hill in Beijing and looked down at Beihai Lake longing to see an old ruin of his palace… but nothing remained. He had come. He had created splendor, and, then, he had gone… just as I would soon be gone from Mongolia. I would take my small life with me and leave. I would leave the splendor of Mongolia in winter. I would leave on a train… watch the cow’s covered against the cold from the windows as they wandered in the open spaces… as herdsmen rode out with their horses in the frozen whiteness. At night I would pray for dreams of riding the small horses, sleeping in the tall grasslands of summer under the stars.

I would pray for Mongolia’s utter silence again.