Mongolia

The dry side of every mountain in Asia.

Mongolia sits on the dry side of every mountain in Asia. The Himalaya, the Altai and the Sayan wring the rain out of every wind before it arrives, and what is left will grow exactly one thing: grass.

Grass cannot be gathered. It can only be followed - walked across by an animal that turns it into milk, meat, felt, fire, and the horse that finds the next pasture. From that single fact come the white tent that comes down in an hour, an empire that crossed a continent without a baggage train, and a capital that began as a monastery that finally stopped walking.

From the shed at the Chinese border where the train is lifted onto new wheels, to the last ger before Russia, Atlas Greaves follows one chain of cause from the shape of the land to a country now meeting the end of its oldest arrangement: half its people stopped on the hills above Ulaanbaatar, under a lid of their own smoke.

Volume Twelve of The Far Countries - one book for every nation on earth, written to be read, not carried.