Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 6 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

Snow leopards are internationally endangered as a species. No one really knows how many there are lurking in the mountains of the Gobi-Altai and Khangai ranges, but it is feared that their numbers are declining to the point of no return. They are magnificent creatures, with tails up to three feet long. Mongolia lost a good deal of sympathy in the international conservation world in the mid-1980s when a BBC correspondent from Beijing interviewed the then Environment Minister, who rather proudly declared that anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could come to Mongolia and shoot a snow leopard.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

A camel, pulling a cart, ambled by en route from nowhere to nowhere else as we entered the small hotel building.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The Shah of Iran also enjoyed hunting in Mongolia formerly. His son who was in the army died here in a hunting accident. They made up another story to explain his death, but he fell from his horse and broke his head.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is a big noise in the dinosaur world. Back in the 1920s a young curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York led several very large scientific expeditions to the Mongolian Gobi Desert. His name was Roy Chapman Andrews. He was an explorer and a scientist, a man of bluff, bravado and drawn guns, the only approach possible in a land of nomads and brigands which had just come under Soviet control after a decade of uncertainty ruled by characters such as the Bloody Baron.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Many of the show trials were admitted to have been just that, and a number of the offenders were slowly revealed to be victims of unfortunate events. But that was as far as that first re-examination of the time went. The fact that Choilbalsan was responsible for exterminating fellow Mongolians, most of whom were members of Mongolia’s inadequate reserve of educated and experienced men, was not dwelt on. It is still one of the extraordinary enigmas of modern Mongolian history that an underdeveloped country could rip itself apart in the service of an imported ideology, supporting its brutality with wholly fabricated evidence, and continue the self-deception until the political climate in another country allowed it to begin a partial refurbishment of the truth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia