QI The Book of the Dead

Poles and Hungarians. By 1241 the Golden Horde had reached the gates of Vienna. It felt like the end of civilisation. Then, in what seemed to be a miracle, the Mongols mysteriously melted away. They went home to Mongolia: a quiriltai had been called to choose a successor to Ogedei, who had died in a bingedrinking spree after a hunting expedition. From then on the Mongols became increasingly directionless and needlessly destructive. At the sack of Baghdad in 1258, centuries of priceless Muslim scholarship were burnt and thrown in the Tigris. The Mongol Empire eventually disappeared and left little trace on the cultures it had conquered, but this only bears testimony to the strength of Genghis Khan’s leadership; he was irreplaceable.
    As was the custom among Mongols, he was buried in an unmarked grave. His four legitimate sons were so paranoid about keeping its location secret (to avoid it being despoiled) that their men slaughtered every single person the funeral cortege came across – Marco Polo later claimed this exceeded 20,000 people. Leaving nothing to chance, they then got soldiers to execute theslaves who had excavated the tomb, and then had those soldiers executed in turn. To find it again themselves, they sacrificed a suckling camel in front of its mother and buried it in their father’s tomb. Camels have long memories so, once a year, they released the mother camel, which unerringly returned to the precise position it had last seen its offspring. The only flaw in the plan was that when the old mother camel finally died all knowledge of the location was lost. Despite many false claims Genghis Khan’s grave has never been found.
    As for his permanent legacy, it stretches far beyond the boundaries of Mongolia. Recent genetic studies have found that 8 per cent of the current male population of central Asia are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.

     
    Among the direct descendants of the American naval officer and polar explorer Rear-Admiral Robert E. Peary (1856–1920) are Peary S. Fowler, a female county circuit judge in Florida, and several Inuit.
    Robert Peary believed it was his pre-ordained destiny to be the first man to reach the North Pole. He talked about the Arctic as though it were his own private property, treating other expeditions as infringements and becoming visibly upset when it was pointed out that he was retracing the routes of previous explorers. With astonishing willpower, superhuman powers of endurance and a fanatical ability to ignore pain, he made eight separate attempts on the Pole in ten years, losing all but two of his toes to frostbite.
    Peary decided from an early age that he wanted to be famous. In his twenties, when he was just beginning his career in the navy,he wrote to his mother: ‘Remember, mother, I must have fame, and I cannot reconcile myself to years of commonplace drudgery.’ Robert’s father died suddenly when he was three and his mother Mary’s way of coping with the tragedy was to devote her life to her son: protecting him from the world at every turn, not letting him play with other boys, telling him he was too delicate, making him wear a sun bonnet. It was a deep but suffocating bond: his mother went with him everywhere, even on his honeymoon. Robert Peary married Josephine Diebetsch in 1888. At the time, he had only made one short, failed expedition to Greenland, but that was soon to change. In twenty-three years of marriage, they would spend only three of them together. Nonetheless, Jo would be Peary’s rock: remaining his principle encourager, confidante and public mouthpiece until his death.
    In 1891 she went with him on a reconnaissance mission to Greenland, becoming the world’s first non-native female Arctic explorer. She wrote a surprisingly cheerful journal and the following year gave birth to their first child, Robert Jr. The family lived among the Inuit and Jo thought her hosts the ‘queerest, dirtiest-looking individuals’ she had ever seen, reminding her ‘more of monkeys than human beings’. She was tough, unsentimental and above all, on her husband’s side. Those who crossed the Pearys or let them down were cut off immediately. One young geologist, John Verhoeff, who had put his life savings into the venture, was so traumatised by the way the Pearys treated him that he effectively committed suicide. Disappearing into the snow, alone and against specific instructions, he shouted back to no one in particular: ‘I hate them! Her and him