appalling sunset--through a barrel-shaped thundercloud into a sea
of fire; and directly the sun went below the horizon the lightning
became visible in the cloud, and I watched it running through the dark
veils of vapour in ropes and loops and flying lassos of silver. The
thunder rolled lugubriously, and far away I could see the rain pouring
in continuous flood, the black fringe of the cloud torn from heaven
down to earth. I wondered had I not better pack up and go down to the
village. But a little wisp of clear sky, containing one pale star,
expanded itself slowly and drove away the great lightning-riven barrel
and banished every cloud, and it was clear and the thunder was not, and
the night was dry and starry. Dawn next morning was clear and cold,
and at the sound of cart-wheels on the highway below me I gladly took
the road again--quick march to get warm. In an hour, however, the sun
was already too ardent a friend, and I took shelter in a caravanserai,
a cubical mud hut with neither chair nor table, and from the samovar
steaming on the floor I prepared my morning tea--put some tea from a
packet in my knapsack into my pot, and then filled up with boiling
water from the samovar. The village street outside was full of life,
crowded with wagons and wagoners standing half in the bright new light
of day and half in the deep, damp shadow of mud walls and banks. I sat
down opposite the village school. The school door was wide open, and I
saw all the village children sitting in desks round the mud-built room.
There were about thirty children, and they were a pretty sight, the
boys in turkey-red cotton trousers, the girls in red frocks, with their
black hair in plaits. There was only one row of desks, but it went
right round the room. In the middle space were two teachers squatting
on a carpet spread on the floor. Each and every child was saying his
lessons at the top of his voice, and sing-song--but not the same thing,
all different, according to the page the boy or girl was at, some far
behind, another far in front. These were all Sart children.
I walked all day after this with a damp towel hanging from under
my hat, and as fast as the towel dried I made it wet again from my
water-bottle. Everyone on the road was thirsty and hungry, and I said
to myself: “The next village is called Cornucula; let’s hope it will
turn out to be Cornucopia!” And it was indeed a horn of plenty, and I
shared there a roast chicken and a pitcher of milk with a companion of
the road, a poor old horseman who had a horse but who had no money, and
was begging his way home to Aulie Ata.
“How much did you give for your horse?” said I.
“It cost thirty-five roubles originally, with saddle and bridle and
bags. I don’t know what it’s worth now. It’s peaceful, that’s the main
thing, and it lives on grass.”
This is really the country where wishes are horses, for you see beggars
riding. What a lot of wishes astray on these mountains!
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Looking for a job.”
“Where?”
“On the new railway.”
“Couldn’t you get one?”
“No; there were thousands waiting, and they only took on two hundred,
and these at the lowest wage piece-work.” He mentioned some figure the
cubic foot.
“How much can a man earn in a month if he goes at it hard?” I asked.
“Twenty roubles (two guineas), not more,” said my acquaintance.
Imagine it--for a job of ten shillings a week, bestial labour, in
the desert, under the Central Asian sun, something like a twenty to
one excess of supply over demand of labour, and the people waiting
weeks, months, on the chance. Surely nowhere but in Russia could
such a phenomenon be noted. There, as nowhere else in the world, is
a tremendous superfluity of white men’s hands. A firm of contractors
has this job from the Government; according to their schedule, labour
was to be paid for at a certain rate--a very low rate--but, seeing the
expectancy and the sad plight of the mobs of unemployed waiting at the
starting-point of the new line, they quite cheerfully make a handsome
reduction in favour of themselves.
After our meal the beggar horseman went off on his nag, and I wandered
through the village on foot. Among other establishments in the village
was a photographer’s, and outside his little house was a notice:
THOSE WISHING TO HAVE THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN MAY HAVE A SHAVE FREE
I went in to the photographer, and saw many photographs of shaven
colonists, all very stiff and serious looking. These were chiefly
pioneers and passers-by, the people of the caravans. It is strange how
unhappy everyone looks in a provincial portrait. The photographer,
however, did a good business.
I settled down for the evening and the night in the sight of lovely
mountains. The sky cleared of wisps of cloud and discovered the stars.
The new moon, born surely that day, was but a hair of silver in the
west, and sank an hour after sunset, followed by a beautiful attendant
star. As I lay on the heath and looked upward, the first constellation
just formed, and it was the seven stars, delicate and lovely in the
half-night, as dainty as a maiden’s ornament. Showers of meteors, half
observed, slipped out of the dark into the dark; long single meteors
left, as it were, phosphorescent trails of light behind them. The
Asiatic mountains drew their cloaks round them, hardened their faces,
and slept as they stood away in the background. It became a night of
countless stars, each star a jewel set in the darkness. The night wind
came waving over the grass, full of health, gentleness and warmth. It
was never still all night, but never cold, and never a cloud touched
the vast glittering sky.
Next night before falling asleep I witnessed an unusual phenomenon.
Away in the north a strange black ribbon seemed to be let down from
a cloud, and it fluttered in the air. I thought of America and
advertisement devices and of aeroplanes all in a second, and then
remembered I was in Central Asia, far away from the inventions of
civilisation. The ribbon came nearer, and as it passed overhead took a
wedge-shaped formation, and I saw it was composed entirely of birds.
They were flying across the heaven at a breathless speed, now in the
clouds, now out, and never breaking up their ranks, the big birds
seeming to be thick on top of one another in the front. On approaching
the line of snow peaks in the south, they defiled into a long, single
line, looking like some aerial train, and then easily, rapidly,
passed over Talas Tau and Hindu Kush to India, as I surmised, just
four hundred miles as they fly. The moon that night was a crescent
of pearl, and stayed a little longer in the sky. I watched her night
by night till she was full grown, and rose in the east the time the
sun was setting, and reigned in the sky the whole night. How pleasant
and serene the night weather remained! All night long the breeze
rippled and flapped in my sleeping-sack and crooned in the neck of my
water-bottle. Far up on the hills lights twinkled in Kirghiz tents, and
in the illumination of moonlight I faintly discerned black masses of
cattle beside which boys watched all night, playing their wooden pipes
and singing their native songs to one another.
As far as High Village (Visokoe) the road remains with the Russians,
and their villages abound. After Visokoe there is forty miles of
moorland to Grosnoe, and then for a hundred miles there is not a
Russian settlement except the town of Aulie Ata. Journeying became
very difficult when the road was over deserted, empty moorland. The
sun poured down, there was not a glimpse of shade anywhere, seldom any
water, and seldom anything to eat. Even the grass was disappearing, and
the Kirghiz everywhere were moving, following the spring, with their
tents and their cattle and their camels, away from the scorched plains
up to the fresher slopes of the mountains. Often I rigged up my plaid
as a tent, often sat in the pale grey shadow of an ancient ruin or a
tomb. The emigrants who tended the oxen on the road were fain to climb
into the canvas-covered wagons and sleep, leaving the slow cattle to
trudge with the extra load through the dust. Russian Ascension Day
came, and the road was perfectly empty--for no one would travel on a
festival. All day long I met but one man, a native on a camel. For a
long time we walked within sight of one another, he allowing the camel
to graze when it felt inclined, but every now and then giving it a
kick, to which it responded by a plaintive groan and a jangling of the
bell round its neck.
One might ask where is Tamerlane, where the warriors, the robbers,
the camp followers of the hordes? The Easterns you meet are all gentle
as children. No one needs to carry a weapon. Where is the old spirit
of fighting? The answer might be found, I suppose, in the thousands of
Cossacks and Russians who, later in the same year, returned along these
roads to fight against the Germans.
The day before reaching Aulie Ata, in the heat of noon, I came in
sight of a green patch on the moors, and sought and found a bubbling
spring of clear water. “Here is the place,” thought I, “to make my
long-deferred cup of tea,” and I cast my knapsack on the moor and
looked around for a spot on which to make a fire. I had gathered a
few sticks along the road in case of need, so I had the foundation
of a little blaze. With what trouble did I keep that fire going till
the kettle boiled, rushing about for wisps of withered weed, hunting
for roots, for a straw, for anything that would burn, and all the
time anxious lest in my absence the pot should capsize. At last, as I
stood over the fire, there were symptoms of boiling, and I was just
rejoicing. Then suddenly all grew black around me, and I lost control
of my body and fell down. Such was the effect of the burning sun on my
neck and head. Perhaps this was something in the nature of a sunstroke.
Be that as it may, even at the moment of falling I got up again. For
what was my vexation to realise, even at the moment that I fell, that
my kettle had capsized. The fact brought me to my senses. I hardly
touched the ground before I started up again to save the water and the
fire. No luck; the water was all spilt, the fire out, and the kettle
lying in the ashes. I did not trouble to pick the kettle up. I sat down
by the spring, soaked a handkerchief, put it on my head, took out my
mug, and drank water--such a lot of water.
What a day! I was to feel the effects of my sunstroke. A great thirst
took possession of me, and when I got to Aulie Ata a touch of fever,
which I had to fight.
Aulie Ata the ancient, the tomb of the Holy One, is a mysterious and
umbrageous city. I became aware of its trees on my outward horizon
early one afternoon, when the mighty sun had just passed the zenith and
was beginning to beat on my shoulders. I had made my siesta at noon in
a tent I contrived with my plaid. I tied one corner to a telegraph pole
and tied stones to the other corners, and somehow made a canopy, and I
lay in a blaze of diffused light on the hard, dry, sandy steppe. Though
the wind blew, it was burning hot, and my right hand was swollen and
smarting, for I hold a strap of my knapsack with it as I march. I drank
the last drain of water in my water-bottle and made the melancholy
reflection that Central Asia is not a land to tramp in. I heard the
jun-jun-jun of camels, but did not care to put out my head to look at
them. I wished I had a tent, or a stout and voluminous umbrella.
Still, one couldn’t stay in this spot all day, so I untied my blanket
from the telegraph pole and the stones, packed my knapsack, and set
off again into the dazzling brilliance of the open country. In about
half an hour I espied an old ruin in the wilderness, and ran along
to it, and found at the foot of the blanched wall three feet of
intense shadow, in which it was just possible to sit and keep in. A
villainous-looking scorpion seemed to be of the same opinion as I was,
but I was too lazy to kill him, so I just flicked him off into the sun.
Oh for some water, or some milk, or some koumis, but not a Kirghiz tent
was to be seen all around. The Kirghiz were twenty miles away up in the
green valleys of the Alexander mountains, where was pasture for their
herds.
On the road once more! And then like a mirage I saw the long dark
streak of Aulie Ata on the eastern horizon. It was twelve to fifteen
miles away, but I thought it to be quite near. So clear is the
atmosphere, so prominent in the wide emptiness of the desert are the
trees of the Russian settlements, that one is constantly deceived as
to the distance of the place in front of one. And I greatly rejoiced
when I saw Aulie Ata; and although I was tired I resolved to get there
without further resting by the way. I walked and walked and my shadow
grew longer as the sun went down in the west behind me; but still the
line of trees seemed as remote as ever. Several times I asked myself:
“Am I not nearer?” and I was obliged to confess that I seemed no
nearer. It was like walking towards the horizon. “There is something of
magic about this city,” I thought.
It was long before I came even to the irrigated fields of the
settlers, and only late in the dusk I arrived at the first outlying
streets of the town, and went in with the procession of cows returning
from the steppe to be milked in the yards of the colonists. In the
midst of the clamour and dust I arrived. As I hadn’t had anything to
drink since noon, and I daren’t touch the water of the irrigation
canals, I was just about as thirsty as it is possible to be. I
determined to stop at the first caravanserai, and there I had a big
teapot and five or six little basins of tea and a bottle of koumis,
and I stopped at the next caravanserai and had a bottle of lemonade
and seltzer water. Tired as I was, however, I did not seek a night’s
lodging, but went first to the post office, about two miles from
the entrance to the town, and I obtained the telegram I knew would
be waiting for me from Russia. I had arranged a little code so that
certain things I wanted to know could easily be told me “by wire.”
Letters take weeks. It had been pleasant to look at the wires by the
roadway as I walked and reflect that a message to me was, perhaps,
winging its way past me. And, sure enough, at the little post office my
telegram was waiting.
After the post office I found a place at which to stay, a Russian inn
called the Hotel London; and so, to justify its name, took a room in it
and felt glad to have reached a city, even Aulie Ata the ancient.
Aulie Ata is a strange town hid behind the foliage of its long lines
of trees. The running water courses along the canals, and, as at
Chimkent and Tashkent, bull-frogs croak in chorus. The foundation of
the settlement is Mohammedan. It was once a great holy place of the
Moslems, the shrine of some antique teacher. But Russia has taken the
upper hand and given a different aspect. There are scores of mosques
lifting their slender minarets above the verdure of the trees, but most
of the houses are Russian houses. And there are hotels, cinema shows,
restaurants, theatres, as well as farmhouses, shops, _sarais_, mud
dwellings, and fixed Kirghiz tents.
Darkness had long since settled down on the town when I went forth to
find a restaurant. Here every restaurant is a _sad_, or garden. It is
fenced with bamboo; the tables are set among flower-beds and gravel
paths, and there is trellis-work with festoons of greenery hanging from
it, strange light and shade betwixt the moonlight and the lamplight and
the darkness.
I found a garden kept by an Armenian, and had dinner by myself at a
table under a fruit-laden cherry tree luridly illumined and yet only
partially illumined by the blaze of a huge spirit lamp. Moths whirred
into vision and descended towards the white table-cloth, and heavy
beetles and locusts stunned themselves against the spirit lamp, and all
manner of winged vermin and midget danced in the light which seemed to
hang like drapery from the tree.
[Illustration: THE NATIVE ORCHESTRA: SEE THE MEN WITH THE TEN-FOOT
HORNS, “TRUMPETS OF JERICHO” AS THE RUSSIANS CALL THEM]
A waiter had taken my order, and a cook far away was cooking what I
had ordered, and I sat and rested and considered the day which at noon
had been ablaze in my improvised tent on the steppe and at night was
here in a lighted but shadowy restaurant-garden in a city.
My dinner was brought, and all the time I was eating my _shashleek_
(bits of lamb roasted on a skewer over charcoal) I listened to an
unearthly hubbub of bands--or of fire hooters, I could not tell which.
Every ten minutes there was an awesome silence, and then there outbroke
the blast of a horn, three times repeated, that sounded like the
trump of doom, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_; then came the sound of
bagpipes and a throbbing of many drums, the horns breaking through the
lesser music at intervals and lifting the roof of the sky. This was an
appalling accompaniment to my meal. I had never heard anything like the
sound of that horn:
_Terum--m--m,
Terum--m--m,
Terum--m--m._
It was like the blast
Of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
Which to King Charles did come,
When Roland brave and Olivier,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died!
Like the horn of Roland blown in the desert and heard three hundred
leagues away. After dinner, I went off to find by ear the origin of
this hubbub. I went along towards the sound, and found it proceeded
from a native orchestra standing on the roof of a circus building. Here
two tall Sarts held in their hands horns ten feet long. They lifted
these horns to the sky and balanced them on their lips; they lowered
them and blasted their music over the roofs of the houses of the city;
they presented them at the heads of the crowd of sightseers, and made
many put their fingers to their ears and walk away: it was a terrifying
and astonishing noise. It was wonderful, however, the effect of the
three angles at which the horns were blown. You felt the first one
went right over the town, it was a voice from the stars, it leapt from
the dark emptiness of the desert on one side to the dark emptiness of
the desert on the other side of the city; the second, blown at the
people’s heads, was in the town and at the town, and caused the houses
to tremble; the third was blown, as it were, to the dead.
These horns are traditional instruments of the Sarts, though it is
said there are only a few men alive who can blow them. It needs great
strength, and the degenerating race does not produce such fine men as
it did. The Russians call them the “trumpets of Jericho.”
An astonishing advertisement for a circus. The sound of these horns
was too much for my temperament, and I fought shy of the show, though
I should otherwise have liked to go in. Still, a new stage in my
journeying had been reached, and I sought diversion, found a theatre,
and bought a seat to see a romance of ideal love. There were seven
people in the theatre, and after an hour we were all given our money
back and told that the company had gone to see the circus. I then went
to the cinema to see the much-advertised “spectacle” of “A Prisoner
of the Caucasus,” but I was informed that the “machine” was broken,
and that the next performance would be “on Friday, if God grant”--a
dark cinema-house where by the light of an oil lamp, which seemed
strangely out of place, one discerned a refreshment bar, a cashier’s
box, where should have been a girl selling tickets, curtains separating
the waiting-room from the theatre, and finally three or four hopeful
or disappointed would-be customers. I asked a Russian present if he
did not find in the noise of the horns something very horrifying and
suggestive, and he replied testily:
“Oh, a great deal of noise, that’s all. Very trying for those who would
rather not hear it.”
He did not feel as I did about the music at all, and his
matter-of-factness rather surprised me. The horns had to me the sense
of calling someone, something, and they were literally terrifying.
In a depressed state of mind I wandered back to the Hotel London, and
found the landlady having a nail-to-nail fight with a woman lodger.
Both sides at once claimed me as a witness--the police were coming, and
I would testify. The landlady had broken into the lodger’s room and
told her to leave at once; the latter, a great, big, hysterical Russian
woman, had replied with fisticuffs and sobs and clamour.
The landlady gave a very disparaging account of the woman lodger’s
present behaviour and past career. The woman lodger, under the strange
impression that she possessed good looks, tried to ingratiate me to
be on her side by giving me saucy looks and knowing smiles. The yard
porter had been sent for the police, and all the while there were
strident cries of “the police are coming”--and the horns kept up their
rumpus over the city, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_.
I was sorry my room had no key and that the window was shuttered from
the outside. The police came and ordered that the woman be allowed to
remain till the morning, and a silence settled down on the inn--silence
broken only by the sound of the horns of the orchestra a mile away. All
sorts of fancies possessed my mind and wrought me to a state of terror,
so that I was afraid of my dreams.
What I dreamed that night has probably little to do with Russian
Central Asia, and yet I shall never think of my journey across this
wild and empty land without half recalling it involuntarily. Even if I
believed that dreams had never any definite prophecy or foreboding in
them, this one is one I should take to a dream interpreter. Now that I
know that all this summer a great war was in preparation and the dogs
of lust and hate were being unloosed, I can say to myself that I at
least had warning that the Devil was at large, that an evil spirit had
escaped into the world.
I ought, perhaps, to tell first the dream which my friend G---- told
me before I left Vladikavkaz, when he warned me of a great impending
world calamity. G---- said that one night, after an arduous day’s work
teaching in class and coaching private pupils at home, he lay down on
his couch and dozed. Hardly had he fallen asleep, when three men of
Eastern aspect, dark faced, bright eyed, brown handed, with white robes
from their shoulders and white turbans on their heads, appeared to him
and pronounced six words in a loud, oracular voice and disappeared. A
second time they appeared and did the same. A third time they appeared
and pronounced them, and this time one of them took up a pen and made
as if to write. The words were not Russian, or, indeed, any language
which G---- knew, but after the third apparition and disappearance he
wakened up with a start and at once picked up an exercise-book and
wrote the words down. They were: _Imaktúr nites óides ilvéna varen
cevertae_. G---- had never been a student of the occult before, but
this caused him to consider. I begged G---- to write them down for me
and let me see how they looked in black and white.
“Well, what do they mean?” I asked.
“I cannot yet be sure,” said G----. “They are certainly part of
a language. Of that I am convinced. I have consulted many great
linguists, and whilst they cannot say what language it is or where its
lingual affinities are to be found, they all agree that it has the
nature of real language. I have thought, as I lived in the Caucasus
in the midst of so many Eastern tribes, that it might conceivably
be intelligible to one or other of them. I have questioned Ingooshi,
Ossetini, Khevsuri, but none recognised any likeness to any tongue they
had ever heard in the mountains. I have been to Petersburg, Berlin,
Paris to try and find out what the words meant, and all to no avail.
Specialists were most sympathetic, but could tell me nothing. However,
since then I have made a profound study of occult language, and have
arrived at some understanding of the significance of the dream. All I
can tell you is that a world calamity is coming, a great cataclysm or
natural subversion. We may expect great earthquakes. Germany certainly
is in danger.”
The dream I had in Aulie Ata was certainly much worse than this. I
thought G---- rather crazy about this dream of his at the time, and
I listened incredulously to his prophecies. But if I regarded them
flippantly perhaps I was wrong. Certainly, if I held there was no such
verity as the occult I was wrong.
They say that Fear stands on the threshold of the occult world, and as
my dream consciousness impinged upon it I experienced abject terror, a
terror that creeps through the marrow of the bones and lifts the roots
of one’s hair at a thought.
I lay down in my dark room at the Hotel London at Aulie Ata after
the fight between landlady and lodger had ceased but whilst the Sart
orchestra still blew their horns over the city. The bed was a foot
short for my tired body; the shutters of the room were barred; I had
no lamp, but only a bit of candle of my own. After a fortnight spent
under the stars and in the immense open house of earth and heaven, it
was sufficiently oppressing and depressing in this shuttered chamber.
But I was tired with the tiredness of one who has tramped under a
sub-tropical sun from dawn to sunset and has added an evening of town
excitement to the weariness of a long journey.