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Title: Through Russian Central Asia

Author: Stephen Graham

Release date: April 27, 2022 [eBook #67938]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Cassell and Company, Ltd, 1916

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was created from images of public domain material made available by the University of Toronto Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA ***





THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA


[Illustration: THE TOMB OF TIMOUR]




  Through Russian
  Central Asia

  By
  STEPHEN GRAHAM

  With Photogravure and many
  Black-and-White Illustrations
  from Original Photographs

  Cassell and Company, Ltd
  London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
  1916




Contents


                                                             PAGE

      INTRODUCTION                                             ix

   1. LEAVING VLADIKAVKAZ                                       1

   2. WHERE THE DESERT BLOSSOMS                                15

   3. WONDERFUL BOKHARA                                        24

   4. MOHAMMEDAN CITIES AND MOHAMMEDANISM                      35

   5. THE HISTORY OF THE TRIBES                                44

   6. TO TASHKENT                                              55

   7. THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST                                     63

   8. ON THE ROAD                                              72

   9. THE PIONEERS                                            134

  10. FELLOW-TRAVELLERS                                       156

  11. ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER                                 173

  12. “MIDSUMMER NIGHT AMONG THE TENT-DWELLERS”               184

  13. OVER THE SIBERIAN BORDER                                203

  14. ON THE IRTISH                                           210

  15. THE COUNTRY OF THE MARAL                                218

  16. THE DECLARATION OF WAR                                  228


  APPENDICES

   1. RUSSIA AND INDIA AND THE PROSPECTS OF ANGLO-RUSSIAN
        FRIENDSHIP                                            237

   2. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE               249

     INDEX                                                    271




List of Illustrations


  THE TOMB OF TIMOUR                      _Photogravure Frontispiece_

                                                          FACING PAGE

  THE CENTRAL ASIAN RAILWAY: NEARING THE OXUS                      18

  THE CENTRAL ASIAN DESERT                                         20

  BOKHARA: THE ESCORT OF A MAGISTRATE                              28

  OUTSIDE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE MOSQUES                    32

  A HOLIDAY AT SAMARKAND: BOYS OF THE MILITARY SCHOOL
    PLAYING AMONG THE RUINS OF THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE               36

  MOHAMMEDAN TOMBS AND RUINS IN THE YOUNGEST OF THE
    RUSSIAN COLONIES                                               40

  A MOHAMMEDAN FESTIVAL AT SAMARKAND--THE HOUR OF PRAYER           48

  CENTRAL ASIAN JEWESSES                                           50

  FINE-LOOKING SARTS IN OLD TASHKENT                               56

  OUTSIDE A GERMAN SHOP IN OLD TASHKENT                            58

  TASHKENT: A FOOTBALL MATCH AT THE COLLEGE                        60

  PLEASANT COUNTRY OUTSIDE TASHKENT                                64

  HEARTY SHEPHERDS: ALL KIRGHIZ                                    66

  THE RUSSIAN TEACHER: A NATIVE SCHOOL IN TASHKENT                 68

  A KIRGHIZ GRANDMOTHER: VENDOR OF _Koumis_                        74

  RUSSIANS AND KIRGHIZ LIVING SIDE BY SIDE AT THE FOOT
    OF THE MOUNTAINS                                               76

  A TENT OF LONELY NOMADS ON A SUMMER PASTURE IN CENTRAL ASIA      80

  SARTS SELLING BREAD: THE _Lepeshka_ STALL                        84

  THE NATIVE ORCHESTRA: SEE THE MEN WITH THE TEN-FOOT HORNS,
    “TRUMPETS OF JERICHO,” AS THE RUSSIANS CALL THEM              104

  “PAST THE RUINS OF ANCIENT TOWERS”                              120

  A SETTLED KIRGHIZ: ONE OF THE CHARACTERS OF PISHPEK             130

  THE IRRIGATED DESERT--AN EMBLEM OF RUSSIAN COLONISATION
    IN CENTRAL ASIA                                               136

  THE SHADY VILLAGE STREET--ONE LONG LINE OF WILLOWS AND
    POPLARS                                                       152

  THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA AT VERNEY--AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE
    OF 1887                                                       158

  VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING                                   168

  CHINESE PRAYING-HOUSE AT DJARKENT                               178

  LEPERS IN A FRONTIER TOWN                                       180

  A PATRIARCHAL KIRGHIZ FAMILY                                    186

  SHEEP-SHEARING OUTSIDE THE TENT HOME                            194

  IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT             198

  FOUR WIVES OF A RICH KIRGHIZ                                    205

  AT A KIRGHIZ FUNERAL                                            207

  KIRGHIZ PRAYING                                                 215

  IN THE ALTAI: KIRGHIZ TOMBS NEAR MEDVEDKA                       222

  ALTAISKA _Stanitsa_: VIEW OF MOUNT BIELUKHA                     230

  MOBILISATION DAY ON THE ALTAI: THE VILLAGE EMPTIED
    OF ITS FOLK                                                   232

  MAP OF ROUTE TAKEN BY AUTHOR                                    270




Introduction


The journey recorded in these pages was made in the summer before the
great war, and although the record of my impressions and the story of
my adventures were fully written in my road diary and in the articles
I sent to _The Times_, I had thought to postpone issuing my book to
some quieter moment beyond the war. But the days go on, and we are
getting accustomed to live in a state of war; war has almost become
a normal condition of existence. At first we could do nothing but
consider the facts of the great quarrel of nations and the exploits of
the armies. War for the moment seemed to be our life, our culture, and
our religion. But things have changed. War started by concentrating
us and making us narrow, but now it is giving us greater breadth. We
have become more interested in the home life of our Allies, in the
“after-the-war” prospects of Europe, in the future of our own British
Empire and of the wide world generally. The war has given us a larger
consciousness, and we have become, as some say, “Continental.” In any
case, we are much less insular. France and Russia have become real
places to the man in the street, and the account he gives of them is
more credible. Even our country labourer can say where Gallipoli is,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Salonica, Bulgaria, Serbia, though, indeed, I have
frequently heard the latter spoken of as Siberia. “My son’s gone to
Siberia,” says the countryman; “it’s a cold place.” Our imagination
ranges farther afield, and young men of all classes think of making
far travels when the war is over. We are not less interested in other
things, but more; only less interested in the old suffocating business
and industrial life of the time before the war, of the stuffy rooms,
the circumscribed horizons, the dull grind. All eyes are opened wider,
all hearts have greater hopes, and that which dares in us dares more.
We are reading more, reading better, and, among other matters, are
thinking more of foreign countries, empires, far-away climes. The
war, bringing so many nations together, has touched imaginations. It
has mixed our themes of conversations and enriched our life with new
colours, new ideas. So, perhaps, the story of this journey and my
impressions of an interesting but remote portion of the Tsar’s Empire
will not come amiss just now. Moreover, during the war many problems
have become clearer, especially those of the British Empire, clearer,
but none the less unsolved, and I feel that a study of a vast stretch
of the Russian Empire, and of its problems and its prospective future,
cannot but be helpful.

Among the letters sent me care of _The Times_ there is one written
about an article which has become a chapter in this book:

  “Since I was a child and steeped myself in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ I
  have never been so enthralled as I was by an article of yours called
  ‘Towards Turkestan,’ which appeared in _The Times_ long since, as
  it seems now (last May?). I am an old, tired recluse. I have been
  reading for over sixty years. I’m very much extinct, but my desert
  also blossomed with your roses.

  “Charm _inexpressible_ breathed from the roses (I think they must
  have been the black-red sort). Strange figures--rich garments,
  all solemnised by, as it were, a twilight glamour made of magical
  influences. All so real, yet remote. I repeat, I have never been
  taken away so far since I was a child. There was another article
  which I cut out and lost ... but I did not prize it as I did the
  Turkestan article, where figures both bizarre and dignified greeted
  you and bade you farewell with roses. And sunset steeps them in a
  golden haze. And they still move there whilst the traveller who has
  spell-bound them in his writing has gone on his way....”

I have printed this letter because it was sweet to have it, and it
touched me. May the roses bloom again!

I am indebted to the Editors of _The Times_ and _Country Life_ for
permission to republish portions of this book previously printed in
their columns, and to _Country Life_ for permission to republish
photographs. For these photographs, except those relating to the
Altai, I am chiefly indebted to the professor of French at Tashkent
Military School and to M. Drampof, of Pishpek. Special permission has
to be obtained to enter Russian Central Asia, and, as I was going on
foot, the possession of a camera might have led to the suspicion of
military spying. So I had my camera sent to Semipalatinsk, which is in
Siberia, and only used it on the Siberian part of my journey. My thanks
are also due to Mr. Wilton, the courteous and able correspondent of
_The Times_ at Petrograd, who obtained for me my permit for travel in
Russian Central Asia.

                                                         STEPHEN GRAHAM.




Through Russian Central Asia




I

LEAVING VLADIKAVKAZ


In the early spring of 1914 I walked once more to the Kazbek mountain.
It was really too early for tramping, too cold, but it was on this
journey that I decided what my summer should be. Once you have become
the companion of the road, it calls you and calls you again. Even in
winter, when you have to walk briskly all day, and there is no sitting
on any bank of earth or fallen tree to write a fragment or rest, and
when there is no sleeping out, but only the prospect of freezing at
some wretched coffee-house or inn, the road still lies outside the door
of your house full of charm and mystery. You want to know where the
roads lead to, and what may be on them beyond the faint horizon’s line.

So it is March, and I am walking out from Vladikavkaz on the Georgian
road, and only on a four days’ journey--to the Kazbek mountain and
back. Indeed, the road beyond is probably choked with snow, and there
is no further progress. But I shall see how the year stands on the
Caucasus.

The stillness of the morning--a circumambient silence. A consciousness
of the silence in the deep of space. Three miles of level highway
stretch straight and brown from the city on the steppes to the dark,
blank wall of the mountains. Beyond the black wall and above it are
the snow-mantled superior ranges, and above all, almost melting into
the deep blue of the Caucasian sky, the glimmering, icy-wet slopes
of the dome of the Kazbek. The sun presides over the day, and as a
personal token burns the brow, even though the feet tread on patches of
crisp snow on the yellow-green banks of the moor. No lizards basking
in the sun, no insects on the wing, no flowers--not a speedwell,
not a cowslip, not a snowdrop. Only little flocks of siskins rising
unexpectedly from sun-bathed hollows like so many fat grasshoppers.
Only an occasional crazy brown leaf that scampers over the withered
fallen grass. There is vapour over the plumage-like woods on the hills,
but no birds are singing. Nature can almost be described in negation,
she shows so little of her glory; yet she makes the heart ache the more.

Persian stone-breakers, hammer in hand, sitting on mats by the side
of the heaps of rocks; primitive carts lumbering with their loads
of faggots or maize-straw or ice; horsemen like centaurs because of
their great black capes joining their head and shoulders to little
Caucasian horses--that is all the life at this season of the year of
the one great highway over the mountains, the great military road
from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis--no motor-cars, no trams, no light-rolling
carriages with gentry in them, no trains.

Stopping at a sunny mound to have lunch, you hear from a hundred
yards away the River Terek like the sound of a wind in the forest,
the impetuous stream rushing between white crusts of frozen foam and
washing greenly against ice-crowned boulders. For sixty miles the road
is that of the valley of the Terek. It passes the Redant and then
becomes the visible companion of the river, winding with it among the
primeval grandeur of its rocks. The Kazbek begins to disappear, hidden
by its barrier cliffs--its Kremlin; but for a mile or so its snowy cap
remains in sight over the great lopsided, jagged crags. The blue smokes
of Balta and red-roofed nestling Dolinadalin rise into the afternoon
sky. The road enters the chilling shadow of the Gorge of Jerakhof, and
you look back regretfully on the red sunlit strand behind you. The
white-framed Terek moves in a grand curve through a broad wilderness
of stones and snow. An icy mountain draught creeps from the cleft in
the grey cold rocks. On the deserted road the telegraph poles and wires
assume that sinister expression which they have in vast and lonely
mountain tracts. The opening by which you entered the gorge becomes
a purple triangle, and far above you and behind you glimmers the
tobacco-coloured sunlit Table Mountain.

The road becomes narrower: on the one hand the river roars among
ice-mantled rocks, on the other the black silt continually trickles and
whispers. The faint crimson of sunset lights the wan towers of Fortoug,
and then one by one the yellow stars come out like lamps over the
mountain walls.

There are three inns between Vladikavkaz and the Kazbek mountain. I
stayed at the second, at Larse, and made my supper with some thirty
Georgians, Ossetines, and Russians, workmen on the road and chance
travellers. Here I heard many rumours of the commercial destiny of the
military road, of the thirty-verst tunnel that it is necessary to make,
of the Englishman named Stewart, the “Boss of the Terek”--_Khosaïn
Tereka_--who has the contract to supply the whole of the Caucasus with
electricity, who will or will not make an electric power station in the
shadow of Queen Tamara’s castle, needing an artificial waterfall three
hundred sazhens high.

“But the project has grown cold,” said I.

“It will come to nothing,” say the hillmen; “for ten years people have
been talking of such things, but nothing has changed except that we
have got poorer.”

But the host is an optimist. “It will come. There will be a tramway
from the city to the Kazbek. The trams will go past my door. We shall
have electric light and electric cooking, and will become rich.”

We remained all thirty in one room all night--square-faced, gentle,
sociable Russians in blouses; tall, Roman-looking Georgians and
Ossetines in long cloaks, with daggers at their tight waists, with
high sheepskin hats on their heads. They ate voraciously bread and
cheese and black pigs’-liver, putting the waste ends when they had
finished into the bags of their winter hoods--astonishing people to
look at, these Caucasians; though half-starved, yet of great stature
and iron strength, with fine, broad-topped, intelligent heads, deeply
lined, cunning brows, long, beak-like, aquiline noses. They would make
splendid soldiers--but not so good “soldiers of industry.” They are
a people who often fail when they go to America. They all knew men
who had gone there and had returned with stories of unemployment or
exploitation. Scarcely one of them had a good word to say of America.
They all, however, looked forward to the time when the Caucasus would
be developed on American lines and hum with Western prosperity. We
slept on the tables of the inn, on the bar, in the embrasures of the
windows, on the forms, on sacking on the floor--the kerosene lamp was
turned low, and nearly everyone snored.

We were all up before dawn, and I accompanied an Ossetine miller who
was in search of flint for his mill, and we entered the Gorge of
Dariel whilst the stars were dim in the sky. It was a sharp wintry
morning, and as the road led ever upward and became ever narrower,
the wind was piercing. The leaking rocks of summer where often I had
made my morning tea were now grown old in the winter, and had wisps
of grey hair hanging down--yard-long icicles and thick tangles of
ice. The precipitously falling streams and waterfalls were ice-marble
stepping-stones from the Terek to the mountain-top.

We entered the gorge by the little red bridge which, like a brace,
unites the two sides of the river at its narrowest point. The stars
disappeared. Somewhere the sun was rising, but his light was only in
the sky so far above. We beheld the green, primeval ruin of Nature,
the red-brown, grey, and green boulders of Dariel in varied immensity
and diversity of shape, the vast shingly, boulder-strewn wastes, the
adamantine shoulders of porphyry, the cold, ponderous immensities of
rock held over the daring little road, the river eddies springing like
tigers over the central ledges between fastnesses of ice.

My Ossetine picked up various stones and struck them with his dagger
to see how well they sparked, and, having apparently found what he
wanted, accepted a lift in an ox-cart and returned back to the inn
at Larse. Perhaps it was too cold for him. I walked up to the square
cliff of Tamara and the tooth of the wall of the ancient castle where
Queen Tamara treacherously entertained strangers, making love to them
and feasting them, and then having them murdered; the castle where the
devil once arrived in the guise of such an unlucky wanderer--the scene
of the story of Lermontof’s “Demon.”

This was once the frontier of Asia, and the romantic country of a
fine fighting people. To this day, despite railway projects and the
hope that the river may provide the Caucasus with electricity, Queen
Tamara’s castle remains almost the newest thing. It is modern beside
the antiquity and majesty of the ruin of Nature. Here the real world
seems to jut out through the green turf and flower-carpeted earth into
the light of day, striking us awfully, like the apparition of God the
Father coming up out of the bowers of Eden. You feel yourself in the
presence of something even older than mankind itself, and you wonder
what differences you would note if, with the goloshes of Fortune on
your feet, you could be transported back a thousand years, a second
thousand, a third thousand, and so on. What did the Ancients make of
this? They held that it was to the Kazbek mountain that Prometheus was
bound as a punishment for stealing fire from heaven. Was that what they
said when they first came fearfully through and discovered the plains
of the North?

An ancient way! And then at the turn of it, the gate to the “Kremlin”
of Dariel, and the towering Kazbek lifting itself to the sky within.
Here is truly one of the most wonderful and romantic regions in the
world. But it was not to see the Kazbek that I made this journey, but
to find again a certain cave where years ago I found my companion on
the road, the place where we lived and slept by the side of the river.
It was there as I left it, familiar, calm, by the side of the running
river, glittering in the noon-day sun, and the granite boulders held
threads of ice and ice-pearls--the ear-rings of the rocks. And I would
have liked to meet my companion again. But Heaven knew under what part
of its canopy the tramp was wandering then. I felt a home-sickness to
be tramping again, and I decided that as soon as the snow and ice had
gone I would take to the road.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so, the season having changed, and the cold winds and rains of
spring giving way to summer, I take the road once more into new
country. The season really changes when it is possible to sleep
comfortably out of doors. This year I go into the depths of the Russian
East, and, besides taking the adventures of the road, continue my
study of Easternism and Westernism in the Tsar’s Empire. I travel by
train to Tashkent, the limit of the railway, and then take the road,
with my pack on my back, through the deserts of Sirdaria and the Land
of the Seven Rivers towards the limits of Chinese Tartary and Pamir,
then along the Chinese frontier, north to the Altai mountains and the
steppes of Southern Siberia. This is a long, new journey--new for
English experience--because, until our entente with Russia, mutual
jealousy about the Indian frontier made it extremely difficult for
the Russian Government to permit observant and adventurous Englishmen
to wander about as I intend to do. Indeed, even now I may be stopped
and turned back from some forlorn spot seven or eight hundred miles
from a railway station, and then, perhaps, silence may engulf my
correspondence for a time. All things may happen; my papers may be
confiscated or lost in the post, or my progress may be stopped by
various accidents. In any case, I have official permission for my
journey, and the weather is fine.

The old grandmother baked me a box of sweet cheesecakes (_vatrushki_),
Vassily Vassilitch brought me fruit and chocolate, another friend
brought three dozen cabbage pies--thus one always starts out for the
wilderness. We assembled in the grandmother’s sitting-room to say
good-bye. I am to beware of earthquakes, of snakes, of having much
money on my person, of being bitten by scorpions, of tigers, wolves,
bears, of occult experiences.

“It is occult country,” said G----, teacher of mathematics in the “Real
School.” “You are likely to have occult adventures; some enormous
catacylsm is going to take place this summer. I don’t know what it is,
but I should advise you to get across this dangerous country as soon as
you can. Siberia is safe, and North Russia, but not Central Asia, and
not, as a matter of fact, Germany.”

He had had a strange dream, and, being of occult preoccupation,
ventured on vague prophecy, which generally took the form of
earthquakes and catacylsms. When I met him in the autumn after my
journey, the great war with Germany had broken out, and I was inclined
to credit him with a true prophecy; but, with honest wilfulness, he was
still figuring out earthquakes and cataclysms to be, and would not have
it that the European conflagration was the fulfilment of his dream.

Another friend is charmed with the idea that I am going to Bokhara, and
won’t I bring her home a silk scarf from the great bazaars? Another
is touched by the dream that I am realising. To him Central Asia is a
fairyland, and the Thian Shan mountains are not real mountains so much
as mountains in a book of legends.

At last the old grandmother says:

“All sit down!”

And we sit, and are silent together for a few moments, then rise and
turn to the Ikon and cross ourselves. The grandmother marks me in the
sign of the Cross and blesses me, praying that I may achieve my journey
and come safely back, that no harm may overtake me, and that I may have
success. Then I pass to each of the others present and say “Good-bye.”
Vera, however, looks at me in such a way that I am sure she means that
she feels I shall never return. So I am bound to ask myself: Is not
this farewell a final farewell? Does not this Russian see something
that is going to happen to me? But she has been very kind to me, and
just at parting puts a beautiful Ikon-print into my hand, and I fix it
in the inside of the cover of my stiff map.

       *       *       *       *       *

The train from Vladikavkaz wanders along the northern side of the
Caucasus, unable to find a pass over the mountains. The meadows as far
as eye can see are yellowed with cowslips. Now and then a derrick tells
that you are in the oil region, and in an hour or so the train steams
into the pavement-shed station that marks the weariness and mud of
Grozdny, capital of the North Caucasian oilfields. There is a breath of
salt air at Petrovsk, a few hours later, and you realise that you have
reached the Caspian shore. All night long the train runs along to Baku,
glad, as it were, to turn south at last and get round the Caucasus it
cannot cross. At Baku I change and take steamer across the Caspian Sea
to Krasnovodsk, on the salt steppes, but I have a whole day to wait in
the city.

Ordinarily, you come to Baku to make money. There is nothing to tempt
you there otherwise. In windy weather you are blinded with clouds
of flying sand; in the heat of summer you are stifled with kerosene
odours. It is a commercial city without glamour. Though it boasts
several millionaires and is an important name in every financial
newspaper in the world, it has no public works, nothing by virtue of
which it can take its stand as a Western city. The working men are
very badly paid--that is, according to our Western standards--and
they do not obtain the few advantages of industrial civilisation that
ought to come to make up for dreary life and health lost. There is
a constant ferment amongst the labouring classes in the city, and
repeated strikes, even in war time. Baku, again, is one of the last
refuges of the horse tram and the kerosene street-lamp. It is only in
the eastern quarter that the town has charm. There you may see strings
of camels loping up the steep streets, panniers on their worn, furry
backs, Persians squatting between the panniers, contentedly bobbing up
and down with the movement of the beast. Or you may watch the camels
kneeling to be loaded, crying appealingly as the heavy burdens are put
on them, cumbrously lifting themselves again, hind-legs first, and
joining the waiting knot of camels already loaded.

The great shopping place--the bazaar--is wholly Eastern, and even more
characteristic than in Russia proper. I feel how the bazaar and the
ways of the bazaar came to Russia from the East. As you go from stall
to stall you are besieged by porters holding empty baskets--they
want to be hired to walk behind you and carry your purchases as you
make them. Characters of the Arabian Nights, these; and yet in the
streets of Warsaw and Kief, and many other cities, those men in red
hats and brass badges, who sit on the kerb or on doorsteps waiting for
passers-by to hire them, are really the lineal Westernised descendants
of the tailor’s fifth brother--I think it was the fifth brother who was
a porter.

In the harbour, at the pier where my boat is waiting, I watch the
Persian dockers working. Real slaves they are, working twelve hours a
day for 1s. 4d. (60 copecks). They have straw-stuffed pack carriers
on their backs, like the saddling of camels, and the rhythm of their
movement as they proceed with their burdens from the warehouse to the
ship is that of slavery. The name of slavery has gone, but the fact
remains. Still, the European is not awakened to pity. The Persians are
the human camels, work hardest of all the people of the East, and are
the least discontented. They are singing and crying and calling all the
time they work. The East slaves for the West, but still is not much
influenced by the West. It is not they who cause the strikes.

Just before the time for my boat to leave another boat arrives from
Lenkoran, and out of it come a party of Persian men with carpet bags
slung across their shoulders, their wives in black veils, many-coloured
cloaks, and baggy cotton trousers, their children all carrying
earthenware pots. More labour available on the docks, more homes
occupied in the little houses that dot the eight-mile crescent of the
mountainous city of Baku.

The boat leaves at nightfall. It is the _Skobelef_, a handsome steamer,
built in Antwerp in 1902. It must have been brought to the Caspian
along the waterways of Europe; an officer on board ventures the opinion
that it was brought to Baku in parts and fitted up there. A pleasant
ship, however it was brought--considerably superior to the ordinary
American lake-steamer, for instance. There were very few passengers,
and these lay down to sleep at once, fearing the storm that was
blowing, so I remained alone on deck and watched the retreating shore.
Leaving Europe for America, you sit up in the prow and look ahead,
over the ocean; at least, you do not sit and watch the Irish coast
disappear. But leaving Europe for Asia, you sit aft and watch her to
the last. And the retreating lights of Baku are the lights of Europe.

The night is very dark and starless, and so the eight-mile semicircle
of lights is wonderful to behold; the handsome lanterns of the
pier, the lights of the esplanade, of the three variety theatres,
of the cinemas and shops, the thousands of sparks of homes on the
mountain-side. This is the real beginning of my journey, and it is very
thrilling; good to sit in the wind and feel the movement of the sea;
good to watch the many lighthouses turning red, then green, in the
night, and to pass within ten yards of a little lamp, just over the
surface of the sea, alternately going out and bursting into brightness
every thirty seconds. The lamp seems to say: “There is danger ...
there is danger,” and it whispers joyful intelligence to the heart.

There is trouble on the water as we reach the open sea, and the boat
begins to roll, but it is still pleasant on the upper deck, and the
high wind is warm.

The lights of Baku and Europe have been gradually erased. First to go
were the sparks of the homes on the mountain-side, then the lights of
the esplanade; the eight great lamps of the pier remain, and one by
one they disappear till there is only the great yellow-green flasher
that tells ships coming into the harbour just where Baku is. That also
disappears at last, and it begins to rain heavily. So I go down to my
berth to sleep.

Next morning the wide green sea was sunlit and flecked with white
crests of turning waves. Looking out of a port-hole, I saw the bright
light of morning shining on the grey and accidental-looking mountains
of Asia. The boat was coming into Krasnovodsk.




II

WHERE THE DESERT BLOSSOMS


Krasnovodsk is one of the hottest, most desert, and miserable places
in the world. The mountains are dead; there is no water in them. Rain
scarcely ever falls, and the earth is only sand and salt. Strange that
even there there is a season of spring, and little shrubs peep forth in
green and live three weeks or a month before they are finally scorched
up. I spent the day with a kind Georgian to whom I had a letter; a
shipping agent at the harbour. He was to have helped me, supposing the
local _gendarmerie_ should stop my landing. But by an amusing chance I
escaped the inspecting officer’s attention, and got into Transcaspia
without questions or passport-showing. One can never be quite sure of
passing, even when one’s papers are in order. The Russian Government
does not give a written passport for Central Asia, but transmits your
name to all the local authorities, and you have to trust, first, to
their having received your name and, second, to their agreeing that
the name received in its Russian spelling is the same as yours written
in English on your British passport. In the case of a name such as
mine, which is spelt one way and pronounced another, there is likely
to be difficulties. During my stay in Central Asia, moreover, I saw
my name spelt in the following cheerful ways--Grkhazkn, Groyansk, and,
of course, the inevitable Graggam, and on some occasions I had the
difficult task of persuading Russian officials that the names were one
and the same. Still, they were inclined to be lenient.

The Georgian was very hospitable; he took me from the pier to his
house, behind six or seven wilted and tired acacia trees, gave me a
bedroom, bade the samovar and coffee for me; and I made my breakfast
and then slept the three hot hours of the day. In the evening he
brought up his other Caucasian compatriots from the settlement, a
little band of exiles, and we talked many hours to the tune of the
humming samovar. We talked of Vladikavkaz and the Kazbek beloved of
Georgians, and of my tramps and of mutual acquaintances in Caucasian
towns and villages, talked of ethics and politics, and the working man,
and of Russia, especially of modern Russia, with its bourgeois and the
evil town life. Mine host had almost Victorian-English sentiments,
did not like the slit skirt and Tango stocking--so evident in Baku,
did not know what women were coming to--despised the Russians for
their flirting and dancing and gay living, believed in quiet family
life as the foundation of personal happiness, and in Socialism as the
foundation of political blessedness. The lights of Europe had not quite
disappeared.

As the train did not leave till twelve, we had a long and pleasant
evening, and when the time came to go mine host brought me a big bottle
of Kakhetian wine, and we all went together to the railway station.
I got my ticket, found my carriage. No commotion, no excitement, the
empty midnight train crept out of the station, over the salt steppes,
and I felt as if in the whole long train there was only myself. It
was very vexatious, leaving in the shadow of dark night when no
landscape was visible, but there was consolation in the fact that the
train accomplished no more than seventy-five miles before sunrise.
Next morning, directly I awakened, I looked out of the train, and
there before my gaze was the desert; yellow-brown sand as far as eye
could see, and on the horizon the enigmatical silhouette of a string
of camels, looking like a scrap of Eastern handwriting between earth
and heaven. A new sight in front of me, for I had never seen the
desert before, except, of course, in Palestine, where it is hardly
characteristic. The cliffs of Krasnovodsk had disappeared; the desert
was on either hand. I looked in vain for a house or a tree anywhere,
but I saw again, as at Krasnovodsk, Nature’s pathetic little effort
to make a home--an occasional yellow thistle in bloom, a wan pink in
blossom here and there on the sand. The train was going so slowly that
it seemed possible to step down on to the plain, pick a flower, and
return.

Strange that the Russian Government should take railways over the
desert before it has developed its home trade routes! The Western mind
would find this railway almost inexplicable. You might almost take it
to be an elaborate game of make-believe. The train is scheduled in the
time-table among the fast trains, and yet at successive empty desert
stations stops 21, 31, 14, 6, 12, 12 minutes respectively, and takes
23 hours to traverse the 390 miles from Krasnovodsk to Askhabad, an
average rate of 17 miles an hour. The reason for this slowness lies,
perhaps, in the fact that the sleepers are not very well laid, and
would be dislodged if greater speed were attempted; and the stops at
the stations are impressive, indulge a Russian taste for getting out of
trains and having a look round, and also, incidentally, let the wild
natives know that the steam caravan is waiting for them if they want
to go. We stop longer at one of these blank desert stations than the
Nord express at Berlin or a Chicago express at Niagara. Russia is not
excited about loss of time. Time may be money in America; it is only
copper money in Russia, and it is more interesting to have a political
railway across the deserts of Asia than to help the fruit-growers of
Abkhasia or to functionise industrially the vast railwayless North.

It is dull travelling, but hills at length appear--the lesser Balkans,
the greater Balkans; salt marshes give way to sandbanks--drifts of sand
heaped up and shaped by the wind like grey snowdrifts. The beautiful
curving lines of the sandbanks are wind runes. All this district was
once the bed of the Caspian Sea, or, rather, of an ocean which, it is
surmised, stretched on the one hand to beyond the Aral Sea, and on the
other to the Azof and the Black Sea. The mountains were islands or
shores or dangerous rocks in the sea.

[Illustration: THE CENTRAL ASIAN RAILWAY: NEARING THE OXUS]

When we had passed the Balkans the country improved _by bits_.
Suddenly, far away, a patch of green appeared, and one’s eye hailed it
as one at sea hails land. When the train drew nearer there came into
view a wonderful emerald square thick with young wheat, set in the
absolute grey and brown of the wilderness. This was the first irrigated
field. Soon a second and a third field appeared in blessed contrast and
refreshment. Out of the yellowish, cloudy sky the sun burst free, and I
remembered that it was the first of May. So May Day commenced for me.

People began to appear at the stations, which up till then had been
desolate; stately Turkomans, wearing from shoulders to ankles red and
white _khalati_, bath-robes rather than dresses; Tekintsi, in hats
of white, brown or black sheepskin, hats as big and bigger than the
bearskins of our Grenadiers; fat, broad-lipped Kirghiz, with Mongolian
brows and rat-tail moustachios drooping to their close-cropped beards;
poor Bactrian labourers, in many colours; rich Persian merchants, in
sombre black. Many women stood at the stations with hot, just-boiled
eggs, with roast chickens, milk or koumis in bottles, even with pats of
butter, with samovars. And there were native boys with baskets heaped
full of _lepeshki_ (cakes of bread). Each station was provided with a
long barrier, and the women, in lines of twenty or thirty, stood behind
their wares and cried to the passengers. The many steaming samovars
were a welcome sight, and at the charge of a halfpenny I made myself
tea at one of them.

The country steadily improved, and the train passed by fields along
whose every furrow little artificial streams were trickling, past
many more emerald wheatfields surrounded by big dykes. The yellow dust
of this desert needs only water to make it abundantly fertile; it is
not merely frayed rock and stone, as the sand of the seashore, but
an organic substance which has been settling from the atmosphere for
ages--the _lessovaya zemlya_. When we realise that there is of this
strange dust a coat deep enough to be a soil, we understand something
of the antiquity of the desert and the fact that, when we consider
geological history, our mind must range over millions of years, whereas
in thinking of the history of man we are almost aghast to think of
thousands of years. So the _leoss_ dust settles out of the clear air.
Incidentally, what else may not be settling out of the air into the
every-day of our world? The spring flowers show the richness of this
dust of the wilderness, for now behold the desert under the influence
of irrigation blooming as the rose. It does, indeed, actually blossom
with the rose, for I notice even on the fringe of the hopeless desert
the sweet-briar, and it is unusually lovely. At the new stations
little children appear, having in their hands little clusters of deep
crimson blossoms. Poppies now appear on the waste, irises, saxifrages,
mulleins, toadflax--the voice of a rich country crying in the midst of
the sand. Here it is literally true:

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

[Illustration: THE CENTRAL ASIAN DESERT]

By evening the train is running along the frontier of the north of
Persia, and every house has a garden of roses. A Persian silk
merchant, all in black, with a talisman of green jade hanging from
a gold chain round his neck, comes into my carriage, and prepares
to occupy the upper shelf. He is travelling all night to Merv, and
has brought a great bouquet of sweet-smelling, double roses into the
carriage. A knobbly-nosed, grey-faced, animal-eared, antediluvian old
sort, this Persian would not stay in my carriage because there was a
woman in it, but asked me to keep his place while he went and locked
himself in the empty women’s compartment next door. He left his black,
horn-handled, slender, leather-wrapped walking-stick behind--its
ferrule was of brass, and seven inches long.

We reached Geok-Tepe, a great fortress of the Tekintsi, reduced by
Skobelef in 1881. At the railway station there is a room in which are
preserved specimens of all the weapons used in the fight. There are
also waxwork representations of a Russian soldier with his gun, and a
native soldier cutting the air with his semicircle of a sword. Many
passengers turned out to have a look at these things. It was sunset
time, and the west was glowing red behind the train, the evening air
was full of health and fragrance, the stars were like magnesium lights
in the lambent heaven, the young moon had the most wonderful place in
the sky, poised and throned not right overhead, but some degrees from
the zenith, as it were on the right shoulder of the night.

It was an evening that touched the heart. At every station to Askhabad
the passengers descended from the train, and walked up and down the
platforms and talked. The morning of May Day had been blank and
dismal; the evening was full of gaiety and life. We reached Askhabad,
the first great city of Turkestan, about eleven o’clock at night, and
its platform presented an extraordinary scene. The whole forty-five
minutes of our stay it was crowded with all the peoples of Central
Asia--Persians, Russians, Afghans, Tekintsi, Bokharese, Khivites,
Turkomans--and everyone had in his hand, or on his dress, or in his
turban roses. The whole long pavement was fragrant with rose odours.
Gay Russian girls, all in white and in summer hats, were chattering
to young officers, with whom they paraded up and down, and they had
roses in their hands. Persian hawkers, with capacious baskets of pink
and white roses, moved hither and thither; immense and magnificent
Turkomans lounged against pillars or walked about, their bare feet
stuck into the mere toe-places they call slippers--they, too, held
roses in their fingers. In the third-class waiting-room was a line
of picturesque giants waiting for their tickets, and kept in order
meanwhile by a cross little Russian gendarme. Behind the long barrier,
facing the waiting train, stood the familiar band of women with
chickens and eggs, with steaming samovars and bottles of hot milk. They
had now candle lanterns and kerosene lamps, and the light glimmered
on them and on the steam escaping from the boiling water they were
selling. I walked out into the umbrageous streets, where triple lines
of densely foliaged trees cast shadow between you and the beautiful
night sky; in depths of dark greenery lay the houses of the city, with
grass growing on their far-projecting roofs, with verandas on which
the people sleep, even in May. But they were not asleep in Askhabad.
I stopped under a poplar and listened to the sad music of the Persian
pipes. In these warm, throbbing, yet melancholy strains the night of
North Persia was vocal--the night of my May Day.

I returned to the station and bought a large bunch of pink and white
roses, and, as the second bell had rung, got back to my carriage, laid
my plaid and my pillow, and as the train went out I slipped away from
the wonderful city--to a happy dream.




III

WONDERFUL BOKHARA


The promise of Persia was not fulfilled on the morrow after my train
left Askhabad. We turned north-east, and passed over the lifeless,
waterless waste of Kara-Kum, 100 miles of tumbled desert and loose
sand. At eleven in the morning the temperature was 80 in the
shade--each carriage in the train was provided with a thermometer--and
the air was charged with fine dust, which found its way into the train
despite all the closed windows and closed doors. Through the window
the gaze ranged over the utmost disorder--yellow shores, all ribbed as
if left by the sea, sand-smoking hillocks, hollows specked with faint
grasses where the marmot occasionally popped out of sight. At one point
on the passage across we came to mud huts, with Tekintsi standing by
them, and to a reach of the desert where a herd of ragged-looking
dromedaries were finding food where no other animal would put its nose.
Then we passed away into uninterrupted flowerless sandhills, all yellow
and ribbed by the wind. So, all the way to the red Oxus River. It is
called the Amu-Darya now, but it is the ancient Oxus, a fair, broad
stream at Chardzhui, but, from its colour, more like a river of red
size than of water. All the canals and dykes of the irrigation system
of the district flow with the red water of the river, and wherever the
water is conducted the desert blossoms like virgin soil. The river is
the sun’s wife, and the green fields are their children.

Chardzhui, the port on the Oxus, is the point for embarkation for
Khiva. There is a small fleet of Government steamers plying between
the two cities, though it is comparatively difficult for travellers
on private business to obtain a passage on one of them. When first
this fleet was started there was some idea that Russia would use them
in her imperial warfare as she pushed south, but probably the vessels
have little military significance nowadays. For the rest, Chardzhui
is famous for its melons, which grow to the size of pumpkins and are
very sweet. Frequently in Petrograd shops or in fashionable restaurants
one may see enormous melons hanging from straps of bast--these are the
fruits of Chardzhui. At this season of the year Chardzhui has a great
deal of mud and does not invite travellers, especially as its inns are
bad.

The train entered the Russian Protectorate of Bokhara, and the
population changed. From Askhabad the natives had special cattle-trucks
afforded them, and they sat on planks stretched over trestles; they
were Sarts, Bokharese, Jews, Afghans. Into my carriage came two
Mohammedan scholars going to Bokhara city. They washed their hands,
spread carpets on one side of the carriage, knelt on the other, said
their prayers, prostrated themselves. Then they took out a copy of the
Koran, and one read to the other in a sonorous and poetical voice all
the way to the city--they were Sarts, a very ancient tribe of Aryan
extraction, some of the finest-looking people of Central Asia, tall,
dignified, wrinkled, wearing gorgeous cloaks and snowy turbans. The two
in my carriage had, apparently, several wives in another compartment,
as they each carried a sheaf of tickets. The women hereabout were very
strictly in their _charchafs_. There was no peeping out or peering
round the corner, such as one sees in Turkey, but an absolute black,
blotting out of face and form. When you looked at five or six sitting
patiently side by side, each and all in voluminous green cloaks, and
where the faces should appear a black mask the colour and appearance of
an oven-shelf, you felt a horror as if the gaze had rested on corpses
or on the plague-stricken.

From the Oxus valley the people swarmed in a populous land, and it was
a sight to see so many Easterns drinking green tea from yellow basins.
Already we were nearer China than Russia, and the sight took me back in
memory to Chinatown, New York, and the _chop suey_ restaurants. I fell
into conversation with a Tartar merchant in carpets, and I tried to
obtain an idea of what Bokhara was like in the year of grace 1914.

“Is there an electric tramway in Bokhara, or a horse tramway?”

“No, nothing of the sort. The streets are so narrow, two carts can’t
pass one another without collision.”

“Are there any hotels?”

“There are caravanserai.”

“No European buildings?”

“Only outside the town. There is a Russian police-station, and a hotel
built for officials. The Emir won’t allow any hotels to be built within
the walls.”

At length we reached New Bokhara, the Russian town, with its white
houses, avenues of trees, its broad streets, and shops, and we changed
to a by-line for Ancient Bokhara. The train drew through pleasant
meadows and cornfields, bright and fertile as the South of England,
and after twelve sunny versts we came into view of the cement-coloured
mud walls of the most wonderful city of Mohammedan Asia, a place that
might have been produced for you by enchantment--that reminds you
of Aladdin’s palace as it must have appeared in the desert to which
the magician transported it. Within toothed walls--a grey Kremlin
eight miles round--live 150,000 Mohammedans, entirely after their own
hearts, without any appreciable interference from without, in narrow
streets, in covered alleys, with endless shops, behind screening walls.
The roads are narrow and cobbled, and wind in all directions, with
manifold alleys and lanes, with squares where stand handsome mosques,
with portals and stairways leading down to the cool and tree-shaded,
but stagnant, little reservoirs that hold the city’s water. Along
the roadway various equipages come prancing--muddy _proletkas_,
unhandy-looking, egg-shaped carts, with clumsy wooden wheels eight
feet high, and projecting axles, gilt and crimson-covered carts made
of cane and straw, the shape of a huge egg that has had both ends
sliced off. The Bek, or Bokharese magistrate, comes bounding along
in his carriage, with outriders, and all others give him salute as he
passes. It is noticeable that the drivers of vehicles prefer to squat
on the horses rather than sit in drivers’ seats. Strings of laden
camels blunder on the cobbles, innumerable Mohammedans come, mounted
on asses--it is clear that man is master when you see an immense
Bokharese squatting on a meek ass and holding a huge cudgel over its
head. Charchaffed women are even seen on asses, and some of them carry
a child in front of them. There are continually deadlocks in the narrow
lanes, and all the time the drivers shout “_Hagh, hagh!_” (“Get out of
the way, get out of the way!”)

[Illustration: BOKHARA: THE ESCORT OF A MAGISTRATE]

The houses are made of the ruins of bygone houses, of ancient tiles and
mud. They have fine old doors of carven wood, but no windows looking on
the streets. A sort of inlaid cupboard, with a glass window, half open,
a spread of wares, and a Moslem sitting in the midst, is a shop. Thus
sits the vendor of goods, but also the maker--the tinsmith at work,
the coppersmith, the maker of hats. The bazaars are rich and rare, and
in the shadow of the covered streets--there are fifty of them--the
lustrous silks and carpets, and pots and slippers, in the shops each
side of the way, have an extraordinary magnificence; the gorgeous
vendors, sitting patiently, not asking you to buy, staring at the heaps
of metallics, silver-bits and notes resting on the little tabourets
in front of them, belong to an age which I thought was only to be
found in books. What a wealthy city it is! It offers more silks and
carpets for sale than London or Paris; it is an endless warehouse of
covetable goods.

What strikes you at Jerusalem or Constantinople is the abundance
of English goods for sale, but here at Bokhara there is a strange
absence of Western commodities. Formerly the English sent all sorts of
manufactures by the caravan road from India, but since the Russians
ringed round their Customs system the commercial influence of England
has waned. Western goods come via Russia. What European articles there
are come from Germany or Scandinavia. For the rest, as in other Eastern
cities, the street arabs hawk churek-cakes and _lepeshki_; men in white
sit at corners selling, in this case, _Bokharese_ delight, brown twists
of toffee, old-fashioned sugar-candy which in piles looks like so much
rock crystal. Beggars in rags sit outside the mosques and hold up to
you Russian basins--they do not, however, cry and clamour and follow
you, as in the tourist-visited cities of Asia Minor and North Africa.
Outside every other shop is a bird-cage and a large pet bird; in some
cases falcons, much prized in these lands. I admired the falcons, and
their owners seemed childishly pleased at the attention I gave them.
I gave a piece of Bokharese silver to a beggar outside a mosque (the
Bokharese have their own silver coinage, which, however, looks like
ancient coin rather than any which is now in use). In one of the big
shadowy bazaars I bought a delicious silk scarf of old-rose colour full
of light and loveliness, falling into a voluminous grandeur as the
melancholy Eastern showed it me. I did not bargain about its price,
that seemed almost impossible, only five roubles (ten shillings), and
the lady who has it now says it is enough to make a whole robe. Somehow
I liked it better as a scarf than I could if it were “made up.”

I passed out of the city and walked round the walls. A road encompasses
them, and on the road are camels with blue beads on their necks and
many Easterns riding them. There is a strange feeling of contrast in
being outside the city. The arc of the grey walls goes gradually round
and away from you, surrounding and enclosing the life of the city; the
city is like a magical box full of strange magicians and singers and
toy shop-men and customers; it is like a strange human beehive full
of life. And outside the walls there is the sudden contrast of fresh
air and space and life and greenery and broad sky. Inside the city
the streets are so narrow that you feel the “box” has got the lid on.
Someone said to me when I went to New York: “We’ll give you the freedom
of the city with the lid off.” Well, Bokhara has the lid _on_. And
you feel that certainly when you get outside and look at the silent,
significant enclosing wall. But the fields are deep in verdure, and it
is like a lovely June day in England--the willow leaning lovingly over
you, overwhelmed with leaves. The walls are battlemented, rent, patched
up, buttressed; there are eleven gates, and at each gate the traffic
going in and out has a processional aspect. Along the walls, between
gate and gate, there is a deep and gentle peace. No sound comes through
the walls; they are broad and high and solid. The swallows nesting
there twitter. You cannot obtain a glimpse, even of the high mosques
within.

I entered the city once more, lost myself in its mazes, and was obliged
to take a native cab in order to get out again. I was living outside
the town in an inn specially built for men on Government service. I
got the last empty room. Pleasant it was to lie back in the sun and be
carried along twenty wonderful streets and lanes, seeing once more all
I had seen before of colour and Orientalism.

The Bokharese are a gentle people. They wear no weapons. They sit
in the grass market and chatter and smile over their basins of tea.
The little pink doves of the streets search between their bare feet
for crumbs. The wild birds of the desert build in the walls of their
houses and bazaars. On the top of the tower of every other mosque is
an immense storks’ nest, overlapping the turret on all sides. Some of
these nests must be eight to ten feet high; they are round, and so look
like part of the design of the architecture. Storks are encouraged to
build there by the Mohammedans, by whom they are held sacred. It is
pleasant to watch the bird itself, standing on one leg, a black but
living and moving silhouette against the sky; to listen to the clatter
of bills when the father stork suddenly flies down to a nest with food.

Bokhara is a sort of Mussulman perfection--there is no progress to
be obtained there except after the destruction of old forms. The
Bokharese keep to the forms of their religion and its ethical laws;
they wear their clothes correctly; they know their crafts. They are a
great contrast to the Russians, who are careless and inexact, and in
their worship often nonchalant to their God; to the Russians, who wear
nothing correctly and come out in almost any sort of attire; to the
Russians, so ignorant and clumsy in their crafts. Yet Russia has all
before her, and Bokhara has all behind her.

The Bokharese have no ambition; civilisation and mechanical progress
do not tempt them. They have a happy smile for everything that comes
along, but nothing moves them. A Russian motor-car comes bounding over
the cobbles, whooping and coughing its alarm signals; a score of dogs
try to set on it and bite it as it passes, and the natives sit in their
cupboard shops and laugh. If the car stops, they do not collect round
it, as would a village of Caucasian tribesmen, for instance. There was
one Bokharian--a Sart, in full cloak and turban--who rode a bicycle, an
astonishing exception.

[Illustration: OUTSIDE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE MOSQUES]

The Russians at present hold Bokhara very lightly, but will no doubt
tighten their hands on it later, as they are taking the solidification
of their Central Asian Empire very seriously. At present there are no
passports, and there is mixed money; but passports are coming in, and
the banks are taking up all the ancient Sartish bits they can get and
giving Russian silver in exchange. There are several Russian banks
within the city walls, and they have a great influence. The Emir is
friendly towards Russia, and is a pompous figure at the Russian Court,
though it is rumoured that in his native palaces he whiles the long
empty day away by playing such elementary card games as _durak_, snap,
and happy family. The Russians have permission to build schools in the
city, and the Russian bricklayer is to be seen at work with trowel
and line, whilst the native navvy carries the hod to and fro. The
foreign goods in the bazaar are mostly cotton, and if you examine the
splendidly gay prints that go to form the clothing of the natives you
find it is all marked Moscow manufacture. The Bokharese merchants go
to Nizhni Fair not only to sell, but to buy. There are no English in
the streets, no tourists, no Americans. Indeed, I asked myself once in
wonder: Where are the Americans? The only people in Western attire are
commercial travellers (_commerçants_), and they are mostly Russians or
Armenians, though Germans are occasionally to be seen. I noticed knots
of these men discussing prices of horsehair, wool, oil-cake, carpets,
silks. It should be remembered that that district is more justly famous
for its carpets than for its silks. The best carpets in the world are
made by the Tekintsi. Armenians, Turkomans and Persians work in whole
villages and settlements in Transcaspia making carpets with needle and
loom. They have the original tradition of carpet-making, a sense for
the particular art of weaving those wonderful patterns of Persia, and
for them a carpet is not a covering on which it could be possible to
imagine a man walking with muddy boots; it is for dainty naked feet in
the harem, or it is a whole picture to be hung on a wall, not thrown
on the floor. Singer’s sewing machines are, of course, installed at
Bokhara; they are in every town in the wide world. The cinema also has
come, and a green poster announces that the Tango will be shown after
the presentation of a striking comedy called “The Suffragette.”

But what does this really matter? Let us ask the deliberate stork,
standing on one leg on the height of the mosque of Lava-Khedei. The
mosque tower has a clock, and the stork seems to be trying to read the
time. But he will give no answer, nor will the Mussulmans below; they
also are scanning the wall to see if it is nearer the hour to pray. And
the clock, be it observed, is not set by Petrograd time.




IV

MOHAMMEDAN CITIES AND MOHAMMEDANISM


The consideration of the wonderful Moslem cities, Constantinople,
Cairo, Jerusalem and Bokhara, with their marvellous blending of
colours, their characteristic covered ways and bazaars, their great
spreads of lace and silk and carpets, slippers, fezes, turbans, copper
ware, their gloomy stone ways and close courts, their blind houses,
made windowless that their women be not seen, their great mosques and
splendid tombs, inevitably suggests a great question of the East. What
is Mohammedanism, what does it mean? At Cairo and Jerusalem, and even
at Constantinople, it is possible to doubt the real nature of the
Moslem world; it seems a makeshift world giving way readily to Western
influence, or, in any case, reproved by the more splendid and vital
institutions of the West standing side by side with many shabby and
wretched phenomena of the East.

But Bokhara is a perfect place. It is much more remote even than Delhi,
and is almost untouched, unaffected by Western life. It is a city of
a dream, and if a magician wished to transport some modern Aladdin
to a fairy city, where there would be nothing recognisable and yet
everything would be beautiful and bewildering, he need only bring him
to the walls of Bokhara. Through Bokhara and its undisturbed peace
and beauty, one obtains a new vision of Mohammedanism, and it becomes
absurd to think that the real Moslem world is of the same pattern as
the Westernised and yet strangely picturesque cities with which we are
familiar. We remember the fact that there are so many millions more
Mohammedans than there are Christians, that they live off the railways,
in deserts, in far away and remote cities, that they journey on camels
and in caravans, and that to them their religion and way of life are
sufficient, that they do not seek new words or inspiration, nor do
they want time to do other things, nor change of any kind. We remember
their mystery, their faith and loyalty, their superb detachment, their
state of being enough unto themselves, their playfulness, audacity,
hospitality, how they shine compared with Christians in the keeping
of the conventions of their religion, their punctual piety, their
pilgrimages, and, with all that, their fixed and definite inferiority
of caste.

[Illustration: A HOLIDAY AT SAMARKAND: BOYS OF THE MILITARY SCHOOL
PLAYING AMONG THE RUINS OF THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE]

Their pilgrimage to Mecca, which we are apt to regard merely as
something picturesque, is in reality one of the most mysterious of
human processions. From Northern Africa, from Syria, from Turkey and
Armenia, from Turkestan, from the Chinese marches (there are even
Chinese Mohammedans, the Duncani), from India, from the depths of
Arabia and Persia--to Mecca. Through Russia alone there travel annually
considerably more Moslems to Mecca than there do Christian pilgrims
to Jerusalem; and some of these Mohammedan pilgrims are the most
outlandish pilgrims. They are illiterate, simple, unremarked. They
do not possess minds which could understand our modern Christian
missionaries, and Russia, at least, has no desire to proselytise among
them. If the peoples of the world could be seen as part of a great
design of embroidery on the garment of God, it would probably be seen
that Mohammedanism at the present moment is part of the beauty of the
pattern and the amazing labyrinthine scheme. It is not a rent, not a
disfigurement.

Mahomet and the Mohammedans is not a subject to dismiss, and when we
look at those wondrous cities of the East it is worth while remembering
that we are looking at a new image and superscription, and are in
the presence of people who own a different but none the less true
allegiance. As upon one of the planets we might come across a different
race that had not had, and could not have, our revelation.

Our prejudice as militant Christians, however, ought necessarily to be
against Mohammedans. They have ever been our religious enemies in arms,
the Saracens, the Paynim, the Tartar hordes; we are not very amicably
disposed to those of our argumentative brothers who, to show their
independence of thought, say they prefer Mohammedanism or Buddhism or
Confucianism or what not.

In reading Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-worship” there is a haunting
feeling that it was a pity that for the “Hero as Prophet” he chose
Mahomet and not Jesus, or that, choosing Mahomet, he had not travelled
in Mohammedan countries, investigating his subject more thoroughly
and giving a truer picture of the significance of Mohammedanism and
of the man who founded it. The Mahomet section of “Heroes” is like a
note that does not sound. Heading the lecture over again, one is struck
with a new fact about Carlyle--his insularity of intelligence. Despite
the fact that he is preoccupied with French and German history, you
notice his narrowness of vision, or perhaps it is that the general
vision of the world which men have now was not so accessible in his
day, and the differences in national psychology now manifest were
hidden in obscurity then. Carlyle saw mankind as Scotsmen, and all
true religion whatsoever as a sort of Southern Scottish Puritanism.
He saw all national destinies in one and the same type, without any
conception of fundamental differences of soul. He admired the Germans,
and the Germans adopted him and his works. And he disliked the French
because so few of them had that “fixity of purpose” and “manliness,”
“thoroughness,” “grim earnestness” of his compatriots. Russia was a
very vague country, but Carlyle approved of the Tsar, dimly discerning
in him one who must have something in common with Cromwell or
Frederick the Great, “keeping by the aid of Cossack and cannon such
a vast empire together.” And the further his imagination ranges the
more do his notions of foreign peoples and races fail to correspond
with his patterns of humanity. Among the many other destinies which
Carlyle might have had and lived through, one can imagine one wherein
he travelled, and found in real life what he sought in museums and
libraries. He would have been a wonderful traveller, and would have
known and shown more of the verities and mysteries of the world than he
was able to do through the medium of history.

Carlyle’s Mahomet is an example of old-fashioned visions. It is clear
now that this “deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming
black eyes and open social deep soul,” was not that determined,
conscientious British sort of character that he is made out to be, nor
has Mohammedanism that Cromwellian earnestness which Carlyle imputed to
it.

It is impossible to find in the Moslem soul “the infinite nature of
duty,” but we would not explain the “gross sensual paradise” and the
“horrible flaming hell” of the Mohammedans by saying that to them
“Right is to Wrong as life is to death, as heaven to hell. The one
must nowise be done, the other in nowise be left undone.” Mahomet and
Mohammedanism are not explainable in these terms.

Probably the most common assumption in the West is that Mohammedanism
does not count. In its adherents it greatly outnumbers Christianity,
but not even those who believe that the will of majorities should
prevail would recognise the Mohammedan majority. For though more
warlike than we, they have not our weapons, and though they are finer
physically, they have not our helps to Nature, nor our civilisation,
nor our passion. They are apart, they are scarcely human beings in our
Western sense of the term, and are negligible. Still, Mohammedanism
is an extraordinary portent in the world. The Mohammedans, those
many millions, are not merely potential Christians, a set of people
remaining in error because our missionary enterprise is not sufficient
to bring them to the Light. It is not an accident, or a makeshift
religion, but evidently a happy form suitable to the millions who
embody it. It is a poetically fitting religion, part of the very fibre
of the people who have it, and it cannot easily be got rid of or
supplanted.

As enthusiastic Christians we consider the Moslem world with some
vexation; some of us even with malice and a readiness to take arms
against it. But as pleasure-seeking tourists and worldly men and women,
we rather love the Turk and the Arab for his “picturesqueness,” for the
picturesqueness of his religion. As sportsmen, we love him because he
has the reputation of fighting well.

[Illustration: MOHAMMEDAN TOMBS AND RUINS IN THE YOUNGEST OF THE
RUSSIAN COLONIES]

It was with a certain amount of dissatisfaction that I fell into the
hands of an Arab guide when I was in Cairo, and was shown, first
of all, the picturesque mosques so beloved of tourists--the Mosque
of Sultan Hassan, the Alabaster Mosque, and so on. Not the ancient
Egyptian remains, which are the most significant thing in Egypt; not
the Early Christian ruins, which are most dear to us (the old Christian
monasteries which the Copts possess seemed to be known by none), but
the mosques made of the stolen stones of the Pyramids and of the tombs,
and inlaid with the jewels taken from ikon frames and rood-screens of
the first churches of Christianity. And as I listened to the details of
the blinding of the architects, the destruction of the Mamelukes,
the fighting and the robbing, the disparaging thought arose: “They are
all a pack of robbers, these Mohammedans.”

They are robbers by instinct, and non-progressive not only in life, but
in ideas. But they are picturesque, and have given to a considerable
portion of the earth’s face a characteristic quaintness and beauty.
They cannot be dismissed.

Carlyle tries to see some light in the Koran, and fails. Probably the
Koran is translated in a wrong spirit or to suit a British taste. But
obviously it is meant to be chanted, and it is full of rhythms with
which we are unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as we are with the sobbing,
plaintive, screaming music that is melody in the Moslem’s ears. The
soul of the Koran is not like the soul of the Bible, just as the soul
of a mediæval Christian city such as Florence or Rome is unlike Khiva
or Bokhara or Samarkand, just as the souls of our eager mystical
populations are different from the souls of those simple, satisfied
and fatalistic people. It is not easy to communicate the difference by
words; it is not merely a difference in clothes. It is a difference
in the spirit, a difference in the spirit that causes the expression
to be different, whether that expression be clothes, or houses, or
cities, or way of life, or music, or literature, or prayer. And while
our expression changes, theirs remains the same. Our spirit remains the
same, theirs remains the same, but only with us does the expression
change.

“God is great; we must submit to God,” is Mohammedan wisdom. It is in
a way a common ground--we must submit. But with the Mohammedan there
is a waiting for God’s will to be shown, whereas with us rather a
divination of it in advance. We are alive to find out what God wills
for us. After “Thy will be done!” we put an exclamation mark and
rejoice. Mohammedanism is fatalism, but Christianity is not fatalism.

And if fatalism gives a tinge of melancholy to life, especially to an
unfortunate life, it still makes life easier. It relieves the soul
of care and takes a world of responsibility off the shoulders. The
Mohammedan is a care-free being. He has, more than we have, the life of
a child.

Consequently, one of the greatest characteristics of Mohammedan people
is playfulness. All is play to them. They are playful in their attire,
in their business, in their fighting, in their talking. They buy and
sell, and make a great game of their buying and selling. They lack
“seriousness.” They are in no hurry to strike a bargain and get ahead
in trade. Their instinct is for the game rather than for the business.
Hence the comparative poverty of the Tartars--the most commercial
people of the East. They are not serious enough to get rich in our
Western way. If they would get really rich as a Western merchant is
rich, they must not waste time playing and haggling. They fight well
because they see the game in fighting. Death is not so great a calamity
to them as to us, for life is not such a serious thing. They look on
playfully at suffering, and laugh to see men’s limbs blown away by
bombs. They like the gamble of modern warfare. And, of course, they
were warriors and robbers before they were Mohammedans. Fighting is
one of their deepest instincts, and as they do not change with time
as we do, they have an almost anachronistic love of battle. They are
fond of weapons as of toys, fingering blades and laughing, guffawing at
the sight of cannon. They love steamboats and battleships as children
love toy steamboats, and they sail them on the waters of the Levant as
children would their toys. Their hospitality is mirthful, as are also
their murders and their massacres. Their heaven and hell are playful
conceptions.

The condition of their remaining children is obedience to the simple
laws of their religion. These obeyed, they are free of all troubles.
And they obey. Hence, from Delhi to Cairo and from Kashgar to
Constantinople, a playful and sometimes mischievous and difficult
world. Looking at the great cities, with their quaint figures and
their chaffering, their elfish spires and minarets, their covered ways
and gloomy and mysterious passages; looking at this city of Bokhara,
with its covered ways crowded with these children-merchants and
children-purchasers, their beggars, tombs, shrines, we must remember it
is all a children’s contrivance, something put together by a people who
do not grow up and do not grow serious as we do--mysterious yet simple,
fierce yet childlike, valorous and yet amused by suffering, Islam, the
enemy of the Church in arms, to this day.




V

THE HISTORY OF THE TRIBES


From Bokhara I proceeded to Samarkand, the grave of Timour. Turkestan
has four great cities remaining in splendour from the most remote
times--Bokhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Alexander the Great
conquered most of this territory and established himself at Samarkand
for winter quarters, but there are few traces of Alexander to-day.
In his day the land was inhabited by tribes who had come out of the
Pamir--Persians, Indians, Tadzhiks. There were also primeval nomads,
with their tents and their herds, a people something like the Jews when
they were simply the Children of Israel, when they were a _family_.
There were possibly hordes of Jews, as there were hordes of Tartars and
Mongols. At the time of the shepherd dynasty of Egypt the peoples of
the East were living in patriarchal families, resembling in a way the
families of the Kirghiz in Central Asia to-day.

For the ethnologist Central Asia is necessarily one of the most
interesting districts of the world, and its inhabitants are like living
specimens in a great ethnological museum. The races there tell us more
about the past of the world in which we are interested than any pages
in the history book. Here we may feel what the Children of Israel were,
the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Turks, the Russians.
We see the destiny of Rome, the destiny of the Church of Christ, of
Christianity, of barbarism.

Not that there are many pure or clear types of historical races in
Central Asia to-day. The land has been a running ground for fierce
tribes coming out of China and Manchuria, coming from the mysterious
and vague regions of the Pamir and Thibet. The Kirghiz to-day exhibit
every shade of difference between the Mongol and the Turk.

After the Greeks of Alexander came the first ferocious Huns. To the
Greeks what is now Russia and Siberia, Seven Rivers Land and Russian
Central Asia was vaguely Scythia. They fumbled northward and eastward
as in a great darkness, and they were rather afraid to go on. Yet we
know that even before the records of Greek history there was an Eastern
trade on the Volga and from the Caspian to the Baltic. The merchants
of Persia and India traded with the Russia of those days. The Persians
ruled from the Oxus to the Danube, and in the wilderness stretching
from the Oxus to the Great Wall of China dwelt the primeval nomads.

South of the Altai Mountains was the fount of the mysterious Huns who,
some centuries before the birth of Christ, ravaged China to the Pacific
and extended their dominion northward, down the Irtish River to the
_tundra_ of the Arctic Circle. These were not a Mongol people, but
Turkish, though eventually they were beaten by the Tartars, and the
Mongolian and Turkish tended to blend. The reason for their turning
westward was an eventual failure against China. The Chinese built
their fifteen-hundred-mile wall against the Huns, but the wall did
not avail them; they were beaten, and were forced to pay an enormous
tribute of silk, gold, and women. Then the Chinese reorganised their
armies, turned upon their enemies, and crushed them. Their monarch
became a vassal of the Emperor. Fifty-eight hordes entered the service
of China--a horde was about four thousand men. The remainder of the
Huns, coming to the conclusion that China was too strong for them,
resolved to fight somewhere else, and set off westward towards the Oxus
and the Volga. They expended themselves on the eastern shores of the
Volga, where they remain to this day as the Kalmeeks. Visitors to the
Southern Ural and the district of Astrakhan will have pointed out to
them the Kalmeeks, a low-browed, broad-nosed type of men, sun-browned,
wizened, and squat, the ugliest in Russia; these are the original Huns,
ferocious in their day, very peaceful and stupid now, and below even
the level of the Kirghiz in intelligence.

The chief Turkish tribes to-day are the Yakuts, on the Lena, the
Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, of whom there are a considerable number in Bokhara
and Khiva, the Turkomans, and Osmanli, the Turks themselves, and they
have all something of the Hun about them. Their history is Hunnish
history. A deformed and brutal people were the hordes of the Huns;
there were many cripples among them and people of distorted features,
many dwarfs. They were the cruellest people that have ever been, and
probably that is why they have such a name for ugliness. Cruelty and
ugliness of feature go together. Even the most refined torturers of the
Spanish Inquisition must have been ugly. There is something terrifying
in the aspect of cruelty. It is an aspect of mania, and when it comes
out in the race must be called racial mania or aberration.

Successive hordes of pagans rolled forward, and the story of each
forward movement of this kind is the same. Each wave, however, seemed
to roll farther than the one before and gather in power and volume to
the point where it multitudinously broke. The Asiatic heathen were soon
over the Volga and across Russia; it was they who set the North German
tribes moving and gave an impetus to the plundering and ransacking of
the Western world. They astonished even the Goths by their ferocity and
ugliness, and in A.D. 376 the Goths had to appeal to the Romans for
protection. The Emperor Valens delayed to answer, and a million Goths
crossed the Danube and began the conquest of Roman territory. The Huns
joined with the Alani, a wild Finnish tribe supposed by some to be the
present Ossetini of the Northern Caucasus, and together they obtained
glimpses of the splendour of the South and came into touch with the
people who would ultimately give them their religion--the Saracens.

Away in the background of Central Asia, however, Mongol tribes were
falling on those Huns who had remained behind and ever setting new
hordes going westward, and the impact from China was felt all the
way to Germany, and hordes of barbarians began to appear before the
gates of Rome itself. Soon the Goths burned the capital of the world
(A.D. 410). A quarter of a century later the Huns found a new leader
in Attila (A.D. 438-453), and became once more the scourge and terror
of all existent civilisation. The Huns of Attila were not just the
old Huns who came out of Mongolia and fought with the Chinese, but a
mixture of all the Turkish tribes of the East. They worshipped the
sword, stuck in the ground, and prayed before it as others prayed
before the Cross. Attila claimed to have discovered the actual sword
of the God Mars, and through the possession claimed dominion over the
whole world. He conquered Russia and Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia,
the islands of the Baltic. He crushed the Chinese and Tartars who
were afflicting the rearguard of his nation in the depths of Asia,
negotiating on equal terms with the Emperor of China. He traversed
Persia and Armenia and what is now Turkey in Asia, broke through to
Syria, and, in alliance with the Vandals, took possession of “Africa.”
His followers crossed the Mediterranean, devastating the cities of
Greece, Italy, and Gaul. Rome abandoned her Eastern Empire to the
Huns in A.D. 446; and, after Attila’s death, the Vandals, a people of
Slavonic origin, sacked Rome once more. Western civilisation seemed to
be extinguished, and a barbarian became King of Italy.

[Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN FESTIVAL AT SAMARKAND--THE HOUR OF PRAYER]

What was happening in Central Asia is but vaguely known. The people who
lived on the horse at the time of Herodotus still lived on the horse
as they do at this day, on mare’s milk, koumis, and horseflesh,
camping amidst great herds of horses, the same breed as the Siberian
ponies which the Cossacks ride now. There were feuds of the hordes,
raids, massacres; the Chinese are said to have attempted to introduce
Buddhism, though without much success. There was much intermarriage of
Turks and Mongols. On the other hand, the conquering Huns returned with
wives of the races of the West, and with a smattering of Western ideas,
bringing even with them the name of Christianity, and some Christian
ideas. Christians began to appear in the ranks of the pagans.

In the seventh century Mahomet was born, and the characteristic
religion of the East took its start, and was soon conquering adherents
by the sword; armies of Arabs and Semitic tribes, initiating the
propaganda of Islam, conquered Persia, Syria, and portions of Northern
Africa and of Spain. In the eighth century they crossed the Oxus, drove
hordes of Huns back into the depths of Asia, captured the rich cities
of Bokhara and Samarkand, and made Mohammedans of all the people all
the way to the Indus. So Uzbeks and Turkomans and Kirghiz and Afghans
and the others obtained a religion which suited their temperament, and
there was comparative peace and trade throughout all Turkestan and
Persia for many a long year. The next great disturbance was caused by
the ferment of the Tartars and the mongrel Mongolian Huns, which came
to a head under the leadership of Chingiz Khan (A.D. 1206-1227), who
was the next conqueror of the world springing out of Asia. He made
for himself an enormous empire, extending from the Sea of Japan to the
River Nieman in Germany, and from the _tundras_ of the Arctic Circle to
the wastes of India and Mesopotamia. There were in his army idolaters
and Judaic, Mohammedan, and Christian converts. He was the Emperor of
the “Moguls”--the word Mogul is the same as Mongol. Among his feats
he laid siege to Pekin, and starved the Chinese to such a point that
they were forced to kill and eat every tenth man within the city. He
conquered Bokhara and Samarkand again, crushed the Russians and the
Poles, took Liublin and Cracow, and, at the battle of Lignitz, defeated
the Germans, filling nine sacks with the right ears of the slain.
Because of Chingiz Khan all Western Europe trembled.

The manners of the hordes of Chingiz Khan and his successors were very
like the manners of the old Huns, and they also brought their flocks
with them, and lived on roast sheep and roast horse and koumis as the
majority of the dwellers of Central Asia seem to have ever lived.

The splendour of the successors of Chingiz Khan decayed, and Russia and
the East gasped and waited till Asia produced another monster--a new
conqueror of the world. In the fourteenth century he arose, the worst
of all, Tamerlane the Great, called Timour the Lame, who conquered
everything that had ever been conquered before by Tartar or Hun.
Under him Mohammedanism reached a great splendour and came nearest to
world-domination.

[Illustration: CENTRAL ASIAN JEWESSES]

Both Bokhara and Samarkand fell to Tamerlane. He conquered great
stretches of Persia, Syria, Turkey, the Caucasus, India, Russia and
Siberia, besieged Moscow and Delhi in two successive years, dethroned
twenty-seven kings, harnessed kings to his chariot instead of horses.

I spent the May of this year in what is particularly the land of
Tamerlane, a sort of Russian India on the northern side of Hindu Kush,
a country with a majestic past but with little present. Tamerlane
the Tartar was once Emperor of Asia, and a potentate of greater fame
than Alexander. At the head of the Tartar hordes he conquered all the
nations of the East and ravaged every land, committing everywhere
deeds of splendour and of barbaric cruelty. The cruelty that is in
the Cossack and the Russian, and the taste for barbaric splendour,
comes directly from his Tartars. But the greatness of the Tartars
has passed away--they are all tradesmen and waiters to-day--and the
greatness of the Russians has come about--they are all soldiers. “Is it
not touching?” said a Russian to me one day at dinner in a Petersburg
restaurant, pointing at the perfect Tartar waiters. “These people
under whose yoke we were are really stronger and more terrible than we
are, but they are now our servants, waiters, valets. If we had become
Mohammedans, the Tartars would still be greater than we. It is the
Christian idea that has triumphed in us.”

There stand among the deserts of Turkestan and beside the irrigated
cotton fields of a new civilisation, the remains and ruins of a
mediæval glory, the mosques and tombs and palaces of the days of
Timour and of his loved wife, Bibi Khanum. The Russians are not
touched by archæology, and have no interest in pagans, even splendid
pagans. English people have considerable difficulty in obtaining
permission to enter the country. So Tamerlane is little thought of.
But in England, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, he had a
tremendous fame--you feel that fame in Marlowe’s great drama:

  Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!
  What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day,
  And have so proud a chariot at your heels
  And such a coachman as great Tamerlane?

Shakespeare burlesqued this through the mouth of Pistol:

              Shall packhorses
  And hollow pamper’d jades of Asia,
  Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,
  Compare with Cæsars, and with Cannibals,
  And Trojan Greeks? nay, rather damn them with
  King Cerberus.

England’s opinion was the same as Pistol’s, and the grandeur of
Tamerlane was forgotten. Yet in two successive years he conquered India
and Eastern Russia. He wore what was traditionally held to be the
armour of King David. And, to-day, who so poor as to do him reverence?
Only the beautiful name of Timour and the ruins of his tombs and
mosques remain, giving a strange atmosphere of mystery and melancholy
to the youngest of Russian colonies.

It is possible now to linger in the romantic idea of all the splendour
that has passed away, and to feel a strange beauty in Samarkand. I
remember reading some years ago a beautiful prose poem in modern
“impressionist” style, written by Zoe Pavlovska, who is, I suppose, a
Russian--perhaps a Cossack. It was the story of pilgrimage to the tomb
of Tamerlane’s most loved princess:

  I shall go to the tomb of the Emperor’s daughter. It will be night,
  but a night when the moon is full; its clear light will guide me
  through the mazes of the streets of the city. These will be narrow.
  At dark corners I shall be afraid--muffled forms will glide past me
  in the deep shadows of the walls.

  Now and then a light will shine from some open window. I shall stop
  and hear the chanting of poems, and will wait to listen, swaying in
  time with the rhythm.

  I shall hear----

  “Who will converse with me now that the yellow camels are gone? There
  is no friend for the stranger, save the stranger.”

  Then I shall creep out of the town by a turquoise-tiled gate. There
  they will ask me, “Where do you go?” I shall answer, showing them my
  box of jade, “I go to the tomb of Bibi Khanum, to lay this at her
  feet.” I will then show them the flower in my box.

  When I have reached the place I shall stand below the broken arches,
  and will see that they are bluer than the blue night sky beyond them;
  the moon will make strange shadows. It will seem as if giant warriors
  are guarding her. Coming to the place where her body lies I shall
  say, “O beloved of Timour”--he who sleeps under a deep green sea of
  jade--“I have brought for you a flower.” Then, though in a cloudless
  sky, the moon will slowly hide herself, the purple shadows will
  lengthen till all is black save where she lies; there each jewel on
  her tomb will glow into its own colour, as if lighted from within,
  and by this faint light I shall see the pale hands and faces of four
  Tartar warriors who will lift the stone which covers her. As they put
  it on the ground they will once more become one with the darkness.

  “Brothers, I am afraid; stay near me.” Thus shall I cry to them.
  There will be no answer, only a silence made more desolate by the
  continuous throbbing round of a distant drum. Slowly from the mingled
  light of the jewels a form will rise in garments of the colour of
  ripe pomegranates worked with flowers in gold; some apple-green
  ribbons will fall from her shoulder, and under her breasts will be a
  sash of vivid crimson. She will wear on her head a crown of jewels
  and flowers and dull gold leaves; jade and amethyst drops will fall
  from this crown on either side of her face, which will be painted
  tulip-pink and her lips scarlet; her eyes will be rimmed with black
  jewels ground into powder.

  Then, gazing at her, I shall lay at her feet the flower from my
  garden, and, smiling, she will give me an amber poppy. She will say,
  looking into my eyes, “You ask for sleep--I would give my eternity of
  slumber for one moment of that sorrow I called life.”

The Great War of to-day makes the past more melancholy, and, as the
centuries roll out with ever newer sorrows and calamities and strifes,
the faces in history seem paler, sadder. The twilight of oblivion
deepens. The history of man becomes more melancholy.




VI

TO TASHKENT


The country east of Samarkand is much greener than the country west
of it. It was interesting to note that the farther east I went from
the shores of the Caspian the less did the desert predominate. There
was abundant life on the plains; many horses grazing, many camels
carrying grey marble for the building of new palaces, many sheep. At
the railway stations were Sarts, Kirghiz, Afghans, occasional Hindus,
Jews--not Russian Jews, but polygamous Eastern Jews, a rich, secluded,
conservative tribe, who will not own their Russian brethren or sit down
with them at meat--at least, so a Jew in the train informed me.

Samarkand is outside the protectorate of Bokhara, and takes its stand
now as a city of the Russian Empire. It is also a great Mohammedan
centre, as much by tradition and history as by present fact; but it is
now completely under Russian influence, and the future which it has is
one which will show itself more and more purely Russian. Already there
are 25,000 Russians there. The city is divided by one long boulevard
into two parts, native and Russian, and it may be surmised that the
present state of Samarkand foreshadows the future state of Bokhara, and
that those three or four houses which form the Russian part of Bokhara
will at length find themselves the centre of a great Russian city,
standing face to face with the Eastern and ancient town. What a history
has Samarkand, both in legend and in history! It was founded by a
fabulous person in 4000 B.C., but only emerged into history as a place
conquered by Alexander of Macedon. It was successively conquered by
the various monarchs of the Huns and the Tartars and by proselytising
Arabs and by the Uzbeks, and at last by the Russians in 1868. Its whole
history is one of being conquered. Its people to-day are the most
gentle in the world, wear no weapons, commit no violence, never even
seem to get angry--I refer, of course, to the native Sarts.

[Illustration: FINE-LOOKING SARTS IN OLD TASHKENT]

A fine chain of cities--Askhabad, Merv, Bokhara, Samarkand,
Tashkent--and strange to realise them to be all on the railway and
in direct economic communication with Europe; it is possible to
take a train from Petersburg to Tashkent, or to Bokhara, or to the
Persian frontier without change. During the week in which I was at
Bokhara and Samarkand work was begun on the new railway which is to
run from Tashkent to Kuldzha, in Chinese Tartary, and in a little
while, perhaps, we may see an agreement made and work begun in the
construction of the railway to India through Persia. Russia, stopped
in the Far East by the emergence of modern Japan, and thwarted in
the Balkans, seemed in the time just before the Great War to be
concentrating her attention on what may be called the Middle East.
How open Europe is becoming to the East, and how easy of access is
the East becoming to us! The friendship of English and Russians in
Central Asia must mean a larger, stronger life for both Empires. And
the development of Asia can mean much to the home Russians; they, as
we, are inclined to take their own land and their capital cities as
the only places of interest in the world. Already, reading some of the
Moscow and Petersburg newspapers, you may alter Kipling’s phrase and
ask: “What do they know of Russia who only Moscow know?”

Tashkent is the capital of Russian Central Asia, and is a well-built
city extending over an enormous area. It occupies a space something
like a fifth of that which London occupies. There is no crowding
anywhere. The houses, for fear of earthquakes, have in no case more
than two storeys, and seldom that. There are many public gardens, where
you may sit at white-spread tables and drink _narzan_ or koumis in
the dense shade of thickly foliaged trees. Tashkent is a city on an
oasis. It has wonderful vegetation. Along all the streets run brisk
streams of fresh water, conducted on the irrigation system from the
river. There is a noise all day and all night of running water, so that
if you wake in the hush of night and listen to it, you may imagine
for a moment that you are living in a village among hills aleak with
thousands of cascades and rivulets. How useful is this water-supply to
Tashkent! There is no need for water-carts; strong natives are employed
with buckets to scoop water from the streams and fling it across the
cobbles all day. So effectual is their work that there is never a whiff
of dust, and, indeed, it is occasionally necessary to wear galoshes,
the streets having been made so muddy. The streams freshen the air,
keep down the dust, give life to the lofty poplars of the many avenues,
and they are the convenient element for thousands of Mohammedans to
wash in before saying their prayers. The streams make the town into the
country. As you walk down the pavemented High Street, and look in at
the truly fine shops of Tashkent, your attention may still be diverted
by the dainty water wagtail that is nesting near by, and as you wait
for the electric tram you observe the small heath butterfly flitting
along, as much at home as upon the mountains. At night, whilst all the
Russians, in white clothes, parade up and down and gossip, and the moon
looks down from above the gigantic trees of the gardens and the main
streets, the streams still take attention, for there proceeds from them
a tumultuous, everlasting, raging chorus of frog-calling.

[Illustration: OUTSIDE A GERMAN SHOP IN OLD TASHKENT]

Up the many long streets from the old town to the new come strings of
gentle-looking camels--low-backed, single-humped, long-necked camels,
with sometimes as many as twenty necklaces of blue beads from below
their ears. The horses, too, are much adorned with carpet cloths and
coloured strings that keep the flies away. The high-wheeled carts
of Bokhara have become too common in Tashkent to attract attention.
Altogether, indeed, the Orient strikes one less romantically here
than in Bokhara. The native population of 200,000 is very dirty and
disorderly; the women, behind their veils, not nearly so strict
or so careful; the houses not so well kept--all in dirt and ruin. On
the roofs of the mosques are thousands of red poppies in bloom, and
occasionally the crane’s nest is to be seen on the tops of the towers
whence the muezzin calls to prayer. There are booths of coppersmiths
and carpet-makers and silk-workers, and caravanserai where all manner
of picturesque Moslems are to be seen lying on divans and carpets or
squatting over basins of tea; but all is second-hand and down-at-heel
after Bokhara. With the coming of the Russians the angel of death has
breathed on all that was once the grandeur of the Orient at Tashkent.
Once there were no Russians in the land, and then what is now old
Tashkent was the only Tashkent; it was a great Moslem city that could
be pointed to geographically as such. But as the fine Russian streets
were laid down, and the large shops opened, and the cathedrals were
built, and the gardens laid out, the old uphill-and-down-dale labyrinth
of the Eastern city slowly changed to a curiosity and an anachronism.
It faded before the eyes. The next year the Russians were to celebrate
the fiftieth anniversary of the conquest of the town--only the
fiftieth! Poor old Tashkent, slipping into the sere and yellow leaf,
passing away even as one looked, always decreasing whilst the new town
is always increasing--there is much pathos in its destiny.

The natives are mostly Sarts, an absolutely unambitious people, honest,
quiet, sober. Scarcely any crime ever takes place among them. A week
in the year they are said to go off on a spree and get rid of the
sin in them. For the rest of the time they are like lambs. They are
uninterested in everything except small deals in the wares they make
or sell. Their wives have rings in their nostrils for adornment--so I
observed when the sun shone brightly on their black veils. A strange
sight the electric tram which goes from the old town to the new and
back again--crowded with men in white turbans and long robes and with
Eastern women in their veils.

The foundation of the society of new Tashkent is laid by the regiments
quartered there, and the fine shops exist chiefly for the custom of
officers and their wives. A Grand Duke, who was banished for giving a
Crown jewel to a favourite lady, lives here in exile, but he is an aged
man now and receives few guests. High official personages constantly
visit the colony, and consequently stay at Tashkent. The whole
atmosphere is military, and there is an unusual smartness everywhere.
Especially do you notice how well dressed the women are at the theatres
and in the gardens, and the men accompanying them nearly all wear
the sword. The middle-class Russian is out of sight, and the peasant
labourer is rare, owing to the fact that the Sarts work at 9d. a day,
but the Russian at 1s. or 1s. 3d. There is, however, a dandy Armenian
element; young hawkers and shoeblacks and barbers who appear in the
evening in white collars and cheap serges, with combed locks under felt
hats, with canes in their hands.

[Illustration: TASHKENT: A FOOTBALL MATCH AT THE COLLEGE]

Tashkent has now many schools, from the important Corpus, the
military college where officers’ sons are educated, to the little
native school where the Russian schoolmaster tries to give Russian to
the Sart. I visited the splendid military school, and was only sorry
to be too late in the season to see an hour of Russian football, the
game being very popular with the boys. Most of the professors at this
school are officers, and I met a charming staff-captain who had known
several English correspondents during the war in Manchuria. The teacher
of French gave me some interesting photographs.

There are six cinema shows at Tashkent, two theatres, an open-air
theatre, a skating rink, and many small diversions. The native turns up
in the cinema, and there are generally long lines of turbaned figures
in the front of the theatre. At the real theatres it is necessarily
those who know Russian who take the seats. At the open-air theatre they
play _The Taming of the Shrew_, at the Coliseum the _Doll’s House_ and
Artsibasheff’s _Jealousy_. The town has two newspapers, and on the day
on which I arrived I found that the leading article of the _Courier of
Turkestan_ was entitled “The State of Affairs in Ulster.” All Europe
seemed to have its eyes on our politics, and Europe extends now as far
east as Tashkent, though it is of “Central Asia” that that city claims
to be the capital.

A wonderful place Tashkent. Cherries ripen there by the 1st of May,
strawberries are seven copecks a pound in mid-May. Everything ripens
three weeks earlier than in Russia proper. It is a fresh, fragrant
city--an interesting curiosity among the cities of the world. The
Russians have in it a city worth possessing. It must be said they have
done their best to possess it, not merely in the letter of the law, but
by improving it and governing it and giving it a Russian atmosphere.
Despite camels and mosques, and natives in their turbans, and the sad
call of the muezzin, you feel all the time as you go up and down the
streets of Tashkent that you are in Russia.

The Kaufmann Square is, I suppose, the noblest position in the new
city, all the avenues and prospects being used to frame the monument
which stands there. This is the statue of General Kaufmann, who took
possession of the land for the Russians. On one side of the monument is
a fierce, dark, enormous, two-headed eagle in stone. But between its
claws this year a dove had its nest. From behind the eagle General von
Kaufmann stands and looks over his new-conquered country. On the other
side of the monument there is the following inscription:

  “I pray you bury me here that everyone may know that here is true
  Russian earth in which no Russian need be ashamed to lie.”

                       (_From a letter of_ GENERAL KAUFMANN, 1878.)

Rather interesting that this should be said by a Russian with a German
name.




VII

THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST


The Russian princes, Yaroslaf Vsevolodovitch and his son, Alexander
Nevsky, did homage to the Mongol khans in the thirteenth century.
Timour brought back thousands of Russian slaves after his conquests,
and Russia lay under the yoke of the Tartars. The Empire of Asia lasted
only a little while in the hands of the dynasty of Tamerlane, and the
Uzbek and the Kirghiz Cossacks appeared, waging a holy war for Islam.
At the present moment there are one million Uzbeks in the province of
Bokhara, three hundred and fifty thousand in Khiva, and five hundred
thousand spread over the rest of Russian Turkestan, and a sprinkling
in Afghanistan. The Uzbeks formed three kingdoms, Bokhara, Khiva, and
Kokand. The Emirs of these states are to this day Uzbeks, but are now
little more than Russian civil servants. A dependence of Kokand was
Pamir, where the Karakirghiz wandered with their flocks--people now
wandering on the Thian Shan mountains in Ferghan and Seven Rivers Land,
also in parts of Sirdaria and Eastern Turkestan. The Kirghiz Cossacks
came south from what is now the Akmolinsk Steppe in Siberia. This race,
a sort of mongrelisation of Huns and Tartars, diffused itself over the
whole desert from Lake Balkhash to the Ural. In the seventeenth century
they were an organised and powerful nation, with a Khan at Tashkent;
but in the succeeding century there was faction and dissension, and the
nation divided off into three large hordes. The great horde went to
Seven Rivers Land in the Northern Ural, the middle horde to the Steppes
of Akmolinsk, and the little horde to Sirdaria and the Ural. From that
day their military spirit seems to have steadily waned. To-day they
are as peaceful as their herds. During the years 1846 to 1854, the
Russians began to penetrate the deserts of Seven Rivers Land and take
the Kirghiz over as subjects. There was very little actual fighting
till the Russians came into contact with the Uzbeks of Kokand, whom,
however, they fought and overthrew with considerable slaughter. Vemey
fell in 1854, Pishpek and Tokmak in 1862. Then the Russians turned
westward, and took Aulie Ata, Chimkent, and Tashkent. In 1867 Seven
Rivers Land was made into a Russian province, and the stream of Russian
colonisation turned out of Siberia southward toward India.

[Illustration: PLEASANT COUNTRY OUTSIDE TASHKENT]

One stream of colonists was moving southward from Siberia, another
was moving eastward from the Volga. One observes the rise of the
Russian power. In the sixteenth century the Russian had begun to take
the upper hand, and Kazan and Astrakhan, though predominantly Tartar
cities, fell to the assaults of Christian arms. In the eighteenth
century the peasant colonists had already come into contact with the
Kirghiz Cossacks, and boundary lines had to be drawn. Orenburg
fell into Russian hands in 1748, and peaceful penetration followed
military success. In 1847 the great horde of the Kirghiz became Russian
subjects, and all the races of Central Asia began to talk about
the coming advance of the Russians and the need to fight them. The
Russian war of conquest was consummated in the East. From Tashkent the
Russians proceeded to make war on the Bokharese. In vain did the Emir
of Bokhara demand the evacuation of Tashkent by the Russians. In 1866
the Bokharese were defeated at the battle of Irdzhar, and Khodzkent
was taken by storm. After heavy fighting with Uzbeks and Turkomans and
great slaughter of the Mohammedans, they approached Samarkand, which
at last they occupied at the invitation of the inhabitants. In 1868
a treaty was made between the Emir of Bokhara and the Tsar, whereby
Samarkand and district passed to Russia.

In 1869 a Russian army crossed the Caspian and laid siege to
Krasnovodsk, and attempts were made to push across the desert along the
northern frontier of Persia. The Turkomans, however, offered an heroic
resistance, and it was not until 1880, when Skobelef was given charge
of the task of subduing the tribes, that Russia made progress. At the
beginning of December, 1880, the army of Turkestan, under Colonel
Kuropatkin, made over five hundred miles progress across the flying
sands and took the fortress of Dengil-Tepe. Askhabad was taken, and
all the fortified points in Transcaspia. Transcaspia was made into a
Russian province in 1881.

In 1884 there was a short struggle, and then the ancient city of
Merv fell into Russian hands, and the English began to view the
Russian progress with uneasiness. There was even such a word coined
as “mervousness,” and Russophobes had Merv on the brain. It must be
admitted we were rather backward not to treat with the Russians and
obtain definite trade treaties at that time. For we lost and Germany
gained a great deal of trade which we might still have retained.

Bokhara and Khiva came under Russian protection. The Central Asian
Railway was built, and Russia became the most important Power in the
Moslem world of Central Asia, owning as subjects so many millions
of Kirghiz, Sarts, Uzbeks, Turkomans, Tekintsi, Tartars, and being
neighbours of Turks, Persians, Afghans and what not. Never was such
a stretch of territory, so many new subjects, or so much trade and
interest won with so little trouble. It was won almost by military
processions. It must be remembered that it could not have been held,
nor would Russia have any real footing there to-day, but for the
peasant pioneers who followed the armies and began settling the land.
And the peasants would not have remained if the Government of Russia
had not helped them with loans, found them suitable plots for their
villages, and irrigated the desert.

[Illustration: HEARTY SHEPHERDS: ALL KIRGHIZ]

Now Turkestan and Russian Central Asia are extremely loyal, peaceful
and happy Russian colonies. Rebellion was put down with such severity
by the Russians, the defeats were with such slaughter, that the
Asiatic tribesmen learned that Russia was too powerful to be trifled
with; they knew they had found their masters, and submitted absolutely.
The Russians overcowed their spirits, they felt there was some magic
power behind them, and that human resistance was vain. Then fear gave
way to placid acceptance of mastery, and the Russians began building
churches and schools and fortresses and barracks, shops, towns,
villages, and no one said them nay. Trade passed into the hands of
Russian merchants, and new towns sprang up beside the old ones--new
Bokhara beside old Bokhara, new Tashkent beside old Tashkent, and the
Moslems saw unveiled the will of God. They could not have been a very
warlike people really. They are not like the Mohammedans under our
rule or the Turks, though it is quite possible that if, as a result
of this war, a great quantity of Armenia and Turkey fell into Russian
hands, the Mohammedans there would accept their fate as destiny and
settle down to live as peacefully as their fellow-believers of Russian
Central Asia. These are meek. During the past winter the Germans have
been endeavouring to stir up Islam to fight England, France and Russia.
Germany and Turkey have found a common ground. The Arabs in Mesopotamia
are fighting a holy war against us. Persia has wavered; there has
been ferment in India, there might have been a rising in Afghanistan,
but there has been no chance of a rising of those Mohammedans who are
Russian subjects. All the aborigines of Russian Central Asia are
devoted to peace, and none have any quarrel with the Russian Empire.

Russia, of course, has considerable control over her Mohammedan
subjects because of the railways. The development of the lines in
Central Asia has undoubtedly been a wise Imperial measure on Russia’s
part, and they are the best fruits of her conquest. The construction
afforded certain interesting engineering problems, though it may be
remarked that Russian engineers generally succeed in building railways
over plains, even over deserts, but fail when they come to mountains.

[Illustration: THE RUSSIAN TEACHER: A NATIVE SCHOOL IN TASHKENT]

The Central Asian Railway had for its original object the pacification
of the Tekintsi, and was a strategic line from the Transcaspian post
of Krasnovodsk to the oasis of Kizil Arvat. It was built over the
desert, and was at first regarded as of a temporary military character.
It cannot now be regarded as a well-built railway, is very loose, and
trains are forced to go very slowly, and it is constantly in danger
of sand obstruction through storms. In the progress of the military
operations against the Tekintsi, Geok-Tepe was stormed in January,
1881, and the first train went through to Kizil Arvat in December of
the same year. Kizil Arvat remained the terminus until the fray with
the Afghans, on March 30th, 1885, when the prolongation was undertaken
seriously. In June, 1885, the Tsar decided to continue the railway
towards the frontier of Afghanistan, and by December 11th, 1885, the
Russian military railway gangs had taken the rails 136 miles on
to Askhabad, at the northern limit of Persia. Merv was annexed, the
rails went on to Merv. By December, 1886, the railway had gone on to
Chardzhui, on the Oxus. The red river was bridged, and the railway went
on to Bokhara and Samarkand. A state service of steamers was started
on the Oxus between Chardzhui and Khiva. In 1888 the completion of the
line to Samarkand was celebrated, and the railway was consecrated with
ecclesiastical pomp. The Russians have always given the impression
that they did not intend to develop their railways, and yet they have
gone on developing them all the same. They have gone south from Merv
to the River Kush, on the Afghanistan frontier, and east from Khodgent
to Andigan and Kokand. They have brought a main line from Petrograd,
by way of Orenburg, over the deserts of Sirdaria, to the cities of
Turkestan and Tashkent, and have thus a railway all the way from the
Baltic to within a few hundred miles of India. In February, 1916,
trains were first run on the first reach of the new railway that is to
join Russia and Western China. It is now possible to go to Chimkent by
train, and possibly next year to Aulie Ata. If English were in charge
of this territory there would probably be more railways by now. In any
case, the chief value of the railways has been the means they afforded
of bloodless pacification of tribes. But their future is not so much a
military future as one of trade and Imperial development.

Russia has made her Imperial conquests by force of arms, and
safeguarded them by railways and colonisation. It should be remembered
that before and after and all the time runs the natural stream of
colonisation. The ultimate bond of unity is that which comes from the
national family ties of colonisation. Nothing stands in Russia’s way,
and she is always quietly colonising the empty East.

An interesting yearly chart might be issued by the Russian Government
showing the waves of colonisation: the new spots in forests and deserts
that have been given names, the new farms, the thickening of the
population in the nearer-in districts, the efflorescence of Russian
enterprise at the farthest-out points whither they have gone. Several
hundred Russian families are settled in Northern Persia, several
hundred also in Mongolia and China. The movement goes on, and it is
not primarily due to the density of population in European Russia. All
Russia, excepting the few industrial regions, is under rather than
over-populated. There is plenty of room. Why, then, should Russia
increase? or why not? Russia has access to the empty heart of Asia.
The old world is hollow at the core, and Russia has access to that
great, wide hollowness, stands at the door of it and stares into the
great emptiness. Then her people are wanderers; they have the wandering
spirit. A cross wind blows over them, and they are gipsies--the
roving heart rules the mind. They love the road and the quest. They
are seekers. Even the most materialistic of them, the least religious
in their outward expression, nourish dreams of success and ideas of
golden climes to be found “beyond the horizon.” We should call many
of them ne’er-do-wells, though as a matter of fact they are all intent
to do well somewhere. They take up farms and give up farms with too
little scruple, and then go farther, disgusting the official eye in one
district, but knowing they will delight other official eyes farther on
when they turn up with carts and cattle and belongings at some verdant,
empty wilderness still farther away from the centre of Russia.




VIII

ON THE ROAD


There was some difficulty in getting on from Tashkent. I had two
British notes, but no bank would change them. The clerks held the paper
upside down, took it to their colleagues, who were supping tea whilst
they worked at their ledgers, took it to the manager to show him a
curiosity, and finally returned it to me “with much regret.” “Don’t
think we are savages,” said one bank clerk, “because we do not accept
your money. The fact is, we’ve never seen it before and cannot even
read what is written on it.” Another clerk, a sympathiser, advised
me that there was an Englishman in Tashkent, a merchant who did much
business and had an account in the bank, bade me go to him, for he
would know what the notes were worth, and would no doubt accommodate a
fellow-countryman. I obtained the address and sought out my compatriot.
His name was something like Kellerman--not very promising. Behold one
of the funniest Englishmen I ever met--as clear a German Jew as I’d
ever seen in my life, scarcely speaking English, and making all the
comic mistakes which Germans make with our tongue, a fat, ill-shaven,
collarless old man of a greasy complexion, a middleman buying wool
and horsehair and oilcakes and seed from the native Sarts and Jews
and Tartars and Kirghiz. He professed to be very pleased to meet a
fellow-countryman, and to be yearning for his “native land”--“a nice
house in Kentish Town, all fog and wet in the streets, a nice fire,
pull the blinds down, and read the ‘_Daily Telegraaf_.’” Every night
in Tashkent he repaired to the public gardens, took a seat beside
the skating rink, and watched the violent whirl of Armenian youths
and their lady friends on roller-skates. Each night between ten and
twelve Kellerman might be found in his place, chuckling to himself at
the sight of accidents. “Causts nawthing,” said he, “and it’s such a
pleasure to see other people break their necks or their legs.”

Needless to say, he would not touch my notes; at first thought they
might be false, and then offered me three pounds ten each for them. He
said he wouldn’t change them, but would be willing to make a deal and
treat it as a matter of business. So I had to post my money to Moscow.

The next obstruction was from the police, who doubted whether I had
permission to wander about in Central Asia, and it was only after
I had myself looked through the books at the police-station that I
found my name, almost unrecognisably spelt, in the list of those who
had permission. At last I got both my money in Russian change and my
_visé_, and was free to go. So I started my long journey from the
limits of the railway to the frontier of China.

I took train to Kabul Sai, a little station north of Tashkent, and
thence set out across the grass-covered downs to Chimkent, the first
point of importance on my journey. I was a little anxious lest I should
be stopped by the station gendarme, for it was not to be thought that
every local police authority would have my name legibly inscribed, and
I did not want to be delayed waiting while Kabul Sai and a hundred
other places wrote to Tashkent for information. However, I escaped
attention, and, having made a good country dinner (big dinner, I should
rather say) at the station buffet, I lounged about till the train went
out of the station, and then, considering compass and map, I cut across
country and found the road--without questions.

So I got on to my feet in Sirdaria, the land of the little horde of the
Kirghiz. The plain was dusty and vast, with a great sky overhead. There
were long-legged beetles that scampered through the dust of the road,
tortoises and their families eating grass and dandelions, and very much
taken aback when picked up and examined. Father Tortoise is big and
green; his children are wee, like young crabs. There was no cultivation
anywhere in sight; the first grass had already seeded and withered,
but thousands of blue irises were in blossom, and the tall sheaves of
their leaves contrasted strangely with the dying grass below. The sun
was hot, but a fresh, travelling wind fairly lifted me as I walked. A
chorus of larks overhead made the prelude to my journey.

[Illustration: A KIRGHIZ GRANDMOTHER: VENDOR OF _KOUMIS_]

The only people on the road were Kirghiz. Far away on the hills I
noticed their great flocks of cattle and the circular tents of the
nomads. There were no villages. No villages, because it was hardly
“white man’s country”; there was no water to drink. I thought to make
myself tea, but I reckoned without my host. Where there should have
been streams there was only a broken parquet of dry mud. No trees,
no shade, no shelter, and, if I should find water, no fuel. The five
post-wagons, drawn each by three horses and driven by enormously fat
Kirghiz drivers with faces the colour of dull mahogany, went past me
in a cloud of dust, and I watched them away as the sun was setting.
Three-quarters of a mile away they all stopped by a wooden bridge.
There was evidently water; perhaps the drivers wanted a drink. I was
very joyful at the prospect of tea. When I got nearer I found that all
the drivers were saying their Mohammedan prayers, and had stopped at
the stream to have the conventional wash. The water was reddish-brown,
with mingled mud; light could not be seen through a glass of it.

I resolved to see what could be obtained at the Kirghiz tents, put my
pack down by the side of the road, and set off, with a pot in one hand
and a bit of silver in the other. There were three tents on a hill,
and near them many cows and goats and horses. I arrived in a whirlwind
of dogs, three or four cattle dogs showing their teeth and barking and
snarling as they tore round me in circles. Several women were employed
tending immense pans of milk which they were boiling over bonfires made
of roots. They seemed a trifle scared at first, but when I showed them
the pot and pointed to the bit of silver they understood, and I was
quickly put in possession of a potful of hot, smoky milk. I carried
it carefully back to the place where I had slung my pack, and there
I sat down, feeling rather lost or accidental, and I drank the hot
milk and munched a bit of bread which I had brought from the town. The
dogs followed me all the way to my resting-place, but when they saw me
sit down and take things calmly they retired a distance and kept up a
desultory chorus.

So I made my first meal out of doors by the roadside. The next thing
was to find a place for the night. There was no variety in the country,
and I could only choose a place where insects were fewer and one not
over a tortoise’s burrow. I had a light, home-made sleeping-sack and
a plaid. The sack was made by sewing two sheets together on three
sides. The sack is a useful institution; it keeps insects out and is
much warmer than open clothing. I had also a mosquito net, for there
are more flies here than in other parts of the world. Before making
my spread I removed an elegant oak-eggar caterpillar. I am always
disinclined to injure the creeping things of the earth, especially on
a long journey. I feel that to a certain extent I am in their charge.
This is a sort of natural superstition. Directly you kill something
superfluously, horror thrills you as it thrilled the ancient mariner
who shot the albatross.

[Illustration: RUSSIANS AND KIRGHIZ LIVING SIDE BY SIDE AT THE FOOT OF
THE MOUNTAINS]

I lay down in such a position as to see the sunset in the evening
and the sunrise in the morning. Sunset was stormy, but somewhere
among the rose-tinged clouds a late lark sang the day out. Then
stars appeared behind cloud curtains, and the night breeze carried
his messages along the heath. The first breath of night was cool
and pleasant, but about an hour after sunset the weather changed
entirely. It became very hot and airless, and lightnings shot across
all horizons. A shower of rain came down, and the stars disappeared.
As I lay considering the sky I heard far off the chattering of
children--chattering, laughing, and occasional bursts of singing. The
sounds came nearer, and presently there emerged a troop of camels,
twelve huge camels stalking out of the night, and on their backs men,
women and children, tents, goods. A little family of wanderers crossing
the wilderness in the night! They came so near to me that the first
camel snorted as he passed, and it was necessary for me to sit up and
warn the others off. I had not anticipated that there might be people
travelling across country in the night. They passed, and the quietness
of night resumed its sway. The clouds thickened, and lightning
shimmered under them; it began to rain again, and then stopped, and the
stars once more came up, and then the clouds thickened once more, and
once more rain came down on me with rapid tapping. So the whole night,
and it was a pleasant tempering of the heat. I slept happily, and it
was a long while before I wakened.

When I reopened my eyes it was to look at the seven stars standing
over a blue-grey, vaporous cloud, and looking like some uncanny Asiatic
frying-pan over a fire. There was scarcely a star but for them, and
south and east and west were all dark. It did not occur to me that
it was near dawn. But suddenly a voice of liquid melody burst from
the sky, and after it, as at a signal, a whole chorus of larks sang
together away high up in the rain-wet vault of the sky.

I slept an hour longer, and it was morning. For my breakfast I visited
another Kirghiz tent, and this time obtained a pot of mare’s milk. A
dwarf-like old woman was squatting on a carpet in the middle of the
tent, and when I said “koumis” she at once got up and brought me a tall
wooden jar. I held my pot, she tipped up the jar, and poured out the
koumis. Good that Kirghiz women are not so strictly hidden as other
Mohammedans of their sex!

About ten o’clock I fell in with two soldiers walking to Verney (some
six hundred miles), their guns and knapsacks having gone before by
wagon. They reckoned they would be more than a month on the road. No
doubt they would march the journey in better style with a whole column,
but as it was they were inclined to stop every two hundred yards and
take off their boots; one wore jackboots, and rags for stockings, and
the other Kirghiz sandals tied with string over bare feet. He told me
light shoes were better than heavy boots, but I knew better.

“Heavy going?” said I.

“Yes, heavy. No water, and no one understands us in the Kirghiz tents.”

We shared what remained of my koumis.

“Where do you come from?”

“Voronezh fort. And you?”

“From England.”

“Have you served in the army?”

“No. We don’t need to unless we want to, you know; our soldiers receive
wages.”

“How much?”

“Fifty copecks a day,” said I, “and a premium when they retire.”

“And they only give us seventy copecks a month. There’s a difference!
How long do you have to serve? Ah! We have only three years to serve.
But I’ve seen your soldiers,” said the Russian.

“Where?”

“At Teheran. We stood side by side with them there. But afterwards it
was found we were not necessary, and they moved us back.”

One of the soldiers was inclined to talk, the other not. Suddenly the
silent one asked: “What are you doing here--making plans?”

“No,” said I apprehensively; “I’m just walking along through the
country to see what it is like. Afterwards I write about it.”

“For a library, so to speak?”

“That’s it.”

After much self-questioning on the subject of where water was to be
found next, we came at last to a brook where there was clear water.
It was warm and salt to the taste, but I decided to make tea. The
soldiers sat by and grinned incredulously. I should not have been able
to light a fire, but that, like the cunning younger brother in the
fairy-tale, I had been picking up every bit of wood that I chanced to
see along the roadway. I had early realised how difficult it was to
find fuel and how precious any stray bit of wood really was. By the
stream there was nothing to burn but hay. “Now shift yourselves,” said
I, “and go and find some dry hay, the driest; we shall need all the
fuel we can get.” They obeyed like good soldiers, and the fire burned
and the kettle boiled and the tea was made. What tea! No one would have
touched it in Tashkent, but out here on the road we drank it to the
last drop and left the tea-leaves parched.

The soldiers then stretched themselves out to sleep, and I went on.
A mile on I met a Kirghiz lad carrying a scythe on his back, and he
rejoiced in my company and talked to me exuberantly in his native
tongue. I replied to him in Russian, but as he did not understand that,
but still went on talking, I reverted for amusement to English. One
thing was clear--he admired my ring very much, and several times he
took up my hand as we walked and looked at the ring and exclaimed.

[Illustration: A TENT OF LONELY NOMADS ON A SUMMER PASTURE IN CENTRAL
ASIA]

When we got to his tent I bade him fetch me some mare’s milk, and so
I got my evening meal. I had never tasted koumis before this day, and
had generally regarded it as more in the nature of medicine than food.
I knew that Russians suffering from catarrh of the stomach and
internal troubles were ordered by doctors to go to Kirghiz country and
live exclusively on koumis. Now it seemed I had to live on it, more or
less, for several weeks. Some say it is as invigorating as champagne; I
do not know. It is certainly a pleasant drink and good food.

That night I slept out till ten, and then thunder and the rain forced
me to pack up and search for shelter. Eventually a little old man whom
I met in the dark conducted me to a Kirghiz caravanserai. _Sarai_ is
Russian for a shed or barn, and the caravanserai is the shed where the
caravan puts in, otherwise an inn. I was accommodated on an old carpet
on a dried mud floor. There were a score of men in the room. Some were
snoring, some were smoking hookahs, one was playing a three-stringed
guitar, and the rest were squatting round a little kerosene lamp on
the floor, dealing out grimy cards, calling out numbers, gathering in
copecks.

The roof of the inn was all canes and earth, and I surmised that grass
was growing above it. The walls were tattered and old, and occasionally
a fat scorpion wandered along them. There was a black and white duck in
one corner sitting on a basket of eggs. I lay away from the walls. “Not
good to sleep indoors,” I reflected; “fresher and quieter on the heath;
but I don’t want to get soaked.”

After my night in the Kirghiz caravanserai I was regaled in the
morning with millet bread and tea. My host charged me 2d. for bed and
breakfast, and I resumed my journey. It was over a moorland country,
high and windswept. All day I was climbing uphill to view points, or
plunging downhill into the rough pits that lay between them. The sun
was a ghost in the haze of the sky; there was a tempering of the light,
and even now and then a cloud shadow cast over the fields, and it was
delicious to look at the myriads of crimson poppies set in meadows of
rank grass.

I was in better country; there were more streams, more people, more
cattle. There were snowy mountains on the horizon. Some freshness from
the snow came from them. I sat on a sun-bathed crown of the downs and
watched the lambs playing; white, brown, yellow, black lambs, very
pretty to look at, very lively. And immense camel herds came stalking
up to me as if released from some pen, groaning, whining, grunting,
lying in the dust and rolling over, getting up again convulsively,
tolling the lugubriously sounding bells that hang under their necks.
There were many baby camels no bigger than donkeys; as they came along
they indulged in ungainly scampering, which made it look as if their
hind-legs were fighting their fore-legs.

Pleasant for me to sit and watch them idly! How different the feelings
of a dozen prisoners whom I saw being marched along my road by two
armed guards, a pitiful little troop of men, some of them stripped to
the waist, because they thought it cooler so, all very dusty and limp,
and all carrying in their hands blue, empty kettles which they hoped to
fill at springs or streams by the way. Alas! there was no water fit to
drink anywhere along that road! Poor prisoners. What to them were poppy
fields, or camel herds, or beautiful views! There was probably just one
thought in each and every one’s head: “When shall I get a drink?” or
“When shall we come to a piece of shade?”

The prisoners went on in the dust; I remained behind in the free air.
In the afternoon I saw a samovar steaming outside a mud hut, and so
went up and was allowed to have tea with a Kirghiz family. Not nomads
these Kirghiz, but settled inhabitants with passports or papers. The
Russian Government is very anxious to get these wandering folk out
of tents into immovable dwellings. There squatted down to tea the
owner of the hut, in a rust-coloured cloak; his wife, in a bright
yellow “cover-all”--hold-all, you might almost say; a boy, in white
cotton slops; and a little dusky girl, naked to the waist, but wearing
cotton trousers, having a silver chain round her neck, and her black
hair in twelve long and slender plaits, each loaded at the end with a
little silver weight that kept them from getting mixed up and looking
untidy. The mother, in yellow, had a sort of wire puzzle in her ears
for ear-rings, on her head a high, white turban. She was by no means
a beauty. She looked as if originally she had been made without a
mouth, and a neighbour had opened a place for it with a blunt knife.
The Kirghiz women are not by any means feminine or attractive in
appearance. As we squatted, each with a basin in our hands, in came
a neighbour from the fields. She wore a white turban and a white
gown. Her face was deep oak-stain. She had a sash of scarlet at her
middle, wore jackboots, and had on her wrists three bracelets of the
serviette-holder type. She was a woman cowherd, just in from the
fields. In her hands she carried a little spinning stick with circular
leaden weight at the bottom of it, and on to this she dexterously
pulled camel hair out of one hand whilst with the other she twirled it
into thread. She was evidently _persona grata_ in the hut. She had the
face of a pirate--a great, big, tanned, jolly, horse-like sort of face.

After tea the boy and girl ran off to the flocks, the women went on
spinning, and the father brought out a bull with a ring through his
nose and a chain and rope hanging from it. He put a bit of hide on the
beast’s back, and then, to my astonishment, mounted and rode away over
the hills. I sat in a shady corner and watched the afternoon turn to
evening.

[Illustration: SARTS SELLING BREAD: THE _LEPESHKA_ STALL]

Presently out of the blue sky came a hurricane shower of hail and rain,
flashing through the dazzling sunshine and yet never obscuring it. It
was big, stinging hail, but none of the Kirghiz seemed to mind it. I
could see all the children of the village disporting themselves with
the lambs and the calves on the hill opposite. Not till twilight did
they return--and then there was for me one of the prettiest sights. All
the children came in riding bareback on calves or sheep, and driving
them forward with kicks of their little bare feet. The little dusky
girl sat astride of a golden-brown lamb, and her brother on an
unwilling brown calf. Following the lamb came the anxious mother ewe,
and following the calf a bellowing old black cow. Many children came
up, and there was a gay gathering and a delicious noise of mirth and
jollity at the end of the day. As a reward to the ewes and the lambs
the children brought them millet bread and fed them from their hands.
The ewes did all but speak to the children, and the way they took the
millet bread from them spoke of an unusual intimacy between children
and animals. The sheep were not worried or stupefied by the children’s
pranks; they were watchful, wilful, and almost as mischievous as the
children themselves. In these wild places of the world where there is
no civilisation and no pretension on the part of man to be more than an
animal himself--where, moreover, man lives in the midst of great herds
where all business and doing seems to be the breeding of young--the
children of men and the children of the herds are much more akin. The
birth of children synchronises with the birth of lambs and foals, and
is associated in the aboriginal mind. One understands how the eyes
of the ancient Israelites and Egyptians, those primeval shepherd and
nomadic peoples, were fixed upon the process of birth. They lived also
in the midst of the animal world.

At nightfall carpets were spread outside the hut for the people to
sleep on. They also lived the night with the stars. But the children
stayed long with the lambs, and I imagine in some cases slept with
them.

I, for my part, decided to push on for Chimkent[A] in the cool of the
evening, and I got into the little town about ten o’clock at night.
Chimkent is a miniature of Tashkent, but without the great buildings
and shops in the Russian half. The same wide town--when you come to it
you are not there; it is necessary to go on and on. The same gullies
running along every street--only the water in them is less muddy than
at Tashkent. The Sartish shops again. The dazzling cinema shows once
more. I made for a brilliant illumination, thinking it might be an
hotel, but it was the cinema theatre “Light.” Cinema theatres all have
names in Russia, none more common than this one of “The Light.”

I found an inn at length, and a room. Next morning I went out for
provisions. Chimkent has a little reputation as a watering-place, and
chiefly because of the supply of koumis! Russians are very fond of
going to outlandish places in order to be “cured,” and koumis is the
cure of Chimkent. It is a beautiful little town, however. Chimkent
has its mountain background, its white-stemmed, magnificent poplars,
its old ruins, its fortifications. The Russians live more freely than
usual. No passport was asked of me at the inn where I stayed. There
was no Government monopoly of the sale of vodka.[B] There seemed to be
fewer police about.

The Sartish bazaar was full of life and colour; carpenters, smiths
and metal workers doing their work at open booths; koumis merchants
standing behind gallon bottles and little glasses, inviting you to
sit down there and then and drink a glass, the white of the milk
gleaming suggestively through the gloomy green of the bottle; silk and
cotton vendors exposing marvellously gaudy wares to veiled females who
tried to look at the stuff without exposing their faces, a difficult
manœuvre; strawberry hawkers; hawkers of _lepeshka_; carpet vendors;
saddle vendors. There were high stacks of gaily coloured wooden
saddles. A Kirghiz woman, riding astride of a pony, and yet having a
dusky baby at her open breast, came and bought just such a saddle.

What remains most brightly in my mind was a long row of silvery-grey
wolf skins exhibited at one shop. It was almost as if the animals
themselves were looking at you. It reminded me of what winter must be
like in this land--not mild, as one might expect, but intensely cold
as long as it lasts. The moors are full of dangers from wolves. It
was hereabouts, some years ago, that a whole wedding party of thirty
or forty people perished on their way from the church to the bride’s
house. The distance was only twenty miles, and in that time the wolves
tore down all the horses and all the people except one Kirghiz driver,
who by sacrificing the last-left couple, the bride and groom, and
throwing them to the wolves, escaped to tell the tale and not feel
shame. The Kirghiz would not feel shame at such an act--they are
somehow outside codes of honour and chivalry and religion. They are not
savages, but they are not civilised.

I spent a day altogether at Chimkent. Before resuming my tramp I bought
myself a bottle in which to keep water or milk against a thirsty hour
on the road. At the shop where I bought it a strange variety of wares
was exposed; first Caucasian wine, then local wine--vodka, called here
table wine--cognac, liqueurs, then ikons, flowers for your grave,
matches and tobacco. Very suggestive, I thought. The landlady was
rather taken aback at my remarks, and said that in a small place like
Chimkent one could not have a separate shop for ikons or for flowers or
for vodka, and her brother was a joiner, and she could take orders for
coffins.

At Chimkent I struck colonial country, the main stretch of Russian
colonisation extending eastward from Tashkent. I set out over a very
worn switchback road, through irrigated fields of barley, through
hayfields, where Russians were at work, past Russian farmhouses, into
a country entirely different from that which I had been traversing.
For the time being the Kirghiz was out of sight and I was in a Russian
colonial district, a sort of Southern Siberia, full of interest and
promise. At dusk I came to an encampment of fifty or sixty emigrants,
with their wagons and horses. Many fires were burning, and iron pails
full of soup were simmering over them; samovars were steaming, children
were skirling and playing, someone was playing a concertina, and many
drunkards were singing. Familiar Russian songs rent the air--the old
songs which Russians never seem to abandon, and perhaps never will
abandon, even when everybody knows the latest music-hall catch.

I slept the night on a hillock overlooking the road, and it was better
than at the inn, even though there was a thunder-shower. The larks
sang the day out again. I listened to the cuckoo calling and to the
conversation of the blue crows that kept visiting me, finding out
something, flying away, and then returning with brethren; watched the
stars and the clouds, and slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had now struck the main road from Tashkent to the Chinese frontier,
and the prospect of my journey changed from one of solitary wandering
over sandy wastes to one full of life and interest in the company of
Russian colonists and Oriental traffickers. From the moment I wakened
up on the hill-side on my first morning after leaving Chimkent, I was
not out of the hearing of songs and laughter and chattering, nor out of
the sight of wagons, carts, camel trains and people.

The road was really four roads, each separated by streaks of trampled
grass-grown mud, now dried or drying after many thunder-showers. On
the southern side you are accompanied by snowy mountains for hundreds
of miles. You would think that you could walk to them in half an hour
and get a handful of snow, so clear is the atmosphere that shows them,
but they are at least twenty miles distant. They are, first, the Alai
Tau, and then the Alexandrovsky Mountains, and then what is known as
the Trans-Ilian Alai Tau, and many of their peaks are over ten thousand
feet high, but are not named and little known. On the north side of
the road stretches the desert in spring, now green to the horizon, but
already turning yellow here and there under the blaze of the sun. On
either hand one sees far-away clusters of grey tents of the Kirghiz,
and near them their herds of cattle-black patches that are horses, red
patches that are cows, grey, white and brown masses like many maggots,
and they are sheep. There are also many camels far away on the hills,
looking like little twists of thick rope with knots in the middle.

Nearly all the traffic at this season is going eastward, and each
morning, when the horses are put in and the wagoners make up the
caravan once more, it is with eyes and faces toward the dawn.

The emigrant caravan starts an hour before sunrise; the camp breaks up
and the oxen and horses are put to, and the long day of creaking and
blundering and toiling onward commences. I was regularly wakened up
by the road which had wakened before me, the moving caravans and the
traders’ carts.

  The stars are setting and the caravan
  Starts for the dawn of nothing. Oh! make haste!

I generally slept at a distance of about a hundred yards from the
actual highway, in order to avoid being run over at night. Even so,
I was frequently in some danger of being trodden on before dawn, and
at least sure to be wakened early by the traffic on the road. Upon
occasion there were whole hordes and patriarchal families on the roads,
with their camels and sheep and horses, their white-turbaned women
riding on bulls, and pretty girl-brides on caparisoned palfreys.

We journeyed from village to village, and each was an artificial oasis
made by the Russian colonists and irrigation engineers. Every ten,
fifteen or twenty miles there was a substantial Russian village; the
farther I went the more distance there was between these settlements,
but still the actual chain was kept up unbroken to the far east
of the colony, and the maps which we have of these deserts are
unrepresentative in that they show blank spaces with a scattering of
Tartar names of places. The map should now be well marked with Russian
names. Each village is a shady shelter, alive with the running water of
the irrigation canals, wherein are trailing families of ducks. There
are long lines of splendid poplar trees, solid houses, schools, shops,
a church, post office, municipal buildings, and so on. A notice-board
tells the number of souls and the date of the foundation of the village.

When the long caravans of new colonists came to a settlement they tied
their horses and oxen to trees, repaired to inns, sought out people
who had come from their part of Russia, and made merry with them. The
village was a great sight when one of the long caravans had come in.

A little respite from the hot road, and then on once more. I see a
Kirghiz riding with reins in one hand and a hawk in the other. The
Kirghiz are great hawkers, using different hawks for different game. I
meet a Sartish cart in which are five soldiers coming home from Verney,
where they have received their discharge--several hundred miles from a
railway station--and they have hired a native cart, and are asleep in
the bottom of it. At last I come to a tumbling mountain stream, and it
is good to have a swim and make myself tea in the shadow of the great
bridge which takes the high road across the water. When a great band of
colonists arrives here, there is an astonishing scene of peasant men
and women bathing. They take to the water as if their very bodies were
thirsty.

We pass through Mankent, one of the few native towns remaining, and
that tending to be swallowed up by Russia also; and there, at a Sartish
shop, stay for koumis--very bad koumis compared with what the Kirghiz
gave me in their tents. Coming out of Mankent I fell in with a band
of rich emigrants going from Stavropol, in South Russia, to beyond
Kopal. They had twenty-four ox-drawn carts and twelve drawn by horses,
and in the carts were their household goods--tables, chairs, beds
and bedding--agricultural implements, reaping and binding machines,
ploughs, grindstones, saws, axes, even metal baths, barrels, guns, pots
and what not in such miscellaneity and promiscuity, mixed with mothers
and babies, that it was touching to see. The oxen, in their wooden
yokes, were fine beasts, and the emigrants tended them on foot. Every
wagon was accompanied by one or two on foot, who flicked off the flies
and encouraged the oxen along, sang songs, and shouted to one another.
Every wagon had buckets swinging at the side. One wagon had several
cages of doves fixed on to it; to another a poor old dog was tied, and
came along unwillingly. In short, everything they could bring from
Mother Russia to the new land the emigrants had brought.

I accompanied them up on to a wild moorland, on to a great plateau,
where we spent the night after passing out of Mankent.

       *       *       *       *       *

As I tramped thus across Russian Central Asia the great event that
should change everything was hidden behind the screens of the future.
The gentle and innocent present was more interesting than past or
future. It is touching to go over my diary and see how guilelessly
and unsuspectingly I and everyone was walking the time road that led
so soon--if we only could have known it--to the precipice of war. The
every-day was friendly, even though it contained storm or adventure
or privation. We were familiar with mornings and evenings as with
long known and trusted friends. As we look back at them they have a
sinister aspect as of police conducting us by stages to some frontier.
It is with these feelings that I look back now to my long tramp to the
mysterious city of Aulie Ata, a famous shrine in the days of Tamerlane.
Each night I slept under the stars, each day journeyed pleasantly
forward under a tropical sun.

One night, near the new Russian village of Antonovka, there was an
appalling sunset--through a barrel-shaped thundercloud into a sea
of fire; and directly the sun went below the horizon the lightning
became visible in the cloud, and I watched it running through the dark
veils of vapour in ropes and loops and flying lassos of silver. The
thunder rolled lugubriously, and far away I could see the rain pouring
in continuous flood, the black fringe of the cloud torn from heaven
down to earth. I wondered had I not better pack up and go down to the
village. But a little wisp of clear sky, containing one pale star,
expanded itself slowly and drove away the great lightning-riven barrel
and banished every cloud, and it was clear and the thunder was not, and
the night was dry and starry. Dawn next morning was clear and cold,
and at the sound of cart-wheels on the highway below me I gladly took
the road again--quick march to get warm. In an hour, however, the sun
was already too ardent a friend, and I took shelter in a caravanserai,
a cubical mud hut with neither chair nor table, and from the samovar
steaming on the floor I prepared my morning tea--put some tea from a
packet in my knapsack into my pot, and then filled up with boiling
water from the samovar. The village street outside was full of life,
crowded with wagons and wagoners standing half in the bright new light
of day and half in the deep, damp shadow of mud walls and banks. I sat
down opposite the village school. The school door was wide open, and I
saw all the village children sitting in desks round the mud-built room.
There were about thirty children, and they were a pretty sight, the
boys in turkey-red cotton trousers, the girls in red frocks, with their
black hair in plaits. There was only one row of desks, but it went
right round the room. In the middle space were two teachers squatting
on a carpet spread on the floor. Each and every child was saying his
lessons at the top of his voice, and sing-song--but not the same thing,
all different, according to the page the boy or girl was at, some far
behind, another far in front. These were all Sart children.

I walked all day after this with a damp towel hanging from under
my hat, and as fast as the towel dried I made it wet again from my
water-bottle. Everyone on the road was thirsty and hungry, and I said
to myself: “The next village is called Cornucula; let’s hope it will
turn out to be Cornucopia!” And it was indeed a horn of plenty, and I
shared there a roast chicken and a pitcher of milk with a companion of
the road, a poor old horseman who had a horse but who had no money, and
was begging his way home to Aulie Ata.

“How much did you give for your horse?” said I.

“It cost thirty-five roubles originally, with saddle and bridle and
bags. I don’t know what it’s worth now. It’s peaceful, that’s the main
thing, and it lives on grass.”

This is really the country where wishes are horses, for you see beggars
riding. What a lot of wishes astray on these mountains!

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“Looking for a job.”

“Where?”

“On the new railway.”

“Couldn’t you get one?”

“No; there were thousands waiting, and they only took on two hundred,
and these at the lowest wage piece-work.” He mentioned some figure the
cubic foot.

“How much can a man earn in a month if he goes at it hard?” I asked.

“Twenty roubles (two guineas), not more,” said my acquaintance.

Imagine it--for a job of ten shillings a week, bestial labour, in
the desert, under the Central Asian sun, something like a twenty to
one excess of supply over demand of labour, and the people waiting
weeks, months, on the chance. Surely nowhere but in Russia could
such a phenomenon be noted. There, as nowhere else in the world, is
a tremendous superfluity of white men’s hands. A firm of contractors
has this job from the Government; according to their schedule, labour
was to be paid for at a certain rate--a very low rate--but, seeing the
expectancy and the sad plight of the mobs of unemployed waiting at the
starting-point of the new line, they quite cheerfully make a handsome
reduction in favour of themselves.

After our meal the beggar horseman went off on his nag, and I wandered
through the village on foot. Among other establishments in the village
was a photographer’s, and outside his little house was a notice:

  THOSE WISHING TO HAVE THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN MAY HAVE A SHAVE FREE

I went in to the photographer, and saw many photographs of shaven
colonists, all very stiff and serious looking. These were chiefly
pioneers and passers-by, the people of the caravans. It is strange how
unhappy everyone looks in a provincial portrait. The photographer,
however, did a good business.

I settled down for the evening and the night in the sight of lovely
mountains. The sky cleared of wisps of cloud and discovered the stars.
The new moon, born surely that day, was but a hair of silver in the
west, and sank an hour after sunset, followed by a beautiful attendant
star. As I lay on the heath and looked upward, the first constellation
just formed, and it was the seven stars, delicate and lovely in the
half-night, as dainty as a maiden’s ornament. Showers of meteors, half
observed, slipped out of the dark into the dark; long single meteors
left, as it were, phosphorescent trails of light behind them. The
Asiatic mountains drew their cloaks round them, hardened their faces,
and slept as they stood away in the background. It became a night of
countless stars, each star a jewel set in the darkness. The night wind
came waving over the grass, full of health, gentleness and warmth. It
was never still all night, but never cold, and never a cloud touched
the vast glittering sky.

Next night before falling asleep I witnessed an unusual phenomenon.
Away in the north a strange black ribbon seemed to be let down from
a cloud, and it fluttered in the air. I thought of America and
advertisement devices and of aeroplanes all in a second, and then
remembered I was in Central Asia, far away from the inventions of
civilisation. The ribbon came nearer, and as it passed overhead took a
wedge-shaped formation, and I saw it was composed entirely of birds.
They were flying across the heaven at a breathless speed, now in the
clouds, now out, and never breaking up their ranks, the big birds
seeming to be thick on top of one another in the front. On approaching
the line of snow peaks in the south, they defiled into a long, single
line, looking like some aerial train, and then easily, rapidly,
passed over Talas Tau and Hindu Kush to India, as I surmised, just
four hundred miles as they fly. The moon that night was a crescent
of pearl, and stayed a little longer in the sky. I watched her night
by night till she was full grown, and rose in the east the time the
sun was setting, and reigned in the sky the whole night. How pleasant
and serene the night weather remained! All night long the breeze
rippled and flapped in my sleeping-sack and crooned in the neck of my
water-bottle. Far up on the hills lights twinkled in Kirghiz tents, and
in the illumination of moonlight I faintly discerned black masses of
cattle beside which boys watched all night, playing their wooden pipes
and singing their native songs to one another.

As far as High Village (Visokoe) the road remains with the Russians,
and their villages abound. After Visokoe there is forty miles of
moorland to Grosnoe, and then for a hundred miles there is not a
Russian settlement except the town of Aulie Ata. Journeying became
very difficult when the road was over deserted, empty moorland. The
sun poured down, there was not a glimpse of shade anywhere, seldom any
water, and seldom anything to eat. Even the grass was disappearing, and
the Kirghiz everywhere were moving, following the spring, with their
tents and their cattle and their camels, away from the scorched plains
up to the fresher slopes of the mountains. Often I rigged up my plaid
as a tent, often sat in the pale grey shadow of an ancient ruin or a
tomb. The emigrants who tended the oxen on the road were fain to climb
into the canvas-covered wagons and sleep, leaving the slow cattle to
trudge with the extra load through the dust. Russian Ascension Day
came, and the road was perfectly empty--for no one would travel on a
festival. All day long I met but one man, a native on a camel. For a
long time we walked within sight of one another, he allowing the camel
to graze when it felt inclined, but every now and then giving it a
kick, to which it responded by a plaintive groan and a jangling of the
bell round its neck.

One might ask where is Tamerlane, where the warriors, the robbers,
the camp followers of the hordes? The Easterns you meet are all gentle
as children. No one needs to carry a weapon. Where is the old spirit
of fighting? The answer might be found, I suppose, in the thousands of
Cossacks and Russians who, later in the same year, returned along these
roads to fight against the Germans.

The day before reaching Aulie Ata, in the heat of noon, I came in
sight of a green patch on the moors, and sought and found a bubbling
spring of clear water. “Here is the place,” thought I, “to make my
long-deferred cup of tea,” and I cast my knapsack on the moor and
looked around for a spot on which to make a fire. I had gathered a
few sticks along the road in case of need, so I had the foundation
of a little blaze. With what trouble did I keep that fire going till
the kettle boiled, rushing about for wisps of withered weed, hunting
for roots, for a straw, for anything that would burn, and all the
time anxious lest in my absence the pot should capsize. At last, as I
stood over the fire, there were symptoms of boiling, and I was just
rejoicing. Then suddenly all grew black around me, and I lost control
of my body and fell down. Such was the effect of the burning sun on my
neck and head. Perhaps this was something in the nature of a sunstroke.
Be that as it may, even at the moment of falling I got up again. For
what was my vexation to realise, even at the moment that I fell, that
my kettle had capsized. The fact brought me to my senses. I hardly
touched the ground before I started up again to save the water and the
fire. No luck; the water was all spilt, the fire out, and the kettle
lying in the ashes. I did not trouble to pick the kettle up. I sat down
by the spring, soaked a handkerchief, put it on my head, took out my
mug, and drank water--such a lot of water.

What a day! I was to feel the effects of my sunstroke. A great thirst
took possession of me, and when I got to Aulie Ata a touch of fever,
which I had to fight.

Aulie Ata the ancient, the tomb of the Holy One, is a mysterious and
umbrageous city. I became aware of its trees on my outward horizon
early one afternoon, when the mighty sun had just passed the zenith and
was beginning to beat on my shoulders. I had made my siesta at noon in
a tent I contrived with my plaid. I tied one corner to a telegraph pole
and tied stones to the other corners, and somehow made a canopy, and I
lay in a blaze of diffused light on the hard, dry, sandy steppe. Though
the wind blew, it was burning hot, and my right hand was swollen and
smarting, for I hold a strap of my knapsack with it as I march. I drank
the last drain of water in my water-bottle and made the melancholy
reflection that Central Asia is not a land to tramp in. I heard the
jun-jun-jun of camels, but did not care to put out my head to look at
them. I wished I had a tent, or a stout and voluminous umbrella.

Still, one couldn’t stay in this spot all day, so I untied my blanket
from the telegraph pole and the stones, packed my knapsack, and set
off again into the dazzling brilliance of the open country. In about
half an hour I espied an old ruin in the wilderness, and ran along
to it, and found at the foot of the blanched wall three feet of
intense shadow, in which it was just possible to sit and keep in. A
villainous-looking scorpion seemed to be of the same opinion as I was,
but I was too lazy to kill him, so I just flicked him off into the sun.
Oh for some water, or some milk, or some koumis, but not a Kirghiz tent
was to be seen all around. The Kirghiz were twenty miles away up in the
green valleys of the Alexander mountains, where was pasture for their
herds.

On the road once more! And then like a mirage I saw the long dark
streak of Aulie Ata on the eastern horizon. It was twelve to fifteen
miles away, but I thought it to be quite near. So clear is the
atmosphere, so prominent in the wide emptiness of the desert are the
trees of the Russian settlements, that one is constantly deceived as
to the distance of the place in front of one. And I greatly rejoiced
when I saw Aulie Ata; and although I was tired I resolved to get there
without further resting by the way. I walked and walked and my shadow
grew longer as the sun went down in the west behind me; but still the
line of trees seemed as remote as ever. Several times I asked myself:
“Am I not nearer?” and I was obliged to confess that I seemed no
nearer. It was like walking towards the horizon. “There is something of
magic about this city,” I thought.

It was long before I came even to the irrigated fields of the
settlers, and only late in the dusk I arrived at the first outlying
streets of the town, and went in with the procession of cows returning
from the steppe to be milked in the yards of the colonists. In the
midst of the clamour and dust I arrived. As I hadn’t had anything to
drink since noon, and I daren’t touch the water of the irrigation
canals, I was just about as thirsty as it is possible to be. I
determined to stop at the first caravanserai, and there I had a big
teapot and five or six little basins of tea and a bottle of koumis,
and I stopped at the next caravanserai and had a bottle of lemonade
and seltzer water. Tired as I was, however, I did not seek a night’s
lodging, but went first to the post office, about two miles from
the entrance to the town, and I obtained the telegram I knew would
be waiting for me from Russia. I had arranged a little code so that
certain things I wanted to know could easily be told me “by wire.”
Letters take weeks. It had been pleasant to look at the wires by the
roadway as I walked and reflect that a message to me was, perhaps,
winging its way past me. And, sure enough, at the little post office my
telegram was waiting.

After the post office I found a place at which to stay, a Russian inn
called the Hotel London; and so, to justify its name, took a room in it
and felt glad to have reached a city, even Aulie Ata the ancient.

Aulie Ata is a strange town hid behind the foliage of its long lines
of trees. The running water courses along the canals, and, as at
Chimkent and Tashkent, bull-frogs croak in chorus. The foundation of
the settlement is Mohammedan. It was once a great holy place of the
Moslems, the shrine of some antique teacher. But Russia has taken the
upper hand and given a different aspect. There are scores of mosques
lifting their slender minarets above the verdure of the trees, but most
of the houses are Russian houses. And there are hotels, cinema shows,
restaurants, theatres, as well as farmhouses, shops, _sarais_, mud
dwellings, and fixed Kirghiz tents.

Darkness had long since settled down on the town when I went forth to
find a restaurant. Here every restaurant is a _sad_, or garden. It is
fenced with bamboo; the tables are set among flower-beds and gravel
paths, and there is trellis-work with festoons of greenery hanging from
it, strange light and shade betwixt the moonlight and the lamplight and
the darkness.

I found a garden kept by an Armenian, and had dinner by myself at a
table under a fruit-laden cherry tree luridly illumined and yet only
partially illumined by the blaze of a huge spirit lamp. Moths whirred
into vision and descended towards the white table-cloth, and heavy
beetles and locusts stunned themselves against the spirit lamp, and all
manner of winged vermin and midget danced in the light which seemed to
hang like drapery from the tree.

[Illustration: THE NATIVE ORCHESTRA: SEE THE MEN WITH THE TEN-FOOT
HORNS, “TRUMPETS OF JERICHO” AS THE RUSSIANS CALL THEM]

A waiter had taken my order, and a cook far away was cooking what I
had ordered, and I sat and rested and considered the day which at noon
had been ablaze in my improvised tent on the steppe and at night was
here in a lighted but shadowy restaurant-garden in a city.

My dinner was brought, and all the time I was eating my _shashleek_
(bits of lamb roasted on a skewer over charcoal) I listened to an
unearthly hubbub of bands--or of fire hooters, I could not tell which.
Every ten minutes there was an awesome silence, and then there outbroke
the blast of a horn, three times repeated, that sounded like the
trump of doom, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_; then came the sound of
bagpipes and a throbbing of many drums, the horns breaking through the
lesser music at intervals and lifting the roof of the sky. This was an
appalling accompaniment to my meal. I had never heard anything like the
sound of that horn:

  _Terum--m--m,
   Terum--m--m,
   Terum--m--m._

It was like the blast

        Of that dread horn,
  On Fontarabian echoes borne,
  Which to King Charles did come,
  When Roland brave and Olivier,
  And every paladin and peer,
  On Roncesvalles died!

Like the horn of Roland blown in the desert and heard three hundred
leagues away. After dinner, I went off to find by ear the origin of
this hubbub. I went along towards the sound, and found it proceeded
from a native orchestra standing on the roof of a circus building. Here
two tall Sarts held in their hands horns ten feet long. They lifted
these horns to the sky and balanced them on their lips; they lowered
them and blasted their music over the roofs of the houses of the city;
they presented them at the heads of the crowd of sightseers, and made
many put their fingers to their ears and walk away: it was a terrifying
and astonishing noise. It was wonderful, however, the effect of the
three angles at which the horns were blown. You felt the first one
went right over the town, it was a voice from the stars, it leapt from
the dark emptiness of the desert on one side to the dark emptiness of
the desert on the other side of the city; the second, blown at the
people’s heads, was in the town and at the town, and caused the houses
to tremble; the third was blown, as it were, to the dead.

These horns are traditional instruments of the Sarts, though it is
said there are only a few men alive who can blow them. It needs great
strength, and the degenerating race does not produce such fine men as
it did. The Russians call them the “trumpets of Jericho.”

An astonishing advertisement for a circus. The sound of these horns
was too much for my temperament, and I fought shy of the show, though
I should otherwise have liked to go in. Still, a new stage in my
journeying had been reached, and I sought diversion, found a theatre,
and bought a seat to see a romance of ideal love. There were seven
people in the theatre, and after an hour we were all given our money
back and told that the company had gone to see the circus. I then went
to the cinema to see the much-advertised “spectacle” of “A Prisoner
of the Caucasus,” but I was informed that the “machine” was broken,
and that the next performance would be “on Friday, if God grant”--a
dark cinema-house where by the light of an oil lamp, which seemed
strangely out of place, one discerned a refreshment bar, a cashier’s
box, where should have been a girl selling tickets, curtains separating
the waiting-room from the theatre, and finally three or four hopeful
or disappointed would-be customers. I asked a Russian present if he
did not find in the noise of the horns something very horrifying and
suggestive, and he replied testily:

“Oh, a great deal of noise, that’s all. Very trying for those who would
rather not hear it.”

He did not feel as I did about the music at all, and his
matter-of-factness rather surprised me. The horns had to me the sense
of calling someone, something, and they were literally terrifying.

In a depressed state of mind I wandered back to the Hotel London, and
found the landlady having a nail-to-nail fight with a woman lodger.
Both sides at once claimed me as a witness--the police were coming, and
I would testify. The landlady had broken into the lodger’s room and
told her to leave at once; the latter, a great, big, hysterical Russian
woman, had replied with fisticuffs and sobs and clamour.

The landlady gave a very disparaging account of the woman lodger’s
present behaviour and past career. The woman lodger, under the strange
impression that she possessed good looks, tried to ingratiate me to
be on her side by giving me saucy looks and knowing smiles. The yard
porter had been sent for the police, and all the while there were
strident cries of “the police are coming”--and the horns kept up their
rumpus over the city, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_.

I was sorry my room had no key and that the window was shuttered from
the outside. The police came and ordered that the woman be allowed to
remain till the morning, and a silence settled down on the inn--silence
broken only by the sound of the horns of the orchestra a mile away. All
sorts of fancies possessed my mind and wrought me to a state of terror,
so that I was afraid of my dreams.

What I dreamed that night has probably little to do with Russian
Central Asia, and yet I shall never think of my journey across this
wild and empty land without half recalling it involuntarily. Even if I
believed that dreams had never any definite prophecy or foreboding in
them, this one is one I should take to a dream interpreter. Now that I
know that all this summer a great war was in preparation and the dogs
of lust and hate were being unloosed, I can say to myself that I at
least had warning that the Devil was at large, that an evil spirit had
escaped into the world.

I ought, perhaps, to tell first the dream which my friend G---- told
me before I left Vladikavkaz, when he warned me of a great impending
world calamity. G---- said that one night, after an arduous day’s work
teaching in class and coaching private pupils at home, he lay down on
his couch and dozed. Hardly had he fallen asleep, when three men of
Eastern aspect, dark faced, bright eyed, brown handed, with white robes
from their shoulders and white turbans on their heads, appeared to him
and pronounced six words in a loud, oracular voice and disappeared. A
second time they appeared and did the same. A third time they appeared
and pronounced them, and this time one of them took up a pen and made
as if to write. The words were not Russian, or, indeed, any language
which G---- knew, but after the third apparition and disappearance he
wakened up with a start and at once picked up an exercise-book and
wrote the words down. They were: _Imaktúr nites óides ilvéna varen
cevertae_. G---- had never been a student of the occult before, but
this caused him to consider. I begged G---- to write them down for me
and let me see how they looked in black and white.

“Well, what do they mean?” I asked.

“I cannot yet be sure,” said G----. “They are certainly part of
a language. Of that I am convinced. I have consulted many great
linguists, and whilst they cannot say what language it is or where its
lingual affinities are to be found, they all agree that it has the
nature of real language. I have thought, as I lived in the Caucasus
in the midst of so many Eastern tribes, that it might conceivably
be intelligible to one or other of them. I have questioned Ingooshi,
Ossetini, Khevsuri, but none recognised any likeness to any tongue they
had ever heard in the mountains. I have been to Petersburg, Berlin,
Paris to try and find out what the words meant, and all to no avail.
Specialists were most sympathetic, but could tell me nothing. However,
since then I have made a profound study of occult language, and have
arrived at some understanding of the significance of the dream. All I
can tell you is that a world calamity is coming, a great cataclysm or
natural subversion. We may expect great earthquakes. Germany certainly
is in danger.”

The dream I had in Aulie Ata was certainly much worse than this. I
thought G---- rather crazy about this dream of his at the time, and
I listened incredulously to his prophecies. But if I regarded them
flippantly perhaps I was wrong. Certainly, if I held there was no such
verity as the occult I was wrong.

They say that Fear stands on the threshold of the occult world, and as
my dream consciousness impinged upon it I experienced abject terror, a
terror that creeps through the marrow of the bones and lifts the roots
of one’s hair at a thought.

I lay down in my dark room at the Hotel London at Aulie Ata after
the fight between landlady and lodger had ceased but whilst the Sart
orchestra still blew their horns over the city. The bed was a foot
short for my tired body; the shutters of the room were barred; I had
no lamp, but only a bit of candle of my own. After a fortnight spent
under the stars and in the immense open house of earth and heaven, it
was sufficiently oppressing and depressing in this shuttered chamber.
But I was tired with the tiredness of one who has tramped under a
sub-tropical sun from dawn to sunset and has added an evening of town
excitement to the weariness of a long journey.

I had hardly lain down before I fell asleep. At once I began to dream.
I had been invited to a friend’s house, and was for a moment by myself
in his dining-room; there was nothing on the table but the cruet. I was
terribly thirsty, and I rushed to one of the bottles and began to drink
from it, but, my host coming along the corridor and into the room, I at
once put the bottle back and pretended that I had been doing nothing of
the kind. This awoke me. My eyes opened, and I thought to myself: “What
an absurd dream! What a dreadful thing pretending is. Why cannot we be
as we are? Manners is, in a way, pretence. Every polite man who comes
up to you to shake hands, if we only knew it, has been doing something
the moment before as impossible as drinking the contents of the cruet.
Mankind are pretenders. The spirit is truth, but the incarnation is a
mask. The whole aspect of humanity is a pretending to be what it is
not....”

I was rather struck by the thought, but lapsed into sleep again. And
then came my terrible dream. In the depths of my sleep a voice suddenly
cried out the most terrifying words I think I have ever heard, and
they were: “_A great dissimulator has escaped, shut in prison from
everlasting._”

At that I started up from my bed with the perspiration on my brow and
the most hideous fear of the Devil. I felt that some new evil spirit
was at large and was seeking a home in a man. My earlier thought came
back to me--all spirits are dissimulators, whether they be devils
or angels, and we men and women are all angels pretending to be men
and women. But now I knew that some devil from which the world had
mercifully been preserved (from everlasting) had escaped into our life,
and would take the form and the appearance of a man somewhere. I had
intelligence of the Antichrist. And now that we are all in the depths
of this war I ask myself sometimes is there a genius of evil in all
this, has the Antichrist perhaps appeared? Does not the fact that St.
George and the angels (the angels, at least, of Mons) are fighting on
our side suggest that the evil powers incarnate are on the other side?

It was two in the morning; the Sarts had stopped blowing their horns,
there was a breathless stillness. I wakened up the hotel porter and
bade him open the shutters of my windows. I lit my candle, took up
pen and paper, and wrote a long letter home. I took out Vera’s ikon
of Martha and Mary, and put it in front of me. I looked at it and
wrote--wrote, wrote. I told all the happenings of the long day past,
the tramping, the sun, the far away vision of Aulie Ata, the strange
town, the Sart orchestra, the Armenian garden restaurant, the Hotel
London, the fight of the two women, the dream of the dissimulator.
I was afraid the candle would go out before dawn. Dawn seemed a long
time coming. But at last the nightingales began to sing, _p-r-r-r-r_
... _sweet_, _sweet_, _sweet_. A muezzin was calling through the dark
night. How resonant his voice! Somehow it went with the nightingale’s
song.

  A muezzin from the dark tower cries
  Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.

Again muezzins from the dark mosques of the city. Suddenly the cocks
gave an extraordinary chorus, and I knew it must be near dawn, and a
cart came lumbering by. Pale rents appeared through the willow trees
that hid the sky. My candle grew little and yellow and flickering,
but it lasted, and I wrote on and on, page after page, till it was
bright morning. Then I lay down and slept an hour, and I had saved
myself, perhaps, from fever. In any case, I had lived through a waking
nightmare.

By day Aulie Ata was, perhaps, less mysterious, but there still
remained a sense of remoteness. It was difficult to imagine European
people living there all the year round and calling it “home.” It is
an oasis, it is true, but it might be truer to call it a sub-tropical
swamp. It is fed by a mountain river, the Talass, which flows off and
loses itself in the desert. But there is plenty of water and a great
deal of verdure is possible, a very large settlement.

Aulie Ata has its cathedral standing in the midst of a pleasant
shadowy garden. It has its bazaar, and its trotting-ground for a horse
fair and cattle market. Here were numbers of Sartish shops where bread
and hot meat-pies were sold. Scores of Kirghiz on horseback or on bulls
blundered about amidst cattle and mud. Young men were trying horses and
showing their paces; others were making deals in sheep and goats. The
sheep for sale were tied in long or short knots, threaded by the heads
as Russians thread onions.

As a general rule a sheep was reckoned as being equivalent in value
to a three-rouble note, and many of the Kirghiz had brought up their
sheep merely as money, and when they bought six shillings’ worth of
stuff at some shop they detached a sheep from their coil and passed him
on to the shopman. So I saw for the first time in my life the literal
significance of _pecunia_ as the Romans understood it.[C]

Aulie Ata is subject to earthquakes, and my landlady explained how one
morning she was washing the floor of her establishment, bending down
over her floorcloth with her legs apart, and suddenly she felt her legs
going farther apart--by which lively figure she meant to explain how
earthquakes are felt.

The chief sights of the city were the caravans of emigrants toiling
onwards towards the farther East. Here were no farms for them, no
encouragement given to settle. For there is now no particular political
need for the colonisation of Sirdaria; the Russians are far more
powerful than the native population, and could never be overthrown by
an uprising or mutiny. The Government encourages emigration to the
points where it is politically most advantageous--that is, on the very
frontier lines. The most vigorous irrigation and settlement work goes
on on the frontiers of China, Afghanistan and Persia. The colonists
have a long road in front of them even after they have reached Aulie
Ata. I myself went on with them.

The weather changed whilst I was at Aulie Ata; torrential rain came
down, rain brought down by the mountains, and only deluging their own
slopes and the country in the immediate vicinity. The desert twenty
miles away remained, no doubt, as parched as ever. The River Talass,
in flood outside the town, presented an unwonted spectacle; the wide,
black, diversified, shingly river, the lowering clouds overhead, the
restless wind from the mountains spitting and promising rain, the
emptiness and dreariness of the world all around, except at the place
where the bridge should have been--but from which it had been lately
washed away--and there, an ever-increasing collection of straw or
canvas tilted wagons and carts, and of oxen, camels and horses, all the
caravans of the emigrants, waiting, as it were, for a ferryman to take
them to another world.

I got over at last on a Kirghiz horse, and was pretty nearly soaked
in the passage. On the other side was a more desolate country. It was
wilder, more broken, perhaps a little greener, but there were very few
farms. Even the Kirghiz seemed of a poorer and dirtier type. I bought
milk at the Kirghiz tents and bread and eggs at the post stations.
At one post-house I had a chicken cooked for me. The heat was not so
trying on this road, for clouds had come over and rain had laid the
dust. I had a sense of travelling in the opposite direction of the way
of the seasons. It had been like June in Tashkent, but here it was
early May. Still, the temperature in the shade must have reached 90°
Fahr.

I slept three nights in the open and tramped three days before I
finally passed out of the province of Sirdaria and entered the
Semiretchenskaya Oblast, Seven Rivers Land, the remotest of the Tsar’s
dominions, remoter than the Far East, because there is no communication
either by rail or river. On my right the great chain of mountains
with snowy summits still stretched on, and on my left the everlasting
moorland. More birds appeared on my way, partridges, bustards, snipe,
eagles, cranes. Straying off the road and up to the first rising ground
of the mountains were a species of little deer, called here _kosuli_.
Marmots popped in and out of sand burrows, occasionally falling a prey
to day-flying owls. The jerboa, with long tail and dainty, bird-like
legs, was a pretty visitor, and among insects the green praying-mantis
was noticeable, the cicada a nuisance, and various spiders and
beetles the bane of night-tide. I was constantly warned against the
hairy-legged _falanga_ and a black spider (the karakurt), both of which
were said to have a mortal bite, though sheep could eat them without
harm. Along the road laborious and stupid-looking beetles rolled their
globular homes of gathered dirt.

Slow travelling out here is very featureless, and I grew tired of
tramping all day, the emptiness of the life, and the dullness of mere
sun and road as companions. What was my disappointment the second
noon to lose a lift that would have taken me thirty versts on at the
cost of a rouble. I had just got up from a siesta under my plaid tent
when a countryman came along with a cart full of clover--food for his
horse--and I bargained with him and got a seat literally “in clover.”
We proceeded thus for a mile when we came to a mud-built caravanserai,
and stopped to have tea. Up to this inn came presently another cart
from the other direction. It contained all his wife’s family, the
people he had been setting out to see. They had had a similar impulse
to come and visit him. In that way I lost my lift, and could hardly
share their joy at the happy meeting.

At Merke, however, the second colonial settlement in Seven Rivers
Land, I hired a _troika_ to Pishpek, three horses yoked to an _arba_
(a native cart), the driver a Kirghiz. This is the usual mode of
travelling for Russians on business in Central Asia. The _troika_
stands instead of the train. But what an impression!

The Kirghiz driver, in rags and tatters, sitting on one hip on his bare
wooden driving-seat, lounging to and fro, one shoulder up, one down,
flicking the three galloping horses with his whip, whistling, shouting.

The horses bounding along, neck by neck, over bump, over crevice, over
chasm; up hill, down dale, never slackening (there is no brake to the
wooden _arba_); coming with a great splash on to a stream, the _arba_
just floating on it as the horses plunge through it; out again, up the
bank; what matter stones--even milestones? What a contrast to the way I
crawled along when walking!

We go along roads that are like dried-up river beds, over roads little
better than mountain tracks. Ever and anon I am nearly shot out of the
cup of dry clover and hay on which I am sitting. I am flung against the
sides, I grasp at the stained Joseph coat of the Kirghiz, I clasp him
round the shoulders.

But the Kirghiz smiles and whistles and shouts again. The horses
whisper hurried secrets to one another in their rhythmical threefold
devouring of space. We go not by versts or by miles, but by leagues.
There are no steamboats, trains, motor-cars, aeroplanes in Seven Rivers
Land, but the _troika_ combines these all in one.

As we go along the level high road the whole country behind us is
blotted out from view by clouds of our dust. We never hesitate as we
dash through market-places and thronged colonial villages. What matter
who is in the way; the _troika_ goes on straight ahead, always seeming
likely to collide as we dash towards other carts or charge into passing
horsemen, the averted horses’ faces breathing into my face as we pass.

The way is always in the view of the snowy mountains and comparatively
seldom in view of houses. It is the land of the tent-dwellers, and
the moors are dotted with grey pyramids and columns, the temporary
dwelling-places of the nomads. Now and then a whole patriarchal family
of the wanderers crosses the road on its journey from the parched
plains up to the greener pasture lands of the hills. They have their
tents and all their goods on camels’ backs; they drive with them
hundreds of head of sheep and goats and cows and mares. They ride
themselves on camels, horses, bulls; their white-turbaned wives, often
four to each man, ride astride of bulls, their faces uncovered, babies
at their bare breasts. Brides--girls of thirteen or fourteen--ride in
extraordinary state in their midst, seated on palfreys with scarlet
horsecloths, themselves clad in bright cottons, their hair in many
glistening black plaits, each loaded with a silver bullet to keep it
from entangling with sister plaits. They also sit astride, and ride
with wonderful grace, as if conscious of being the treasure of the
whole caravan. They are good to look upon.

We pass endless lines of wagons drawn by toiling oxen or little, jaded
ponies, and tended by burly Russian peasants and their plump, laughing,
perspiring womenkind--emigrants going to settle in the youngest of
Russian colonies a thousand miles or more from a railway station. We
have to turn off the road and tumble over the rough moorland in order
to circumvent hundreds of such emigrant wagons. We overtake and
pass the equivalent of whole goods trains--long strings of lorries
and pack-carts and camels, piled with consignments of goods to be
delivered all along the way from Southern Siberia on the one hand and
from Orenburg and Tashkent on the other to the limits of the Himalaya
Mountains. We pass, or, as it happens, get entangled in a mile of
camels, each having on its back a mountain of horsehair or wool, some
twenty couples of dirty camels in a company, each company led by a
Chinese Mohammedan on an ass, a _Dunkan_.

We pass the mud-walled, mud-domed, ace-of-spade-like tombs of the
Kirghiz; we pass ruins of ancient towers, battered caravanserais.
We escape from the desert into a sort of artificial oasis made by
irrigation--the Russian village or Cossack _stanitza_. We change horses.

At nightfall I overtake a lady going to the town where her sweetheart
lives. She is in a hurry that brooks no delay. There are only horses
for one, so I offer her a place in my _arba_. She is accompanied by
many boxes and bags. She wants to go on all night, no matter----

[Illustration: “PAST THE RUINS OF ANCIENT TOWERS”]

Twilight turns to darkness, the moon comes out fair and large,
opposite the setting sun. The clouds are lit with gentle light and a
faint colouring. The _troika_ goes on and on. I lie full length in
the _arba_, my head on a pillow which my companion has lent me, and I
look up at the sky. The night is gentle and touching. The Kirghiz is
silhouetted above us; the moon is now shining full upon us; in a
moment it is cut off by the black line of the roof of the cart, but
even then the sky is the more beautiful for a hidden presence. We sit
up and look into the night landscape.

The moon gives glimmering illumination to squads of poplars, waving
cornfields, silver streams, the thatched roofs of cottages, mud huts.
The nightingale sings the short night through, owls hoot, dogs rush out
at us as if they were fired from farm-yards, but the laconic driver
flicks them with his long whip when they get near the horses’ legs, and
they fall each into the rear and slink back to the dark yards whence
they came.

We leave behind populous villages, and issue on to the moors. Night
hides the scarlet poppies, but the air contains their odours. The moon
no longer stands over the black mound of the horizon, but has climbed
over the zenith. The cocks are crowing, my companion is sleeping, the
bells of the _troika_ are chingle-dingling, chingle-dangling all the
time.

We have to change horses, however. We get a samovar in the waiting
time, and Zinaida--such is her name--becomes an excited chatterbox. It
is only fifty miles to her goal and her sweetheart. She tells me how
she met him, what sort of life they will lead when they are married,
the name of their first boy, should they have one.

Two scalding glasses of tea, and then into the _arba_ once more,
with fresh horses, and a new Kirghiz driver wakened up to take us.
Zinaida’s boxes are corded on securely, her bandboxes are better
bestowed away, she makes a more comfortable arrangement of quilts and
pillows, and we lie back and both fall asleep.

When next we change horses sun pales the stars. It is the last change.
Twenty miles more and our winged chariot flies up the courtyard of the
town post-house. I am stiff. Zinaida, however, is as fresh and nimble
as a young deer. A young man with a pallid face is waiting for her on
the post-house steps, and she jumps down to him in a trice, and he
folds her in his arms and kisses her.

We passed through Bielovodsk and Novy Troitsky, the latter being an
extensive Cossack station, where all the village men have red stripes
on their trousers, and where even the little boys riding the horses in
from the steppe have red-striped breeches cut down from father’s. The
Cossacks are soldiers first and peasants only second or third. Whilst
farming they are understood to be “on leave,” and when war breaks out
they are at once at the direct service of the Tsar on the field of
battle. Novy Troitsky was a Cossack camp in the days of the conquest of
Central Asia, and when pacification was consummated the Cossacks were
invited to send for their sweethearts, wives, mothers, families, and
settle on the pick of the land chosen out for them by the Government.
There are many such settlements; they are called _stantsi_, or
stations, whereas the other settlements are called _derevnyi_, villages.

On the whole, Seven Rivers Land seemed to be more fruitful than
Northern Sirdaria. The settlements were very large ones; there were
many enormous villages with schools, churches, big general stores and
several thousand inhabitants. Pishpek, however, was not quite so large
as Aulie Ata. The populations of the colonial towns on my route may
give an idea of these growing agricultural communities:

                                              _Inhabitants_
  Chimkent     64 versts from railway station        15,756
  Aulie Ata   242       ”        ”       ”           19,052
  Pishpek     505       ”        ”       ”           16,419
  Verney      743       ”        ”       ”           81,317
  Kopal     1,102       ”        ”       ”            3,966
  Sergiopol 1,352       ”        ”       ”            2,261

These figures are taken some years ago, and probably twenty per cent.
should be added to the numbers now. These are the biggest.

       *       *       *       *       *

The towns of this colony are not connected with Western Europe either
by rail or waterway, and there is an unexampled provincialism in
the country. The people are far away by themselves, and they have
consequently developed a distinctive local patriotism. The Central
Asian pioneers are great talkers about their own country, and they are
proud of everything that marks it out as different from Russia and
the rest of the world. They are proud of its vast empty spaces, its
mountains, its wild beasts and birds, its tigers, wild boars, aurochs,
wild goats, its falcons, flamingos, partridges; proud of the Kirghiz,
of the tortoises, of the camels--in fact, of anything and everything
that seems to mark the country as original. Its people are all hunters.
The engineer, the “topograph,” the “hydro-technic,” the land surveyor,
the Cossack, the peasant colonist, all carry the gun. The towel-hooks
and hat-pegs in their houses are goat horns and antlers. The words of
the colonists’ mouths run out in hunting-stories. All journeys are made
on horseback or by post-horses, and the people are always moving to and
fro. Even the colonists shift about from one settlement to another--by
arrangement with the colonisation authorities.

I met many people on my journey: two _khodoki_, foot messengers from a
village in Kursk government, sent by the villagers to spy out the land
and choose a plot for colonisation, but now hastening back in order
to be home by St. Peter’s Day and the cutting of the barley. Land was
scarce with them; all in the hands of the landowners. The population
increases--so many children always are born--but the free land does
not increase. The two _khodoki_ had not, however, found what they
wanted in Semi-retchie, and were returning to Kursk with a tale of
disillusionment. “They told us it was heaven out here, and you reaped
harvests just after throwing out the seed. But it appears there is as
much work here as there,” said they.

I met a commercial traveller, a “_voyageur_, the representative of a
certain firm,” as he called himself. He was travelling post-horses,
and had a large chest of travelling samples, which was roped on to
the back of his _britchka_. He was carrying Moscow cottons in bright
assortments of colours and patterns, and when he came to a town where
there were ten cotton shops he went into each rapidly and deposited a
complete set of his samples, and left them with the shopkeepers for an
hour or so while he had his dinner and had a shave and a bath. In that
way he met me, resting while the shopowners and their friends discussed
his goods. Commercial travellers in tea, sugar, cotton, china, ironware
and other dry goods were very frequent on the road, but were mostly
Tartars or Armenians.

I also met a boy going home from the University of Kief, going home to
Verney, and in a tremendous hurry to get back to his mother and the
girl he left behind him a year ago. He was “agin the Government,” and
imagined that England was ahead of Russia in every way, and wondered
what the English would not have done with Central Asia had it been
theirs. “Just think of the wealth in these mountains,” said he. “Just
imagine it; we have not one mine in this vast territory twice the size
of Germany. We have only one factory--a lemonade factory.”

“Its destiny seems to be agricultural,” said I.

“What is student life like at Kief?” I asked. “Do you meet together
much? Are there debates, literary discussions? What’s in the air?”

He could not tell me if there was anything in the air. Life was duller
there than formerly. The students kept more to themselves; but they
had a _Semi-retchinsky_ club. All students from Seven Rivers lived
together, and they had musical evenings and dances. It was pleasant;
the _Semi-retchenski_ were great patriots in their way.

At Pishpek I had a delightful meeting with a Government
topographer--Nazimof, a man of thirty, of gentle birth, elegant,
graceful, old-fashioned. I met him at an inn. I had been put into his
room by a grasping landlady who would not confess she was full up and
could take no more visitors. After somewhat of a “scandal,” raised by
the topographer, it was agreed that I should share his room. Every
corner was occupied with his professional equipment--long iron map
cases with padlocks, chests of instruments, tent poles, carpet chairs,
rolls of canvas, boxes of books, papers and clothes.

“Excuse all this,” said he. “I am taking it up into the mountains as
soon as I get news that the snow has melted a little.”

He explained that he was on Government service, charting maps. He
was going to live the whole summer up among the mountain passes and
literally bathe in snow. He would rig up his tents by the aid of the
Kirghiz, hunt, shoot, survey, chart, discover, without any other
fellow-European with whom to share fellowship.

We spent two days together in Pishpek, and talked of many things. His
brother had been sent to Jerusalem this year by the Orthodox Palestine
Society to inquire into the conditions under which the peasants
journeyed and the exploitation of the aged pilgrims by the steamship
company and the Greek monks. He had brought back just such a tale of
woe and of happiness as I had myself to tell after my pilgrimage. A
good deal is going to be done to better the conditions of the pilgrims’
journey, and there is even a proposal that the Government take the
pilgrims on their own boats. I wondered whether it was worth while
interfering, and I told my own experiences on that journey and gave my
impression; the telling introduced me.

My new friend told me how much he wanted to get away from Seven Rivers
Land and see the world. Once, as a boy on a Russian training-ship, he
had landed at Newcastle, and had seen something of England--had even
slept in a sailors’ rest. He would like to _see_ England, to come and
live there, and understand the country and the nation, to see America,
also Australia. He liked being up in the mountains, working by himself
in the fresh mountain air, talking to chance-met Kirghiz, shooting wild
goats and partridges. But by the end of the summer he would be terribly
bored. He would come down from the mountains, rush into Verney,
complete his maps, and then bolt for Petersburg. He thirsted for human
society all the summer through.

He was always dressed in white, and wore a fez on his shaved head. He
sat with me hours in a bamboo _palatka_ in the one garden restaurant of
Pishpek, and we talked over koumis, over roast chicken, over tea, over
wine. At night, too, when he lay on a broken-down bedstead and I on a
dusty divan, he prattled of his wife and children that he was sick
to leave behind, and of the boy in himself which made him always seek
loneliness and adventures, however much his heart bade him remain at
home.

“I wouldn’t change my lot, but still it is wrong to marry at twenty,
as I did. There are so many partings and it is a great pain. A young
man has things to do in the world, and he is bound to put his wife and
family in the background; his ties are his pains. Most happy marriages
are made of men of middle years, when they have made a little fortune
and can take things more easily. When a stout, old man marries a young
girl, moreover, there is generally a happy, healthy family.”

“But surely you don’t mean to say that old men are better fathers than
young men?” I urged.

“Yes; they have fewer stakes in the world. They are not called on to
go and chart the valleys and peaks of the Thian Shan Mountains. They
know they will not be called on to fight for their country. They know
they’ve got enough money to educate their children and keep up a good
home. They are not so fretful, not so irritable as young men, but
good natured, easy going, and a pretty girl can make one do what she
desires.”

I surmised he must have quarrelled with his wife a little just before
leaving, and be sick at heart to get back home and make it up.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pishpek, though four hundred miles from a railway station, is a
promising town. The climate seemed to be a hot and dry one, though, of
course, it is easy to be misled by the chances of the weather. There
are long, white streets, with ranks of poplars on each side, a big
market-place, a high road of shops and colonial stores, many places
where _Kvass_ and aerated waters are sold, garden restaurants. There is
not the atmosphere of mystery that Aulie Ata has. It is more colonial
and less Eastern, though, of course, there are the inevitable Oriental
hawkers and the native bazaar. Pishpek has a camel ambulance, a roughly
shaped wood-sleigh with enormously long shafts, to which a Bactrian
camel is yoked. Pishpek also has its lepers, and, as in all these
Eastern towns, there is a great deal of skin disease, though chiefly
among the natives.

The colonists seemed fairly well-to-do, though there was little
evidence of culture, few books, no pianos; the cinema, it is true, but
that is rather a sign of poverty. But the Russians seemed thriving and
everyone seemed to have plenty of horses and cattle. In this country,
where wishes are horses, even the hawker of bootlaces in the bazaar has
his nag tied to a poplar tree near by.

The Kirghiz going from the parched plains up into the mountains let
me understand the changing of the season. The road out from Pishpek
led into desolate country, and I was troubled by the heat and the
difficulty of obtaining food and drink. I carried four pounds of bread
with me out of Pishpek, but that very quickly vanished, some eaten by
myself, some by ants. Ants got into my bread at night and riddled it
so that I could not break off a fragment without an ant appearing in
it. I carried two water-bottles with me, and filled them with milk
or water when I could. Neither milk nor water seemed to be very good
to drink. The best thing out here is the aerated water, apricot or
pineapple; it is very thirst-quenching and a good corrective to the
stomach. When my European bread gave out I had to eat _lepeshka_, which
I cannot recommend. It seems a possible diet when one is hungry, and if
you have wine to wash it down you feel you are making a beautiful meal.
One afternoon, however, I had a _très mauvais quart d’heure_ after
_lepeshka_. A lump of it stuck in my gullet and would not go down and
could not come up. I thought I was choked.

A melancholy native stands with a tray of _lepeshki_ in the road, and
you buy three for five copecks--three rolls for five farthings. No
matter how hard they are, they can be soaked and softened in tea. But I
often wondered what gave the cement-like quality to them. On the road I
have often felt that my diet was unsuitable, but never have I had such
indigestion as on a diet of mare’s milk and _lepeshka_. It is claimed
that mare’s milk is the best thing in the world for the stomach. Koumis
cleanses and fortifies and freshens everything; it is the mother of the
inside. But it does not dissolve _lepeshka_. I was told that it was
difficult to tell the difference between champagne and mare’s milk.

“But, to start with, one is white,” said I.

“Oh, it’s not the colour; it’s the quality.”

[Illustration: A SETTLED KIRGHIZ: ONE OF THE CHARACTERS OF PISHPEK]

“It is best when it is thick.”

“It’s not a matter of being thick or thin, but in the tingling taste
and the exuberance and happiness you feel after it.”

“Well, I’ve nothing to say against koumis.”

I kept a diary of on what and how I spent my money on the road, and the
entries run like this:

  _Monday._            _Copecks._
      Boiling water        5
      Koumis              10
                          --
                          15

  _Tuesday._
      Boiling water        3
      Lepeshka             5
      Milk                 5
                          --
                          13

  _Wednesday._
      Koumis              10
      Pilgrim              5
      Beggar               2
      Milk                10
      Kvass                3
                          --
                          30

  _Thursday._
      Lepeshka             5
      Sheep’s milk         5
      Koumis              10
                          --
                          20

And so on; a poor budget. The greatest disappointments of this journey
were the absence of fuel and the great difficulty of making a fire.
It took something like two hours to collect enough straw and withered
grass and splinters of wood to make a fire. And the dried camel-dung
blocks would not burn. As I tramped I made it a golden rule to pick up
and put in my knapsack every bit of combustible material that my eye
lighted upon on the road, but even so it often happened that I had to
buy hot water at some dusty, broken-down caravanserai or in a Russian
inn or from some Tartar draper.

Night in an inn or post-house or under the resplendent Asian stars! Hot
day toiling over empty moors and across half-empty deserts, staying in
shady Russian villages, going up the yards of the farmhouses with my
pot in hand asking for milk, drinking about a pint of milk, and filling
my two bottles so that I might have something better than water with
which to quench my thirst when I was out on the road again; talking to
the farmers; riding behind the reckless Kirghiz and his three horses;
and then night again and its problems and charms!

Seventeen versts beyond Pishpek is Constantinovka, and seventy-one
versts, Kurdai. Russian settlement is rather sparse until Kazanskaya
Bogoroditsa and Linbovinskaya are reached, and these are in the urban
district of Verney, the capital of the colony. There is an enormous
amount of room for human beings here and, when the railway comes along
and puts stations every twenty miles or so from European Russia, all
the way, to Kuldja in China.

After the Cossack village of Linbovinskaya, with its shops and bazaar,
comes the approach to Verney, and the high road is worn into many
tracks and is broad and deep in dust. Along these come many equipages
and picnic carts with pleasure parties of Russians, and for the first
time since leaving Tashkent there was a suggestion of the life of
a large provincial town. But, after all, Verney was only a larger
Pishpek.




IX

THE PIONEERS


All the way to Verney the carts are travelling eastward, but on the
road to Kopal two processions meet one another; the colonists coming
from Tashkent meet the colonists coming from Omsk and Semipalatinsk. It
struck me that those coming from the North were a poorer, harder, more
jaded people than those who had accompanied me from the West. Perhaps
that was because the journey from Siberia was more trying and there
was less to eat on the way, or because the people who came by way of
the northern road were from provinces of Russia where the standard of
living and the average of health were lower.

The pioneers were a rugged sort of folk. They walked with their oxen
and horses, they wandered all over the sandy wastes looking for roots
and straws, and fifty people would spend hours getting enough fuel to
make a fire to boil their pots. They got covered in white dust; their
boots were through; their feet blistered; their carts broke down or
cattle died; but still the band went on patiently, cheerily. They went
very slowly, and I overtook many bands as I walked. I would fall in
with the caravan at evening, and listen with an involuntary thrill to
the great choruses these people sang as they went. They chaffed one
another, gossiped, shouted to the cattle, sang with as much easy-going
cheerfulness as if they were in their native province and driving the
cattle in from their own pasture lands, and not threading the road
across the silent deserts of Central Asia. I would see another party
afar off at ten in the morning, a grey-brown mass on the horizon, and
catch it up by twelve noon. And there would be a strange sight: not a
single peasant walking or in sight. Only the creaking, slowly moving,
patient carts and the clumsy, straining oxen or little ponies, going on
by themselves without the flick of a whip or the whisper of a master’s
voice. And, coming close up to the wagons, I would hear snoring. The
whole caravan would be sleeping and snoring in the shelter of the
tarpaulin tilts, and yet going ever slowly on, slowly on, through the
blaze of the Asian noon-day, over the desert, toward the happy valleys
of the East.

I suppose that, but for the instinctive movements of the Russian people
and the seeking spirit, it would be difficult for the Government to
settle these remote tracts of the Russian Empire. People would not go
simply because of the grants they obtain. It is the wandering spirit
that is the foundation of the Empire. In Central Asia the officials
complain that the people who come are not like those who remain behind
in Russia; they are the most restless of all Russians. They have
wandered thus far, but they have no wish to settle down even now. They
take up land, build villages, till the soil, but sure enough after
a few years they are itching to move on farther. The majority of
colonists are people who have come not direct from Russia, but from
some less remote farm or homestead in Turkestan, Seven Rivers Land, or
Siberia. And these people do not recognise the arbitrary limits of the
Russian Empire, but stray over in considerable numbers into Persia,
Mongolia, and Chinese Tartary. It is true that the Government exercises
considerable control upon the movements of the pioneers. It indicates
each year what tracts of territory are open to colonisation, what
developments have been made in the irrigation system, and shows spots
where villages may be built. The colonial village is not a haphazard
growth such as is the ordinary European village. It does not simply
grow; it is planned by the Government engineers and indicated in a
schedule before ever a single inhabitant has set eyes on it.

[Illustration: THE IRRIGATED DESERT--AN EMBLEM OF RUSSIAN COLONISATION
IN CENTRAL ASIA]

When the harvest has been taken in in Russia many peasants go on
pilgrimage to shrines and many go out in quest of new land. The
_khodoki_, or walkers, set out. A village or a family sends out a
messenger to seek new land; this messenger is called a _khodok_. The
_khodoki_ are specially encouraged by the Government. The police will
not allow a whole village to take to the road and go off all together
in quest of land; they insist on the _khodok_ going first and booking
something in advance. Very great reductions are made in railway fares
and great facilities are given to the _khodoki_, who go forth and look
at all the valleys and irrigated levels at the disposal of the
colonists during the year in question. They travel in twos and threes,
one _khodok_ being required for each three families.

When the _khodoki_ come back, after three weeks, or it may be three
months, or three years, there is necessarily tremendous excitement in
the village. They cannot then disclaim the _khodok’s_ authority to have
taken land in their name, or in any case they very seldom do disclaim
it. It often happens, of course, that the _khodoki_ return saying
that they have found nothing better than their own land and their own
village, and that, consequently, they do not recommend a move. Many
of the _khodoki_ I met on the road were well-to-do peasants who had a
stake in the old country and would not readily advise their constituent
villagers to sell out and come to Central Asia. Still, more than half
of the messengers sent out come back with a positive message. They have
found and taken land.

Whether the _khodok_ has done well or ill, the families set out. It
happens occasionally that the messengers choose death-traps and places
of eternal desolation, and they are terribly blamed. But it ought to
be remembered that Government engineers and agricultural specialists
have indicated the sites as possible before ever the _khodoki_ set
eyes on them; or a Russian general, visiting a district, has said:
“Plant fifteen villages on the eastern slopes of this range of hills,”
or “twenty villages along this valley,” and it has been done simply
because he wanted Russian villages for strategical considerations.

The manner of settling the Empire is so interesting to us that I append
a summary of the information given to all Russians desirous to emigrate
to the Russian colonies. This is for the year 1914:

The provinces open to colonisation this year are those of Uralsk,
Turgaisk, Akmolinsk, Semipalatinsk, Seven Rivers, Tobolsk, Tomsk,
Yenisei, Irkutsk, Transbaikal, Amur, and Primorsk. Also Yakutsk,
Sakhalin, and Kamchatka.

_The following people are allowed to settle beyond the Ural._--All
peasants and _meshtchane_, those engaged exclusively in agriculture,
and also artisans, workmen, factory hands, merchants and shopkeepers.
People of other classes must, before emigrating, apply to the governor
of the province in which they live.

_The Government invites no one to emigrate, and is anxious only to show
all possible help to those who have decided to take that step, and to
make the emigration laws and the grants and privileges accorded to
colonists clear to everyone._


EMIGRATION OF AGRICULTURISTS

_All agriculturists thinking of crossing into Asia should first think
well: Is there not some way of improving the home land and remaining on
it?_

Having become owners of your land at home (by the completion of
purchase after the liberation from serfdom), it is possible to let
part of it out to others, or by careful culture greatly increase the
harvest, or you can mortgage it to the Peasants’ Bank and buy other
land, either in your own or in a neighbouring province.

It is another matter when the land you possess is so little that there
is none to let out or mortgage, or when it is difficult to buy suitable
land at all near, when the land offered by Government or private owners
becomes year by year less and the prices year by year higher.

Then it is worth while considering the question of emigration to
Asiatic Russia, where there is still much space. The Government assigns
land to the extent of 25-50 dessiatinas a farm or 8-15 dessiatinas for
each male soul. Or it is possible to settle in a village or Cossack
station by special arrangement, and lease land cheaply from settled
colonists. To enable people to travel to such places the Government
helps with cheap tariffs and money grants.

During the past seven years more than three million souls have firmly
established themselves in this way, and in many places it may be said
that the colonists have become rich and live in a more flourishing way
than they did on the old lands at home. But it must be remembered that
such results are not attained at once. It is not a little heavy labour,
grief and poverty that have to be undergone during the first years in
the new place. Not every family has the strength to bear such trial.
It is reckoned that of every hundred families going across the Ural
fifteen return to the old country after having failed to take root
in the new. It is hard for families where the general health is weak,
where there are not good working hands, or where there is no money
whatever to start with. Such families would do better not to stir;
better to work a bit more on the home lands till they get some means to
take up new land and try and develop it.


THE EMIGRATION OF FACTORY HANDS AND ARTISANS

The towns and villages are greatly in need of people knowing trades.
Especially great is the need in the provinces of Amur, Primorsk, and
Transbaikal, where railways, fortresses, and barracks are being built,
and where mining, fishing and lumbering are in full swing. More than
a hundred thousand men are employed annually on the Government works
alone, and private firms want more. Unskilled labourers, brickmakers,
joiners, diggers, bricklayers, sawyers, locksmiths, glaziers, miners,
and anyone who has any special knowledge or knack, willing hands and a
heart to work.

Wages are higher than in European Russia, and all manner of help is
given in transport. There is a great reduction of fares on the Siberian
Railway, and every _artel_ of workmen contracted for the Government,
and also for many private businesses in connection with lumbering and
fisheries, is transported to its field of work FREE OF CHARGE and taken
back at specially cheap rates.

Many of those who go out with _artels_ like the country and the
conditions so much that they prefer to stay and take up plots of land
and settle.


WHERE AND HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SETTLE?

In the provinces open for colonisation there are a great number
of specially chosen plots of Government land at the disposal of
individuals or of numbers electing to farm and work together. The
names of peasants electing to see these or choose one of them are
gratuitously enrolled by the emigration officials. In the more settled
and inhabited places of Siberia, Turkestan and Seven Rivers Land, where
land has now obtained a considerable value, there are also special
plots marked out by the Government, and these may be bought. Also in
many peasant settlements and Cossack stations there are wide stretches
of land granted by the Government to the Cossacks or sold in time past
to freed serfs, and on these it is possible to settle when arrangements
can be made privately with the peasants or the Cossacks, as the case
may be. Finally, it is also possible to lease land or to buy it from
private individuals.


TO WHOM DOES THE GOVERNMENT GIVE HELP?

Although emigration is permitted to all who wish, yet, in order to
enjoy the advantages of Governmental help and grants in aid, it is
necessary that families should first send out messengers, and should
await their return before setting out themselves. This is only enforced
by the Government in order to save the people from the ruin which often
follows unconsidered and frivolous emigration. It should be remembered
that all who have not obtained land in advance through their messengers
(_khodoki_) will find that they have to take their turn last in the
selection of plots of land.


THE SENDING OF MESSENGERS (KHODOKI)

Any peasant or town family occupying itself with agriculture can now
send out a _khodok_, and it is now allowed to send one _khodok_ to
represent several families, but not more than five. What is more, any
working man, artisan or tradesman can obtain a _khodok’s_ certificate
without difficulty, and can make the journey to the places of
colonisation and become acquainted with the local conditions.

The faithful _khodok_ should make a thorough study of conditions of
life in the new places, consider carefully all the plots of land
offered, and, choosing the most suitable, inscribe his name for it
according to the regulations. The _khodok_ must not set off without
his certificate, for only by showing the certificate can he travel at
reduced rates or be recognised by the officials in Turkestan or Siberia.

In Seven Rivers Land and the other provinces of Turkestan no
permission is given to people of other than the Russian race or the
Orthodox religion. In the case of Old Believers and other sects whose
teaching forbids military service, no permission can be granted to
settle--therefore, no Molokans, Baptists or Seventh Day Adventists are
allowed to settle anywhere in Turkestan.

The certificates, both for _khodoki_ and emigrating families, are
given gratuitously. The _khodok_ certificate for 1913 is printed on
yellow paper, the colonists’ on rose-coloured paper, and the tariff
certificate on green.[D]

The most convenient time for looking over the plots of land is from
April till June, but the best are taken up very quickly at the
beginning of spring; many people of foresight get to the various points
in the winter in order to form an idea of the winter life of the
district and to be on the spot when the new plots are laid open in the
early spring.

In order to make it easier for the messengers and to decrease the
expense, _khodoki_ are advised to go in groups and not alone. A party
together always fares better than separate people can, and more trouble
is necessarily taken for them.

_Khodoki_ often take very little money with them, and, through poverty,
are obliged to return without having found the land they want. It is
not possible to find suitable land at once; it is necessary to go to
various places and look at many farms. For that, time and money are
both necessary.

It is not thought wise to answer advertisements or apply at offices
where the promise of arranging everything is made. It is impossible to
take up land except through application to the emigration officials,
and they do their work without making any charge. Everyone who promises
to obtain an option on a plot of Government land after the payment
of a fee is practising deceit, and complaint should be lodged at
the Emigration Department in St. Petersburg. (Postal address: St.
Petersburg Emigration Department, Morskaya 42. Telegraphic address: St.
Petersburg, Emigrant.)

_Khodoki_ should remember that many of the free plots of land indicated
in the booklet may have been allotted to other people before their
arrival. So it is, generally speaking, wise to take a wide view of the
possible places of settlement. _Khodoki_ should obtain the full list of
plots offered by the Government. This list can be obtained at Seezran
station, at Orenburg, Iletsk, Ak-bulak, Jurun, Arees, Tashkent.

The following reductions are made in railway and steamer fares for
messengers and colonists and their families, and also in the charges
for baggage:

1. People holding certificates as colonists or messengers of colonists
are taken on all railways at a reduced fare--at a fourth of the cost
of a third-class ticket--and they are accommodated in the grey wagons
of the fourth class, or, in the absence of these, in goods trains.
Children up to ten years of age are carried free.

2. Baggage is taken on the same train as that by which the colonists
travel, and is charged at the rate of one hundredth part of a farthing
per pood per verst, the first pood per ticket going free. Horses and
horned cattle are taken at half a farthing per head per verst, and
small domestic animals at a quarter of a farthing per head per verst.
Fowls and small animals in cages or baskets are charged by weight as
if they were ordinary baggage.

3. Baggage is divided into three categories.

_First category._--Domestic goods and furniture in packing cases; more
than eight poods per person of either sex cannot be taken at this rate.

_Second category._--Animals, carts, agricultural machinery, guns,
provisions, can only be taken to the number and extent shown on the
back of the tariff certificate.

_Third category._--Grain, flour, seed, trees and vines can only be
taken up to ten poods per person.

Beyond these limits baggage must be taken at the general commercial
tariff.

In the case of loss the railway undertakes to pay the owner forty
roubles a pood for baggage in the first category (though not more
than 120 roubles for each ticket), six roubles a pood for the second
category, and a rouble and a half a pood for the third category.


TABLE OF DISTANCES

                                            _Approximate
                                             equivalent
                                _Versts._    in miles._
  From St. Petersburg to--
      Omsk                        2,937        1,958
      Semipalatinsk               3,666        2,444
      Tashkent                    3,727        2,484
      Vladivostock                8,268        5,512

  From Moscow to--
      Omsk                        2,681        1,794
      Semipalatinsk               3,410        2,340
      Tashkent                    3,123        2,082
      Vladivostock                8,012        5,340

  From Odessa to--
      Omsk                        3,784        2,522
      Semipalatinsk               4,518        3,008
      Tashkent                    4,536        3,024
      Vladivostock                9,115        6,076


TABLE OF RAILWAY FARES FOR EMIGRANTS

  _No. of   _Equivalent   _Cost of ticket   _Equivalent
  versts._   in miles._     in roubles._[E]   in shillings._
                         _rbls._ _copks._    _s._  _d._
    750         500         1     80           2     8
  1,500       1,000         2     80           4     2
  2,250       1,500         3     65           5     5
  3,000       2,000         4     45           6     7
  3,750       2,500         5     55           8     3
  4,500       3,000         6     65           9    11
  5,250       3,500         7     65          11     5
  6,000       4,000         8     75          13     0
  7,500       5,000        10     95          16     4
  9,000       6,000        13     05          19     7


BAGGAGE TARIFF FOR EMIGRANTS

  To carry 3 poods (i.e. 1 cwt.)--
      1,000 versts   30 copecks (i.e. about 6d.).
      5,000   ”       1 rouble  50 copecks (2s. 3d.).
      9,000   ”       2 roubles 70  ” (4s.).

  To carry 30 poods (i.e. 1/2 ton)--
      1,000 versts    3 roubles (4s. 6d.).
      5,000   ”      15    ”    (22s. 6d.).
      9,000   ”      27    ”    (40s. 6d.).

And other amounts and distances proportionately.


CHARGES ON THE RIVERS

                        _Fare in
                        roubles._         _Baggage
                     _rbls._ _copks._   per pood._
  From Omsk to--
      Pavlodar           3     20         20 copecks
      Semipalatinsk      4     80         25    ”

  From Krasnoyarsk to--
      Batenei            2     50         16    ”
      Minusinsk          2     80         18    ”

At the larger stations and piers colonists’ shelters have been built;
free medical aid is given, and hot food is served out cheap (for
instance, a plate of lenten or of ordinary soup, four copecks--one
penny).

To children up to ten years of age and to sick persons, hot food is
given free. To small children (up to three years), white bread and milk
is given free.

People who become ill of infectious diseases are removed to the
Government hospitals and treated free.

At the great emigration stations beware of swindlers and charlatans, of
whom there are not a few. It goes without saying that even the poorest
emigrants have a little money, and they stand to lose even that if they
are not careful. Beware of loiterers, card games with unknown persons,
pick-pockets, robbers. Hide your money in a place where it cannot be
stolen. Do not accept drinks of vodka or beer from unknown people. It
is a common trick to scatter thorn-apple seed in vodka; the colonist
loses consciousness, and is robbed. Many people have suffered in this
way through lack of caution.

If on the road you purchase cattle or horses, obtain a certificate of
purchase, or else the persons from whom you have bought may come back
and declare that you have stolen what you bought.


SEVEN RIVERS PROVINCE (_Semiretchenskaya Oblast_)

One of the most remote Central Asian possessions of Russia, remarkable
for its natural wealth and the beauty of Nature.

The route thither is either by rail to Tashkent or by rail to Omsk, and
up the River Irtish to Semipalatinsk, and then 500 to 1,000 versts or
more by road.

It is bounded on the south and east by China, on the north by the
province of Semipalatinsk, on the west by the provinces of Sirdaria and
Ferghan.

The principal inhabitants are wandering Kirghiz, of whom there are
about one million. The Russians number about 200,000, and there are
about 200,000 of other races. Half the Russian population is Cossack.

The province is divided into the jurisdictions of Verney, Pishpek,
Przhevalsk, Jarkent, Kopal and Lepsinsk.

The northern districts of Lepsinsk and Kopal are specially suitable
for agricultural settlement, and there is much land there not needing
irrigation, as there is comparatively much water.

In the districts of Verney, Jarkent and Pishpek irrigation is
generally necessary. Free plots of land are mostly in the district of
Jarkent and on the frontier of China. When the railway has been brought
across to Verney, trade will certainly develop, so the sale of products
will be facilitated and the conditions of farming very profitable.

Then the southern parts of the province are very mountainous. Fruitful
valleys are separated by great ranges, but with time a road system will
be developed and this difficulty overcome.

A railway will soon be built from Tashkent to Verney.

There are as yet no steamers. The largest river, the Ili, crosses the
centre of the province. Besides the Ili there are many mountain streams
and also large lakes; among the latter may be named Balkhash, Alakul,
Issik-Kul.

The climate is very varied, there being levels of eternal snow and of
burning sand. The chief occupations of the colonists are cattle farming
and all branches of agriculture. A well-watered farm gives, as a rule,
a rich and abundant harvest.

Wheat is sown (from 7 to 10 poods the dessiatina), rye oats (8 to 14
poods), millet, peas, potatoes, maize, sunflowers, mustard, flax, hemp,
poppy, buckwheat, etc. And the harvest gives wheat up to 150 poods the
dessiatina, oats give from 70 to 120 poods the dessiatina, and barley
90 poods. In the districts of Pishpek, Jarkent and Verney rice is
sown, and gives 100 roubles the dessiatina clear profit. Orchards are
cultivated almost everywhere with success.

PRICES

  Wheat           30 to 80 copecks the pood.
  Rye             30 to 60    ”       ”
  Oats            30 to 60    ”       ”
  Barley          30 to 70    ”       ”
  A horse costs   45 roubles
  A cow costs     25 to 30 roubles
  A camel costs   50 roubles
  A sheep costs    3 to 5 roubles
  Labour costs     from 70 copecks to 1 rouble
                       50 copecks the day.


GOVERNMENT GRANTS

(_a_) In the measure of 100 roubles the family is given in the
districts of Pishpek and Verney, except for certain special districts
where colonisation proceeds without loans. A hundred roubles are also
given to settlers in the district of Kopal, excepting the survey of
Altin-Emel and certain plots in the valley of the River Chu and also in
the neighbourhood of the Lake Issik-Kul.

(_b_) In the measure of 200 roubles the family in the northern parts of
the district of Jarkent and in the survey of Altin-Emel in the district
of Kopal.

In the southern and eastern frontier region half the loan is reckoned
as not returnable to the Government.

In the artificially watered tracts in the districts of Verney and
Pishpek no grants are made.

Beyond personal loans special grants are made for purposes of supplying
general needs, for the building of schools, churches, village barns,
mills, brick factories and irrigation works. For the poorer districts
the Government takes upon itself the burden of building schools and
churches, and hundreds of thousands of roubles are spent annually for
this purpose. The Government also sinks wells for the colonists.

Personal loans are repayable by instalments after five years. The
first five years there is no need to repay anything, but during the
succeeding ten years after that the whole should be cleared off.

General loans are repayable within ten years.


TAXES

Settlers are free of all Governmental charges and taxes for the first
five years. During the second five years half has to be paid, and after
ten years settlers take their stand with the established colonists.


MILITARY SERVICE

Settlers over 18 years at the time of settlement are allowed to
postpone their starting service for three years.

In Turkestan six years’ grace is given to all over 15 years of age.


TIMBER

When there is no timber, the Government provides free wood for building
purposes--from the nearest Crown forest.

TURKESTAN

Though, generally speaking, Turkestan is shut for the purposes of
immigration, nevertheless a great number of people go there every year,
there being a great demand for labour of all kinds. Cotton growers give
even as much as two roubles fifty copecks per day. Good wages are paid
on the irrigation works. Artisans are needed in the towns and villages.
Turkestan is rich, and can support any working man who goes there. It
is good to go there and make some money before taking up land, and also
to get some experience of the climate and conditions. As regards the
taking up of land when allowed, grants in the measure of 165 roubles
are given in the provinces of Sirdaria, Samarkand and Ferghan, and
in the measure of 250 roubles to settlers in the frontier regions of
Zaalaisk and Pamir, half of which is not returnable.

[Illustration: THE SHADY VILLAGE STREET--ONE LONG LINE OF WILLOWS AND
POPLARS]

It is impossible to give the whole of this “combined circular” in
extenso, but I think I have included or summarised all that is vital.
It indicates the scaffolding of empire building. The people at home
feel cramped or restless. They send out their KHODOKI, the pioneer
messengers. The messengers select a portion of new land and return to
Russia. The families of the emigrants follow. But first they must sell
off or abandon all manner of cumbersome property; and good-bye has to
be said to friends, to the old village, to church and churchyard, and
the dead. Most difficult of all for many Russians is the leaving
the dead behind. There is the whole agony of separation, the being cut
off from Russia and going forth as a new child into Siberia or Central
Asia. Then the long, monotonous train journey, and the road journey
at the end of it; the caravan on the Central Asian road, and it is in
the caravan that the colonists begin to taste of new life, and many
feel they would like to go on wandering so all their lives. But they
reach the place the messenger has found for them, and then commences
the great work of making a habitation of man where no habitation has
ever been before. Prayers and thanksgiving, and then work. There is no
possible living without work, and the rather easy-going ways of the old
land have to be given up and a new life begun of arduous labour and
unflagging energy. To their aid comes hope and the passion for making
all things new. No Russian would work so much were it not interesting;
it is real life, the wine of experience.

First of all, trees are planted. How pathetic to see the long rows
of three-foot-high poplar shoots and willow twigs! A month on this
sun-beaten road leaves no doubt in the emigrant’s mind as to what is
the first necessity--shade, shade. Trees are planted all along the
main Government dyke. The colonist chooses the place for his house;
he digs a trench all round it and lets in water from the dyke, and he
plants trees along the trench. Then he buys stout poplar trunks and
willow trunks, and makes the framework of his cottage. He interlaces
little willow twigs, and makes the sort of wilted green, slightly
shady, slightly sunny house that children might put up in a wood in
England. But that is only the beginning. To the willow house he slaps
on mud puddings. This is the filthiest work. He makes a great quantity
of mud, and treads it up and down with his bare feet till he gets the
consistency he requires, and then, with his hand, fetches out sloppy
lumps of it and builds his walls. In a few days the mud hardens, and
he has a shady and substantial dwelling, and one that in an earthquake
will swing but will not collapse. His roof he makes of prairie grass,
great reeds ten feet to fifteen feet in length and thick and strong, or
of willow twigs again and turf. In his second year he has a little hay
harvest on his roof. He ploughs his little bit of desert. He exchanges
some of his oxen for cows. He strives with all his power--as does a
transplanted flower--to take root. He looks forlorn. You look at his
poor estate and say: “It is a poor experiment. The sun is too strong
for him; he will just wither off, and the desert will be as before.”
But you come another day and you see a change, and exclaim: “He has
taken root, after all; there is a shoot of young life there, tender and
green.” Along the road I noticed villages of all ages; of this year, of
last year, of four years gone, of twenty years, forty years.

There are now several thousand Russian villages in Central Asia--year
by year scores of new names creep into the map in faint _italics_. It
is astonishing to English eyes, because we are accustomed to think
that maps of Asia do not change. We like to preserve the old Asiatic
names of places, and our map-makers seem to have prejudice in favour
of Teuton nomenclature similar to the prejudice for spelling the
names of Russian places with German pronunciation equivalents. Asia
becomes predominantly Russian, and not by virtue of troops stationed at
outlandish posts, but by virtue of this process of settling.

The process of colonisation is, however, slower than the process of
colonising the British Empire. The population is said to increase at
a greater rate, but the organic development is slower. The facilities
for getting to Siberia and Central Asia are greater, but the prospect
held out is not so alluring, not so fascinating. There is more work to
be done by the immigrant here than in Canada or Australia or Africa.
There are no large fortunes to be made in a few years, no speculative
chances, no great whirling wheel of life set going. On the other hand,
Russian colonisation is sounder colonisation, more solid and lasting.
It has a better quality and it promises more for the future, unless we
British are going to wake up to the facts of our situation.




X

FELLOW-TRAVELLERS


It is not necessary to say much about Verney, the capital of Seven
Rivers Land. It is so subject to earthquakes that it is difficult to
see in it a permanent capital. No houses of two storeys can with safety
be built, so it is more suited to remain a military centre and fortress
than to be a great city. In order to look imposing, shops and stores
have fixed up sham upper storeys; that is, they have window-fronts
up above, but no rooms behind the fronts. Singer and the cinema are
here, though an enormous number of Singer shops have been compulsorily
closed all over the Russian Empire during the war. Verney has its
bazaar, its inns and doubtful houses, its baths, dance halls, clubs,
restaurants. Although it is so far from a railway station and such an
enormous distance from the wicked West, it has its frivolity and sin
and small crime. It has no electric cars. It has no Bond Street or
West End. One may say, however, that it has its Covent Garden. Verney
is a great market for fruit and vegetables. Its native name means the
city of apples, and for apples it is famous. All travellers from China
are given Verney apples when they pass through. Carts heaped high with
giant red radishes are driven through the town, and the strawberry
hawkers make many cries. Many horses are adorned with fancy garments,
and I noticed donkeys with trousers on. Women ride about astride, and
are evidently used to horseback, tripping along leaning forward over
the horse as it springs to a gallop, sedately coming up the high street
at a walk, erect like little fat soldiers. Then, Kirghiz women astride
of bulls are to be seen, and I saw one carrying twin babies and yet on
bull-back, dexterously holding the cord from the ring in the animal’s
nose, and guiding it whither it should go. Verney has its newspaper.
It has some hope of culture, and in the High School two dozen students
matriculate each year and go off to the Universities of Kief, Moscow,
and so on. Verney folk are grumblers at home, but when they get to
Russia they develop great local patriotism and sigh for a bit of Verney
bread, even of the stale bread of Verney. At the Universities the
students of Seven Rivers Land keep together, and know themselves as a
body having certain views and opinions of their own. Then, after their
course, they come back to their home land and bring tidings of Russia.
I talked with some students, and found them not unlike our own colonial
students in their outlook and their attitude to the Empire. They help,
but, of course, a far away place like this needs a lot of helping in
the matter of culture. They bring back books and musical instruments.
When I went out at night, strolling through the moon-illuminated city,
I listened to the tinkling of pianos, and it was interesting to
reflect that each instrument, besides coming thousands of miles by
train, had also come five hundred miles in a wagon along these Central
Asian roads.

There is a suggestion of America in the life out here. When you ask
the way you are directed by blocks, not by turnings, and you may be
sure the town is a planned one, with the streets running at right
angles to one another. Only Nature, with her earthquakes, has tumbled
it, given you chasms to jump over, and made it dangerous to walk in
the outskirts of the town at night. There is much advertisement of
wares and of persons, and a keenness to prosper and get rich. “Getting
rich flatters your self-esteem,” I read, and again, “Buy Indian tea
and get rich.” It is quite clear to me that buying Indian tea really
makes poorer, for it is altogether inferior to Russian tea; but, then,
these people have not our experience, they do not know the history of
tea-drinking in England; how once we also had good tea, but that, in
the national passion for cheapness and “getting rich,” we have come
to drink popularly that vile thick stuff we now call tea. Verney has
its rich bourgeois--rich for Verney--men with ten or twenty thousand
pounds capital. Among such is, or was (for perhaps he has been interned
or expelled), a German sausage-maker, who started his career in the
market-place with five pounds of sausages on a plate, and is now a
respected merchant with shops and branch shops and a fame for sausages
throughout Central Asia.

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA AT VERNEY--AFTER THE
EARTHQUAKE OF 1887]

The local newspaper had made some sort of record of the cinema films
that were shown in the five towns of Seven Rivers and analysed them in
this way:

  Scientific    2 per cent.
  Historical    3    ”
  Industrial    3    ”
  Nature        4    ”
  Farce        20    ”
  Lurid drama  60    ”
  Polite drama  8    ”

Which seemed to give a fair account of its civilising force. I visited
three or four cinemas at various remote places, and was astonished
at the French and Italian horrors, German and Scandinavian bourgeois
funniosities, ghastly white-slave tragedies, and many visualised penny
dreadfuls. When you see the crowds of Russians at these performances
you realise that the penny dreadful is by no means played out, that
many people did not in the old times read the penny dreadful just
because they did not know what lay between the covers of those badly
printed books, what enthralling rubbish. The business has changed hands
commercially, but the thing sold is the same. It is sold in a more
acceptable form--that is all.

Astonishing to see the yellow men of Asia staring at the cinema: the
turbaned Sart; the new Chinaman, with cropped pigtail; the baby-like
Kirghiz. Whatever do they make of American business romances and
the Wild West and Red Rube and Max? They seem engrossed, smile
irrelevantly, stare, go out, but always come again. The cinema is a
queer window on to Europe and the West.

The road from Verney to Iliisk, on the River Ili, seemed more deserted
than the road to Verney had been. Many parties of pioneers evidently
turn south at Verney, and not so many turn north-east towards Iliisk.
It is waste territory, overgrown with coarse grass and thistles. There
are occasional mountain rivulets, bridged on the roadway with straw
and mud bridges much higher than the level of the road, so that every
bridge is a sort of hump. Behind me and behind Verney immense steep
mountains lifted themselves up into the clouds. The road that I walked
was a slowly descending tableland.

I passed through the little village of Karasbi, and then through the
more substantial settlements of Jarasai and Nikolaevski. These are
prolonged and attenuated villages. The oldest houses are the biggest
and the deepest in trees, they have plenty of out-houses and farm
buildings; but the newest are bare and wretched, with poplar shoots in
front of them but three feet high. There are some deserted hovels--even
a fine house was perhaps a hovel to begin with, a temporary mud hut
put up to give shelter whilst the first work was done on the fields.
I saw many houses half built, showing their framework of yet green
willow and poplar twigs. I saw whole families and villages at work on
new settlements, and also families living in tents. On the foundations
of the new dwellings or attached to the rude framework were little
crosses, only to be taken down when there would be a place in the
house for the ikons brought from their old homes in Russia. Some
colonists, on being asked when they had arrived, replied, “Last week,”
others said, “During these days”; the dust on their wagons was new.
Everyone had a sort of Swiss Family Robinson air, as of exploring an
island, making natural discoveries, and bringing things from a wreck.
Some groups, however, were already busy sowing their new fields, and I
understood that that was the first thing to do; that was the work, and
the building the new cottages was the play. They had nothing to fear
from sleeping in the open every night of summer and early autumn--a
lesson to these Russians, who in their home cottages or in railway
carriages are afraid of fresh air as if it brought pestilence.

I spent two wonderful nights under the stars on the road to Iliisk, the
first in a sort of natural cradle in a copse, the second in a hollow
which I made for my body in the bare sand of the desert. I passed out
of the new land on to the waste of the Ili valley; the road was visible
twenty or thirty miles ahead, and on it in front of me are telegraph
poles unlimited, at first with spaces between, but in the distance
thick, like black matches stuck close together in the sand. I walked a
long way in the evenings, and I remember, as the sun set, an enormous
and foolish bustard that was under the impression I was chasing it.
It would fly the space of five telegraph poles, I’d walk the space of
three; then it would fly three, I’d catch up; and it would fly on ahead
along the track as if it dared not desert the poles. Finally, however,
just at the last rays of sunset, it flew crossways over the desert and
disappeared.

I was rather nervous at this time about the _karakurt_, the black
spider that sheep eat with pleasure, but whose bite is mortal to men;
and each night when I made my fresh-air couch I took pains to keep out
of the way of flies, beetles, spiders, and snakes. I never was troubled
by the _karakurt_, but I had a lively time with beetles and running
flies, to say nothing of snakes, whose sudden darts and writhings gave
me momentary horrors many times. The valley of the Ili is a wild place,
with tigers and panthers; a splendid district for study and sport, I
should say. However, no beasts came and snuffed my face in the night.

Each night on the road I learned to expect the moon later and later. It
always seems unpunctual, always late, but not worried, and having that
irreproachable beauty that excuses all faults. She came up late over
the Ili desert in a wonderful orange light, and then, emerging into
perfect brilliance, paled the myriad stars, set them back in the sky,

  Divesting herself of her golden shift and so
  Emerging white and exquisite.

I lay looking eastward on the sand, and on my right, in the vague night
shadow, lay the tremendous pyramids of the Ala Tau mountains, the great
cliff triangles south of Verney, first vision of the mighty Thian Shan.
The clouds had lifted off them during the night, and in the morning
I saw them in their true perspective, vague, smoke-like, shadow-based
and grey-white, sun-bathed, many-pointed rocky and precipitous summits
stretching a hundred miles and more from east to west.

It was ten miles in to breakfast at Iliisk. The water in the little
lakes being salt, and my water-bottles empty, I could not make tea. The
lakes and ponds remind you that you are between Issik-Kul and Balkhash.
It is, however, desert country till you come to the thickets of the
river, and there the cuckoo is calling, there are bees in the air, and
it is glorious, fresh, abundant summer. The bases of the mountains are
all deep blue as the sky, but utterly soft and delicious to the gaze,
and the colour faints into the whiteness of the hundred-mile-long line
of snow.

Iliisk is marked large on the map for convenience sake. One must mark
it large to indicate a town on the River Ili, but though there is
a prospect of its becoming an important trade centre, it is as yet
insignificant, no more than a village, a church, a post-station, a
market-place, and the dwelling-houses of two thousand people. I noticed
new colonists here, using their horses to tramp great slops of mud
to the proper consistency of mud dough for making the walls of new
cottages. So Iliisk is increasing in size, its population is growing.
Most of the houses here were mud huts of the swinging kind, built to
withstand earthquakes, and their roofs were very light and beautiful,
being of jungle reeds of a golden colour, each stem twelve feet long
and ending in a broom of soft plumage. The River Ili, from which these
reeds are cut, is a grateful sheet of silver, the breadth of the Thames
at Westminster, has pink cliffs, is spanned by a wooden bridge, and has
little tree-grown islets. Among the reeds on the banks lurk the tiger
and panther and many snakes. Little steamers go to and fro out of China
and into China, doing trade in wool, but held up every now and then
by the Chinese for extra bribes. In the village wagons and camels are
being loaded with raw wool--indicating the future significance of the
little town as a trade centre. The population is predominantly Russian,
though there are Tartars, Kirghiz, and Chinese Mohammedans. Near the
market-place is a Tartar mosque with a green crescent on the top of it.

My road lay eastward toward Kopal, but before taking it I had my
breakfast at Iliisk--sour milk and stale bread--at a cottage, with
Christ’s blessing, and how good!

The morning was very hot when I set out again, and I took off my jacket
and put it in my knapsack, carrying the enlarged and weighty bundle on
thinly covered shoulders. The land was sandy and desolate, being too
high above the level of the River Ili to allow of simple irrigation.
If it is to be opened up for colonisation, the river must be tapped
much higher up, in Chinese territory, but this the Chinese will not
as yet allow. I met no colonists on my road out from Iliisk, not even
any Kirghiz. Summer had scorched away whatever grass the desert had
yielded, and the nomads had retired for the season and gone to fresher
pastures higher in the hills. How frugally it is necessary to lunch in
these parts may be guessed. It is no place to tramp for anyone who must
have dainties and must have change. On the whole I do not recommend
Central Asia for long walking tours. For one thing, there is very
little opportunity of getting anything washed, including oneself; no
early morning dip, no freshness. It is not as in the Caucasus:

  The wild joy of living, the leaping from rock up to rock,
  The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool, silver shock
  Of the plunge in the pool’s living water.

At night I was fain to discard my sleeping-sack, those two sheets sewn
together on three sides; but the beetles and spiders and mosquitoes
made that impossible. On the other hand, the whiteness of the sack,
when the moon shone full on me, always made it possible that some
long-sighted Kirghiz might bring his tribe along to find out what I was.

After a night in the desert above Iliisk I came to a place which was
not a place and was called Chingildinsky, perhaps because of the
sound of the bells on horses galloping through, for scarce anyone
ever stops there, but I suppose really after Chingiz Khan. However,
at the Zemsky post-station, to which I had repaired to have tea,
I made an interesting acquaintance, a M. Liamin, a Government
engineer, architect, and inspector of bridges. He was travelling on
a long round through Seven Rivers and Western China via Chugachak--a
military-looking gentleman in the uniform of a colonel, but much more
sociable than a Russian officer is permitted to be. He was riding in
his own _tarantass_, with his own petted horses, Vaska and Margarita.
He asked me if I would care to accompany him, and we travelled a whole
day together, all day and all night. Whenever we came in sight of any
game the Kirghiz coachman took his master’s gun and had a shot at
it. In this way we brought down two pheasants and a woodcock, to the
delight of the Kirghiz and the not unmingled pleasure of his master,
who could not bear to think of animals in pain. Liamin was inspecting
Government buildings, chiefly bridges, and of these chiefly bridges
long since washed away. He had to report annually to the governor of
Semi-retchie.

“There are two hundred bridges needing repair or rebuilding. I make
my report, and the governor sets aside two hundred roubles. A rouble
apiece,” he explained, smiling. “But what is a rouble!”

We passed through remarkably empty country, but it was on this second
day out of Iliisk that I met for the first time the colonists coming
southwards from Siberia. More than half my journey was done; I was
nearer Omsk than Tashkent.

In Liamin’s _tarantass_ were all manner of boxes and padlocked safes,
map rolls, instruments, pillows, quilts, weapons. There was a soft
depth where one sat and lolled on one’s back whilst one’s knees
in front were preposterously high. It was a jolly way to travel,
and we were both sick of solitude and glad to hear the sound of our
own voices. Liamin was charming. We talked on all manner of themes.
His favourite authors were Jack London, Kipling, and Dickens. Wells
depressed his soul, because he was so pessimistic. It seemed to him
very terrible that it was necessary to kill so many people before Man
would make up his mind to live aright. The World Republic was not
worth the price paid. He had read “The World Set Free” in a Russian
translation, and he could not bring himself to believe that there would
ever be such slaughter as a world-war meant. Mankind was not so stupid.

Though he was a high-placed official, Liamin was all against the
colonisation of Central Asia, which he called a fashionable idea, and
full of sympathy for the wandering Kirghiz, who were being excluded
from all the good pasture lands and harried across the frontier into
China. At one village where we stopped we met a land surveyor and an
old, grizzled, retired colonel who both held the opposite view, and
they belaboured Liamin as we sat round the samovar.

“The Kirghiz are animals, nothing more. The Russians are men. The
Kirghiz are going to China. God be with them! Let them go! Are they not
pagans? We should be well rid of them! Just think of their cruelty;
they put a ring through a bull’s nose and tie him by that to a horse,
and by his tail to a camel! If they want to stay with us, let them
remain in one spot, become civilised, and obtain proper passports;
then their land will be secured to them. But if they _must_ wander
about like wild animals, here to-day and the other side of the mountain
to-morrow, then they must pay for their liberty and wildness.”

A grievous question, this, in Russian Central Asia. Liamin could not
make his way in his argument against the colonel. The future of the
Kirghiz tribes is problematical, but I should say that they were
certain to go over the frontier into China in ever greater numbers as
Central Asia becomes civilised by the Russians. What they will do when
Mongolia and China become civilised I do not know. But that is looking
a long way ahead.

[Illustration: VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING]

At a place called Karachok we saw somewhat of the festivity of a
Kirghiz wedding. There was a great crowd of men--the guests from
the country round about--and they all stood around the tent of the
bridegroom, while the womenfolk, apparently all collected together, sat
within and improvised songs. The felt was removed from the side of the
tent and the cane framework was exposed, so the girls and women within,
all in white and with white turbans on their heads, looked as if they
were in a cage. Kirghiz women are not veiled. They were all sitting on
the floor--that is, on carpets on the ground of the tent. They sang as
the Northern Russians sing in the provinces of Vologda and Perm and
Archangel, in wild bursts and inharmonious keening. The men joined
occasionally in the songs, and occasionally burst into laughter, for
the words were full of funny things invented by the girls. That seemed
to be the sum of the entertainment. A sheep had been roasted whole. A
race had been run for the prize of a dead goat--the national _baiga_
race. About midnight the singing ended, and the guests prepared to take
their wives away and go home; the camels and bulls and horses were led
forth, also the wives. And then broke out a quarrel. One of the guests
had stolen a silver button off the coat of another man’s wife, had
cut it off with the scissors as a keepsake, and she had countenanced
the theft. The wife, being the personal property of the husband, had,
of course, no power to give the button on her own account. There was
likely to be an outrageous fight with cudgels, but Liamin appeared in
the midst of the dispute and calmed it all away in the name of law and
order. The guests mounted and rode away, out into the darkness, by
various tracks, on horses, camels, bulls, their wives with them. It was
astonishing to see the effect of the appearance of an officer among
the angry crowd. They forgot their differences at one look and the
recognition of a uniform. Even the dogs ceased barking when they saw
the sword of my friend and they smelt his khaki trousers.

Our horses had been taken out of the shafts and given three hours’ rest
and plenty of oats to eat. We walked out over the wild and empty moor
together and chatted, came back and had tea, and then got into the
_tarantass_ once more. It was the depth of night before we moved on,
and although we had clambered in before the horses were brought back,
our object being to go to sleep before we started, we went on comparing
impressions. I told him my life, he told me his, told me about his
wife and children and his home at Przhevalsk, of his horses and his
experiments in breeding, of the horse races at Verney, of the joy of
the Kirghiz in racing, the one Russian pursuit and interest in which
they fully share, the common ground of the two peoples in the colony.
Liamin spent a great deal of the year in China and on the frontier, and
had evidently much experience of the Chinese. He considered there would
be a quarrel with China sooner or later through the progress of Russia
in Central Asia. But the Chinese would be beaten. He did not fear their
millions. They were not equipped as the Japanese were.

“What do you think of the Yellow Peril; is it getting nearer?” I asked.

“There is no danger of it whatever,” said he. “Europe is far too
warlike to be in any danger from the Chinese.”

“Do you think Europe is more or less warlike than it was; do you think
it is getting less warlike?” I asked. This was, of course, before the
Great War.

“Yes, it’s getting less warlike, I suppose,” said Liamin. “But it
will be a long while before we are too effeminate to withstand the
Mongols. But woe for us if there should ever come such a time! They
are a devilish people. At first glance they seem artless and childlike,
but you can never be sure what they are up to; they are secret and
mysterious. It is an axiom with me that all Asiatics lie; but the
Chinese particularly. You remember when San Francisco was destroyed by
earthquake the Americans discovered a hitherto unknown and underground
city run by the Chinese, and in it many white people who had long
since disappeared nobody knew whither, people who had been advertised
for and sought for by relatives and police and what not. Wherever the
Chinese form colonies they turn to devilry of one kind or another. I
remember the ghastly things the Chinese did in the Boxer insurrection,
the originality of the tortures they invented. Fancy this as a torture!
A Russian whom I knew fell into their hands, and their way of killing
him was to fasten a corpse of a man to him, and day and night he lived
with this corpse till the worms ate into him and he died of madness!
The Russian villagers don’t mind doing business with the Chinamen,
but always remember they are pagans, and many think they have direct
dealings with devils. I was at Blagoveshtchensk when the Chinese opened
fire on us, and our Siberian colonists drove all the Chinese out of the
city, thirty thousand of them, and they were drowned in the river like
rats.”

By this time the horses had been put in, Karachok left, and we were
jogging gently through the night. The Kirghiz who drove slept; the
horses also almost slept as they walked. Liamin at last, tired or made
drowsy by the movement, nodded as he talked, and fell asleep in the
middle of a sentence. The road climbed over high mountains, the moon
bathed the track and the wild and empty landscape with light. How far
on either hand stretched the uninhabited world! It was like posting
across a new and habitable planet where men might have been expected
to be living, but where all had died, or none but ourselves had ever
come. The world itself poked up, its great back was shyly lifted as if
it were some gigantic, timid animal that had never been disturbed. It
was a wonderful night; quiet, gentle, and unusual. Liamin, at my side,
slept silently and intensely. The Kirghiz looked as if cut out of wood.
I lay back and looked out, my fingers locked behind my head. So the
small hours passed. Night seemed to move over us and be left behind,
and I saw ahead the creeping dawn, the morrow, the real morrow, golden
and lucent on the eastern horizon. The sun rose and flooded into our
sleepy and sleeping eyes as we clattered over the brow of a hill. We
came to the Tartar hamlet of Kuan-Kuza, and it was morning.




XI

ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER


At Kuan-Kuza I parted company with Liamin. I went off for a walk on
the hills; he went on with Vaska and Margarita. I had now reached
mountainous country and a region of fresh air. There were green valleys
and wild flowers, streams beside which I could make a pleasant repast,
and I had a most enjoyable walk to Kopal. There were patches of snow
on the heights, and I clambered up and fingered it just for the joy of
realising the contrast to the heat of the deserts I had come through.
The road went high over a green tableland to Altin-Emel, where I came
to cross-roads for China. An enormous caravan of camels blocked all
the ways here; two or three hundred ranks of camels, roped three in a
rank, roped crossways and lengthways, bearing huge panniers of wool,
but no passengers. Chinamen and little Chinese boys were in charge
of them, and ran among the camels’ legs cursing and calling as the
strings of bewildered or purposely contrary animals threatened to get
into knots and inextricable tangles. Sarts were doing a good business
here, selling hot lunch from wooden cauldrons with three compartments,
in which were meat-pies, soups, potatoes, respectively, all cooking
at the same time over charcoal. Altin-Emel is an interesting point on
the road. Here may be seen upon occasion British sportsmen with Hindu
servants, and two or three britchkas full of trophies and large antlers
done up in linen and cotton-wool and fixed with rope. Before the war
four or five British officers passed through Altin-Emel every year on
their way to Chinese Tartary or India, or from those places, coming
home. Some were out here at the time the war broke out, and were a long
time in finding out exactly what had happened in Europe.

It is very beautiful country, with snow peaks in view in the distance
and at your feet white iris, forget-me-not, and brilliant Scotch roses,
those yellow blossoms thick on thorny stems. Then there are fields of
mullein as thick as stalks of corn after the peasants’ sickles have cut
the harvest. There are good-looking and frequent Russian villages and
Cossack stations, Kugalinskaya, Polovinka, Kruglenkoe. I passed through
a village started only in 1911, very clean, well kept, and promising.
Kugalinskaya Stanitsa was an old settlement, the land probably given to
the Cossacks when the conquest took place. This place was very drunken
the time I stayed there, though now, since the war and prohibition,
that characteristic must have vanished. The Cossacks apparently found
life rather boring; they had a marionette show in the bazaar, lotto
banks and roulette tables, where copecks were risked and bottles of
vodka staked. The public-house was full of singing drunkards. I can
imagine how cheered up the people were when war was declared.

After a wonderful night on a little green tableland covered with
mulleins, where when I spread my bed I must crush mulleins, I went
on to Tsaritsinskaya. There, on the pass over the mountains and the
Kok-sa River, I got my first soaking on this vagabondage, soaked to
the skin by mist and drizzle; but I did not seem much the worse for
it, and dried naturally in the sun on the morrow, visibly steaming.
It was quite like a Caucasus road now, steep, wild, magnificent with
gorges and passes, foaming rivulets, villages threaded with the life
of running water, the paradise of ducks and their broods. The outward
roads were marked by heaps of mud and stones, and on these I went to
Jangiz-Agatch, with its fine trees, and Karabulak and Gavrilovka;
finally, a day over great sweeps of country illumined by gorse in bloom
and yellow roses, over leagues of wolf-hunted moorland to Kopal.

Kopal is 825 miles from a railway station, and one of the last places
on earth; a town without an inn, without a barber; a place you could
run round in a quarter of an hour, and yet having jurisdiction over
an immense tract of territory along the Russian frontier of China. It
was late in the evening when I arrived there, and when I went to the
post-house I found it crowded with Chinamen; Chinamen on the two beds,
on the floor, in the passage; chop-sticks on the table. They were all
travellers on the road to Pekin, making their way slowly northward to
the Trans-Siberian Railway.

At once one of those who occupied a bed got up, apologised, and vacated
his sleeping-place, offering it to me. Despite my refusal, he took
off his blanket and quilt and spread them on the floor instead. His
humility was touching--especially in contrast to my own instinctive
loathing of a bed on which Chinese had lain. Fortunately, I did not
feel tired.

I do not carry a watch on my travels, so the idea of what time it is
gradually fades from the mind. The hour is not a matter of anxiety;
dawn, noon, sunset, night are the quarters of the clock, and they
suffice. But in the post-station at Kopal, whilst the Chinese were
officiously effacing themselves, I found myself idly looking at the big
clock hanging in a shadowy corner and trying to make out the hour. The
face of the clock was a tiger looking at a snake. When it was twelve
o’clock the hands were between the tiger’s eyes. At a quarter-past
seven the hands held the serpent. The clock was very dusty, but imagine
the start I got when suddenly I saw that the eyes in the tiger face
were rolling at me. As I stared the pupils slowly moved across the
whites of the eyes. The pendulum made the eyes roll.

It was only nine o’clock, and I had noticed as I came into the town a
considerable flare of lights, a large white tent, and a notice of a
Chinese circus. A Chinese circus was something not to be missed in this
empty and outlandish country, so I put down my pack in the post-house
and went out to see the performance. It was something truly original, a
piquant diversion after a long day’s journeying in the wastes and wilds
of the mountains of Alai Tau.

It was a circular tent, small enough for a circus tent, having only
three rows of seats around the arena. The price to sit down was thirty
copecks, to stand behind, fifteen copecks. Soldiers came in free, and
there were some thirty of them, with their dull peasant faces and dusty
khaki uniforms. Near the entrance there was a box covered with red
bunting, free for the chief of police and his friends. The chief of
police has a free box at nearly every local entertainment in Russia--he
can permit or forbid the show. There were three musicians--Russian
peasants, paid a shilling a night, I understand--and they gave value
for money unceasingly on a concertina, a violin, and a balalaika. The
public on the bare, rickety forms ringed round the as yet empty stage
numbered from 100 to 120, and were a mixture of Russians, Tartars, and
Kirghiz. All the Russian officers and officials of the town seemed
to be there, and were accompanied by their smartly dressed wives and
daughters. The Tartar merchants looked grim in their black skull-caps,
their women queenly, with little crowns on the tops of their heads and
long veils falling over their hair and their backs. There was a row
of these crowned Tartar women together; a row also of Kirghiz women,
in high, white turbans wrapped about their broad brows. There were
colonists and their _babas_--open-faced, simple-souled peasant women
who came to be petrified by the seeming devilry of the heathen Chinee.
To them the fact that the Chinese are heathen--not Christian--is
no joke, but a fierce reality. They look upon the Chinese as being
comparatively near akin to devils.

Naphtha lamps swung uneasily from the high beams of the tent, and flung
unequal volumes of light from dangerous-looking ragged flames. The
sandy arena and all the eager people round were brightly shown in the
plenitude of light.

The first item on the programme was not particularly striking. A bell
was rung, and a little Chinaman in black came out and twirled and
juggled a tea-tray on a chopstick. Then followed a Russian clown with
painted face, old hat, and yellow wig, who proceeded to be very serious
and show the public various tricks. He had three Chinese servants,
and the fun consisted in their stealing his things and spoiling his
efforts. Finally, he took a big stick and chased them round and round
the arena--to the great delight of all the children present.

[Illustration: CHINESE PRAYING-HOUSE AT DJARKENT]

The clown’s turn ended, there came forward a very handsome Chinee in
black satin knee-breeches, tight stockings, scarlet jersey, and English
collar and tie. He was rather tall, had a big, womanish face, gleaming
teeth, and long, black hair. He walked jauntily in little slippers, and
carried a handful of ten knives. Another Chinaman came out with an old
tree trunk, which he held up on end. A child came and stood up against
the trunk. The handsome Chinee then stood and flung the knives as if
to pin the boy to the wood, and he planted them between the child’s arm
and his body, over his arm, between his legs and beside his legs, on
each side of his neck, on each side of his ears, and over his head--and
all the time as he flung them he smiled. He repeated his feat, placing
all the knives round about the boy’s head, never raising the skin.

Number four was the owner of the troupe, an old fellow in a light
blue, voluminous smock and long pigtail. He conjured a platter of
biscuits and cakes, glasses, a teapot, a steaming samovar, all out of
nothingness, inviting the public to come and have tea with him, and
talking an amusing broken Russian:

“You laugh, you think this fine trick, but I show you ’nother mighty
juggle; took me ten years to learn this juggle ...” and so on.

As the applause dies down the bell rings again, and out comes the
“Chinaman with the cast-iron head.” All the time “the orchestra” plays
Russian dances, plays them very noisily. He with the iron head lies
down on the sand and puts two bricks on his temple. At a distance of
ten yards another Chinaman holds a brick and prepares to aim it at the
head of his prostrate fellow-player. He aims it, but the iron-headed
one pretends to lose his nerve and jumps up with a terrible scream,
pointing to the music. The music must be calmed down. The audience
holds its breath as the trick is repeated to gentle lullaby airs. This
time the prostrate man receives the bricks one by one as they are
aimed--square on the bricks lying on his temple--and, of course, is
none the worse, though he takes the risk of a bad shot.

The old conjurer came out again and danced to the Russian Kamarinsky
air, holding a bamboo as if it were his partner, and doing all manner
of clever and amusing turns. The young man who juggled the tea-tray on
the chopstick reappeared, and did a difficult balancing trick, raising
himself on a trestle which rested on little spheres on a table. Then
came two most original items, the dancing of an old man in a five-yard
linen whip, and the rolling round the body of a rusty eight-foot iron
sceptre.

The man who danced made the long whip of linen crack and roll out over
the arena in splendid circles and waves, and he was ever in the midst
of it. The juggler of the sceptre contrived to roll the strange-looking
implement all over his body, about his back and his shoulders and his
stomach, and never let it touch the ground and never touched it with
his hand--and at the same time to dance to the music. This was a most
attractive feat, and was as pleasant to watch as anything I had ever
seen in a large city.

[Illustration: LEPERS IN A FRONTIER TOWN]

There was an interval and a great buzz of talking and surmise. After
the interval came wrestling matches and trick-riding on bicycles.
A clever little Mongol had no difficulty in disposing of those who
offered to wrestle with him, and a Russian cyclist who rode on his
handle-bars received great applause from the people of Kopal, most
of whom had not seen a bicycle before.

So the entertainment ended, and everyone was well pleased. The juggling
was a great mystification to the simple Russians, and I heard many
amusing comments from those behind me and beside. The conjuring forth
of the steaming samovar was especially troubling to the minds of the
peasant women, and I heard one say to another:

“God knows where he got it from.”

And the other replied seriously:

“What has God got to do with it? It’s the power o’ Satan.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I returned to my post-house in a pleasant frame of mind; it was one by
the clock with the tiger face, and I took out my sheets and blanket and
slept in a wagon in the yard. All the Chinese were snoring.

I said Kopal had no barber, but next day I found a Sart who shaved.
I entered a dwelling in the bazaar, half home, half cave. Picture
me sitting on a rag of carpet on the floor of a mud hut, a red
handkerchief tied tightly round my neck. A bald-headed old Mohammedan
holds in his hand a broken mug containing vinegar. He dips his thumb
in the vinegar, and then massages my cheeks and chin and neck. It was
queer to feel his broad thumb pounding against my skin and chinbone. He
made no lather, but he thought that he softened my skin with his hard
thumb and the vinegar. Then he brandished a broken razor over my head,
and fairly tore the hair off my face with it. He gave me no water with
which to rinse, but as he finished his job he put into my hand three
inches of broken mirror so that I could survey my new countenance and
judge whether he had done well.

The Chinese at the post-house behaved like Christians, or, rather, as
Christians should, with great humbleness and altruism, giving up the
samovar to Russian visitors, fetching water to fill the washing-bowls,
cleaning and drying the dishes after their breakfast, and sweeping the
post-room floor before they went away. The postmaster’s wife said there
was a constant flow of Chinese, and they always behaved in that way.

Kopal, four thousand feet above the sea level, is in the midst of fine
scenery, and the frontier all the way to Chugachak and the shoulder of
the Altai mountains is wild and desolate. The boundary is marked by
numbered poles, but there are few soldiers or excisemen to question you
if you cross either way. There is a certain amount of smuggling done,
one of the articles brought through from China being Havana cigars, of
which the local bureaucracy is said to be fond.

Sportsmen on the road to Kuldja sometimes put up at Kopal. They
are given facilities to make such journeys and receive honourable
treatment, their names being forwarded to all the postmasters on the
way and instructions being posted in all the post-houses along the
road. It was interesting to read on the post-house walls notices of
the following type:

“There will pass this way” (then would come an English name). “You are
to give him horses and all of which he may stand in need. In the case
of his being hindered for any reason, you will be severely punished.”

These English often possess their own _tarantasses_, and sleep in them
at night. In that way they avoid the unpleasantness of sleeping in a
room full of Chinese. On the whole it is better to sleep out of doors
than in.




XII

“MIDSUMMER NIGHT AMONG THE TENT-DWELLERS”


I walked forth from Kopal on a broad moorland road, and after several
hours’ upland tramping came to the Cossack village of Arazan--a typical
willow-shaded settlement with irrigation streamlets rushing along the
channels between the roadway and the cottages. Here, at the house of
a herculean old soldier, I was offered for dinner a dish of hot milk,
ten lightly boiled eggs, and a hunch of black bread--the typical meal
of the day for a wanderer in these parts. In the pleasant coolness of
five o’clock sunshine I passed out at the other end of the only street
of the village and climbed up into the hills beyond. I turned a neck in
the mountains, descended by little green gorges into strange valleys,
and climbed out of them to high ridges and cold, windswept heights. All
about me grew desolate and rugged. It was touching to look back at the
little collection of homes that I had left--the compact, little island
of trees in the ocean of moorland below me and behind me--and look
forward to the pass where all seemed dreadful and forbidding in front.

In such a view I spread my bed and slept. The hill-side was covered
with mullein stalks, and as it grew dark these stalks seemed to grow
taller and taller and blacker all about me till they looked like a
great wood of telegraph poles. The vast dark masses of the mountains
dreamed, and in the lightly clouded heaven stars peeped across the
world, rain-laden winds blew over me, and I had as lief it rained as
not, so dry was everything after weeks of summer heat. But no rain
came, though the winds were cool and the night was sweet.

Next morning, with great difficulty, I collected roots and withered
grass enough to boil a pot and make my morning tea, and I sat and ate
my breakfast in the presence of Mrs. Stonechat and her four fluffy
little youngsters, gurgling and chirping and not afraid to sit on the
same bank with me, while their mother harangued them on “How to fly.”
While sitting there the large raindrops came at last, and they made
deep black spots in the dust of the road, the lightning flashed across
my knife, the thunder rolled boulders about the mountains, and I sped
to a cave to avoid a drenching shower.

I was in a somewhat celebrated district. The Pass and the Gorge of
Abakum are among the sights of Seven Rivers Land, and are visited by
Russian holiday-makers and picnickers. All the rocks are scrawled with
the names of bygone visitors, and by that fact alone you know the place
has a name and is accounted beautiful. When the rain ceased, and I
ventured out of the cave again, I saw a Russian at work writing his
name. He had a stick dipped in the compound with which the axles of
his cart-wheels were oiled, and the wheels of the cart were nearly
off for him to get it. For the first time I saw how these intensely
black scrawls of names and signatures are written on the rocks. We are
content to scratch our names with a bit of glass or a nail, or to chalk
them, or cut them with a pocket-knife; but the Russians are fond of
bold, black signatures two or three feet long, and they make them with
this pitch and oil from the wheels of their carts.

It was a pleasant noontide on the narrow road, between crumbling indigo
rocks and heaped debris. The stony slopes were rain-washed, the air
fresh, and all along the way these dwarf rose bushes which I had seen
on the road to Kopal, thorny, but covered with scores of bright yellow
blossoms on little red stems. The jagged highway climbed again high
up--to the sky, and gave me a vision of a new land, the vast dead
plain of Northern Semi-retchie and of Southern Siberia. Northward to
the horizon lay deserts, salt marshes, and vast lakes with uninhabited
shores, withered moors and wilted lowlands. I saw at a glance how
uninteresting my road was to become if I persevered straight ahead
towards Semipalatinsk, and I resolved to keep to the mountains in which
I found myself, and follow them eastward and north-eastward to the
remoter town of Lepsinsk.

[Illustration: A PATRIARCHAL KIRGHIZ FAMILY]

From that height, which was evidently the famous pass, I descended
into the pretty gorge of Abakum. The road was steep and narrow, the
cliffs on each side sheer. A little foaming stream runs down from the
cliffs, over rubbish heaps of rocks, and accompanies the highway in
an artificially devised channel. A strange gateway has been formed in
a thin partition of rock, and through this runs the stream below and
the telegraph wire overhead; there is a footway, but carts are obliged
to make a detour. At this gateway and on the rocks I saw a further
intimation of commercial Siberia. Commercial travellers had scrawled:

  BUY PROVODNIK GALOSHES AT OMSK

and

  BUY INDIAN TEA AND GET RICH

which was almost as if I had seen in the midst of the wilderness
something like “Owbridge’s Lung Tonic: 4,000 miles to London.” Still,
these advertisements of galoshes and tea were scrawled, not printed,
and were done voluntarily by enthusiastic travellers who probably
received no fee for doing such a thing. In England you cut your
Rosalind’s name on the tree; in Russia your own name; in America you
write what O. Henry called “your especial line of graft,” and all the
New World is scrawled with hand-written advertisements of trade. So
in the far-off gorge of Abakum I saw a suggestion of the America of
the future-great commercial Siberia, to which perchance, some day,
Americans will emigrate for work as the Russians emigrate to America
to-day.

I felt this pass and gateway to be the entrance to Siberia, though,
politically, the frontier is about three hundred miles distant. After
six or seven turns the road issued forth upon a level strand of green
and grey--the Siberian southern steppe. Lepsinsk, my next point, was
the first town with a name ending in “sk,” and there are scarcely more
than four towns in Siberia not ending so. None of the emigrant carts
that I now met were coming from the south, but all from Siberia, and
many of the emigrants were Siberians discontented with their northern
holdings. They seemed poor people, and the caravans were rather
woebegone. There is a good deal of land offered to the emigrants in
the neighbourhood of Lepsinsk, most of it contiguous to the Chinese
boundary; but, though it is green and fertile, it is as hard a land
to settle as the plains in the south. The Siberians missed the pine
forests, the shelter and the fuel of them, and it was a sight to see
the straggling procession of women behind the dust-covered wagons--they
had to spread themselves about the moor and the roadway, and search for
roots and splinters of wood with which to make a fire at the end of
their day’s journey. All the women held their aprons or petticoats up,
and gathered the fuel into their laps. It took them nearly all day to
get enough for the fires to boil the nightly soup.

For me, however, it was a green and joyous road from Abakum eastward
to Sarkand, keeping to the mountain slopes and not faring forth upon
the scorched plain that lies away northward. I did not repent that the
cross-roads tempted me to go eastward, hugging the mountains. Long
green grass waved on each side of the road, and in the grass blue
larkspur and immense yellow hollyhocks. I was in the land where the
Kirghiz has his summer pasture, and often I came upon whole clans that
had just pitched their tents. It was a many-coloured picture of camels,
bulls and horses, of sheep swarming among children, of kittens playing
with one another’s tails, of tents whose framework only was as yet put
up, of heaps of felt and carpet on the grass, of old wooden chests
and antediluvian pots and jugs of sagging leather lying promiscuously
together, while the new home was not made. On this road the Chinese
jugglers overtook me and camped very near where I slept one night. I
was amused to see the old conjurer who had juggled the steaming samovar
out of thin air hunting mournfully for bits of wood and roots to make
that same samovar boil in real earnest.

Next day I came to the village of Jaiman Terekti and its remarkable
scenery. The River Baskau flows between extraordinary banks, great
bare rocks, all squared and architectural in appearance, giving the
impression of immense ancient fortresses over the stream. These
squared and shelved rocks are characteristic of the country-side
and the geological formations, and they give much grandeur to what
otherwise were quiet corners. The gateway of Abakum itself owes its
impressiveness to this geological rune.

At a village hereabout I fell in with four boys going up into the
mountains to study for the summer. They were students from some
large engineering college, and, as part of their training, they
had been sent out to study irrigation works and bridges in this
colony. At every bridge we came to on the road they stopped and gave
it their consideration, and made notes as to its structure and its
necessities, and at each village they considered the control of the
mountain streams, the canalisation of the water, and the uses to which
the natural supplies of water could be put. They called themselves
_hydrotechnics_, and would eventually blossom, perhaps, into irrigation
engineers. Their trip was costing them no more than one hundred
roubles--say, ten pounds each for the three months of summer. Their
headquarters was to be a village on a river about a hundred miles north
of Lepsinsk; there they would pitch their tents and camp, cooking their
meals, arranging expeditions, and making good their study. Altogether
about three dozen young students would turn up at their camping-ground,
and make up the equivalent of a summer class.

The four young men had in their protection a lady in cotton trousers,
a tall young woman of athletic appearance and good looks. She
and her two little children were on their way to the husband, a
Government engineer, who had charge of the building of the new town of
Lepsinsk--the nearest railway point to Old Lepsinsk. She was a very
striking figure in her _sharivari_, and the natives collected round her
and stared in an absurd fashion. She told me she had bought the print
for 1 rouble 87 copecks, and made them herself just before starting
out; skirts were so inconvenient for travelling in and collected
the dirt so. But she drew thereby an enormous amount of attention to
herself, it must be said. She was rather a crazy Kate. It tickled me
to think how her husband would pitch into her when she arrived at her
destination. But perhaps I was mistaken, and he was so homesick that he
would not even laugh when she appeared. She was a regular scapegrace,
with light blue, torn, openwork stockings, and button boots, one of
which was fastened with a safety-pin, the other with two shirt-buttons.
But she was very naïve and had bunches of smiles on her lips--the sort
to which much is forgiven. When she tried to smack her children, they
went for her tooth and nail, and the little boy, aged two, continually
imitated someone, probably the father, and addressed his mother thus:

“_Akh tee somnoi ne zagovarivaisia_” (“Don’t stand there talking to
me.”)

“_Bross!_” (“Stop it!”)

“_Pliun!_” (“Spit!”)

I was called upon to imitate cats and dogs and sheep and pigeons and
camels, and make-believe generally to an unlimited extent.

The lady told an amusing story of a banquet to which the Kirghiz had
invited her husband and herself. It should be explained that the
Russian for the head of an animal is _golovo_, and for the head of an
expedition or band of workmen is _glavny_, the adjective derived from
_golovo_, a head. At this banquet in the Kirghiz tent the engineer was
put in the highest seat, and was told that the dinner was coming.
Suddenly a Kirghiz appeared with a roast sheep’s head, and carried it
to the Russian, saying:

“Please, eat!”

“What’s this?” asked the engineer. “The head for me; that won’t do at
all. I don’t want the sheep’s head; you must cut me something more
tasty.”

“No, please,” said the Kirghiz. “You are the head man, and you must eat
the head.”

“That will never do,” said the Russian. But they besought him to honour
their custom and permit the rest to eat, for until he had started on
the head nobody else might begin.

All the engineer’s workmen were Kirghiz, for he was working in Kirghiz
country, in a district as yet untouched by Russian colonisation. The
wife and her babies turned off at a mountain track, and were taken to
her husband’s camping-ground by a Kirghiz. We were loath to let the
woman go, for she had given much gaiety to the road.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lepsinsk is what the Russians call a _medvezhy ugolok_ (a bear’s
corner), a place where in winter the wolves roam the main street as
if they did not distinguish it from their peculiar haunts. It is by
post-road 945 miles from Tashkent on the one hand, and 1,040 miles from
Omsk on the other--roughly, 1,000 miles from a railway station. It is
high up on the mountains on the Mongolian frontier, and lives a life of
its own, almost completely unaware of what is happening in Russia and
in Europe--a window on to Mongolia, as a local wit has called it.

In the course of the next five years a railway is to be run from
Semipalatinsk to Verney, and as Lepsinsk is the largest town on the
way, it should in justice pass through it. But Lepsinsk is high. When
the news of the projected railway came, the burgesses made a petition
to the authorities asking to be informed where exactly the railway
would be, and they would remove Lepsinsk thither. Everyone who had any
business would transfer his stock. They were informed, and in a year,
or a year and a half, Lepsinsk promised to remove itself fifty miles
westward. Building operations were in full swing on the new site, land
having been allowed by the Government free; and the engineer whose wife
we had met was in charge. If the war does not preclude the continuation
of the railway construction, Old Lepsinsk will be abandoned.

I spent four days in the town in the company of the young
_hydrotechnics_. We were given rooms free at the Zemsky guest-house,
and I stayed three nights there before resuming my journey toward the
Irtish. The students quickly found and made friends with people in the
town. We found a family that came from the same country-side as one of
the young men, and spent the whole evening in a big farmhouse, drinking
tea, trying musical instruments, and singing Russian choruses. Next day
we went to the colonists’ information office, made friends with the
young man in charge, and went and played _pyramid_ with him in the
town assembly rooms; several other folk came in, young and old, and
joined in the game of billiards till we were a dozen or more. After
billiards we all sat down to a crude lunch of boiled and undisguised
beef, without vegetables, but with jugs of creamy milk to drink. The
conversation went on cards, billiards, the coming Sunday-night dance.
Couldn’t an orchestra be made up to supplant the usual gramophone to
which the people danced on Sunday evenings? Had the cinematograph films
come, and that had been so long expected? What would happen if one
showed a cinema film backward--wouldn’t the story be often more funny?

[Illustration: SHEEP-SHEARING OUTSIDE THE TENT HOME]

Sunday morning we spent in the domain of the colonists’ information
bureau, and interviewed peasants for the manager whilst he was still in
bed. What a litter there was everywhere--tea glasses, cigarette boxes,
picture post cards, electric lamps, old letters, forms issued by the
Government, maps--the same in the bedroom as in the office. There was a
typewriter, and I amused myself trying to write English sentences with
the Russian type, there being a fair number of letters in the Russian
language resembling our own. The people who came for information had
various pleas. One was ill, another had quarrelled with her husband.
An old man pushed in front of him a rather downcast young woman, and
commenced his appeal to us in these words: “I recommend this woman to
your mercy. The land which is hers is being stolen away from her.”
She had fallen out with her husband, and had fled to her father’s
house. But meanwhile the husband was trying to sell the land or raise
money on it--at least, so the father said. But we pointed out to him
that that was nonsense; the land was not yet the unqualified property
of the husband, and he could not sell it; he could only give it back
to the Government, and so on and so on. On Sunday evening we all went
to the assembly rooms, and saw Lepsinsk in its Sunday best, talked
vociferously in crowds, listened to a gramophone, watched peasant
girls and young men dance melancholy waltzes--there was no Russian
dancing, but the people were glad to think themselves “European.” I
made acquaintance with the _ispravnik_, or whoever he was who ruled
Lepsinsk, and with the local rich men--a remote, obtuse, provincial
set, whose only interest was cards. They were very keen on playing me
at _preference_, a complex Russian card game which I have generally
thought it worth while not to learn, and I was amused to hear that
they would teach me, and what I lost would pay for my lesson. I talked
a little about England. They got their daily papers three weeks after
issue, as a rule, but they read them as new when they came. Their
chief idea of our British activities was that the suffragettes were
assassinating, murdering, bombing, expropriating, and they chuckled
over the fact that our men were not able to manage the women.

Lepsinsk is an out-of-the-way place, and, as far as the road is
concerned, a blind alley among the mountains. I was much exercised
to know which way I should go next, and I did not want to retrace
my steps to Altin-Emel. The map and my route was another topic of
conversation among the worthies of Lepsinsk. Everyone gave me a
different account of the roads and the ferries. Eventually I decided to
cut across country and take the risk of marshes or rushing water lying
in my path--a rash decision, as I might after a day or so be forced to
walk back to the town and try some other way; but it turned out to be a
perfectly happy decision. On this track I saw more of the Cossacks and
of the Kirghiz, two races in striking contrast, and I spent Midsummer
Night--always a festival night--under very beautiful and unusual
circumstances.

Lepsinsk is a Cossack settlement. All the young men are horsemen,
have to serve their term in war, and are liable to military service
without any exemption or exception. All Cossack families and Cossack
villages are brought up on these terms. The children are taught to get
on to horseback and ride as we teach our children to walk. They learn
the songs which the regiment sings as it comes up the main street
on horseback, bearing the black pikes in their hands. The women,
whose children and husbands go to the war, are patient as the mother
of Taress Bulba. War is the normal condition of life, and the mere
manœuvres are taken so seriously that the opposing parties frequently
forget that it is only a friendly test, and do one another serious
injury. “The Cossacks get so enraged, and they can’t stop themselves
when they are called upon to charge the sham enemy,” said a Lepsinsk
boy to me.

On the Monday morning I said good-bye to the students, and, shouldering
my knapsack, set off in a north-westerly direction to find Sergiopol,
forded the Lepsa river, and climbed out of the green valley where
Lepsinsk lies as in a cup. The mountain-sides were rankly verdant, and
the purple labiate was thick as in spring-time. It may be remarked that
strawberries were not expected to ripen in Lepsinsk for three weeks,
whereas six weeks ago in Tashkent they had been a penny a pound.

I passed over the fresh green hills and panted at the gradient, plunged
down through beautiful meadows, slept a night in the Cossack station of
Cherkask, lying on some felt and being almost eaten up by mosquitoes in
what the soldier host called a garden. In this village I saw a pitiful
sight--almost naked Kirghiz women treading wet mud and manure into
stuff for fuel blocks. They looked astonishingly bestial and degraded.
You could not feel that they had any soul or stood in any way above
the animals. Yet as young women they had probably been attractive and
pretty in their day, and might even have won the fancy of white men.
There was a question whether the wife in _Candida_ who soiled her
lovely fingers putting kerosene into the lamps was really degraded by
dirt, but here was something nearer reality.

I slept on the sand beside Gregoriefsky, and next day went deep into
the desert, into a land of snakes, eagles, snipe, and lizards. On
the Lepsa shore I saw forests of the gigantic reeds with which the
houses and bridges are roofed. Here were leagues of ten-feet rushes
that waved boisterously in the wind as in a cinema picture. I was
warned here against the boa-constrictor; but the worst I saw were
intent-eyed little snakes gliding away from me, scared at the sound of
the footfall. I got my noon-day meal of koumis in a Kirghiz _yurt_,
borrowed a horse with which to get across the difficult fords, one of
black, reed-grown mud, the other of swift-flowing water. All day I
ploughed through ankle-deep sand, and but for the fact that the sun was
obscured by cloud, I should have suffered much from heat. As it was,
the dust and sand-laden wind was very trying. Early in the evening I
resolved to stop for the day, and found shelter in one of twenty tents
all pitched beside one another in a pleasant green pasture-land which
lay between two bends of the river--a veritable oasis. Even here, as I
sat in the tent, I listened to the constant sifting of the sand on the
felt sides and roof.

[Illustration: IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT]

It was a good resting-place. An old man spread for me carpets and rugs,
and bade me sleep, and I lay down for an hour, the sand settling on me
all the time, and blowing into my eyes and my ears and my lips. In the
meantime tea was made for me from some chips of Mongolian brick tea.
The old Kirghiz took a black block of this solidified tea dust and cut
it with an old razor. The samovar was an original one. It had no tap,
and leaked as fast as it would pour. Consequently, a bowl was set
underneath to catch the drip. This filled five or six times before
boiling-point was reached, the contents of the bowl being each time
returned to the body of the samovar.

After tea I went out and sat on a mound among the cattle, and watched
the children drive in sheep and goats and cows, and the wives milk them
all. It was a scene of gaiety and beauty. There were many good-looking
wives, slender and dainty, though they were so short in stature, had
white turbans on their heads and jackboots on their feet. As they went
to and fro, laughing among themselves and bending over the cattle,
their breasts hanging like large full pears at the holes made in their
cotton clothes for the convenience of their babies, they looked a very
gentle and innocent creation. These women did all the work of milking,
and I saw them handle with rapidity ewes, she-goats, cows, mares,
draining all except the last into common receptacles. The mares’ milk
alone was kept separate, to be made into koumis. I must say my taste
rebelled against a mixture of sheep’s milk, goats’ milk and cows’
milk, even when made sour; but the Kirghiz were not worried with such
fastidiousness.

When the milking was accomplished fires were lit in oblong holes dug in
the earth outside the tents--the Kirghiz stoves. Bits of mutton were
cut up and fixed on skewers and placed over the glowing ashes in the
holes. So supper was cooked. I was called into a tent, and there made
to sit on a high wooden trunk, while eight or ten others sat below me
on rugs. “You are a _barin_,” said the oldest man. “You must have the
highest seat.” Seated up there, they brought me about a dozen skewers
of grilled mutton on a wooden plate and bade me eat. I should not have
been surprised to see a sheep’s head brought in to me.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s far too much for me.”

“You eat first,” said the old man. “Then we will eat.”

So I took a skewer and put them at their ease. There were in the tent
the old man, his son, two wives of the latter, several children, an old
woman, and a minstrel. Outside and in other tents were many sons-in-law
and daughters-in-law and cousins, a whole genealogical tree of a
family. Among the Kirghiz all sons remain in the father’s and father’s
father’s family; only the girls change families, sold or arranged for
in marriage. The men all wore hats, or, rather, bonnets, trimmed with
an edging of fox’s fur, and the foxes from whose thighs this fur had
been taken had been captured by trained eagles. The Kirghiz are deeply
versed in falconry, and have diverse birds for various preys: hawks for
cranes, for plovers, and for hares. They hunt the fox, whose skin is
very precious, with eagles. They carry the hawks on their wrists when
they ride, and for the support of heavy birds they have stalls or rests
coming up from their saddles to hold the bird arm, whilst they hold
the horse’s reins with the other. The most interesting man in the tent
in which I supped was the minstrel, a tall, gaunt heathen in ragged
cotton slops; he thrummed on a two-stringed guitar and improvised
Kirghiz songs till the dusk grew dark and midsummer night came out with
countless stars over the desert and the tents and the cattle and the
wanderers.

Asked whether I would sleep inside the tent or out, I preferred the
open air, and my hosts made a couch for me, a pile of rugs over an
uneven thickness of mown clover. And there I lay and watched the stars
come into their places in the sky as at the lifting of a conductor’s
baton. It was St. John’s Eve, a night of mystery and of remembrances.
A young moon looked down on me. In the twenty tents around me were
singing and music and momentary strange illuminations. Inside the
tents the Kirghiz set fire every now and then to piles of weeds, which
flared up, causing all the felt walls and roofs of the tents to glow
like strange, enormous, shimmering paper lanterns, like fire reflected
in silver. They would suddenly glimmer and glow and glimmer again, the
light would go, and the grey-white tent would be opaque again.

All night across the sleeping encampment came volumes of music from
young throats, the songs of the children minding the cattle. The
stillness of the night reigned about this music, and was intensified
by the _dun-dun_ of rusty camel-bells, the jangle of the irons on
hobbled horses, the occasional sneeze of a sheep with a cold, and the
hullabaloo of dogs barking on false alarms. I lay and was nibbled
under by goats, trying to get at the clover, and breathed at by
ruminating cows.

So the night passed. Orion chased the Pleiades across the sky. The
eyes that stared or lay open and were stared at by the stars drooped,
and eyelids came down over the little windows. Sprites danced among
us, tiptoed where we slept, breathed devilry upon our faces and dusty
clothes, and I dreamed sweetly of home and other days.

Next morning I felt the turn of the year and looked forward to the
glorious autumn and the new life coming after the long journey and the
much tramping.

I was up at the dawning and away before the hot sun rose. The old man
of the Kirghiz gave me my breakfast himself, a pot of _airann_ and a
cake of _lepeshka_, and came forward with me, showing me the track
onward towards Sergiopol.




XIII

OVER THE SIBERIAN BORDER


I crossed the Lepsa by a bridge made of old herring barrels, struck the
highway to Sergiopol at Romanovskaya, and pursued my journey along the
sandy wastes and salt swamps on the eastern borders of Lake Balkhash.
The Lepsa falls into this great lake at last. The wind blew up the
sand so that there was some chance of missing the way, and I sat some
hours on my knapsack and shut my eyes to keep the sand out. It was
dreary country, yellow and inhospitable. The odour of the bleached
grasses and herbs was almost overpowering, and food and palatable
water were far to seek. Tall, bleached and withered grasses and white
weeds and dust-laden, knobbly steppe; wind and racing sand--sand in my
eyes, in my mouth, on my body--I felt a most despicable creature, and
questioned my sanity in ever starting out on such an absurd journey as
this through Russian Central Asia. But I saw ahead of me Sergiopol,
Semipalatinsk, and a happier clime. Sixty versts north of Romanovskaya
the road, gradually ascending a long moor, entered broken country
through black and rusty mountainettes, and here was a little crooked
gorge with a stream through it, and it was possible to sit by my own
little fire and make tea for myself once more. Then more moorland, and
heavily scented grass, and enormous bustards, the size of goats, and
skinny little brown marmots, and withered mullein stalks, and comical
blue jackdaws perching on them and cocking their heads to one side
and peering at me as I passed. Then streams of colonists and their
carts. Then an official and his wife, sleeping in their night attire
in their slowly moving _tarantass_, huge pillows for their heads, and
sheets and quilts and what not--an example of the Russians’ gift for
making themselves at home. Near Ince-Agatch I met two Germans going
cheerfully along on foot--as I was--a botanist and a geologist, neither
of them speaking Russian, but feeling pretty well as much at home as in
Germany, more so, perhaps. One wonders what was their fortune at the
outbreak of war. There are certain international pursuits that know
no restriction of national or imperial ground. I do not suppose the
Russian grudges the German making a study of his flowers and rocks--if
he is not spying at the same time. Probably we ought not to lay so much
stress on purely national research in ornithology, entomology, geology,
botany, the ways of peoples, and so forth. Individuals and their work
are dedicated to their nation and their empire, but that should not
keep our practical scientists, collectors, prospectors, students to
a mere portion of the surface of the globe. Russian Central Asia and
Siberia claims greater attention from our scientific men, hunters,
and expert collectors. Russians, on the whole, do little; Germans
have done something; but it does not matter by whom it is explored,
there lies here a vast natural field for the study of mankind. These
domains are scarcely touched, except by vulgar gold hunters and rock
tappers--people of paltry greed and little imagination. The great era
of research has not even begun, and libraries of books have yet to be
written on the natural wonders and astonishing discoveries to be found
and made in this wilder and more neglected half of Asia. After the war
Siberia and Russian Central Asia will begin to draw more attention from
us.

[Illustration: FOUR WIVES OF A RICH KIRGHIZ]

Sergiopol, the last point in Seven Rivers Land before entering Siberia,
is a beautifully situated diminutive town, or, rather, village, for it
has been degraded from the rank of town. The hills and moors around it
are beautiful virgin country, bathed in pleasant sunshine and breathing
healthful air; but in itself it is but a miserable place, a collection
of wee grocer-shops and cotton stores. The shopkeepers are mostly
Tartars, doing very small trade and thinking it very large and feeling
“passing rich.” The vendors of cotton goods do the most trade, for all
the Kirghiz wear cotton and give a great deal of consideration to the
purchase of it. I met a commercial traveller smoking a cigarette in
the market-place, a man sent out by one of the great cotton firms of
Moscow, and he was carrying bags of samples to all the stores of Seven
Rivers Land. The Tartars took so long to decide what they were going to
buy that the traveller was reduced to a novel procedure. Directly he
arrived at a settlement he took from his chest eight bags of samples,
and went rapidly from one shop to another, leaving a bag at each, and
saying he would return in an hour and a half. Then he went into the
market-place and had a smoke and chat with chance comers. If there were
more than eight shops he had a second round, and distributed the bags
to the remainder after the first set had come to a decision. Not a very
good way of doing business, one would think; but, then, the Tartars
spoke in their own language, consulted their wives about materials
and colours, and liked to be free of the presence of the Russian. He
did quite a good business. He told me that his cotton goods found a
large market in China. The Chinese and the Kirghiz were extremely
critical as to the quality of the cotton and the colour and design.
You could not palm off shoddy cotton on these people. It was their
Sunday best as well as week-day, and their outer garment as much and
more than undergarment. Its quality and appearance mattered. Neither
German cotton nor their own Lodz manufacture was any use. Lodz is the
great centre for the production of shoddy cotton--so much so that the
adjective Lodzinsky is a Russian colloquialism for shoddy, and when you
say _Lodzinsky tovar_ it is more than when we say “a bit of Brummagem.”
Moscow, however, produces good qualities of cotton and good prints.
Manchester has dropped behind Moscow in this respect and tended to
compete rather with Lodz. Perhaps after the war we shall solve this
passion for cheapness, this competition with Germany in turning
out _cheap_ wares, and will revert to our earlier prejudice in favour
of British quality. It is rather touching in Russia that best quality
goods are often called _Anglisky tovar_ (English wares), even when made
in Russia. Our reputation for thoroughness survives.

[Illustration: AT A KIRGHIZ FUNERAL]

Still, I do not suppose that Great Britain will ever compete with
Russia in the supply of cotton to the interior. Russians and English
living in Russia have imported our British machinery and set up mills
which are really British mills on Russian soil, and an enormous
business has been founded. Russia, moreover, hopes to be able to grow
enough raw cotton in her Central Asian dominions to be able to make
her cotton business a national self-dependent industry. Cotton is the
material mostly used for clothing in Russia, even in the towns. The
women are still content with cotton dresses and the men with cotton
blouses. When cloth and “stuff” come in, if they ever do, the cotton
industry will tend to degenerate, but not till then.

Sergiopol is a place of little significance. But the next town,
Semipalatinsk, in Siberia, is a large colonial town, with over
35,000 inhabitants--larger, even, than Verney. But Siberia is an
old-established Russian colony, while Seven Rivers began only fifty
years ago, and was a desert. Perhaps even now it is little more than a
desert qualified by irrigation. The obstacles in the way of successful
settlement have been tremendous. Still, these obstacles are being
overcome. The result of half a century’s work is a measure of clear
success and a healthy promise. Hundreds of Russian villages have
established themselves, and the channels of small trade have been kept
open. Yellow deserts have become green with verdure, and chains of
oases have been made. Russian schools and Russian churches have arisen
on the northern side of India, and an essentially Christian culture is
spreading in a way that is clearly profitable to the Old World. The
colony sadly needs a railway, and the railway is being built quickly,
even now, in the time of the war. For the Kirghiz, who do most of the
labour, are not required for military service. When the railway comes,
more people will come with it, more colonists, more traders, and they
will take away the products which the farmers would gladly sell. We
are accustomed to think of railways spoiling districts, but Russian
Central Asia, with its empty leagues of sand and barrenness, will only
profit by the railway. The railway must go east from Tashkent all the
way to Verney, and probably as far as Kuldja, in China, then northward,
through Iliisk and Sergiopol, to Semipalatinsk, through Siberian
farms and settlements, forests and marshes, to the Siberian main line
at Omsk. This will greatly strengthen the Russian Empire when it is
achieved. It will be a wise measure of consolidation.

M. de Vesselitsky, in his able book on Russia, remarks that whereas
in 1906 the population of Canada was greater than that of Siberia,
in 1911 Siberia had two million more inhabitants. This is the more
astonishing because Canada has splendid and populous towns, whereas
Siberia has only three cities of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.
A strange contrast to European Russia, this Asiatic Russia; no Court,
no Emperor, no aristocracy, no modern aims or claims, no power--in a
sense, human tundra and taiga, though many millions are living there.
Then a power enters it, commercial capital and the Russian desire to
get rich, and Siberia begins to seek new wealth. European Russia and
the dazzling if somewhat tawdry West begins to hear of the wealth of
Siberia. Our civilisation, the centre of attraction, draws from all the
outside wilds and wildernesses gold, precious stones, skins. So we help
Siberia in the material sense and set its industrial life a-going.




XIV

ON THE IRTISH


The most interesting circumstance in the history of Semipalatinsk up
till now is that Dostoieffsky, in exile, was domiciled there. The
cities dotting the wastes of Siberia are not notable. They are young,
and things have not happened in them. But dreary Semipalatinsk held the
mightiest spirit in modern Russia--Fedor Dostoieffsky, the author of
“The Brothers Karamazof.” So Semipalatinsk, on the loose sands of the
River Irtish, has now its Dostoieffsky house, where Dostoieffsky lived,
and a Dostoieffsky street. It will, no doubt, be a place of pilgrimage
in the future for those wishing to grasp the significance of the great
Russian.

Semipalatinsk is a dull collection of wooden houses and stores, an
important trading centre functionising an immense country-side. What
struck me most were the large general shops, with their extensive
supplies of manufactured goods and all manner of luxuries. There were
at least six department stores, with handsome clocks, vases, bedroom
furniture, mandolins, violins, guitars, Vienna boots, American boots,
gay hats, silk dresses, wrapped chocolates, promiscuous and lavish
supplies of all manner of European goods. English wares seemed
noticeable chiefly by their absence, and the cutlery was Swedish, the
stoves Austrian, the wools and the cottons Russian, the note-paper
American or French, the wonderful enamel ware and nickel and aluminium
ware German. Only sanitary contrivances, cream separators, and
agricultural machinery seemed to be English. How much more of these
things might be sent. However, with all these signs of luxury--luxury
for Russians--Semipalatinsk lacks the graces of a town; has no
lighting, no pavement or public place, no theatre, only a cinema. Its
prospect is waste, loose sand, which the air holds even in calm--a
grit in the eyes and in the mouth. Its trees do not flourish, and only
people accustomed to a quiet life could go on living there from year
to year. The peasants bring most life into the town, selling their
products in the immense open market, or buying manufactured goods to
take up-country to their farms. The broad River Irtish flows placidly
onward, five hundred miles to Omsk and thousands of miles to the Arctic
Ocean, and it is navigated by a considerable number of steamers and
sailing boats. It is a great waterway--a sort of safer sea in the
heart of Asia. The wonder is that more towns have not sprung up on its
shores. In the history of the world it has not yet become a typical
river. It flows from the silences of the Altai mountains, through the
silences of Northern Asia, the noise of man hardly ever becoming more
than a whisper upon it. It never becomes

  Bordered by cities and hoarse
  With a thousand cries,

and it cannot be said that as we go onward to its mouth

      Cities will crowd to its edge
  In a blacker incessanter line;
  That the din will be more on its banks,
  Denser the trade on its stream.

It is almost as peaceful and serene as a river in an undiscovered
continent.

At Semipalatinsk I stayed some days before taking boat up-stream
to Malo-Krasnoyarsk. It was here that I read of the astonishing
intelligence of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his
wife. The Russian papers of the time devoted a great deal of space to
the details of the murder, the reprisals taken by the Austrians, the
gossip of Europe. The preoccupation of the British Press with home
affairs was astonishing, and in all the telegraphed opinions of our
representative papers there was not an utterance that overstepped the
limits of conventionality. Whether the murder was planned politically
by Germany, as has been hinted, or planned politically by Serbia
for vengeance, or came about accidentally through the passion of a
noble Serb, it was in any case a test phenomenon. It had enormous
significance to diplomatists and scanners of political horizons. By
the attitude and behaviour of Germany and Austria their intentions,
at least in the Near East, could be gauged. But it did not seem of
sufficient importance to conscious England. The Austrians tried to
spread the idea that Russia had contrived and bought the murder of the
Archduke because she feared his intentions in the Balkans. But, out of
the Germanic dominions, that did not carry weight. Austria manifestly
threatened Serbia politically, and some British people scratched their
heads and asked questions: “Shall we go to war for Serbia?” Then came
the seemingly obvious answer: “No, not for _Serbia_!” which fairly
indicates the blindness of that part of England which was vocal at that
time. In that spirit we neglected our duty in connection with the St.
James’s conference after the first Balkan war, and in that spirit we
alienated Bulgaria in the great European war which followed.

Austria threatened war, and there was clearly the prospect of Austria
and Russia fighting. I weighed it up in my mind as I waited at
Semipalatinsk, and more than once I asked myself whether I had not
better give up my journey onward and go straight to Western Russia.
But, deciding I did not want to write war correspondence, I concluded
I would continue my way, and rest as I had intended--on the verdant
Altai. So I left Semipalatinsk and went in a little steamer up the
narrowing and rocky river, past wooded islands, grey moors, and emerald
marshes. It was a long though not monotonous river journey. We stopped
at elementary wooden landing-stages beside small hamlets, bought
eggs, fish, fruit from peasant women and children, backed out into
midstream again, making our big wave that went washing along the banks
and drenching incautious boys and girls; we beat up the water with
our paddle, turned, saw ourselves clear of the pier, and a widening
stretch of water between us and the bank, found our course between the
buoys, avoided the weirs and the shallows. Morning became hot noon,
and the afternoon and twilight time came on, and then luminous starry
night, and again morning and hot noon. We stopped at the little town
of Ust-Kamennygorsk, the headquarters for several mining camps, a bit
of qualified civilisation not unknown to British mining engineers.
We had on board a couple of priests, a commercial traveller, some
workmen coming back from doing a job, and two dozen raw Cossacks who
had been ordered to serve on the Chinese frontier--rather interesting
to reflect now how they were travelling away from the place where
they would be needed. At that time all the preparations for war were
going on apace in Germany; the roads were full of horses newly bought
by the Government, the trains full of stores; at the military camps
the last manœuvres were being worked out with full regiments and the
complete panoply of war. We in the steamboat were all travelling the
wrong way, away from the interest of the world--the centre--up-stream
on the fast-flowing river, against the currents and the tendencies.
A month later all would come back, forced by the declaration of war.
Still, little we recked. We had a holiday spirit. There were several
high-school girls and girl students on board--_gimnasistki_ and
_kursistki_--and the deck was vocal with their chattering and laughing.
They were a charming contrast to rough Siberia. The deck passengers
drank vodka and sang. Down below deck was a public stove, and there
sizzled a score of pots--pots with jam, with eggs, with fish, with
chickens, with milk. I made my coffee there, and would frequently see
it rising at the boil and be unable to pick the pot out for others
tending their fish-soup and women taking the scum off their strawberry
jam. At each little village people bought things to cook, so that at
times you might have thought it was a sort of cooking expedition.

[Illustration: KIRGHIZ PRAYING]

So we went on at this momentous time in history. The river became more
rapid and difficult to navigate; it serpentined through wild gorges,
where the rocks were broken and ragged and squared and angular. The
steep cliffs were full of detail that was delicious to the eye. Where
the cliffs were not so steep Nature had clothed their nakedness with
mould and grass. We passed from placid stretches which seemed to throw
the rays of the sun back on the ship, the people and the sky, and we
entered the intense cold shadow of high, sheer rocks. The water became
green and shadowy. The scenery changed every moment as we went round
a new bend of the river and entered new territory through forbidding
gates of rock. Frequently we found ourselves in foaming cauldrons from
which there seemed to be no exit; we wandered round, travelling as
often north as south, and catching glimpses of sun from all imaginable
quarters, and found loopholes of escape to new reaches. The steamer
seemed a toy beside the huge cliffs on each side, and the sunshine,
when we came into it, seemed sufficient to blind the whole Altai. The
higher we pursued our winding way the higher became the cliffs, till
eventually we had grey crags of several hundred feet hanging over us.
In the earlier gorges the greenness of the vegetation of the hills
was reflected in the river in a deep, shadowy green, but in the later
ones the drear greyness of the cliffs was alone reflected, and the
swift-moving, placid water looked like oil. As far as Gusinaya Pristan
trees--birches--but infrequent ones, and growing in haphazard ways
from clefts in rocks. Besides our panting, puffing steamer, with its
streamer of dense smoke and persistent showers of sparks, there were
only rafts on the river--logs roped together, and peasants standing on
the water-washed floating platforms. They seemed to be very skilful in
managing them. On the banks we saw occasional tents and fishermen’s
tackle, small fires with tripods over them, and old black pots whereby
you guessed that fish were cooking. Occasional hay-making parties also
visible on the wan outskirts of farms. It was a fascinating journey,
and one could not take one’s eyes from the changing scene, the prospect
from door after door as we passed new rocks, the delicious side views,
the clefts and wounds healed with birch trees and greenery, the
battered, jaggy prominences, dull blue, purple, yellow with age and
many weathers.

Everyone watched curiously for the next scene, and the change was so
frequent that no one got tired. Mountains, ridges--the grandeur of
our rock basins multiplied upon us so that we felt we were steadily
ascending a high mountain range by river. Night was wonderful,
especially when we stopped to put some cargo off or to take on wood,
and we got out and walked on the cliffs and the sand; the stars in the
sky had their drips of golden reflection in the river, and the opposite
banks and rocks were majestically silhouetted against the sky. The
navigation of this river is, perhaps, one of the sights of the future.
“Parties will be taken out.” But there is no romance there, no castles,
no ruins--only Nature and the grey tumultuous misery and beauty of a
scarred continent.




XV

THE COUNTRY OF THE MARAL


Malo-Krasnoyarsk, on the Irtish, is a hot, sandy village supporting
itself by agriculture, fishing, and melon growing. It is treeless, no
one seeming to have cared to plant the trees which could so easily have
been grown, and the native Kirghiz are employed making fuel blocks out
of manure. The stacks of these black blocks give an unpleasant odour
when the wind is blowing over them. Otherwise, the Irtish is rather
wonderful--deep and green and swift, with powerful currents.

From Malo-Krasnoyarsk I journeyed along the burnt road and over the
vast stretches of pungent wormwood that grow on the moors. The road
climbed to the mountain ridges of the Narimsky range, and along them
to the Central Altai. I had given up tramping now, and an old man in
a dirty crimson blouse drove me in a cart to Bozhe-Narimsky village,
took me for three shillings, and was ready to drive me to Kosh Agatch,
on the other side of the mountains, if I would say but the word. Kosh
Agatch, according to his reckoning, would be five hundred miles, and
he would have to plan a month’s journey over the mountains, hire extra
horses, and buy provisions. According to him traders made the journey
frequently, especially Tartars and Chinamen, buying maral horns.

On the higher slopes of the Altai the sale of the horns of the maral
deer (_Cervus canadensis asiaticus_) seems to be, if not the chief, at
least the most picturesque means of earning a livelihood. I was making
my way into the maral country. Here the colonists, instead of farming
sheep and cows, farm a species of deer with very valuable horns--the
maral. The horns are not valuable as ornaments, or as bone, or as
drinking vessels, but as medicine. A very curious trade. The Russians
cut off the horns of the deer every spring, boil them, dry them, and
sell them into China, where they sell at the rate of about a shilling
an ounce, and give almost miraculous relief to women in the pains of
childbirth, make it possible for barren women to have children, and
many other things.

“Is it good for that purpose?” I asked of the man who was driving me.

“They say so,” said he, without committing himself.

“But do Russian women use this medicine?”

“No; it’s too expensive.”

“But do they believe in it?”

“No, they don’t need it. They are not like the Kitankas and Mongolians,
who suffer very much. These Chinawomen are like the camels here. The
camels would die out if it were not for the skill the Kirghiz women
have in making them breed. They would die out, but the Kirghiz keep
them going. The same with the Chinawomen; they need the powder of the
maral horn. No Chinawoman of any importance thinks of marrying without
a pair of maral horns in her possession, and if her father be too poor
to purchase them, the husband must. They all use it, and you can buy
the powder in any chemist’s shop in China.”

“Or an imitation?” I suggested.

My driver could not say whether the substance could be imitated. Later
on, on my journey, I saw marals, both on the run and in the immense
maral gardens which the Russians keep in their colony.

Bozhe-Narimsky was a pleasant green corner, with tumbling river,
many willow trees, mosquitoes, marshes. Thence the road went higher
and higher to Maly Narimsky and Tulovka, through districts where
once were forests of great pines and now are only forests of stumps,
through wildernesses of pink mallow and purple larkspur, and over
vast, swelling uplands covered with verdure, finally to within sight
of gleaming streaks of snow and ice, the glaciers of the central
range. Bozhe-Narimsky, Maly Narimsky, Tulovka, Medvedka, Altaiskaya,
Katun-Karagai were the names of the Russian villages and Cossack
stations on the way up. Most of them were well-established settlements,
for this territory is Siberia, and not what is called Russian Central
Asia. It has been in Russian hands a long while, and only the fact
that Russia is so vast, and there is so much room for the overflow
of population, explains the backwardness of the colonisation of the
Altai. Russia has never had any enemies worth the name here, and has
very little to fear unless the Chinese ever turn bellicose. The only
people who stood in her way were the mild nomads, the Kalmeeks and the
Kirghiz. These had unrecognised rights to certain valleys, springs,
winter pastures, summer pastures, and they walled off their discoveries
with stones and boulders, never dreaming anyone would think of annexing
them. But when the Russian generals came riding down the valleys with
their engineers, saying, “Fix me a village here and a village there,
and give us twenty villages along the length of that valley,” no
Kirghiz or Kalmeek had the spirit to say nay, and with a melancholy
smile they crept away, leaving the fields to those who must take them.

Near Tulovka I saw the first marals, six speedy deer running ahead
of as many horsemen, just outrunning their horses, but not disposed
to race out of sight and get lost. The horsemen, who were Cossacks,
carried lassos in their hands, and I rather wondered why they did not
shoot the deer and have done with their hunting. A villager put me
right, however.

“These are not wild deer, but escaped ones,” said he. “There are no
wild deer left; they have all been caught now. No one has seen a wild
maral for fifteen years. They have all been caught and put in gardens,
and now we breed them. If they shoot these marals they lose six good
breeders. A buck maral is worth two hundred roubles. It’s a sad day for
the man who has lost these. It is very difficult to catch them, they
are very crafty; and then one doesn’t want to injure their horns in
taking them. They generally have to ride them down until they are dead
beat; no use frightening them; just keep them on the move and give them
no rest.”

At Medvedka I stayed with an old man who kept a maral farm. My host was
a comical fellow, somewhat over six feet high, with long hair, bushy
beard, kind and gentle eyes--a giant’s shoulders, an ogre’s stomach,
but the walk and manners of a child. His great pine log house had a
threshold so large that you might almost call it a veranda but that
peasants do not have verandas. There were steps up to it, and then a
long covered way, one side of which was the log wall of the house,
in which peeped wee glass windows; the other side was a solid little
railing, where you could lean and watch the pigs, the turkeys, the
geese, the horses and dogs in the big farm-bounded farmyard. Beyond
the yard and the pasture stretched upward the voluminous and irregular
mountain-side, deep in a tangle of shadowy undergrowth and made
majestical by mighty firs. The gloom and splendour of the mountains
brooded over the big log house.

[Illustration: IN THE ALTAI: KIRGHIZ TOMBS NEAR MEDVEDKA]

On the veranda were a whole series of green, many-branching antlers
just sawn away from heads of marals--an unusual sight in any cottage.
They were velvety and hairy; if you touched them you found them soft.
Not the antlers hunters bring home and hang on their walls, nothing
hard or sharp or fearsome, but gentle, rounded and smooth-knobbed,
unripened antlers, sawn off from a stag’s head with a saw.

Mikhail Nikanorovitch, mine host, took me up to his maral farm, a tract
of mountain-side many acres in extent, fenced in by a gigantic paling,
the posts of which were eight or nine feet high and very solid. The
maral is a magnificent jumper, and has been known to clear eight feet
upon occasion and get away. As the farmer has to buy the posts from
the Government, the construction of a _maralnik_, as they call it, is
not without considerable expense for the peasants. Quite a small place
would cost two hundred roubles.

Mikhail and I stumped up the mountain-side quite a height till we came
to his wild enclosure. Mine host called the deer as his peasant wife
might have called chickens to their food, and they came fluttering
towards him to be fed, but, spying me, stopped short, sniffed the air,
then turned and fled to the wildernesses of their prison.

“In the summer they are in this big place,” said Mikhail, “but in late
autumn, before the snows, we drive them into a smaller place, and we
feed them there all the winter. It is in this smaller place that we saw
off the horns in the early summer.”

He took me along to the shed where the horns were sawn off.

“We make the first cutting only when the calf has reached its third
year. We cut off the horns in June and the beginning of July--when the
antlers are most developed and so worth most. If we leave them later
they harden and are no use. They would then have to be allowed to bear
their horns till next spring, when in any case they shed them.”

“What happens to those who have had their antlers sawn off; do they
shed the stumps?” I asked.

“Yes, they shed their stumps. That is in April or May; and then they
change their coats and are generally in a bad state of health.”

He described how they managed the animal during the sawing business:
put its fore-legs in a noose, its hind-legs in a noose, threw it on
the ground, bandaged the eyes, someone carefully holding the head and
saving the horns from damage all the time. They sawed off the horn with
an ordinary hand-saw--such a one was lying on a sort of bench in the
shed to which the old fellow had led me--and when the sawing was done
they stopped the bleeding with coaldust and salt, and then tied up the
stump tightly with linen. The blood soon stops flowing, and the maral,
being put at liberty, forgets and scarce knows what he has lost. In
their tamed state the deer have found a sort of alternative destiny,
and the peasants say that often marals which escape in the summer come
back voluntarily to the enclosures for food and shelter in winter-time.
Still, some do finally disappear, and although the villager I met
earlier was of opinion that all the marals had been caught, there must
still be many thousands at large upon the vast and unexplored Altai. In
their wild state they are extremely shy of human beings, and seemingly
with good reason.

Old Mikhail, who was a kind of three-storied man, pottered about,
stooping the whole length of his huge body to pick wild strawberries
and raspberries, and he constantly called out to me to help myself to
fruit. When we got back to the farmhouse I found his wife boiling a
chicken for me in a pail over a bonfire in the garden.

Mikhail showed me where they boiled the horns, and explained the
process of preservation. There were enormous coppers for the boiling.
The horns were put into boiling brine, just dipped in and taken out
several times. The difficulty was to immerse them and yet not touch the
metal sides of the pots. If the sides were touched the delicate skin
might easily be frayed. After the immersion the horns were exposed in
the open air. They dried fairly rapidly, and lost weight; by the time
they would be ready for sale they would have lost half their original
weight. In the late summer and autumn Chinese and Tartar merchants
appeared and made great deals in maral horns throughout the whole
district. In China the substance of the horn is known as _ludzon_.

Mikhail was an extraordinarily hospitable type of peasant, and heaped
plenty on the table that evening--a great crust of honeycomb, for he
kept his own bees and possessed a hill-side dotted with white hives;
wooden basins full of berries; butter--and butter is rare enough in
peasants’ houses; and soup and chicken and white bannocks. We had an
amusing talk about England. He had never seen a train, the sea, an
Englishman, or a German or a Frenchman, or, indeed, any race but
Russian, Kirghiz, Chinamen, Tartars, Kalmeeks. We compared the prices
of things, and he was greatly alarmed at the cost of meat in England. I
made him wonder more and more.

“Now, for instance, a hare,” said I. “I do not suppose they cost much
here, but in our country we pay six or seven shillings for one at
Christmas.”

Mikhail was astonished.

“What, for the skin?” asked he.

“Oh, no; we don’t value the skin--throw it away or sell it to the
rag-and-bone man for twopence.”

“You don’t mean to say you pay that for a hare. Now, here we keep the
skin to sell and throw away the flesh. It’s good enough for hogs. I
never thought of a hare having a price as food. I don’t know that I
could say what was the price of hare’s flesh here. We throw it away.”

He played with the idea, and then eventually inquired of me whether it
were possible to get an iced freight-truck from Omsk to London, and
what would it cost.

I could not say.

“Well,” said Mikhail, “supposing we put a nominal price of two copecks
(a halfpenny) a hare exported from here, we could make a big profit,
and it seems to me they could be got to London, and there would be a
big profit for every one concerned.”

I promised to give the matter my consideration, and he was so much in
earnest that, despite the fact he had never seen a train and could
neither read nor write, he made me note his address carefully and take
it to England, where I could give it to a _commersant_, and he would
contrive matters.

“Tell him,” said he, “that we can let him have ten hares for a rouble.
Good night.”

I was getting ready to lie down. Some overcoats had been spread on the
floor for me.

“Tell him there’s no end to the number of hares to be had here. Good
night,” said he again.

And after I had lain down he came to me again and said:

“Are you comfortable? There was a man here once who made his fortune
exporting _sarka_ skins. Good night.”

Next morning he gave me a large metal pot of honey and black currants
mixed, as a present, and he drove me to Altaiskaya Stanista, the top of
the Altai, himself.




XVI

THE DECLARATION OF WAR


It is a fine mountain road from Medvedka to Altaiskaya, over mighty
open upland where the great firs grasp the earth with talon-like
roots. Here and there along the road are Kirghiz tombs enclosed by
rude hurdles, reminding one of the palings of the maral gardens. An
occasional Russian hut, a mountain stream pouring across a road,
forests of stumps, and again forests of those giant firs standing as
against the wind--storm trees, broad at base, needle-pointed at the
apex, every branch a strong son.

At Altaisky I proposed to stay a few weeks, and then cross the
mountains to the Kosh Agatch road, northward toward Biisk; but
the tidings of war came across my plan here, and farther than the
Altai I did not go. But I had a quiet fortnight in a wonderful
spot--Altaiskaya, opposite Mount Belukha, one of the great snow peaks
that stand on sentry here between China and Siberia, and I walked and
climbed. It would be a splendid place in which to spend a whole summer.
There are places that are so placid and beautiful that you exclaim:
“Good heavens, this is a very paradise!” When you have been there a day
you want to stay there for ever, or to go away and to return and return
again. So it was at little Bobrovo on the Dwina, so again at Altaisky.
I thought to myself I shall come here again and spend six months, and
write a long and interesting story. And I will ask “Pan” to come, and
he also will come and write a wonderful story. “Pan” is an English
friend, a great, tall, gentle, quick-scented human, a dear mortal who
snuffs the air with his nose and can tell you thereby what has happened
in a place any time this three weeks past.

Altaiskaya was full of the freshness of youth, and the air gave
you wings and its valleys were full of wonderful flowers. I have a
long-acquired habit of associating a certain phrase in the Lord’s
Prayer with the most beautiful thing I have seen during the day, and if
I have seen nothing beautiful, and have been leading a dull life in a
town, my mind goes roving back to certain wondrous sights in the past.
Most frequently of all it goes to the wastes, covered with crimson
poppies, in Russian Central Asia, and occasionally to the verdure and
splendour of the Altai and the delphiniums there, the blue, purple and
yellow monkshood, the China-blue larkspurs, blue and purple larkspurs.
A wonderful place for flowers. Here are sweeps of blue sage, mauve
cranesbills poking everywhere, saffron poppies, grass of Parnassus,
campanula, pink moss flowers and giant thistle-heads, gentian, Siberian
iris.

Just outside the Cossack settlement it was late summer, and the glossy
peony fruits were turning crimson from green, opening to show rows of
black teeth--seeds. But as you climbed upward toward the snow the
season changed, and it was possible to recover the lost spring.

The southern side of the mountains seemed to be very bare, but our
side, the northern one, was green. It was comparatively easy to
reach districts where it might be thought no foot of man had ever
trod--primeval moss-grown forest, where were no tracks, no flowers,
nothing but firs and moss. Numberless trees had fallen, and the moss
had grown over them, and, in climbing through, one helped oneself from
tree to tree, balancing and finding a footing. Above this jungle was a
stretch of steep mountain-side sparsely grown with young firs, and then
grey, barren, slippery rock. Wonderful shelves and chasms, fissures,
precipices, and ways up without ways down, boulder-strewn tracks and
founts of bubbling water, milk-white streams, crystal streams.

I was housed very well with a prosperous Cossack family, and, except
for the fact that there was a terrible monotony in their dinners, had
no reason to complain. Every evening when I returned there was beef
“cutlets,” white scones and butter, a jug of milk, and the samovar. The
whole family was in the fields hay-making all day, and were indisposed
to give time to cooking.

[Illustration: ALTAISKA _STANITSA_: VIEW OF MOUNT BIELUKHA]

Most days I spent by the side of a little mountain river, where I
built a sort of causeway out of rocks, diverted the channel, made a
deep bathing-pool--enthralling occupations. Here also I had a bonfire,
made coffee, baked potatoes, cooked red currant jam. Strips of red
currants hung like bunting on some of the bushes, and were so thick
that you could pick a potful in a quarter of an hour. Here also I
sorted out and re-read thirty or forty copies of _The Times_, saved
up for me, with letters, at the post office of Semipalatinsk--all the
details of the political quarrel over Ulster, the resignation of Sir
John French (as he was then called), of Colonel Seely, the vigorous
speeches of Mr. John Ward, the brilliant defences of Mr. Asquith. We
seemed to be running forward silently and smoothly to an exciting
rebellion or civil war in Ireland, and nobody seemed to deplore the
prospect of strife. The Government, nominally in favour of peace at all
costs, were incapable of preventing their opponents obtaining arms,
and were, therefore, allowing their friends to arm. On the whole we
seemed to be tired of the dull blessings of peace, out of patience with
peace. Yet we were not ready for the strife that was coming, though
certainly in a mood to take arms. It is astonishing that with our many
international characters--those diplomatical journalists of ours--we
did not know what was coming, or no one was at pains to undeceive us.
Journalists abroad, even if they are out of touch with Courts and are
uninfluential, have yet much greater opportunities for understanding
international situations than Foreign Offices. Why is it that they
nearly always mislead? In our country a certain glamour overspreads
the personality of the polyglot who writes of foreign Courts and
foreign policies, but as an observer of the Press for many years I can
give it as my opinion that, as a nation, we do not gain much from
the pens of those journalists who run in and out of chancelleries and
are well known at foreign Courts. In any case, as regards those who
dealt specially with Germany, Austria and the Balkans at the time of
the outbreak of war, they were either blind or ignorant, which is
unthinkable, or mixed up somehow in the great German intrigue.

Silence reigned in Europe, and under cover of that silence what
tremendous preparations were being made, what hurrying to and fro there
was. It is astonishing to look back now to those serene and happy weeks
in the Altai and to feel the contrast of the innocence of Nature and
the devilish conspiracy in the minds of men. If there are devils in
the world, black spirits as opposed to white spirits, what triumph
was theirs, what hidden ecstasy as at the coming triumph of negation.
Behind the screen of this silence horns were blowing announcing the
great feasts of death, the blasting of the temples wherein the spirit
of man dwells, the orgy of ugliness and madness. But being, happily,
untuned to this occult world, we did not hear them.

[Illustration: MOBILISATION DAY ON THE ALTAI: THE VILLAGE EMPTIED OF
ITS FOLK]

It was holiday time, the end of July, the Englishman’s great liberation
moment when, even if he goes on working in office or factory, he
ceases to work hard and lazes at his work. His wife and family have
gone to the seaside. He will join them in a week or so. Meanwhile he
is “camping out at home.” The young man is buying stout boots and
greasing them for tramping, is scanning maps and guidebooks, and making
absurd tables of mileage, prospective hotel bills and expenses. The
teachers, with the children, are liberated from the schools, and the
former are gone on Polytechnic tours and what not, whilst the latter
chalk mysterious diagrams on the pavement and play hop-scotch, or play
“Wallflowers, wallflowers, growing up so high,” or “This is the way she
went.” The unfashionable but numerous marriages take place of those
who must make the honeymoon coincide with annual leave, and the happy
couples take Cook’s tickets to Strasburg, to the Tyrol, to Munich.

And those Russians who _must_ escape their fellow-Russians, and don’t
like the bad drains of their own watering-places, are off to German
baths and Bohemian and Austrian spas. Students are tripping across to
Switzerland. And on all in German territory the guillotine of war is
going to fall. At all the money-changers’ offices at Charing Cross
and in the City you can buy German marks, though there is not much
gold to be had. French gold, English, Russian can be had in almost
any quantities, and Cook’s will sell you German hotel tickets for all
August.

One lazy July afternoon I sat on the wooden steps leading up to my
veranda and talked with a Cossack on wars in general, what prospects
of war there actually were at that moment; and we concluded that there
might possibly be war with Austria. It was the idlest talk, but the
Cossack lives for a new war, and I did not like to discourage him. He
for his part rather hoped for a nearer war; one with China would suit
him, but he’d thankfully consider a war with Austria if nothing else
were available.

I went along the exterior street of the village to the little post
office facing the wall of the White Ones, as they call the Altai, and
talked with the postmaster about marals, and he closed the office
to go out and show me where his garden was. Here also were several
_maralniki_, and I found them when clambering up the ridges, and the
deer, seeing me, would scamper away. The village had a butter factory,
and I used to go there and wait during the last stages of production
for a pound of butter, and, sitting on a bucket upside down, chatted
with other villagers. Opposite the cottage where I stayed lived the
priest, and he often came across and talked. The church was the next
building after the priest’s house, and was a beautiful little wooden
temple built by the peasants themselves. I was quickly in the midst
of the life of the settlement, and when the news came I was at once
thought to be the obvious person to apply to for information. On the
30th of July, after a long day on the mountains, I slept serenely on
the overcoats on the floor of my Cossack habitation. Next morning came
the young horseman with the red flag flying from his shoulder, and the
tremendous excitement and clamour of the reception of the _ukase_ to
mobilise for war. As I wrote when I described this in “Russia and the
World,” the Cossacks were not told with whom the war was or would be,
and one of the first surmises that they made was that the war must be
with England--crafty old England, who always stood in Russia’s way and
was siding with the Turks again. Or she was afraid Russia was going to
attack India.

The real news came at last, and with it the necessity to return to
Europe as soon as possible. The war came across my summer as it came
across the summer of thousands of others, cutting life into two very
distinct parts. At the village of Altaisky I must draw my war line
dividing past and present, one part of life from this other new
astonishing part. The story of my journey has drawn to its close.
Before, however, leaving the subject of Russian Central Asia I would
give the thoughts and reflections that the journey has suggested, and
especially those referring to Anglo-Russian rivalry in empire, the
questions of India and Constantinople, the future of our friendship and
of the two empires.




APPENDIX I

RUSSIA AND INDIA AND THE PROSPECTS OF ANGLO-RUSSIAN FRIENDSHIP


The prospects of Anglo-Russian friendship are very fair at the
moment of writing, the after-the-war prospects. Generally speaking,
international amity or hostility has heretofore depended on the absence
or presence of clashing interests. Russia does not stand on our road of
Empire, and has never fought us and could never fight us commercially
as Germany has done. Our only doubt about Russia has been as to her
possible designs on India. Fifty years ago there were few Englishmen
who did not entertain expectations of eventual war with Russia, and
after the annexation of Merv, and the running of the Central Asian
Railway thither, Beaconsfield was obliged to assure us that the keys
of India were to be found in London, and consisted in the spirit and
determination of the British people. We felt we were secure because we
could fight Russia and did not fear her. As Lord Curzon wrote in his
book on Russian Central Asia:

  “The day that a Russian army starts forth from Balkh for the passes
  of the Hindu Kush, or marches out of the southern gate of Herat _en
  route_ for Kandahar, we may say, as Cromwell did at Dunbar: ‘Now
  hath the Lord delivered them into my hand.’”

Our other bond of security lay in the fact that the Russians knew they
could not successfully attack us. Though it must be said now, after
our thwarted efforts against the Turks on Gallipoli and our experience
in Mesopotamia, that it is not clear that we could count on winning a
distant war of invasion. Though we are increasing daily in military
power and sagacity, as a result of fighting the Germans, we are not so
military a nation as we were in the days of the Crimean War. But the
invasion of India by Russia may well be put out of the head once and
for all. No statesman in Russia ever seriously contemplated it, and
in this country those statesmen who thought of it either decried the
idea or used it as a political bogey. As Namirovitch Danchenko said
recently: “From my seventy years’ knowledge of Russian life, I should
say that the people who dreamt about the conquest of India could be
found in Russia only in a mad-house.” No serious steps were ever taken
to thwart Russian imperial policy in Central Asia, and all that fear
has brought about was mistrust and a refusal to enter into partnership
with Russia in certain schemes in Asia.

The Russians have been ready to trust us for a long time, and they
were anxious for an Anglo-Russian agreement even at the time when
the invasion of India bogey was most in the air here. Probably the
Germans, those persistent enemies of Anglo-Russian friendship, were
responsible for a great deal of subterranean propaganda in England.
Many in England were pro-Russian--Gladstone (though, of course, even
Gladstone asked for a war credit on one occasion of fear of Russia),
Carlyle, Froude, Kinglake--there was a real basis of sympathy. But
the poisoners of the mind of the British people succeeded. What an
interesting glimpse of popular feeling is found in Burnaby’s “Ride to
Khiva” if we read it now. There is a certain poignancy in his remarks.
Consider this passage to-day:

  “Another peculiarity in several Russians which I remarked ... was
  their desire to impress upon my mind the great advantage it would be
  for England to have a civilised neighbour like Russia on her Indian
  frontier; and when I did not take the trouble to dissent from their
  views--for it is a waste of breath to argue with Russians about this
  question--how eager they were for me to impress their line of thought
  upon the circle of people with whom I was most immediately connected.
  Of course, the arguments brought forward were based upon purely
  philanthropic motives, upon Christianity and civilisation. They said
  that the two great Powers ought to go together hand in glove; that
  there ought to be railways all through Asia, formed by Anglo-Russian
  companies; that Russia and England had every sympathy in common which
  should unite them; that they both hated Germany and loved France;
  that England and Russia could conquer the world, and so on.

  “It was a line of reasoning delightfully Russian, and though I was
  not so rude as to differ from my would-be persuaders, and lent an
  attentive ear to all their eloquence, I could not help thinking that
  the mutual sympathy between England and Germany is much greater
  than that between England and Russia; that the Christian faith
  as practised by the lower orders in Russia is pure paganism in
  comparison with the Protestant religion which exists in Prussia and
  Great Britain; that Germany and Great Britain are natural allies
  against Russia ... that Germans and Englishmen understand by the term
  ‘Russian civilisation’ something diametrically opposite to what is
  attributed to it by those people who form their ideas of Muscovite
  progress from the few Russians they meet abroad.”

Burnaby’s remarks seem pretty foolish in 1916. And his views are
representative of the views of many English in 1875. Prussia, whom he
admires so, had just crushed the French whilst we stood by. The Boer
War had not come. The Kaiser had not sent his telegram to Kruger. Our
military conceit had not been taken out of us; and so, when Russia
offers Britannia the hand of friendship, Britannia round her draws her
cloak and folds her arms.

But Russia was sincere. She admired the English. She alone of
Continental nations appreciated the spirit of Dickens and our
Victorian novelists. England was still the foolish friend of Turkey,
it is true, but she was not _perfide Albion_. Nor was she simply “Mr.
Cotton,” as Ibsen dismissed us, or “a nation of shopkeepers.” From the
first Russia has had some sort of _flair_ for the English gentleman,
has seen the best thing in our race; and their wish for friendship
with us has been a sentimental matter, not a desire for commercial
partnership, not a bond of sympathy between revolutionary Russia and
our Socialists. The desire for friendship with England dates to before
the emergence of our Socialists as a party in England. It is a genuine
craving for mutual understanding between the real Russia and the real
England.

Fortunately, that desire on Russia’s part found an answer on this side.
We became friends--we are now brothers-in-arms against a common foe.
If the shedding of blood for a common ideal strengthens friendship,
we should be good friends for this generation at least. Those who
are young now will keep in remembrance the stress of these days, the
sacrifice, the common sadness, the shared triumph. Holy Russia has
become near to us, and, despite all machinations and insinuations, will
remain near. And, with the hope of making things more easy, let me
indicate the points of resistance to Russian friendship still remaining
in our national life.

I. _India._--A number of our people, chiefly on the Unionist side in
politics, still fear Russian designs on India, and for that reason
deny Russia the right to Constantinople and the Straits, should
she take them. In doing this they unwittingly play the German game,
which is to reserve Constantinople for Germany. There are several
European journalists in the pay of Germany, and among other things
they do for their money is the stirring up of British suspicion about
Constantinople and Russia. The fact is that this is Russia’s legitimate
outlet, her front door, and there can be no settled peace in Europe as
long as it is barred up or liable to be barred. It is also the seat and
capital of the Russian faith, and what in 1876 Dostoieffsky answered to
the question on what high ground Russia demanded Constantinople from
Europe is still true:

  “As the leader of Orthodoxy, as protectress and preserver of
  Orthodoxy, the rôle predestined for Russia since the days of Ivan
  III. ... that the nations professing Orthodoxy may be unified under
  her, that the Slav nations may know that her protection is the
  guarantee of their individual personality and the safeguard against
  mutual hostility. Such a union would not be for the purpose of
  political aggression and tyranny, not a matter of commercial gain.
  No, it will be a raising of Christ’s truth, preserved in the East,
  a real new raising of Christ’s Cross, and the conclusive word of
  Orthodoxy at the head of which will be Russia.... And if anyone holds
  that the ‘new word’ which Russia will speak is ‘utopia,’ worthy only
  of mockery, then I must be numbered among the Utopians----”

Still, it must be said that at the present moment Constantinople does
not seem likely to fall as a fruit to the Allies or to Russia, and
unless Bulgaria should turn upon her unnatural allies there is not much
question of St. Sophia becoming Christian again. We ought only to keep
in mind that Russia has striven for Constantinople not to have a base
from which to oppose us, but in order to keep the door of her own house
and to be Queen of the Eastern Church.

The next point, and where the question of India causes us to be
suspicious, is that of Persia. Here, happily, some understanding has
been obtained and spheres of influence allotted; but our distrust has
stood in the way of the consummation of one of the most interesting
schemes of the century: the trans-Persian railway. If this railway had
been built before the outbreak of this world-war, it would have been
of extraordinary value to the Allies, an effectual means of checking
the inflammation of Islam. There will be little money left when the
war is over, but certainly the overland route to India should be
one of the first big civilising schemes to receive attention. World
railways, instead of little bits of lines, belong to the future of the
Old World, and we can have them now or put it off for another era. It
depends on the faith and imagination of our generation. Then Persia
falls inevitably under European surveillance, and there is no reason
for English and Russians at the outposts of Empire to compete and be
jealous and suspicious and to squabble.

For the rest, Russian Central Asia raises no further problems. It is a
peaceful, growing Russian colony, shut away from the chances of attack
by foreign Powers--likely to remain for a thousand years one of the
most peaceful places upon earth. Unlike India, it is comparatively
empty and its peoples are decaying. The railways which Russia has
built were built in order to subdue the Tekintsi and the Afghans. The
railways which she is building have in view only the convenience of the
colonists, the development of the colony, and trade with China. Russia
is slow out there, and she is laying the sound foundations of a healthy
and happy colonial country.

II. _Rivalry of Empire._--Whatever be the direct issue of the war
with Germany, one indirect result seems certain: England will have
more empire, whilst Germany will have less, and Russia will not
lose anything. Two great empires will emerge more clearly, facing
one another because of the dispersal of the German ambition. There
seems to be only one possibility of German extension, and that
lies in the chance of Germans and Austrians turning on their own
allies and absorbing Bulgaria and Turkey. But that chance must be
considered remote to-day. The Russian and the British Empires will
stand facing one another in friendly comparison. The Russian Empire
is self-supporting, it has no need to import the necessities of
life--food, fuel, raiment; whereas we could support ourselves, but
do not, not having reconciled our self-hostile commercial interests.
For many a long day Russia will export for British consumption corn,
butter, eggs, sugar, wool, and wood, to say nothing of other things.
And when at last we succeed in making our own Empire independent, the
Russians will eat their butter themselves and there will be more white
bread on the peasant’s table. It will be no calamity for Russia.

I was speaking on the future of the Russian Empire at one of our
leading Conservative clubs in London last winter, and I was surprised
to note a very important feeling of opposition toward Russia. Those
who were interested in manufactures wanted the tariff against
British goods reduced, and those who were Imperialist in spirit felt
a certain jealousy and suspicion of the Russian Empire. Several
speakers warned Russia that she had better give up the dream of having
Constantinople--it would be bad for her health if she were to have it.
But the most significant utterance came from an ardent tariff reformer,
who did not know how far love of Russia was compatible with love of
the British Empire, for more Russian grain coming to us meant less
Canadian grain, and so on. If we gave Russia any preferential treatment
as regards her exports to us, we handicapped our own colonies. We ought
to give our colonies preferential terms, but how would the Russians
feel if we asked for reduced tariffs for the import of our manufactured
goods into Russia while at the same time we put a tax on the produce
they sent to us. That problem is a serious one, and it cannot be
doubted that the best policy for us is to make ourselves self-dependent
as an Empire whatever it may cost us in foreign favour. Russia must
not misunderstand our efforts to consolidate the Empire, and I do not
think she will. The diminution in our import of food-stuffs from Russia
will be gradual, and will be made up partially by the increased import
of other things which Russia has in superabundance. Yet even as regards
ores and mineral products we have to learn to be self-supporting. The
war itself, which shuts us off from Russia and throws us upon our own
resources, has sent us to our own colonies. We are beginning to find
in the Empire not only our food, but also the raw materials required
for our products. Take, for instance, the case of asbestos. The only
first-class quality of asbestos in the world comes from the Urals, and
it is a product of great value industrially. During the war it has
been very difficult to get it from Russia. The result has been that we
have found a very good though still inferior quality in Rhodesia, and
may quite conceivably obtain all our best supplies from that colony in
time, the lower grades coming from Canada, which begins to have a great
output. But our tendency to be self-dependent will tend to rid Russia
of many exploiting foreign companies, and for that the Russian people
will be thankful. They want to experience what gifts they have for
doing things for themselves.

III. _The Trade Treaty._--Russia will be so much in debt to us
financially at the end of the war that there will be a tendency to
regard her as an insolvent liability company possessing valuable
assets. Some of our business men may want to treat her as such and
appoint a trustee, so to say. There is a movement to inflict upon
Russia a trade treaty similar to that, or even more humiliating than
that which Germany called upon her to sign. The bond of friendship with
Russia cannot be a commercial halter round her neck. She would quickly
resent foreign financial control, no matter from what quarter it might
be exercised. Russia will be all but bankrupt after the war, and all
that she will have lost will have been lost for the common cause. We
should be generous to her and see what can be done, not to tie her and
bind her industrially and financially, but for us all. Russia herself
is ready to make a kindly treaty providing us with real advantages over
Germany, but she could not make a treaty whereby arrangements would be
made for the paying off of her financial war debts to her allies.

IV. _The Basis of Friendship._--The basis of friendship with Russia is
not really trade, and no provision needs to be made to make a trade
basis. We had plenty of trade with Germany or Germany with us, and that
did not make for friendship. On the contrary, the question of trade and
of haggling over money is almost certain in the long run to lead to
estrangement, or, at least, mutual dis-esteem. There has been a growing
trade, but that has not led to the growing friendship. Friendship has
been founded on real mutual admiration. We like the Russians, and
they like us. The positive side of Russia profoundly interests us. Of
course, we are not vitally interested in the negative side, the rotten
conditions of life in certain classes, the faults of Russia, the seamy
side of the picture. We are thoroughly aware of the ugliness of the
negative side of our own life, and we would ask--do not judge us by
that, that is not England. Similarly, in Russia we are interested in
beautiful and wonderful Russia, in Holy Russia, not in unholy Russia.
This positive side is comparatively unrealised here, for gossip and
slander make more noise than truth, but in it is a great treasure both
for Russia and for ourselves in friendship. On the whole the prospects
are good.




APPENDIX II

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE


The moment of peace will be the moment of reconsideration. We shall
want to know where we all stand, and we shall want to face the
facts--financially, individually, imperially. We shall want to know
what we have got, what we owe, what sort of empire we have to make
or mar in the succeeding years, what are its resources, what its
possibilities, and ours. One may remark, in passing, what very good
work is being done by the Confederation of the Round Table.[F] The
calculation is exercising many patriotic British minds. First of all be
it remarked, in order to remove misconceptions, we British people are
not by any means the most numerous white people. We have in our Empire
something like 63 million whites, whereas Russia has at least 140
million, Germany has 65 million, and the United States have 82 million
of mixed race. We compare favourably with the United States because we
are homogeneous and much more calm in soul, and favourably with Germany
because she has no land for expansion, though it must be remembered
that if Austria and Germany should unite, the Germans would have almost
as large a white population as Russia, and certainly a very much more
active one. There remains Russia, with its enormous population and its
astonishingly extensive territory. Russia has ample room for ten times
her present population, and she has it at her back door, as it were.
She has no oceans to cross. The railway goes all the way or can go all
the way from Petrograd to the uttermost ends of her earth. She has also
calm, and can develop without worry. As an empire, compared with ours,
she has tremendous advantages. Her people are not impatient to be rich,
the strain of her race is not confused through foreign immigration, she
is shut off from mongrelising influences, and tends to grow with pure
blood and a clear understanding of her own past and her own destiny.
She has less chance of making mistakes. And, as I have said, her
problems are much simpler. It is not difficult to keep the stream of
colonisation moving into the emptiness of Asia when the railways are so
good as to carry one six thousand miles for thirteen roubles, a little
over a sovereign.

Our younger politicians have got to decide what they are working
for--trade, or the Empire, or the people, or the individual. They must
affirm a larger policy than has been affirmed heretofore, a world
policy, and they must not scorn the lessons which Germany has taught
them: the necessity to be thorough, to have large conceptions, and
to work for the realisation of these large conceptions rather than
potter about doctoring the little-English constitution here and giving
a little funeral there. We teach our children a very foolish little
proverb: that if we look after the pence the pounds will look after
themselves. That is the opposite of the truth, which is, that if we
look after the pounds we need never worry our heads about the pennies.
If we nationalised our ocean-transit, we should not need to insure our
working men against unemployment. If we scheduled the enormous tracts
of land available for culture in the Empire, we should not need to wage
war with the landowners in Great Britain.

Our present Colonial Minister, Mr. Bonar Law, has risen to the front
as the political leader of our Conservative and Imperialist party.
He does not seem to love party strife, and he has, perhaps, found a
permanent post at the Colonial Office. He is the next man of importance
after Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and though by no means so great a man,
he is an admiring follower of the great Imperialist. Whatever we may
think of the merits of Free Trade and Protection, Chamberlain was
undoubtedly right in his larger conception of a unified British Empire,
a _Zollverein_. And the Liberals who opposed him and confused the
issue were merely opportunists. They were not concerned to find what
they could agree with in his proposals. They merely fought him to beat
him and step into his shoes politically. The riff-raff of political
opportunists set on him, and he was forced to shed one of his great
illusions, a trust in the common sense of the people. Mr. Bonar Law is
his successor, and we wish him well. He might well carry his office out
of the arena of party politics and sit at the Colonial Office whatever
wind were blowing. For Imperial Policy must have continuity if it is to
be successful.

England must hope and pray that Mr. Law has given up mere politics.
We are thoroughly sick of the bad-tempered quarrelling and malicious
fighting of the heads of the parties. Even a first-rate man is
ninth-rate when he is quarrelling, and a quarrel among politicians is
always a quarrel among ninth-rate politicians. Political genius likes
affirmation and agreement. The task of Mr. Bonar Law is to think about
the Empire and gain consciousness of its true destiny; it is not to
think out devices in political antagonism. As a nation we demand he
give his whole time and the cream of his intellect to the positive task
of giving to every citizen of the Empire the consciousness of the large
thing. He will be attacked; curs will bark at him; the Germans and
German Jews will try and stir up the uneducated against him; there will
be all manner of insinuations. But he need never reply or attempt to
defend himself. The nation and the Empire will back him calmly. There
is a splendid Russian tale of a prince climbing a mountain to obtain a
bird, and all the stones behind him shout abuse after him. He is safe
on his quest on this condition only, that he does not turn round and
listen, or draw his sword to attack. If he turn he will change to a
stone himself. The point is, we are going to be more in need of great
men once this war is over than we ever were before--of great men with
big ideas, faith that they can be realised, and that calm of spirit
which is the greatest strength.

If Mr. Bonar Law is not great enough, or if he’d rather continue in
the political arena, there is another man for the post, and that is
Lord Milner. Lord Milner strikes one as the greater man. The Empire
is his one idea. He thinks largely--his imagination takes him in vast
sweeps over the surface of the Empire. He has dignity, is a powerful
speaker, and a clear thinker on Imperial matters. His weakness is a
certain aloofness or reserve, an ambassadorial manner, and one is not
quite sure what is behind it. Mr. Bonar Law, on the other hand, is
unscreened; he is familiar, even domestic in his manner. Probably what
Mr. Law has to guard against is doing things in small parcels, doing
branch things rather than root things, whereas Lord Milner may give
offence occasionally by a lack of consideration for other people’s
feelings--want of tact, in fact. In any case they are both men on whom
the eyes of the nation rest. Lord Milner has sent me an extremely
interesting letter which had been addressed to him by a number of
British citizens who have become lost to the British Empire. By his
kind permission I reproduce it:

                                 “_Open Letter to Lord Milner._
                                                  “QUINCY, MASS., U.S.A.
                                                     “_Dec. 15th, 1915._

  “LORD MILNER,--I have read with intense interest the report of your
  speech appearing in _The Times_ Weekly Edition of Nov. 19th. You
  mentioned the indifference of the working man to Imperial affairs. I
  am a working man, and possibly my views on these questions may be of
  some small interest to you. When I speak of my views I mean that they
  also are the views of other workers with whom I come in contact. I
  mix daily with several dozen workers, British born, and I assure you
  that the opinions here expressed are the opinions of practically all.

  “We believe that right now a strong committee should be formed to
  deal with Imperial reconstruction after the war. This committee
  should have a well thought out, clearly defined, and decisive policy
  to put in operation the moment the war ends. We believe that not
  less than half a million soldiers who have fought in the war should
  be settled in Canada, Australasia and U.S. Africa, and that an
  appropriation of not less than one billion[G] pounds sterling should
  be voted for the purpose. Canada is a land of vast agricultural
  possibilities and great mineral wealth. A small group of the best
  agricultural and engineering experts in the Empire should be sent
  over to make all necessary preparations for the coming of the men.
  The exact location or locations where they are to settle should
  be defined, lines of branch railways should be surveyed, sites
  of model garden cities, cement built, should be located, mining
  properties surveyed, and the location of factories and workshops
  should be decided upon. Nothing should be left to chance. The gang
  ploughs, threshing machines, motor tractors, grain elevators,
  etc., should be provided and run on the co-operative principle, and
  the entire properties should belong to the nation. If one-half the
  energy, foresight, and preparation used in the war were used for the
  reconstruction, the scheme is an assured success.

  “There are great irrigation and artesian possibilities in S. Africa.
  Preparations should be made _now_. Incidentally the intensely
  loyalist stock thus settled would swamp the Hertzog party with their
  disruptive ideals. In Australia very great possibilities await
  irrigation. I have only to point out what has been done in arid S.
  California and Arizona to prove this.

  “The British Empire heretofore has been more or less imaginary;
  there has been nothing tangible about it. Take my own case, for
  instance. I cite it merely because it illustrates a principle. Seven
  years ago I was in Scotland and unemployed. There were a great many
  unemployed at the time. Those who had no means were left to starve.
  Was anything done for them? Absolutely nothing! All were British,
  loved Britain, were able and willing to work, yet no organisation
  was created to utilise their services. Personally I came to the
  United States. I have done better here than at home; had better pay,
  shorter hours, better conditions. What is the British Empire to us?
  Absolutely nothing; a mere sentiment. Yet our feelings are British
  still, our sympathies are British; but that is not enough. There must
  be something tangible to go on, something _real_; sentiment alone is
  no use. An Englishman here whom I meet daily is a veteran of the S.
  African war. When that war finished he was not allowed to settle in
  S. Africa. At home he could not get work. He was driven to want. He
  had to pawn his medal to live, and finally was assisted to America.
  He has done well here and has been steadily employed. But he has been
  embittered, and his sentiment in his own words is: ‘To hell with the
  British Empire.’ It is an empty phrase to him, without meaning; and I
  tell you, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, that these
  things will mean the decline and fall of the Empire if they do not
  stop. In the United States there are several million British-born who
  are lost to the Empire for ever. Their sentiments are British, their
  sympathies are British, but their interests are here, and interest
  becomes sentiment. And observe that their children born here have
  _sentiment_ as well as interest for the land of their birth.

  “The British Empire is the largest in the world. In natural resources
  it is the wealthiest. It could support a population of hundreds of
  millions in a high degree of prosperity. The British are an able and
  intelligent people. The nation is rich. The problem is to settle the
  people throughout the Empire and develop its resources under the
  guidance of experts, according to a well thought out and definite
  plan. This plan wants to take shape now. If the war were to suddenly
  end one year hence, and an army of three million men disbanded, we
  would (and will) be faced by industrial chaos. The problem must be
  placed in the hands of experts, and be so clearly worked out that
  when peace is declared the soldiers will be drafted without fuss to
  the various parts of the Empire, and immediately tackle the problems
  of city and railway building, agriculture and irrigation, mining and
  manufacturing. And these properties must be owned by the nation.
  These measures will create a _real_ Empire in which every citizen
  will have a tangible interest. Each part will legislate on its own
  domestic affairs, and the Imperial Parliament, dealing with Imperial
  affairs and representative of all the Dominions, will be held in
  London. With such conditions you will find a strong sentiment for
  Free Trade within the Empire and Protection without, and also a
  strong desire for that universal military training which will defend
  what in very truth is one’s own. Start this programme at once, and
  do it thoroughly, and you can be absolutely certain of a solid and
  enthusiastic backing.--Believe me, yours sincerely,

                                                      “WM. C. ANDERSON.”

Under Mr. Anderson’s signature appeared the signatures of forty-nine
men, all British subjects once, people of pure race and complete
British traditions, now “lost to the Empire.” The letter was endorsed
thus:

  J. C. COLLINGWOOD, late of Glasgow, Scotland;
  A. W. COATES, late of York, England;
  JAMES J. BYRNES, late of Dublin, Ireland;
  T. GIBBONS, late of Newfoundland;

and so on, a list far too long to quote here but most impressive in its
implication--“late of Great Britain, now and henceforth of the United
States of America.”

I will add a letter sent to me from Tasmania, for it will help to give
the atmosphere of the problem:

                                             “9 GARDEN CRESCENT,
                                                  “HOBART, TASMANIA,
                                                             “AUSTRALIA.
                                                  “_Oct. 3rd, 1915._

  “DEAR SIR,--I am just being interested in your book, ‘Russia and the
  World.’ I read it because I was delighted with your vagabond trip
  along the Euxine shores. You deal with the problems of the British
  Empire. Perhaps you might like to get a view from ‘down under’? Well,
  I do not consider in the matter of defence that a huge land empire
  has advantages over a sea empire. Russia is to-day more vulnerable
  than the British Empire. Let us suppose the British Isles with a
  navy such as it possesses to-day, with a million men ready for home
  defence, and with an expeditionary force of 250,000 men--‘ready’ at
  an hour’s notice to step into transports also ready. Let us assume
  that two-years’ provision of corn is stored, and a tunnel with
  France. Let us also assume that every available rood of British
  ground is cultivated. What country could invade and conquer the
  British Isles? What country could keep up a two-years’ naval war? Let
  us come to Australia--grand in her isolation. We shall soon have a
  quarter of a million of trained soldiers. We launched a new cruiser
  last week, and we are going to build submarines. We can not only
  defend ourselves, but we could supply garrisons for India. So far as
  external aggression is concerned, South Africa is safe. Canada is
  liable to attack from the Americans, and in the course of time will
  be attacked. If the British expeditionary army were landed promptly,
  and Canada had our plan of compulsory service, the Empire would be
  right there. India is safe except from Russia.

  “Have we a weak spot as an Empire? Certainly we have. England for
  three parts of a century has allowed herself to be bled to death by
  the emigration of her best youth to foreign countries. That ought
  to be stopped. There should be an export tax of £20 upon every
  emigrant to the United States or other alien country. (Plain talk
  about U.S.A.) As to the present ‘colonies’--hateful title--there are
  but two British ones within the Empire--Australia and New Zealand.
  The others have an undesirable mixture of races. It should be a
  portion of the Imperial policy to fill up Canada and South Africa
  with British-born people. But such emigration must be upon a system.
  Under a proper system we could do with two millions of immigrants
  in Australia. Suddenly dumped upon our wharves, 1,000 would be an
  inconvenience. Your scheme of cheap ships is admirable. When we
  build railways in Australia, and provide water schemes, we do not
  consider whether they will ‘pay,’ but whether they will develop the
  country and add to the happiness of the people. The best method
  of emigration is to dispatch from the United Kingdom every year,
  say, 500,000 youths and girls from 15 years of age and upwards.
  These would find homes _at low wages_ in settlers’ families in
  Canada, South Africa and Australia, and would become acclimatised
  and absorbed into the population. This emigration should be a State
  scheme and COMPULSORY. But the emigrants should not be made slaves
  of. When their indentures ended they should be allowed, if they
  wished, to return to England in one of your ships free of charge. I
  do not wish to enlarge upon the subject, but the failures of adult
  English immigrants who come here are pathetic. They cannot get along,
  neither would we get along in England. The immigrant should be
  captured young. This is the greatest problem of the Empire:

  “(1) To fill up the Empire with loyal citizens of pure British birth.

  “(2) In the cases of Canada and South Africa, to send large numbers
  in order to neutralise the alien elements now existing there. To
  stop foreign immigration into British territories, especially German
  immigration.

  “Upon the question of naturalisation we have been too easy and
  indifferent. A man wishing to be naturalised should make a solemn
  application in _propria persona_ before a court. He should be under
  the obligation to abjure his foreign nationality and to take a
  British name. We have now our directories crowded with foreign names,
  which through generations of intermarriages have lost their original
  national significance.

  “I note that you compare our culture with that of America. Thanks! No
  two countries could be more dissimilar--there is not amongst us the
  greed, the wild rush, or the boastfulness of the Americans. We do not
  like them. While we are on comparisons, let me remind you that while
  you have failed to adjust your Irish question, we have federated
  Australia, a task of no small difficulty. While you have been talking
  and spilling ink about conscription, we have a system of compulsory
  training, both for the army and the navy, in full operation. While
  you allow strikes in the midst of war, our difficulties are being
  settled by wages boards and arbitration courts. We are not perfect,
  but our Press is much superior in tone and culture to yours. It is
  painful to read some of your Yankeeised London papers. In literature
  we have given you Mrs. Humphry Ward, though to learn new sins we read
  the indecent novels which appear to be the chief product of British
  fiction. And we have given the world--Melba!

  “As to our share of the war. I walked down-street in Hobart yesterday
  to take a ‘billy’--pity your simplicity if you do not know what that
  is--to the City Hall. It was filled with all sorts of good things for
  our boys at Gallipoli for Christmas. Outside the newspaper office I
  read the cable, another ghastly list of Australian casualties. Were
  they necessary? Could not the Turks have been outflanked and their
  communications cut? When I reached home my wife and her friend
  were knitting socks for the soldiers. The lady friend mentioned, be
  it correct or not, that a ship that declined to carry troops--the
  _Wimmera_, New Zealand to Melbourne--was taken possession of and
  forced to take the men. The streets are full of soldiers ready to
  sail, and, alas, with many returned from the war crippled for life.
  And such splendid young men. What an improved edition of the British
  race the Australians are!

  “Enough from stranger to stranger, but as your book seems to indicate
  gleams of intelligence on your part, and as it interested me, I
  am humbly--as a native-born Australian now close approaching the
  Psalmist’s limit--endeavouring to repay the compliment.--Yours truly,

                                                       “WILLIAM CROOKE.”

And Mr. Crooke enclosed a poem on the launching of H.M.S. _Brisbane_ at
the naval dockyard at Cockatoo Island:

  Another link in the steel-strong chain which holds us heart to heart,
  Another pledge to the old, old vow which swears we’ll never part;
  While life doth last and love doth last we’ll give thee of our own--
  Dear Motherland, accept this gift we lay before thy throne.

  Forged in the heat of a southern sun, framed ’neath an Austral sky,
  Worthy indeed this ship shall be to float thy flag on high.
  Fanned by the breath of a South Sea breeze, kissed by the foam-flecked
    spray,
  Did ever a child of War awake as this one wakes to-day?

  We bargain not in windy words, and not in idle boast,
  We speed her sliding down the slip, and make her name a toast.
  Remember ye that gaunt, grey wreck on Cocos’ barren rocks [_Emden_],
  Where seagulls pick the whitened bones around the old sea-fox.

  Another link in the steel-strong chain which holds us heart to heart,
  Another hound slipped from the leash to play a winning part;
  Her flag is broken to the wind, her steel has met the sea--
  Dear Motherland, accept the gift we give this day to thee.

The letters indicate something of the spirit of our people, and they
more than touch on the “after-the-war” problems of the Empire. Both
indicate the way we lose our citizens to the United States of America.
And it is, of course, loss to the Empire whenever an Englishman settles
in the U.S.A. Our social interchange with the United States is a snare
for us. The gleam of their dollars is the Star-spangled Banner, and
not the Union Jack. We do not see that, although the Americans speak a
recognisable dialect of our language, they are a foreign people, with
their own national interests. When a man or woman goes there to settle
he is lost to us, and if in the great unrest after the war a great
number of our young people set sail for “God’s own country,” it will
mean that we can add the numbers of those young people to the total of
our casualties. That is clear.

Then we cannot afford to imitate the ways of the U.S.A. The U.S.A.
receive the discontented and rebellious of all nations in Europe--it
is Europe’s safety-valve. Our Irish go there, German anti-militarists,
Russian Jews and Finns, Austrian Slavs and what not. The nature of the
United States is composite and its task is synthesis. The nature of our
Empire is elementary and its task is to keep pure. Canada has made a
mistake in opening its doors to aliens, and especially to those aliens
who would stand a poor chance of passing the tests at Ellis Island.
Canada behaves as if it were left behind in the struggle by America,
as if she had been asleep in the past and was now making up for lost
ground by any and every means. She is virtually accepting those aliens
whom the U.S.A. consider not good enough to take. Through the help of
Tolstoy and the Quakers the Dukhobors were dumped down on Canadian
soil. They have refused to become naturalised British subjects, and
have sacrificed estates to the value of over three million dollars--“in
the name of the equality of all people upon earth we would not be
naturalised, and we sacrificed this material fortune.” They learn no
English, conform to no English rules, nourish no English sentiments,
are lost to Russia, and are no use to us. The same may be said of the
hundreds of thousands of other aliens we are letting in. It should be
obvious that to lose British-born citizens, our own spirit, flesh and
blood, in the United States, and at the same time to take those aliens
who cannot pass the doctor and the immigration examination at New
York, is a woeful and even ridiculous circumstance.

After the war America will be extremely rich and we extremely poor.
She will be in a position to buy everything that is offered for sale.
We must take care not to offer birthrights in any shape or form. That
which we can legitimately sell let us sell, but that which is in the
nature of an heirloom of the British people let us not be tempted
to sell, no matter how high the mountain of dollars be piled on the
American shore or how dazzlingly it may shine in the sunshine. I say
this with no malice against the American people. They are a splendid
people, and they are working out their own ideals. They are carrying
out their ideals of town-planning, marriage-planning, slum-raising,
park-planting, wages-raising beyond anything we dream of here. When I
wrote in my book on America that we British were the dying West whereas
America was the truly living West, I was taken up by British critics
as if I had said something very disparaging about my own people. That
was a mistake. I do not desire to see my own people a Western people,
such as the Americans are, but rather a nation seated between the East
and the West. Some of us fondly think ourselves Western in our ideals,
but the fact is the Americans have left us far behind, and we can never
catch up because we do not really believe in these ideals. But we can
gain immensely by seeing America _go ahead_. Let us shake hands with
America; she is splendid. God speed! Go on, work out your ideals, let
us see you as you wish to be. Meanwhile we will go on with our own
problems and the realisation of our own ideals.

With America on the West then also with Russia on the East--shake
hands! Thanks to Russia, and God be with her also. Let her realise her
ideals and discover what she is; we shall learn from the spectacle of
her self-realisation. And meanwhile we will go on with our own problems
and the realisation of our own ideals.

We who write about foreign countries are the torch-bearers to foreign
progress and the means of foreign friendship. We render good service,
and if our light shine well and show clear pictures it is unfair to
reproach us with a wish to Russianise or Americanise or whatever it
is. Our function is a legitimate one, and, far from confusing or
alienating our readers, our hearts are actually with our own nation and
we help our fellow-countrymen to see themselves as quite distinctive.
Our minds certainly are confused by the writings and sayings of
those stay-at-home folk who imagine that difference of nationality
is only difference of speech and customs, and perhaps of dress, not
understanding that first of all it is difference of soul and difference
in destiny.

To return to the comparison of the two Empires and the consideration
of the colonial letters, Mr. Anderson asks for an Imperial Commission
to consider the “after-the-war” problems, and in conversation with Mr.
Bonar Law I learn that such a Commission is to sit, and there is the
possibility of an Imperial Parliament being formed. This ought to be
taken up warmly by our people at home. I also discussed with Mr. Law
the prospects of emigration after the war. There is a great unrest in
the Army. Great numbers of men have one common opinion that they are
not going to return to the old dull grind in factory and office after
the war is over. They are going in for an open-air life, going to
Canada, going to Australia, or going to take up land at home in Great
Britain. The Canadians and Australians have served their home lands
well by telling the men at home what it is like in the far parts of
the Empire. Our men have a genuine admiration for the physique of our
Colonials. The fine bodies and good spirits of these men speak for
themselves, and then they are full of talk of a rich country, beautiful
Nature, wildness, big chances, prosperity. It is no wonder that the
Englishman wants to go there also when the war is over. There will
be a great readiness to go. The question is what facilities will be
given them to go? How much will it cost and how much land will they be
given, and what status will they have within the Empire? Mr. Law was
not inclined to give much answer to that, and he reminded me that we
wanted to get some more men back to the land in our own country. The
back-to-the-land movement here is, however, of little importance if we
are going to look upon the whole Empire as a British unity and feel
that a man on the land in Australia can be of more significance than a
man on the land in Essex.

I asked Mr. Bonar Law whether he thought that our manufacturers here
would be dismayed at the prospect of so many young men going to the
Colonies, would they not oppose facilities being given? Would they not
feel that it was necessary to keep the labour market overflowing with
labour in order to keep labour cheap? In any case, would they not feel
they needed to keep the men in England? The foundation of personal
wealth is a plenitude of labour. The more hands employed, the richer
the man at the top. Mr. Law did not think they were likely to raise
objections.

The overcrowding in the United Kingdom is much greater than in France
or Germany or Italy. India is also terribly over-crowded, but Canada
and Australia and South Africa are practically empty. The only nation
that occupies the correct amount of land proportional to its population
is China. Russia has double the territory of China, and something
like a third of the total population. And, thanks to cheap railway
fares, the Russian population spreads quietly and naturally. After the
war we must nationalise a steamship service for the use of British
subjects only, and make it possible to travel anywhere in the Empire
for a pound or so, paying for food according to a normal tariff. We
must give emigrants privileges in our own Colonies that they would not
obtain in the United States. We must set up big Imperial works, and
spend time and money in development. We must not relax our rule of the
seas, but go on building an ever better, ever more efficient Navy, and
not underman it. We must live even more on the sea than we have done
in the past, for the seas are our high roads, the connecting links of
Empire. We must get out of the foolish habit of thinking of Canada
and Australia and South Africa as terribly far away. It is a little
world, and there is scarcely a far-away in it. We have to give to our
working men, and to their children in the schools, the consciousness of
belonging to a big and glorious thing rather than the consciousness of
belonging to a little State that is almost played out. Let us think of
Russia with her bigness, her space, her consciousness of unity, and of
the large thing, and remember we have all the possibilities of health
and splendour that the Russians have if we will only face our problems
and do the things which are obvious to all except to those who fight in
the political arena for fighting’s sake.

To recapitulate:

(1) Russia has at least double the white population in her Empire
that we have in ours. Why should we not take steps to transplant from
over-crowded Britain to the less crowded parts of the Empire, and so
get better families?

(2) The Russian Empire is all on land, and is easily strung together by
railways, whereas our Empire is across seas. Fares within the Russian
Empire are cheap. Why should we not popularise our ocean travel and
have cheap fares on the seas?

(3) Russia, through certain natural advantages, keeps her race pure,
even on the outskirts of Empire. Why should we let our own people go
to the United States, and try to fill up our Colonies with aliens
who, in time of war, are ready to blow up Parliament buildings, powder
factories, plot assassinations, and what not?

(4) Russia is self-supporting in food, fuel, and clothing. Why should
not we be?

(5) The Duma is elected by the people not only of Russia in Europe,
but by the people of the whole Russian Empire. Why should not we have
Imperial representatives in the House of Commons--one man one vote for
all white British citizens.

(6) The Russian Empire is a large unity with a growing consciousness
of its own power. Why should not the British Empire realise similar
possibilities of unity and self-expression?

[Illustration: RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA.

MAP SHEWING TRAVELLER’S ROUTE.]

[Illustration]




Index


  A

  Abakum, Pass and Gorge of, 185, 186-7;
    advertisements in, 187

  Africa taken by Attila, 48

  Agriculturists, emigration of, 138

  Alabaster Mosque, Cairo, 40

  Alai Tau Mountains, 90

  Alakul, Lake, 149

  Alani, the, 47

  Alexander of Macedon, 56

  Alexander the Great, 44

  Alexandrovsky Mountains, 90

  Altai, Central, 218 _et seq._

  Altai, flora of, 229

  Altai Mountains, the, 8

  Altaiskaya, 220, 228, 229

  Altin-Emel, Government aid to emigrants, 150;
    the cross-roads for China, 173, 174

  America--after the war, 265

  Amu-Darya, 24

  Anderson, Wm. C., an open letter to Lord Milner, 253-7

  Anglo-Russian friendship, prospects of, 237 _et seq._

  Antonovka, 94

  Ants, ravages of, 129-130

  Apples, the City of. (_See_ Verney)

  Arabs and Semitic tribes, conquests of, 49

  Arazan, dinner at, 184

  Arbitration courts, 261

  Arizona, 255

  Artisans, emigration of, 140

  Asbestos, the question of supply of, 246

  Ascension Day, the Russian, 99

  Asia, a former frontier of, 6;
    the deserts of, 17, 18

  Askhabad, the railway station, 22;
    fall of, 65;
    extension of Central Asian Railway to, 68

  Astrakhan, fall of, 64

  Attila, Huns of, 48;
    conquests of, 48

  Aulie Ata, captured by Russians, 64;
    a mysterious city, 101;
    a former Moslem shrine, 104;
    the native orchestra, 106;
    its cathedral, 113;
    sheep as payment, 114;
    frequency of earthquakes in, 114;
    population of, 123

  Australia, irrigation possibilities in, 255;
    railway system of, 259;
    military service compulsory in, 259, 261;
    federation of, 261;
    the Press of, 261


  B

  Bactrain labourers, 19

  Baku, 10;
    the bazaar, 11;
    the harbour, 12

  Balkan war: the St. James’s Conference, 213

  Balkans, the, 18

  Balkhash, Lake, 149, 203

  Balta, 3

  Baltic, islands of, conquered by Attila, 48

  Barber, a Sart, 181

  Barber-photographer, a, 97

  Baskau, River, 189

  Beaconsfield, Lord, and the “keys of India,” 237

  Belukha, Mount, 228

  Bibi Khanum, wife of Tamerlane the Great, 51

  Bielovodsk, 122

  Blagoveshtchensk, Siberians _versus_ Chinese, 171

  Bobrovo, 229

  Bokhara, Ancient and New, 27

  Bokhara, Russian Protectorate of, 25, 66;
    absence of hotels in, 27;
    scenes in, 27;
    a Mohammedan settlement in, 27;
    houses, shops, and bazaars of, 28;
    its silver coinage, 29;
    the sacred stork of, 31;
    Russia’s hold on, 32;
    power of Mohammedanism in, 35 _et seq._;
    Uzbeks in, 63;
    the Central Asian Railway and, 69

  Bokharese, the, 31-2;
    and the battle of Irdzhar, 65

  Bokharese delight, 29

  Boxer insurrection, the, 171

  Bozhe-Narimsky, 218, 220

  _Brisbane_, the, a poem on launch of, 262-3

  British Empire, the, necessity for consolidation of, 245-6;
    white population in, 249, 269;
    after-the-war problems, 249 _et seq._;
    and the Russian Empire, 249-270;
    expert development of resources necessary, 256;
    a Tasmanian view of future problems of, 258-262

  British Isles, the, after the war, 265

  Buddhism, attempted introduction of, into Central Asia, 49

  Bulgaria, alienation of, by Britain, 213

  Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva,” 239


  C

  Cabbage pies, 8

  Cairo, 40

  California, 255

  Camel-breeding, Kirghiz women and, 219

  Canada, comparison with Siberia, 208-9;
    suggested after-the-war measures for, 254;
    aliens in, 264

  Carlyle, Thomas: “Heroes and Hero-Worship,” 37-9;
    his pro-Russian proclivities, 239

  Carpet-making in Transcaspia, 33

  Caspian Sea, the, 10

  Caucasians, author’s impression of, 5

  Caucasus, the, future development of, 5

  Central Asia, ethnology and, 44;
    races of, 44 _et seq._;
    Chinese attempt the introduction of Buddhism, 49

  Central Asian Railway, building of, 66, 68, 69;
    consecration of, 69

  _Cervus canadensis asiaticus._ (_See_ Maral)

  Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. Joseph, 251

  _Charchafs_, 26, 28

  Chardzhui, 25;
    extension of Central Asian Railway to, 69

  Cheesecakes, sweet, 8

  Cherkask, 197

  Chimkent, Russian capture of, 64;
    the cinema at, 86;
    the bazaar, 87;
    population of, 123

  China attacked by the Huns, 45-6;
    the Great Wall of, 46;
    Russians in, 70;
    the Boxer insurrection, 171;
    land proportional to population in, 268

  Chinatown, New York, 26

  Chinawomen and maral horn, 220

  Chinese, altruistic, 176, 182;
    a native circus, 176 _et seq._

  Chinese Tartary, 8;
    Mohammedans, 36, 164

  Chingildinsky, 165

  Chingiz Khan, 49-50

  Christianity _versus_ Mohammedanism, 37 _et seq._

  Chugachak, 182

  Churek-cakes, 29

  Cinema theatres, popularity of, 61, 86, 104, 159, 211

  Colonial preference, question of, 245

  Colonials, British admiration for, 267

  “Commonwealth, Prospect of a,” 249 (note)

  Confederation of the Round Table, the, 249

  Constantinople, Germany and, 242;
    Dostoieffsky on, 242;
    and the Great War, 243

  Constantinovka, 132

  Cornucula, 95

  Cotton goods, 206-7

  Crooke, William, letter to author, 258-262

  Curzon, Earl, 237


  D

  Danchenko, Namirovitch, on Russian conquest of India, 238

  Dariel, Gorge of, 5;
    the “Kremlin” of, 7

  De Vesselitsky, M., 208

  Deer-farming, 219 _et seq._

  Dengil-Tepe taken by Kuropatkin, 65

  Denmark, conquest of, by Attila, 48

  _Derevnyi_, 122

  Desert, the, railways in, 17;
    wheatfields in, 19, 20;
    antiquity of, 20;
    its flora, 20

  Dockers, Persian, 12

  Dolinadalin, 3

  Dostoieffsky, Fedor, 210;
    on Russia’s demand for Constantinople, 242

  Dukhobors in Canada, 264

  Duncani, the, 36

  _Dunkan_, a, 120


  E

  Earthquakes, frequency of, 57, 114, 156

  Egypt, the shepherd dynasty of, 44

  Electricity, a Caucasian contract for, 4

  Emigrants, house-building by, 153-4;
    a suggested export tax on, 259

  Emigration, compulsory, 260

  Emigration, Russian, 138 _et seq._;
    inducements for, 141;
    restrictions concerning, 142;
    concessions on rail and steamer, 144 _et seq._

  England and India, 241

  England and Russia: the question of India, 241-4;
    rivalry of empire, 244-6;
    the trade treaty, 246-7;
    the basis of friendship, 247-8

  English, uneasiness of, at Russian progress, 66, 245

  Ethnology and Central Asia, 44

  Europe, after-the-war prospects of, 249 _et seq._


  F

  Factory hands, emigration of, 140

  _Falanga_, hairy-legged, 116

  Falconry, the Kirghiz knowledge of, 200

  Falcons in Bokhara, 29

  Fatalism, Mohammedanism and, 42

  Ferghan, grants in aid of emigration to, 152

  Flint-hunting in the Caucasus, 5, 6

  Fortoug, 3

  Froude as pro-Russian, 239


  G

  Gavrilovka, 175

  Geok-Tepe, 21;
    the railway station of, 21;
    storming of, 68

  Georgians, 4, 16

  Germany, conquered by Attila, 48;
    preparations for Great War in, 214;
    an enemy of Anglo-Russian friendship, 239;
    and Constantinople, 242;
    white population in, 249

  _Gimnasistki_, 214

  Gladstone, Right Hon, W. E., a pro-Russian, 239

  Goths, the, 47, 48

  Great War, the, Germany’s ambitions, 67;
    reception of news of declaration of war at Semipalatinsk, 213;
    Germany’s preparations for, 214;
    England’s unpreparedness for, 231

  Gregoriefsky, 197

  Grosnoe, 99

  Grozdny, 10

  Gusinaya Pristan, 216


  H

  Hassan, Sultan, Mosque of, 40

  Havana cigars in Kopal, 182

  Huns, the, 45, 46 _et seq._;
    of Attila, 48;
    Mongolian, 49

  _Hydrotechnics_, Russian, 190, 193 _et seq._


  I

  Ikons, Russian, 10

  Ili, River, 149, 164

  Ili, valley of the, 162

  Iliisk, 163

  Imperial commission for after-the-war problems, an, 266

  Ince-Agatch, 204

  India and Russia, 237 _et seq._;
    Namirovitch Danchenko on Russian conquest of, 238;
    fear of Russian designs on, by British politicians, 241-2;
    the overland route to, 243;
    overcrowding in, 268

  Indian frontier, the, 8

  Indians, the, 44

  Irdzhar, battle of, 65

  Irrigation, artificial, in the desert, 20;
    engineering students, 190, 193 _et seq._

  Irtish River, 211 _et seq._

  Issik-Kul, Lake, 149


  J

  Jaiman Terekti, 189

  Jangiz-Agatch, 175

  Jarasai, 160

  Jarkent, a jurisdiction of Seven Rivers Province, 148;
    rice-growing in, 149;
    Government aid to emigrants to, 150

  Jerakhof, Gorge of, 3

  “Jericho, trumpets of,” 106


  K

  Kabul Sai, 74

  Kalmeeks, the, 46, 221

  Karabulak, 175

  Karachok, 168

  Karakirghiz, the, 63

  Kara-Kum, desert of, 24

  _Karakurt_, the, 116, 162

  Karasbi, 160

  Katun-Karagai, 220

  Kaufmann, General von, 62

  Kazan, fall of, 64

  Kazanskaya Bogoroditsa, 132

  Kazbek mountain and Prometheus, 7

  _Khalati_, 19

  _Khodoki_, 124, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144, 152

  Khodzkent captured by Russians, 65

  _Khosaïn Tereka_, 4

  Khiva, 44;
    Uzbeks in, 63;
    under Russian protection, 66

  Kief, University of, student life at, 125

  Kinglake: his pro-Russian sympathies, 239

  Kirghiz, the, 19, 45, 46, 74 _et seq._, 116, 221;
    become Russian subjects, 65;
    their system of _pecunia_, 114;
    skill at falconry, 200;
    relieved of military service, 208

  Kirghiz Cossacks, the, 63-4;
    women, description of, 83-4;
    wedding, 168;
    banquet, 191, 192;
    women and camel-breeding, 219

  Kizil Arvat, 68

  Kok-sa River, 175

  Kokand, 63;
    Uzbeks of, defeated by Russians, 64

  Kopal, population of, 123;
    a jurisdiction of Seven Rivers Province, 148;
    a walk to, 173;
    author’s arrival at, 175;
    a quaint clock at, 176;
    visit to a Chinese circus, 176-181;
    altruistic Chinamen, 182;
    boundary of, 182;
    facilities to sportsmen, 182

  Koran, the, Carlyle and, 41

  Kosh Agatch, 218

  _Kosuli_, 116

  Koumis, 80, 81, 86, 199

  Krasnovodsk, 10, 15 _et seq._;
    a Georgian host in, 16;
    siege of, 65

  Kruglenkoe, 174

  Kuan-Kuza, 172, 173

  Kugalinskaya, 174

  Kugalinskaya Stanitsa, 174

  Kurdai, 132

  Kuropatkin, Colonel, 65

  _Kursistki_, 214


  L

  Labour question in England, the, 268

  Larse, a night at an inn, 4-5

  Lava-Khedei, mosque of, 34

  Law, Mr. Bonar, 251-3, 266, 267, 268

  Lepers, 129

  _Lepeshki_, 19, 29, 130

  Lepsa, the, 203

  Lepsinsk, 148, 186, 188, 192;
    “removal” of, 193;
    the information bureau, 194;
    a Cossack settlement, 196

  Lermontof’s “Demon”: scene of story of, 6

  _Lessovaya zemlya_, the, 20

  Liamin, M., 165-172

  Lignitz, battle of, 50

  Linbovinskaya, 132, 133

  Lodz: its production of shoddy cotton, 206

  “Lodzinsky,” definition of, 206

  _Ludzon_, 225


  M

  Mahomet, birth of, 49

  Malo-Krasnoyarsk, 218

  Maly Narimsky, 220

  Mankent, 92

  Maral, the country of the, 218 _et seq._

  Maral deer horns, 219 _et seq._

  _Maralnik_, cost of construction of a, 223

  Mare’s milk. (_See_ Koumis)

  Marlowe on Tamerlane the Great, 52

  Mecca, Mohammedan pilgrimages to, 36

  Medvedka, 220;
    a maral farm at, 222

  Melba, Madame, 261

  Merke, 117

  Merv, fall of, 66;
    Central Asian Railway extended to, 69;
    annexation of, England’s attitude on, 237

  Mesopotamia, a holy war in, 67

  “Midsummer Night among the tent-dwellers,” 184 _et seq._

  Milner, Lord, 253;
    an open letter to, 253-7

  Mogul. (_See_ Mongol)

  Mohammedanism and Mohammedan cities, 35 _et seq._;
    Mecca pilgrimages, 36;
    Cairo, 40;
    the Koran, 41;
    fatalism and, 42;
    characteristics of, 42-3;
    birth of Mahomet, 49.
    (_See also_ Bokhara)

  Mongolia, Russians in, 70

  Mongolian brick tea, 198;
    Huns, 49

  Mongols, the, 47

  Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca, 36


  N

  Narimsky Mountains, 218

  Naturalisation, the question of, 260

  Navy, the, necessity for increasing, 268

  Nazimof, M., 126 _et seq._

  Nevsky, Alexander, 63

  Nikanorovitch, Mikhail, 223 _et seq._

  Nikolaevski, 160

  Nomadic tribes, 44 _et seq._

  North Caucasian oilfields, 10

  Northern Persia, Russians in, 70

  Novy Troitsky, 122


  O

  Oil region of the Caucasus, 10

  Orenburg falls into Russian hands, 65

  Osmanli, the, 46

  Ossetines, 4, 5, 6, 47

  Oxus, the, 24;
    a State service of steamers on, 69


  P

  Pamir, 8, 63;
    grants to emigrants, 152

  Passports, 15, 32

  Pavlovska, Zoe, a pilgrimage to tomb of Bibi Khanum, 53-4

  Paynim, the, 37

  _Pecunia_, 114

  Pekin, siege of, 50

  Persia, roses in, 20 _et seq._;
    its future, 243

  Persian dockers, 12

  Persians, the, 44, 45

  Petrovsk, 10

  Photographs and free shaves, 97

  Pigs’ liver, black, 4

  Pishpek, fall of, 64;
    population of, 123;
    a meeting with a Government topographer, 126;
    climate of, 128;
    skin disease in, 129;
    a jurisdiction of the Seven Rivers Province, 148;
    Government grants for emigrants, 150

  Police, Russian, 177

  Polovinka, 174

  Porters, Russian, 11, 12

  _Proletkas_, 27

  Prometheus, legend of, 7

  Przhevalsk, 148


  R

  Railway concessions and fares for emigrants, 144 _et seq._

  Railways, Russian, 17, 18, 56, 68 _et seq._, 244, 250, 268;
    scenes at stations, 19, 20;
    British distrust of Trans-Persian Railway, 243

  Rice-growing, 149

  “Ride to Khiva,” Burnaby’s, 239

  River charges for emigrants, 147

  Romanovskaya, 203

  Rome burned by the Goths, 48;
    sacked by the Vandals, 48

  Roses, Persian, 20 _et seq._

  “Round Table,” the, 249 (note)

  Russia, English entente with, 8;
    railway systems of, 17, 18, 56, 68 _et seq._, 244, 250, 268;
    conquered by Attila, 48;
    rise of, 64 _et seq._;
    colonisation of, 66 _et seq._, 70 _et seq._;
    powers of chief of police in, 177;
    mobilisation of, 234;
    her possible designs on India, 237;
    future of her empire, 244 _et seq._;
    exports of, 244-5;
    the question of a trade treaty, 247;
    the white population in, 249, 269

  Russia and England: the question of India, 241-4;
    rivalry of Empire, 244-6;
    the trade treaty, 246-7;
    the basis of friendship, 247-8

  Russia and India, and prospects of Anglo-Russian friendship, 237
      _et seq._

  Russian card games, 195;
    colonies: provinces open to colonisation, 138;
      information to intending colonists, 138;
      colonisation, 155;
    exports: the Tariff Reform view of, 245

  Russian Central Asia, capital of, 57 _et seq._;
    commercial travellers in, 123-4

  Russian Empire, the, and the British Empire, 249-70

  Russian Turkestan, Uzbeks in, 63


  S

  St. James’s Conference, the, 213

  Salt steppes, the, 10, 15, 17

  Samarkand, the grave of Timour, 44;
    conquest of, 50;
    an impressionist poem on, 53;
    a Mohammedan centre, 55;
    foundation of, 56;
    Russian occupation of, 65;
    and the Central Asian Railway, 69;
    Government inducements to emigrants, 152

  San Francisco, a Chinese underground city in, 171

  Sandbanks, 18

  Saracens, the, 47

  Sarajevo tragedy, the, 212

  Sarts, the, 26;
    in Samarkand, 56;
    natives of Tashkent, 59-60;
    their orchestra: music from 10-ft. horns, 106

  Scandinavia, Attila’s conquest of, 48

  Scythia, 45

  Semipalatinsk, 207;
    Dostoieffsky in exile at, 210;
    shops of, 210-211;
    and the Sarajevo tragedy, 212-213

  Semiretchenskaya Oblast. (_See_ Seven Rivers Land)

  Semi-retchie, Northern, plain of, 186

  Semitic tribes, with Arabs, conquer Persia, etc., 49

  Serbia and the assassination of the Archduke of Austria, 212-213

  Sergiopol, population of, 123;
    shops of, 205;
    a commercial traveller’s experiences in, 205-6

  Seven Rivers Land, Russian penetration and occupation of, 64, 116,
      148;
    fauna of, 116;
    its troika, 117 _et seq._;
    climate of, 149;
    Government grants to emigrants, 141,150;
    taxes, 151;
    military service, 151;
    timber, 151;
    cinema shows in, 159;
    the Pass and Gorge of Abakum, 185, 186-7

  Shakespeare’s burlesque on Tamerlane the Great, 52

  _Shashleek_, 105

  Shaving extraordinary, 181-2

  Sheep as payment for goods purchased, 114

  Siberia, value of land in, 141;
    an old-established Russian colony, 207;
    compared with Canada, 208-9;
    population of, 209

  Sirdaria, deserts of, 8;
    author at, 74;
    a Kirghiz settlement at, 75 _et seq._;
    Government grants to emigrants, 152

  Skobelef, General, reduces Geok-Tepe, 21;
    in Transcaspia, 65

  _Skobelef_, the, 13

  South Africa, irrigation possibilities in, 255

  Southern Siberia, steppes of, 8

  Spider, black, 116, 162

  _Stantsi_, 122

  Steamship service, a national, 268

  Stewart, Mr., “Boss of the Terek,” 4

  Storks in Bokhara, 31

  Strikes in war time, 261

  Suffragettes, Russian opinion of, 195


  T

  Table Mountain, 3

  Tadzhiks, the, 44

  Talass, River, 113, 115

  Tamara, 6

  Tamara, Queen, castle of, 6

  Tamerlane the Great, his conquests for Mohammedanism, 50;
    Emperor of Asia, 51, 63;
    Marlowe on, 52;
    conquest of India and Eastern Russia, 52

  Tariff reform and Russian exports, 245

  Tartars, enemies to Christians, 37;
    rising of the, 49

  Tashkent, 57 _et seq._;
    water-supply of, 57-8;
    muezzin towers of, 59;
    an exiled Grand Duke at, 60;
    schools, 60-1;
    cinema shows at, 61;
    Russian atmosphere of, 61-2;
    Kaufmann Square, 62;
    taken by Russians, 64

  Tea, Russian and Indian, 158

  Tea dust, solidified, 198

  Tekintsi, the, headgear of, 19;
    a great fortress of, 21

  Terek, River, 3

  Terek, the “Boss” of, 4

  Thian Shan Mountains, 162

  Timour the Lame. (_See_ Tamerlane the Great)

  Tokmak, fall of, 64

  Tolstoy, 264

  Transcaspia becomes a Russian province, 65

  Trans-Ilian Alai Tau Mountains, 90

  Trans-Persian Railway, the, 243

  Tribes, mediæval history of, 44 _et seq._

  Triple Entente, the, 8

  _Troika_, the Russian, 117 _et seq._

  Tsaritsinskaya, 175

  Tulovka, 220

  Turkestan, cosmopolitan, 22;
    four great cities of, 44;
    value of land in, 141;
    restrictions as to emigration, 142;
    demand for labour in, 152;
    grants in aid, 152

  Turkish tribes, the chief, 46

  Turkomans, dress of, 19;
    one of the chief Turkish tribes, 46

  Turks, the, 46


  U

  United Kingdom, the, overcrowding in, 268

  United States, the, mixed races in, 249, 264;
    loss of British citizens to, 263 _et seq._

  Ust-Kamennygorsk, 214

  Uzbeks, the, 46;
    in Bokhara, Khiva, and Russian Turkestan, 63


  V

  Valens, Emperor, 47

  Vandals, the, 48

  _Vatrushki_, 8

  Verney, fall of, 64;
    population of, 123;
    a jurisdiction of the Seven Rivers Province, 148;
    rice-growing at, 149;
    Government grants, 150;
    capital of Seven Rivers, 156;
    its apples, 156;
    the High School, 157;
    German sausages in, 158;
    newspaper record of cinema shows, 158-9

  Visokoe, 99

  Vladikavkaz, the military road of, 2, 4

  Vodka in Russian Central Asia, 86

  Vsevolodovitch Yaroslaf, 63


  W

  Wages boards, 261

  Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 261

  Wheatfields in the desert, 19, 20

  _Wimmera_, the, 261

  Wolves in Russian Central Asia, 87


  Y

  Yakuts, the, 46

  Yaroslaf Vsevolodovitch, 63

  Yellow Peril, the, 170


  Z

  Zaalaisk, Government grants to emigrants, 152

  _Zollverein_, a, Chamberlain and, 251




  PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.
  F 15.416




FOOTNOTES:


[A] Connected by rail with Tashkent since my tramp across the country.

[B] As the Government never exercised a monopoly of the sale of vodka
in Russian Central Asia the Tsar’s edict did not apply to these
regions. However, I believe the sale of intoxicating liquor has been
greatly restricted by the local authorities.

[C] _Pecus_ = a head of cattle, a beast of the field.

[D] This differentiation in hue is in case the persons holding the
certificates should be illiterate.

[E] Counting the rouble as worth 1s. 6d. At the moment of writing it is
worth rather less than 1s. 4d., but it should improve somewhat.

[F] See “The Round Table,” a review of the interests of the Empire, and
“The Prospect of a Commonwealth,” an extraordinary after-the-war volume.

[G] American value, i.e. £1,000,000,000.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Illustrations have been moved to the nearest paragraph breaks. In some
    cases, these breaks are on different pages. The List of
    Illustrations has been updated to reflect these changes.

  In the Index, it appears that two entries have been inadvertently
    combined into one: Russian card games. The text has been retained as
    printed.




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