and we brought together this team, we started packing up.
There’s Fred Hiebert, my partner in this.
We got to this point where we pass this gate.
There was a gate that was guarded
by these Mongolian soldiers, right.
That essentially have been stationed there for 800 years.
I’m serious. The descendants of the Darkhads, you know…
this tribe that had been put in place by Genghis Khan himself
to defend this region, the Ikh Khorig.
This zone that you know
he closed off to anybody outside of the Imperial family.
Marco Polo wrote about this place, right.
The history of the Mongols was written by
historians like Rashid Al-Din, from the 17th century.
He wrote about this place.
They wanted to go here but they couldn’t.
And for the first time, I am entering into this zone.
I am on that journey.
We take that data, we had the GPS points now
where the crowd had converged.
We could mathematically calculate
where everybody had converged and clustered.
And we started looking and you can
see where people had converged.
These little clusters of tags would result in
you know, us finding things
like this huge Khirigsur, which had been here for 3,000 years!
We started scanning this region.
This is a magnetometer and you walk
back and forth in these lines.
And you add up all this data.
And of course the sheep come after you
every once in a while.
And the result is you create these maps of
what’s under the sub-surface, right.
There is some metal underneath this rectangular mound.
We don’t really know what it was but it wasn’t–
we don’t believe it was, you know
what we were really looking for.
So we push north, we push deeper
into this region of this Ikh Khorig
towards this mountain, right.
This place that legend has it Genghis Khan went to
every time he went to war, right.
He’d go there and pray to Tengri and say
well, you know, “Am I okay here”.
Then he would go out and wage war.
We would head out every single day
up into the upper reaches of this mountain range
to hit all of the different peaks
to try to see what people were tagging.
We’d fly these drones across this whole region
with cameras on them to look and see
if we could see things that…
you know, were little higher resolution
than what we were seeing from space.
We’re moving down off the side of this mountain and
literally this storm just starts descending all around us.
You can see this big rain cloud coming at us.
Among it was lightning, and thunder, and wind
and it started blowing all around us at this rate
which was, I mean, really terrifying.
Cause there’s no trees around you to duck into.
We had to move almost a mile down off this ridge
down to those trees, just to try to get down below the tree line
get down into the undercut but we’re so exposed, and
we had these big magnetometers hanging off of our back.
We ran, we ran and the wind started blowing.
You know, I mean, it started gushing around us and
I mean, we couldn’t even hear each other.
And as we were running down off the side of this mountain
down the south-east flank of that mountain
what would be the sunny side of that mountain
what the secret history the Mongols had described as being
where Genghis Khan should be buried
all these trees started falling down around us.
( crashing sounds )
And, you know, it was really…
it was almost like…
the mountain was showing us
its underbelly, it was showing us a window
into the sub-surface, you know.
And it would be in the roots of one of those trees
that my life would really change.
My geologist turns to me and shows me this thing
and I’m looking at it, just in the roots of this tree.
And it’s this lion face.
We made a plan, as we were walking around
we’re like literally walking around across
across this grass and the earth is crunching underneath me.
I could feel, I could feel like I was stepping on something.
I could hear it crunching underneath me
like ( crunching sounds )
And we agreed that it was okay to just look under the grass
like it was a rug, you know
we’d just stare barely underneath this.
You know, this thing, we’d look underneath the grass.
And, we were standing on a roof.
And as you look at these pieces that are in this sub-surface
it’s this part of this temple.
We started finding horse bones, tons of horse bones.
We sent this data out to get Radiocarbon dated
and it comes back…
at exactly our sweet spot, right.
Somewhere between 500 and 800 years old.
Genghis Khan died in 1227, about 800 years ago.
So, Fred and I, we started making a plan.
And we started mapping out this region
with whatever tools we could find.
We used cameras on our drones and we created this
3-D photogrammetry mapper of the surface.
And we started using things like ground penetrating radar.
This is an 18–
actually an eight-antenna array radar system.
We’re doing a virtual dig.
We’re trying to recreate the unknown, in virtual reality
because we can’t actually go there
and pull up the earth, right.
But, I feel like…
I didn’t really even have to look for this artifact.
I just had to look at what was happening around me
and realize that the people around me were
they were telling me that the history was still alive
the artifact was in the experience.
Did we find the tomb or did each individual in us
each individual in this group find something in themselves?
”
Be First to Comment