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]