The Good Shepherd

I pulled myself up onto the cold stone ledge, all the while trying not to exhibit any signs of weakness. This cliff that popped up out of nowhere in the northern wilds of the Gobi Desert was built for long-legged giants, not little humans.

I heard a bleat. A family of goats mocked me. This minor escarpment was certainly no match for their fearless feet.

After catching up to our guide, I listened to his Mongolian narrative and did my best to interpret his hand gestures. He pointed to a dry stone wall, barely shin high but clearly built by human hands. It marked the entrance to a small cave. Although the sunlight was disappearing fast I could make out frozen puddles of candle wax and a lone khadag. Used for ceremonial purposes, these blue topaz scarves provide irregular intervals of vivid colour amid the sea of grassy stubble and sandy soil that washes over much of the desert floor.

The real payoff for climbing to goat-height was the view. Sunset over Asia’s largest desert is breathtaking both in its beauty and its loneliness. Our shepherd guide pulled his robe sleeves taut over his chilled hands and grinned. For all his poverty and isolation, he knew that the view from this remote rock was unrivalled. From this one spot I believed I could see all 500,000 square miles of the Gobi. Close to the horizon a growing line of dust was kicked up by a muted motorbike, like a plane at thirty thousand feet leaving its vapour trail in the sky.

I clambered back down the rock face in the same ungraceful fashion as I had ascended. The Russian Jeep from Ulaanbaatar rattled and rocked its way back to the shepherd’s ger, where a dinner bucket of rice and leathery dried beef awaited our return. Our high-heeled translator, who had sensibly stayed back at the camp, translated the shepherd’s story of the cliff dwelling. Eight years ago a female Lama (a spiritual teacher) brought a group of students to this sacred place for prayer and instruction. They spent forty-eight days undiscovered and undisturbed, leaving behind only the candle remnants and silk khadag.

That night our host laid out bedding across the floor of his ger for our group to sleep on. Outside, the livestock settled down for the night too although not before some lengthy and noisy debate. Above our heads snowflakes flickered in the starlight then floated down through the gap where the canvas fell away from the chimney pipe.

Weighed down by layers of thermals and thickly knotted rugs and landlocked by traveling companions I craned my neck to find the shepherd. Still wearing his robe, he lay on a handful of sheepskins stretched over a row of rough wooden slats. This desert nomad, who lived amongst his goats, his sheep and little else, had stripped his bed bare for us.