A.  Genghis, to me, is first of all a very clever leader and extraordinarily tough man, a good organizer who was able to really take a mob of people and make a very disciplined army out of it. He always borrowed something from other people whenever he needed to. For example, he borrowed the script of the Uygur people of western China, because Mongols had no written language of their own. And he borrowed tactics; he borrowed the idea of using catapults against cities. He was always picking up ideas. I think the discipline of this man is a big thing.

There’s no question that Genghis killed a lot of people. He used civilians as cannon fodder; he certainly destroyed some cities just to make an example to others—psychological warfare. He was not a very nice man. On the other hand, he was probably not much different from other conquerors of the 13th century except he just did a lot more of it.

It’s interesting: I found an archaeologist at Samarkand who had excavated very extensively there. He estimates that that city had a population of 200,000 and that Genghis probably killed 100,000. And in my mind that’s a much more realistic way of looking at Genghis. He did slaughter a lot of people. It was a terrible thing, but it’s not millions in a city. It may have been cumulatively millions in all of the cities he destroyed.

A.  When I got this assignment, I started doing some reading and fortunately came across a very good professor at Indiana University, Larry Moses, who’s been studying Genghis Khan for 25 years. And Larry was an enormous help. So was a professor at Columbia, Morris Rossabi, who’s a specialist on Kublai Khan and the Chinese period of the Mongols.

When you go into almost any city in the part of the world where Genghis operated—Bukhara, for example, a wonderful old city—you can simply go to the mosque and find the imam. The imam is going to know local history. You’re going to hear the local lore from these people, interesting tales about what happened. Some of it may be true, some of it may be not true, but everybody’s got stories. I think they love to talk about Genghis. I think they’re just as fascinated with him as we are.

A.  I pack a few drugs to keep my intestines functioning, and usually they do function okay. I use a tape recorder in interviews. I talk to my tape recorder when I’m in an airplane or whatnot. That’s basically my way of taking notes. I carry a laptop; I couldn’t live without that laptop. It’s just had its 100,000-mile [161,000-kilometer] checkup. I go back to my hotel at night, and I put my notes in there and that’s salvation to me. My handwriting is really so bad that to use a notebook these days is just not smart, because I can’t read it half the time after I’ve done it.

I take gifts. Lots of people are going to help you along the way; there are going to be museum directors, or religious people, or just ordinary citizens. I take copies of the Geographic. You know, in that part of the world, in isolation, that the magazine is going to be out on somebody’s coffee table, or whatever passes for the coffee table. It’s going to be this wonderful thing that this foreigner left, and it has pictures from all over the world. A pocketknife is a very nice gift for people, especially one with all the gadgets on it.

In terms of clothes, I pack as little as I can. I take one coat, three sets of underwear, three sets of socks; I get it down to just the bare minimum.

Now and then, you’ll come to an old collective farm. When the Soviet Union ran Mongolia, it tried to introduce collective farms, and you can see these buildings. They’re being abandoned, because when the Soviets left, people went right back to being nomadic. They just pulled up and left. They were not interested in living in those houses or trying to grow wheat, which was a marginal thing there anyway.

A.  Mutton. You’re going to have mutton. And it seems like the oldest animals, the ones that have the strongest flavor, are the ones that are preferred, that are killed. And it’s going to come in a big slab on a plate. And you’re going to eat it with your fingers. Sometimes a few vegetables, but not much. Mongols are not much interested in vegetables. Mutton is the meat. I can’t remember eating anything else in Mongolia except mutton.

A.  There’s a wonderful feeling in Mongolia to me because it’s so empty. It’s incredible to stop in Mongolia and just be up on the rim of a saucer and look around and realize that you’re looking at miles and miles of grassland and, off in the distance, some mountains. You can’t see anybody; you can’t see another soul. It’s an exhilarating kind of feeling to me. Maybe way off in the distance you see sort of a stipple of gray coming down a hillside, and it’s a flock of sheep. And then finally you’ll see the shepherd on his little horse, pony, behind, just meandering along. That’s Mongolia.

A.  My biggest worry on this trip was going into Afghanistan. I really wanted to go, because I first went there 30 years ago and I’d been back a few times since. I have a great fascination with Afghanistan, but because of the civil war there’s almost no government. It’s really hard to get into that country. So I went to the United Nations in Pakistan. The UN has a feeding program there providing flour and oil and basic food for Afghan people, but they also have an airplane and it does fly around Afghanistan.

So I arranged to go on that plane. But we’re flying over Afghanistan at 21,000 feet [6,405 meters], and I keep wondering, you know, those mujahidin [resistance fighters] down on the ground—do they have missiles that will really go up to 21,000 feet [6,405 meters] or not? I think my scariest time was probably being in that airplane flying over Afghanistan and just not knowing what would happen. As it turned out, nothing happened at all, and I had no problems at all in Afghanistan.