Adventure Magazine Cover — page 197: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Camp-Fire resembles both Sanscrit and German. Branches of him spread into Kashmir and Tibet, and established civilizations. Was this Tokharian, as we may call him, a nomad out of Northern Europe? Or was he a highly cultured Aryan of Persian ancestry out of the Mesopotamia basin? He seems to have been Ary- an, witness his writing, his weapons. But, —— little is known about the gentleman, though "infor- mation is coming in yearly. Hence the persistent rumors of “white’’ civiliza- tion in ancient Central Asia—the early Chinese references to “blue-eyed barbarians.”” Our legends of “White Huns,” etc. And we hear that Genghis Khan had red hair, and that Kubilai Khan looked like a “white” man. Throwbacks? Well, we have traced this Aryan, horse-riding, Sanscrit-like writing and long-sword-fighting chap back to 1000 s.c. and we aren’t in the least sure how white he was then. Perhaps he was then more white than yellow and he certainly wasn’t negro. But when his children, a couple of thousand years later, came out of Central Asia, our fathers in Eu- rope ‘didn’t see any family resemblance at all—in fact called them devils. ‘They were the Huns, the Alans, the Vandals, etc. And when his grandchildren came out of Cen- tral Asia about twenty-three centuries later, our ancestors called them servants of Antichrist, and spawn of Gog and Magog, and “‘Tatars.”’ And our ancestors ran away from them. And, though there were many Nestorian Christians among the Mon- gols and they seemed really eager to claim the Euro- pean Christians as brothers of a sort, the Pope and all would have nothing to do with them. So our Tokharian’s great-grandchildren became either Mu- hammadan or Buddhist. Enough of this! But you can see why it’s illogi- cal to say, as Legendre hints, that Genghis Khan and his Mongols were ‘‘white’”? men, and, because of that, victorious conquerors. ‘They were victori- ous because they were good fighters, and had remarkable leaders. [us like Prester John. Our medieval ancestors believed from various tales that an enormously wealthy Christian monarch ruled in Central Asia, a white man. The fact of it was that Wang Khan, one of the Keraits (Krits, hence “Christians”) ruled that part _of Central Asia, that he was a Turko-Mongol who wandered about in barbaric splendor and some of his family were Nestorian Christians, and a large part of his people likewise. So Genghis Khan was a Turko-Mongol nomad, whose ancestors probably were Aryan two thousand years before, who had red hair. He wasn’t a white man in the sense that St. Louis of France, who lived about the same generation, was a white man. He was Genghis Khan, and a wonder at that. To yawp that Genghis Khan was a white man, whose children were bastardized by negro captives, and produced the Mongols of today, is simply the bunk.—a. L. As an afterthought, on the Seller-Legendre, yellow race, descent of Mongols matter—the most impor- tant point was left out of my letter. The most im- portant ethnological point, dating back a couple of thousand years. That is, the Mongol-Tatar tribes are not wholly of Turkish extraction. It follows, 195 that they are not wholly of Indo-Scythian descent. I have a lot of respect for the German, Professor Friedrich Hirth. This is what he says of the people between the Sea of Aral and Korea: ‘The Huns should be looked upon as a political and not a racial union. The Huns proper, as the dominant race (about 300 a.p.) were probably of Turkish extrac- tion. So were the Hiung-nu, their predecessors in the east.” (Note the Hiung-nu—Wu-sun, Yue-chi, etc., are the chaps that had Aryan forefathers, may- be.) “But the Hiung-nu as a political power com- prised ancestors of the races which we now separate from them as being of Mongol and Tungusic extrac- tion.” All of which simply means that the Huns who wandered over into Europe were part of a confed- eracy of Central Asia tribes that were variously de- scended—part Indo-Scythian, part Turkish, part aboriginal Siberian. INO’: glancing at a book written by d’Ohsson, who was an authority on the Mongols in his day, we find this: ‘“There were three distinct races, Turks, ,Mongol-Tatars, and Tungusis, or Tchortes (Devils).” This is encouraging, because it fits with what a lot of modern ethnologists say that there are three different races, the Turks of Central Asia, the Mon- gol-Manchu tribes north and west of China proper, and the Esquimaux tribes up under the Arctic circle. Every one disagrees heartily as to whether the American Indian is descended from the Esquimaux (as the Lap and Finn are) or from the Mongol-Tar- tar-Tungusi-Manchu layer, a little way south of the Arctic regions. I asked an ethonologist out here from whom the Mongol-Tartar-Manchu-Tungusi chaps were descended, and he said, “From the Chinese, of course.’”’ No one knows where the Chi- nese came from. So there we are! Authorities say so many different things about the ancestry of the Central Asia people before 200-300 a.p. that a mod- ern story-teller like myself can’t summarize their opinions. ‘THE legends of Central Asia, the Prester John mys- tery, the White Huns, the sand-buried ruins of the Gobi, the unknown Tokharoi and their language, the remnants of Alexander’s Greeks, the Aryans tucked away in the mountains here and there, the red-haired conqueror, Genghis Khan, all these are intensely interesting to us today and we are just beginning to get at the facts behind them. It’s the greatest treasure house of the world, and that’s why men like Stein, Sven Hedin, Koslof, Hoernle, An- drews, Osborne, Huntington, etc., are devoting their lives to the exploration of Central Asia. The se- crets hidden away there loom gigantic. But as to the S.-Legendre (as quoted in the Dear- born Independent) line of argument that there never was a yellow race, and that the armies of Genghis Khan conquered most of the world because they were white men, well, I pass the yellow race on to ethnologists. As to Genghis Khan, it’s not often that a serious-minded fiction writer can say to a scientist, “You’re drawing on your imagination, old chap.” "[ HERE was, among Genghis Khan’s horde, a a kind of affinity for Christians. Remember that after the generation of St. Thomas and St. Andrew, many early Christians penetrated Central COMMICLO© S CO