Mongolian Adventure: 1920s Danger and Escape Among the Mounted Nomads of Central Asia (Equestrian Travel Classics)

It was the kind of country that sheltered nomads and harbored renegades. It was wild. It free. It was Mongolia in the early 1920s, that legendary magnet for foot-loose sons of the horizon like Henning Haslund. Descended from a 19th Century Danish explorer, when young Haslund reached Mongolia in 1923 he discovered a lost equestrian world left largely untouched since the Middle Ages. Cruel Buriat warlords ruled a vast grass covered kingdom inhabited by freedom-loving Mongols, tight-lipped Russian mercenaries and the human riff-raff of a dozen countries. It was a world where traditions of poetry and hospitality ran side by side with extreme cruelty. Into this realm of horsemen rode Haslund Henning. He originally planned to journey to Mongolia to help other Danes set up an agricultural cooperative. Yet the dust of the steppes got into his blood. There was always some reason not to return to the boring safety of Europe, some horse to ride, some legend to explore. “Mongolian Adventure” is Haslund’s story of these early adventures. It is an epic tale inhabited by a cast of characters no longer present in this lackluster world, shamans who set themselves on fire, rebel leaders who sacked towns, and wild horsemen whose ancestors conquered the world. Amply illustrated, it remains a classic of equestrian adventure.