Herding the iron yak.

Writing challenge 27th July.
Location - Outer Mongolia
Object - Black umbrella
Genre - Steam punk

Herding the iron yak.

I am worried, very worried. The Winter is passing into Spring and the snows are melting fast. There wasn’t much snow up here this year. This means there will not be much melt water and so there will be a shortage of grazing for my yaks and horses. If my yaks don’t have enough grazing, their milk will dry up and eventually they will die. That means we will eat them but what will we live on when that meat is gone? We will also die and our bones will join the others bleaching up here in the harsh sun and thin air.

      I leave my wife Zaya and children Genghis and little Khulan in our yurt, which I have set up in the best grazing area I can find. I take my best horse, Sodbileg, and set off on the long trip to the city, Ulaanbaatar. It is hell on earth for me. Everything is cold and hard, with concrete and people everywhere. There are very few animals so it takes me some time to find someone to buy my horse at a good price.

      It also takes me a long time to find the job centre. The clerk looks at me and sniggered. ‘We don’t get much call for yak herders here,’ he says.

      ‘My name is Genghis and at least I can herd more than a desk,’ I say. ‘How much milk does it give you a day and can you kill and eat it if you need to?’ There are a few chuckles behind me in the queue. I have made some friends but on the wrong side of the counter.

      ‘My name is Genghis too. Why don’t you go and ask if they want any engine drivers down at the locomotive depot?’ suggests my desk jockey friend. ‘You could fit it with a harness and stop and milk it now and again.’ The queue erupts with laughter again but not with me this time.

      ‘If you are Genghis Two, I am Genghis One,’ I retort, as I leave and go to try and find the loco depot. One of my new friends, from the queue, Genghis, stops me and asks if I know what I am doing.

      ‘No, but I am desperate, I need to get a job to earn some money to buy food for my family.’

      ‘OK, come with me then, I am an engine driver, I’ll introduce you to a guy I know, called Ghengis. He’ll give you a job if he thinks you will be good at it.

      As we walked through the streets of Ulaanbaatar, my new found friend explained what had been happening.

‘The Chinese have been investing heavily in Mongolia and have laid a railway track from Ulaanbaatar to Lhasa, a distance of about 2,400 kilometeres. To achieve a 50% saving on steel required for the track and because not many trees grow around here to provide the timber for the sleepers, they used the monorail, gyro stabilised system, that was invented by Louis Brennan in the early part of the twentieth century and further developed by Andrew Cadwith in Derby, England in the twenty first. The big benefit of this system, apart from the steel saving of course, is that the train will automatically bank to the inside of a curve so that passengers don’t notice any bends. This happens because of the laws of gyroscopic precession that you will, of course, be fully aware of.

      There was also a problem with supplying coal and water for the engine across the high plains of Mongolia so it was decided to not use a steam engine  but the fusion reactor system recently fully deveoped and proven at the JET laboratories in Culham, England. This drives a generator to provide power to the electric motors fitted to each of the wheels. These are also, of course, used for regenerative braking.

      This design would therefore provide smooth, fast transport across the distance between the two capital cities. It requires no fuel or water en route and it provides a comfortable ride because of the automatic tilting on bends. A great advance on the old Pendolino system.

      Everybody was happy, including the Chinese investors as the capital cost had been minimised. The system was built over the last ten years, using migrant Mongolian labour who set up works camps along the line as it progressed across the plain.

      It was opened with a lot of publicity to show that the Chinese led the world in massive engineering projects and in being a benign and developing influence on their empire – sorry, ‘colleague states’.

      Then the problems started.

      You will know that the high plains of Mongolia overlie iron-rich rocks. The grass that grows on the ferruginous soils is therefore high in iron and so the grazing yaks take in iron with the grass they feed on. Your knowledge of biochemistry will tell you, of course, that the iron will be chelated in the chitin of the hooves as magnetite. This results in the yaks all having magnetic hooves. This has not been a problem for many years, the yak herders just used them as compasses which resulted in the myth that yak herders never get lost.

      During the spring and autumn migrations to and from the mountain summer pastures, the yak herds have to cross the newly laid mono rails and some became stuck fast to the rail by their magnetic hooves.

      The trains were very fast and did not have time to stop and remove the yaks from the line so just crashed into them. You remember the old rhythmic noise you used to hear on trains before the days of continuously welded rails – the ‘clickety clack’ as the wheels rolled over the joints? This has now changed to ‘yackety yak’ as the train ploughs through the unfortunate animals. The yak herders claimed compensation of course. They had to validate their claim by handing in the yak hooves so there was soon a thriving black yak market in Ulaanbaatar for yak hooves. The Chinese had no use for the hooves so they slung them in a skip at the back of the government office, once a claim had been processed. Genghis, who had the contract for emptying skips – ‘Chinese takeaway’, as he was known around the town, was soon a very rich man. It is estimated that some hooves had been through the system more than fifty times before the Chinese government officials clicked on to the scam.

      The sun was very hot on the high plains so a sun shade had to be retro fitted to the passenger cars on the train. It only covered part of the train so was called a penumbrella.

      With their fusion power source and super cooled electric motors on each wheeel, the trains were extremely fast. They managed to get up to a fairly constant cruising speed of 500 kph. This is admittedly some 70kph slower than the French AGV record but it still caused the same problems in the tunnels under the moutain ranges. The train acts like a piston in a cylinder and so produces a shock wave which runs ahead of the train at the speed of sound and produces a double sonic boom as it leaves the tunnel. Comedians in the small towns near the tunnel exits started timing their jokes such that a punch line would be followed by a ‘boom, boom’ from the advancing train.

      After investing in such a grand project there was no money left so the Project Manager, Liam Genghis, decided to not build platforms at the very few stations across the high plains so, for health and safety reasons, the driver has to make an announcement at each stop, ‘Please mind the steppe’.

      Here we are at the locomotive depot. I’ll leave you to it now as I need to get back to the job centre to see if there are any better paying jobs at the airport they are starting to build in a couple of weeks time.

      Good luck and safe driving!’

      ‘Thanks, Genghis, maybe see you on the train I’m driving.’

I walk into the depot, stop at the reception desk and asked to see Genghis.

      ‘Whom shall I say wants to see him?’ asks the receptionist.

      ‘Tell him that my name is Genghis and that a friend of his, Genghis, sent me,’

He picks up the ‘phone on the desk.

      ‘Hello Genghis, it’s Genghis here on the front desk. A yak herder called Genghis has come to see you, he says a friend of yours, callled Genghis, sent him to see if you have any loco driving jobs.’

      ‘OK, thanks Genghis, send him in, we do need someone as Genghis has just handed his notice in. Could you delete him from the employee spreadsheet please?’

      ‘OK. Err drat and double drat,’ said Genghis. ‘I selected ‘Genghis’ and I have just sacked 97.5%  of our employees.’

      ‘Never happened to me when I was herding yaks,’ says I.

The Giant's Causeway.

The Giant’s Causeway and the National Trust.

You may have seen on the news that the National Trust is having to justify including the ‘young earth’ creationist view of the origin of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, in its display in the new visitor centre.

      There are many myths associated with this spectacular sight of myriad hexagonal rock columns on the coast of Antrim.  I thought I would put the record straight and tell you the real story of their origins to save you from any confusion you may be feeling.

      Firstly, Flynn M’Kool, the giant, did not exist and therefore could not have thrown rocks into the sea to make a causeway across to Scotland. That’s the end of that one. Next you will be telling me that you believe in the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas and Evolution!

      Secondly, it is obviously ridiculous that rocks melted and were thrown up from under the surface of the Earth some sixty million years ago. That was before my Grandad was born so clearly cannot be true. Have you ever tried melting a rock? Just get your cigarette lighter out and try it if you don’t believe me. Then, you may ask, who sandpapered them into their present hexagonal shape – Flynn M’Kool again? I’ve already told you that he never existed.

      Thirdly the ‘young Earth’ creationists say that there was an underwater eruption a few  years ago. The Earth is only 6,000 years old so it must have happened fairly recently. This is just as unlikely as the previous theory as again the rocks would have to be melted so we are back to the cigarette lighter problem. This time it is even more difficult to believe, have you ever tried lighting a cigarette under water?

      Now we have disposed of all those silly myths, I can tell you real story. My Grandad told me this so it must be true.

      It all happened when he was just a young lad. People in Northern Ireland kept pandas as pets but they had to build fences to keep them safe in their back gardens or the dinosaurs would get in and eat them. ‘Dinosaurs were mostly herbivores,’ I hear you cry? Yes, I know, but Pandas don’t eat meat so they tasted like cabbage to the dinos.

      You will probably know that pandas only eat bamboo. In fact they prefer the young growing shoots, or Panda Growth Tips as they are known to biologists.

      My Grandad well remembers the year when there was a very cold winter followed by a wet spring and cool summer. ( He can’t remember what he had for breakfast yesterday tho’.) This combination meant that the bamboo harvest failed and a panda famine loomed.

      Pandas are resourceful bears so they used their sharp claws to climb the older plants in the bamboo forests of Counties Down and Antrim to get at the tender young branches at the top. Everyone thought they were climbing up to harvest the twigs but it turned out that they were only taking the pith. This saved the lives of about half of the pandas, who then survived through the following winter until the new growth started in the following spring.

      As they slid back down the trunks, their sharp claws wore away the bamboo of the circular trunks, forming a hexagonal cross section.

      You won’t see any pandas in Northern Ireland now as the bamboo forests were killed off by the climate change that we all know about. The pandas emigrated to China on a pandle steamer.

      All that survives to this day are the fossilised trunks of the relict bamboo forest on the North Antrim coast with those peculiar unexplained, until now, hexagonal columns.

      When you go to the National Trust visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway, I am quite happy for you to discuss this account with the National Trust ranger there. Ask him about the origins of the fossil forest you can see out of the window.

      I’ll send this history to the NT and see if they agree to give it equal prominence with the nonsense they have displayed already – 60 million years, giants, melting rocks? Pah!

      What happened to the dinosaurs, I hear you ask. They got very hungry because there were no pandas to eat so they all trooped across the Giant’s Causeway one moonlit night and found their way to Inverness where they learned to swim. I think you know the rest.

      So there you have it, the true story all laid out in black and white – just like the pandas. If you don’t believe it, just go and talk to my Grandad, but please don’t ask him about his breakfast.