There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its architecture and streets which gives this feeling. The poor, and most of the despised foreigners, may or must go on foot, but the true Mongol, male or female, young or old, layman or lama, is by nature a horseman. Even the women, in their incredibly heavy ornaments and cumbersome garments, sit the tight little wooden saddles covered with red cloth as if they were part of the jogging animal beneath them. Children ride as easily and as soon as they can walk. Horsemen are so numerous and so fundamental in the Mongol scheme of things that the pedestrian has only secondary rights in the soft-footed streets of Urga. It is not so much his natural rudeness, nor even his inbred scorn for the horseless, which makes the Mongol so apt to ride down the walker unless the latter sidesteps. Probably it has never occurred to him, any more than to his horse, that all other movable beings should not necessarily always make way for him.
Besides the omnipresent Mongol pony there are strings of haughty camels from, or off again to, the desert; there are oxen and their crudest of two-wheeled carts, and now and again a yak, or a cross between this and the native cattle, identified mainly by its thick bushy tail. It is not only this quaint long-haired animal from the roof of Asia which reminds one of the close relationship between Mongolia and its distant neighbor, Tibet. The lengthwise Tibetan script stands beside the upright Mongolian on the façade of more than one building and on many a monument; not a few of the friendly-looking, darker-tinted natives of the lofty land behind the Himalayas, recognizable also by their different garb, the right arm and shoulder protruding from the cloak, may be met in the market-places; when the visitor begins to poke his nose into religious matters he finds that Tibet is much closer to him than he suspected.
Though there are sights of an inanimate nature in Urga that are well worth seeing, it is especially the unique and striking costumes of her people which cause bitter resentment for the confiscation of a camera. The Mongols are as fond of gaudy colors as the Andean Indians, though somewhat less given to barbaric combinations of them. Of a score of laymen often no two wear robes of the same hue; red, purple, blue, green, and all the combinations and gradations between them may be seen in any gathering outside religious circles. Men who pride themselves on their liberality toward the outside world show a fondness for ugly slouch-hats of a cheap quality that quickly fades to a nondescript hue. But these are so few as to be conspicuous among their orthodox fellows, who display a variety in head-dress which I have not the energy to attempt to describe. Suffice it to say that these are all striking, both in color and form, and that the overwhelming favorite seems to be the pagoda-shaped thing with a ball, generally of colored glass, on top, and side-wings of fur. This is common to both laymen and lamas and is said to have been originally copied from a sacred peak of central Asia.