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]