Free The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan by P. B. Kerr

university, I wanted to travel somewhere really remote, and Mongolia seemed about as remote as one could get. So I learned the language and read some books. Although to be honest, there’s really just one book that matters when it comes to Mongolia.
    “
The Secret History of the Mongols
is the oldest surviving book about the Mongols, although it is more of a history of the rise and death of Genghis Khan in particular than of the Mongols in general. This is hardly surprising since he’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to the Mongols. It was written sometime near his death in the early thirteenth century. Around A.D. 1227. After he had conquered the largest contiguous empire in recorded history.”
    “What does
contiguous
mean?” asked John.
    “It means ‘connecting without a break,’ ” said Nimrod. “Within a common boundary. The Mongol Empire stretched from the Black Sea to North Korea. It was truly vast. And what’s more, it took a little over seventy years to conquer. Compare that to the Roman Empire and the British Empire, which took much longer to bring together and you can understand just how great a warrior Genghis Khan really was.”
    Philippa drew her uncle aside for a moment so that she could speak without being overheard by the professor and Axel; John followed.
    “Wasn’t he a djinn?” asked Philippa.
    “Part djinn,” said Nimrod. “Almost certainly.”
    “Well, that would help explain why he was such a great warrior, wouldn’t it?”
    “Yes, but the Mongols didn’t know that. You see, Genghis preferred to conquer countries the old-fashioned way. He wanted to measure himself and his own conquests against great heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. And his military conquests would hardly have been the same in his own eyes if he’d relied on djinn power to bring them about. It’s these conquests that
The Secret History
largely deals with.”
    Nimrod strolled nonchalantly back to the professor and Axel to continue with his story.
    “However, no Mongol-language versions of this book —
The Secret History
— have come down to us today and all surviving versions derive from Chinese translations dating from the end of the fourteenth century. Only one of these — itself now lost — mentioned a secret weapon called Fu Xi that the Xi Xia Emperor Xuanzong threatened to deploy against the Mongols when Genghis Khan threatened to invade his country. The Xi Xia Empire was the largest province in ancient China.”
    “Isn’t Fu Xi a kind of dragon?” said Philippa. “In the I Ching?”
    “Very good, Philippa,” said Nimrod. “Yes, that’s quite right.”
    “So was that his weapon? A dragon?”
    “Metaphorically speaking, yes,” said Nimrod. “Which means it was not a real dragon. But as a figure of speech, something that was like a dragon. You see, it was said that with his dragon weapon the Emperor Xuanzong would bring ten thousand days of fire down upon the heads of not onlythe Mongols but the Xi Xia, too. What he called
yi wàng nián de huŏ zâi.
A kind of extreme scorched-earth policy in which one country destroys itself in order to deny it to the enemy.
    “As it happened, the speed of the Mongol cavalry tribesmen was such that the Xia were completely overrun before Xuanzong could deploy his weapon; and the ‘dragon’ fell into the hands of the Mongols. Just like a lot of other weapons — gunpowder and siege engines and better swords. Genghis Khan was fascinated with new weapons, which partly explains his success in conquest. And he was especially interested with this ‘doomsday’ weapon of the Emperor Xuanzong.
    “Having said that, there’s little known for sure about the true nature of the weapon. Some people think it was just gunpowder, which the Mongols took from the Chinese and learned to use, but other contemporary Chinese sources mention a dragon that came out of the Yellow River and which some people have speculated may actually have been a