…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658.

On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

We were playing under the guava trees. Dust on our knees, sun in our hair. The air smelled of ripe guavas, mogra flowers, incense, and crushed dried leaves on the ground. And here a story was passed from lips to ears as a secret, just as it was passed over hundreds of years, something ancient—something not touched 

“Do you know Genghis Khan?” he whispered, leaning in close, eyes sharp with secrecy.

“No.”

“He could make whole towns disappear. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers, like magic, snap..gone

We were five.

“No”

“Yes.” His voice shook a little, with wonder. “Everything, your family, this garden, our neighbourhood, this city… poof. He just points and if he wishes, it goes away.”

I didn’t laugh. I looked. I looked as I have never looked…from a distance…at everything that I was close to—and imagined them disappearing. I grasped the fragility of my world as only a five year old could. I still remember that I was not afraid. Years later I understood that there is profound clarity in the simple idea that our world is fragile. There is freedom in it, and even peace, but that is a story for another day.

And Genghis Khan has stayed with me ever since right next to this beautiful little story by Borges. 150 words and saying so much, just like what my friend whispered to me. Empires, ideologies, epistemologies, and even human ambition…whatever we build to mirror this world gets buried in it. All what remains is the real, a fragment covering a beggar in the desert. So as a beggar I go to Mongolia wrapped in Baudrillard's dictum.

“It is the map that precedes the territory.”

Like the beggars, we are living in the map, in signs and simulations, referring to other signs and simulations ad nauseam, the reality is inaccessible, the grand truth about the empire will not be discovered…the fragment is all that remains. The course is set.

We’re going to race the wind. That’s what I keep thinking over dinner, during training, while doing the chores. We're going to race the wind, I say to myself. I sit with the glow of a screen, watching fragments of the Gobi March flicker across the screen—bodies running through the steppes. I mouth it again: we’re going to race the wind. Not in that Nike commercial, just do it kinda way. No. This wind is different. Six days without mercy. Salted lips, swollen sun. Dehydrated, a bit delirious, half-holy. The kind of wind that has carried dreams and fears. Smell of ancient times. Mongolian wind. Grass-grit-hymn wind. Wind that remembers the names of horses from the last 10,000 years wind. Wind that doesn’t care if you’re ready wind.

Khar Bukh Balgas—where we first gather. A ruined fortress. Abandoned, like a tooth pulled from history’s mouth. We’ll start there. I picture the stones watching us, unamused. Who are these soft-shoed pilgrims, these salt-sweated runners, speaking in dozens of tongues but all craving joy and suffering?

The course is six days long but centuries wide.
The grasslands will fold us in—green and wide and whispered to by animals.
The hills will unmake us.
The valleys will show us bones they have gathered.
The rivers, if we’re lucky, will cool our feet.
And the nights will be stitched in stars.

They say we’ll sleep in gers—round wool cocoons.
They say temperatures swing like a blade—sunburnt days, frostbitten breath by morning.
They say.
They say.

We will race the wind.
And maybe the wind will let us be at Erdene Zuu Monastery and discover hundred treasures
Feel the presence of Karakorum and Ögedei
Or maybe it’ll take everything—
snap its fingers—
and leave us only with
tattered maps on our bodies,
praying.