En Route: Yolyn Am by Truck and Foot

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Photo by Woodlief Thomas.

When he woke up, the train was passing through the Gobi. Parched, yellow-brown weeds covered the rolling steppe, across which enormous, shifting cloud-shadows sprawled. A barbed-wire fence ran alongside the tracks. At the foot of the fence, every several yards or so, sun-bleached bone from rabbits, wolves, horses, and other animals sat silent. Skulls, solitary jawbones, legs, ribcages, all these, but rarely a complete skeleton.

Beyond, the desert looked desolate and free.

He read there was a gorge in the Gobi where there was ice year-round. Yolyn Am, or Vulture’s Mouth, it was called. Ice in the desert, he thought. He would go there.

Dalanzadgad, the Gobi town nearest Yolyn Am, was gray and bleak. It was mid-day, and he saw only a handful of dust-covered people walking along its main street, a street down which few cars drove. Dirty, razor-backed stray dogs roamed. A drunken man, naked to his waist, staggered down the center of the street, stopped a car and yelled Mongolian obscenities into its windshield.

At a store he got a week’s worth of water and noodles, and a little bread. Outside he found an old man with a truck and asked if the man would drive him into the Gobi and return to get him a week later. They agreed on a price, and the old man accepted.

The Soviet-era truck rocked unsteadily across the desert. He said nothing, nor did the old man. All around nothing but blue sky and brown rocks, dirt. The horizon before them seemed always in flight, as if the land underneath was moving backwards, perpetually replacing itself ahead of them.

Finally, a ridge appeared in the distance. It grew nearer and nearer, until they reached a pass. On the other side of the pass, hills, even patches of green. They wove through the hills, bumping back and forth across the rocky terrain, until they pulled off the main road into a valley and stopped.

Still silent, they got out of the truck. He gave the old man half the money and told him he’d see him in a week. He shook the old man’s leathery hand, and the old man got in his truck and left.

It was early morning, not yet hot, when he came upon the entrance of Yolyn Am.

A big grassy clearing, edged by craggy cliffs, grew narrower and narrower until the brown crags ate all the green up and met at the gorge, which was about thirty feet wide and a hundred feet deep.

He walked in and everything darkened with shadow, the air turned colder. And there the ice was. It rose about four feet high on each side of the gorge. He saw it slowly melting, and he imagined this melting happening every day, just as there would be a hardening every night. Over and over again for the past however many thousands of years.

He looked at one of the ice walls. The top and bottom were brown with dirt, but then they settled into a pristine white as he followed them slowly toward the center. Near the center the ice turned light blue before turning bluer and bluer still, until the ice was of the deepest blue imaginable. He stared into the ice, and he wondered how cold it must be inside that blue; how cold it must be inside the heart of that wall of ice.

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