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.