I had been invited to a friend’s house, and was for a moment by myself
in his dining-room; there was nothing on the table but the cruet. I was
terribly thirsty, and I rushed to one of the bottles and began to drink
from it, but, my host coming along the corridor and into the room, I at
once put the bottle back and pretended that I had been doing nothing of
the kind. This awoke me. My eyes opened, and I thought to myself: “What
an absurd dream! What a dreadful thing pretending is. Why cannot we be
as we are? Manners is, in a way, pretence. Every polite man who comes
up to you to shake hands, if we only knew it, has been doing something
the moment before as impossible as drinking the contents of the cruet.
Mankind are pretenders. The spirit is truth, but the incarnation is a
mask. The whole aspect of humanity is a pretending to be what it is
not....”
I was rather struck by the thought, but lapsed into sleep again. And
then came my terrible dream. In the depths of my sleep a voice suddenly
cried out the most terrifying words I think I have ever heard, and
they were: “_A great dissimulator has escaped, shut in prison from
everlasting._”
At that I started up from my bed with the perspiration on my brow and
the most hideous fear of the Devil. I felt that some new evil spirit
was at large and was seeking a home in a man. My earlier thought came
back to me--all spirits are dissimulators, whether they be devils
or angels, and we men and women are all angels pretending to be men
and women. But now I knew that some devil from which the world had
mercifully been preserved (from everlasting) had escaped into our life,
and would take the form and the appearance of a man somewhere. I had
intelligence of the Antichrist. And now that we are all in the depths
of this war I ask myself sometimes is there a genius of evil in all
this, has the Antichrist perhaps appeared? Does not the fact that St.
George and the angels (the angels, at least, of Mons) are fighting on
our side suggest that the evil powers incarnate are on the other side?
It was two in the morning; the Sarts had stopped blowing their horns,
there was a breathless stillness. I wakened up the hotel porter and
bade him open the shutters of my windows. I lit my candle, took up
pen and paper, and wrote a long letter home. I took out Vera’s ikon
of Martha and Mary, and put it in front of me. I looked at it and
wrote--wrote, wrote. I told all the happenings of the long day past,
the tramping, the sun, the far away vision of Aulie Ata, the strange
town, the Sart orchestra, the Armenian garden restaurant, the Hotel
London, the fight of the two women, the dream of the dissimulator.
I was afraid the candle would go out before dawn. Dawn seemed a long
time coming. But at last the nightingales began to sing, _p-r-r-r-r_
... _sweet_, _sweet_, _sweet_. A muezzin was calling through the dark
night. How resonant his voice! Somehow it went with the nightingale’s
song.
A muezzin from the dark tower cries
Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.
Again muezzins from the dark mosques of the city. Suddenly the cocks
gave an extraordinary chorus, and I knew it must be near dawn, and a
cart came lumbering by. Pale rents appeared through the willow trees
that hid the sky. My candle grew little and yellow and flickering,
but it lasted, and I wrote on and on, page after page, till it was
bright morning. Then I lay down and slept an hour, and I had saved
myself, perhaps, from fever. In any case, I had lived through a waking
nightmare.
By day Aulie Ata was, perhaps, less mysterious, but there still
remained a sense of remoteness. It was difficult to imagine European
people living there all the year round and calling it “home.” It is
an oasis, it is true, but it might be truer to call it a sub-tropical
swamp. It is fed by a mountain river, the Talass, which flows off and
loses itself in the desert. But there is plenty of water and a great
deal of verdure is possible, a very large settlement.
Aulie Ata has its cathedral standing in the midst of a pleasant
shadowy garden. It has its bazaar, and its trotting-ground for a horse
fair and cattle market. Here were numbers of Sartish shops where bread
and hot meat-pies were sold. Scores of Kirghiz on horseback or on bulls
blundered about amidst cattle and mud. Young men were trying horses and
showing their paces; others were making deals in sheep and goats. The
sheep for sale were tied in long or short knots, threaded by the heads
as Russians thread onions.
As a general rule a sheep was reckoned as being equivalent in value
to a three-rouble note, and many of the Kirghiz had brought up their
sheep merely as money, and when they bought six shillings’ worth of
stuff at some shop they detached a sheep from their coil and passed him
on to the shopman. So I saw for the first time in my life the literal
significance of _pecunia_ as the Romans understood it.[C]
Aulie Ata is subject to earthquakes, and my landlady explained how one
morning she was washing the floor of her establishment, bending down
over her floorcloth with her legs apart, and suddenly she felt her legs
going farther apart--by which lively figure she meant to explain how
earthquakes are felt.
The chief sights of the city were the caravans of emigrants toiling
onwards towards the farther East. Here were no farms for them, no
encouragement given to settle. For there is now no particular political
need for the colonisation of Sirdaria; the Russians are far more
powerful than the native population, and could never be overthrown by
an uprising or mutiny. The Government encourages emigration to the
points where it is politically most advantageous--that is, on the very
frontier lines. The most vigorous irrigation and settlement work goes
on on the frontiers of China, Afghanistan and Persia. The colonists
have a long road in front of them even after they have reached Aulie
Ata. I myself went on with them.
The weather changed whilst I was at Aulie Ata; torrential rain came
down, rain brought down by the mountains, and only deluging their own
slopes and the country in the immediate vicinity. The desert twenty
miles away remained, no doubt, as parched as ever. The River Talass,
in flood outside the town, presented an unwonted spectacle; the wide,
black, diversified, shingly river, the lowering clouds overhead, the
restless wind from the mountains spitting and promising rain, the
emptiness and dreariness of the world all around, except at the place
where the bridge should have been--but from which it had been lately
washed away--and there, an ever-increasing collection of straw or
canvas tilted wagons and carts, and of oxen, camels and horses, all the
caravans of the emigrants, waiting, as it were, for a ferryman to take
them to another world.
I got over at last on a Kirghiz horse, and was pretty nearly soaked
in the passage. On the other side was a more desolate country. It was
wilder, more broken, perhaps a little greener, but there were very few
farms. Even the Kirghiz seemed of a poorer and dirtier type. I bought
milk at the Kirghiz tents and bread and eggs at the post stations.
At one post-house I had a chicken cooked for me. The heat was not so
trying on this road, for clouds had come over and rain had laid the
dust. I had a sense of travelling in the opposite direction of the way
of the seasons. It had been like June in Tashkent, but here it was
early May. Still, the temperature in the shade must have reached 90°
Fahr.
I slept three nights in the open and tramped three days before I
finally passed out of the province of Sirdaria and entered the
Semiretchenskaya Oblast, Seven Rivers Land, the remotest of the Tsar’s
dominions, remoter than the Far East, because there is no communication
either by rail or river. On my right the great chain of mountains
with snowy summits still stretched on, and on my left the everlasting
moorland. More birds appeared on my way, partridges, bustards, snipe,
eagles, cranes. Straying off the road and up to the first rising ground
of the mountains were a species of little deer, called here _kosuli_.
Marmots popped in and out of sand burrows, occasionally falling a prey
to day-flying owls. The jerboa, with long tail and dainty, bird-like
legs, was a pretty visitor, and among insects the green praying-mantis
was noticeable, the cicada a nuisance, and various spiders and
beetles the bane of night-tide. I was constantly warned against the
hairy-legged _falanga_ and a black spider (the karakurt), both of which
were said to have a mortal bite, though sheep could eat them without
harm. Along the road laborious and stupid-looking beetles rolled their
globular homes of gathered dirt.
Slow travelling out here is very featureless, and I grew tired of
tramping all day, the emptiness of the life, and the dullness of mere
sun and road as companions. What was my disappointment the second
noon to lose a lift that would have taken me thirty versts on at the
cost of a rouble. I had just got up from a siesta under my plaid tent
when a countryman came along with a cart full of clover--food for his
horse--and I bargained with him and got a seat literally “in clover.”
We proceeded thus for a mile when we came to a mud-built caravanserai,
and stopped to have tea. Up to this inn came presently another cart
from the other direction. It contained all his wife’s family, the
people he had been setting out to see. They had had a similar impulse
to come and visit him. In that way I lost my lift, and could hardly
share their joy at the happy meeting.
At Merke, however, the second colonial settlement in Seven Rivers
Land, I hired a _troika_ to Pishpek, three horses yoked to an _arba_
(a native cart), the driver a Kirghiz. This is the usual mode of
travelling for Russians on business in Central Asia. The _troika_
stands instead of the train. But what an impression!
The Kirghiz driver, in rags and tatters, sitting on one hip on his bare
wooden driving-seat, lounging to and fro, one shoulder up, one down,
flicking the three galloping horses with his whip, whistling, shouting.
The horses bounding along, neck by neck, over bump, over crevice, over
chasm; up hill, down dale, never slackening (there is no brake to the
wooden _arba_); coming with a great splash on to a stream, the _arba_
just floating on it as the horses plunge through it; out again, up the
bank; what matter stones--even milestones? What a contrast to the way I
crawled along when walking!
We go along roads that are like dried-up river beds, over roads little
better than mountain tracks. Ever and anon I am nearly shot out of the
cup of dry clover and hay on which I am sitting. I am flung against the
sides, I grasp at the stained Joseph coat of the Kirghiz, I clasp him
round the shoulders.
But the Kirghiz smiles and whistles and shouts again. The horses
whisper hurried secrets to one another in their rhythmical threefold
devouring of space. We go not by versts or by miles, but by leagues.
There are no steamboats, trains, motor-cars, aeroplanes in Seven Rivers
Land, but the _troika_ combines these all in one.
As we go along the level high road the whole country behind us is
blotted out from view by clouds of our dust. We never hesitate as we
dash through market-places and thronged colonial villages. What matter
who is in the way; the _troika_ goes on straight ahead, always seeming
likely to collide as we dash towards other carts or charge into passing
horsemen, the averted horses’ faces breathing into my face as we pass.
The way is always in the view of the snowy mountains and comparatively
seldom in view of houses. It is the land of the tent-dwellers, and
the moors are dotted with grey pyramids and columns, the temporary
dwelling-places of the nomads. Now and then a whole patriarchal family
of the wanderers crosses the road on its journey from the parched
plains up to the greener pasture lands of the hills. They have their
tents and all their goods on camels’ backs; they drive with them
hundreds of head of sheep and goats and cows and mares. They ride
themselves on camels, horses, bulls; their white-turbaned wives, often
four to each man, ride astride of bulls, their faces uncovered, babies
at their bare breasts. Brides--girls of thirteen or fourteen--ride in
extraordinary state in their midst, seated on palfreys with scarlet
horsecloths, themselves clad in bright cottons, their hair in many
glistening black plaits, each loaded with a silver bullet to keep it
from entangling with sister plaits. They also sit astride, and ride
with wonderful grace, as if conscious of being the treasure of the
whole caravan. They are good to look upon.
We pass endless lines of wagons drawn by toiling oxen or little, jaded
ponies, and tended by burly Russian peasants and their plump, laughing,
perspiring womenkind--emigrants going to settle in the youngest of
Russian colonies a thousand miles or more from a railway station. We
have to turn off the road and tumble over the rough moorland in order
to circumvent hundreds of such emigrant wagons. We overtake and
pass the equivalent of whole goods trains--long strings of lorries
and pack-carts and camels, piled with consignments of goods to be
delivered all along the way from Southern Siberia on the one hand and
from Orenburg and Tashkent on the other to the limits of the Himalaya
Mountains. We pass, or, as it happens, get entangled in a mile of
camels, each having on its back a mountain of horsehair or wool, some
twenty couples of dirty camels in a company, each company led by a
Chinese Mohammedan on an ass, a _Dunkan_.
We pass the mud-walled, mud-domed, ace-of-spade-like tombs of the
Kirghiz; we pass ruins of ancient towers, battered caravanserais.
We escape from the desert into a sort of artificial oasis made by
irrigation--the Russian village or Cossack _stanitza_. We change horses.
At nightfall I overtake a lady going to the town where her sweetheart
lives. She is in a hurry that brooks no delay. There are only horses
for one, so I offer her a place in my _arba_. She is accompanied by
many boxes and bags. She wants to go on all night, no matter----
[Illustration: “PAST THE RUINS OF ANCIENT TOWERS”]
Twilight turns to darkness, the moon comes out fair and large,
opposite the setting sun. The clouds are lit with gentle light and a
faint colouring. The _troika_ goes on and on. I lie full length in
the _arba_, my head on a pillow which my companion has lent me, and I
look up at the sky. The night is gentle and touching. The Kirghiz is
silhouetted above us; the moon is now shining full upon us; in a
moment it is cut off by the black line of the roof of the cart, but
even then the sky is the more beautiful for a hidden presence. We sit
up and look into the night landscape.
The moon gives glimmering illumination to squads of poplars, waving
cornfields, silver streams, the thatched roofs of cottages, mud huts.
The nightingale sings the short night through, owls hoot, dogs rush out
at us as if they were fired from farm-yards, but the laconic driver
flicks them with his long whip when they get near the horses’ legs, and
they fall each into the rear and slink back to the dark yards whence
they came.
We leave behind populous villages, and issue on to the moors. Night
hides the scarlet poppies, but the air contains their odours. The moon
no longer stands over the black mound of the horizon, but has climbed
over the zenith. The cocks are crowing, my companion is sleeping, the
bells of the _troika_ are chingle-dingling, chingle-dangling all the
time.
We have to change horses, however. We get a samovar in the waiting
time, and Zinaida--such is her name--becomes an excited chatterbox. It
is only fifty miles to her goal and her sweetheart. She tells me how
she met him, what sort of life they will lead when they are married,
the name of their first boy, should they have one.
Two scalding glasses of tea, and then into the _arba_ once more,
with fresh horses, and a new Kirghiz driver wakened up to take us.
Zinaida’s boxes are corded on securely, her bandboxes are better
bestowed away, she makes a more comfortable arrangement of quilts and
pillows, and we lie back and both fall asleep.
When next we change horses sun pales the stars. It is the last change.
Twenty miles more and our winged chariot flies up the courtyard of the
town post-house. I am stiff. Zinaida, however, is as fresh and nimble
as a young deer. A young man with a pallid face is waiting for her on
the post-house steps, and she jumps down to him in a trice, and he
folds her in his arms and kisses her.
We passed through Bielovodsk and Novy Troitsky, the latter being an
extensive Cossack station, where all the village men have red stripes
on their trousers, and where even the little boys riding the horses in
from the steppe have red-striped breeches cut down from father’s. The
Cossacks are soldiers first and peasants only second or third. Whilst
farming they are understood to be “on leave,” and when war breaks out
they are at once at the direct service of the Tsar on the field of
battle. Novy Troitsky was a Cossack camp in the days of the conquest of
Central Asia, and when pacification was consummated the Cossacks were
invited to send for their sweethearts, wives, mothers, families, and
settle on the pick of the land chosen out for them by the Government.
There are many such settlements; they are called _stantsi_, or
stations, whereas the other settlements are called _derevnyi_, villages.
On the whole, Seven Rivers Land seemed to be more fruitful than
Northern Sirdaria. The settlements were very large ones; there were
many enormous villages with schools, churches, big general stores and
several thousand inhabitants. Pishpek, however, was not quite so large
as Aulie Ata. The populations of the colonial towns on my route may
give an idea of these growing agricultural communities:
_Inhabitants_
Chimkent 64 versts from railway station 15,756
Aulie Ata 242 ” ” ” 19,052
Pishpek 505 ” ” ” 16,419
Verney 743 ” ” ” 81,317
Kopal 1,102 ” ” ” 3,966
Sergiopol 1,352 ” ” ” 2,261
These figures are taken some years ago, and probably twenty per cent.
should be added to the numbers now. These are the biggest.
* * * * *
The towns of this colony are not connected with Western Europe either
by rail or waterway, and there is an unexampled provincialism in
the country. The people are far away by themselves, and they have
consequently developed a distinctive local patriotism. The Central
Asian pioneers are great talkers about their own country, and they are
proud of everything that marks it out as different from Russia and
the rest of the world. They are proud of its vast empty spaces, its
mountains, its wild beasts and birds, its tigers, wild boars, aurochs,
wild goats, its falcons, flamingos, partridges; proud of the Kirghiz,
of the tortoises, of the camels--in fact, of anything and everything
that seems to mark the country as original. Its people are all hunters.
The engineer, the “topograph,” the “hydro-technic,” the land surveyor,
the Cossack, the peasant colonist, all carry the gun. The towel-hooks
and hat-pegs in their houses are goat horns and antlers. The words of
the colonists’ mouths run out in hunting-stories. All journeys are made
on horseback or by post-horses, and the people are always moving to and
fro. Even the colonists shift about from one settlement to another--by
arrangement with the colonisation authorities.
I met many people on my journey: two _khodoki_, foot messengers from a
village in Kursk government, sent by the villagers to spy out the land
and choose a plot for colonisation, but now hastening back in order
to be home by St. Peter’s Day and the cutting of the barley. Land was
scarce with them; all in the hands of the landowners. The population
increases--so many children always are born--but the free land does
not increase. The two _khodoki_ had not, however, found what they
wanted in Semi-retchie, and were returning to Kursk with a tale of
disillusionment. “They told us it was heaven out here, and you reaped
harvests just after throwing out the seed. But it appears there is as
much work here as there,” said they.
I met a commercial traveller, a “_voyageur_, the representative of a
certain firm,” as he called himself. He was travelling post-horses,
and had a large chest of travelling samples, which was roped on to
the back of his _britchka_. He was carrying Moscow cottons in bright
assortments of colours and patterns, and when he came to a town where
there were ten cotton shops he went into each rapidly and deposited a
complete set of his samples, and left them with the shopkeepers for an
hour or so while he had his dinner and had a shave and a bath. In that
way he met me, resting while the shopowners and their friends discussed
his goods. Commercial travellers in tea, sugar, cotton, china, ironware
and other dry goods were very frequent on the road, but were mostly
Tartars or Armenians.
I also met a boy going home from the University of Kief, going home to
Verney, and in a tremendous hurry to get back to his mother and the
girl he left behind him a year ago. He was “agin the Government,” and
imagined that England was ahead of Russia in every way, and wondered
what the English would not have done with Central Asia had it been
theirs. “Just think of the wealth in these mountains,” said he. “Just
imagine it; we have not one mine in this vast territory twice the size
of Germany. We have only one factory--a lemonade factory.”
“Its destiny seems to be agricultural,” said I.
“What is student life like at Kief?” I asked. “Do you meet together
much? Are there debates, literary discussions? What’s in the air?”
He could not tell me if there was anything in the air. Life was duller
there than formerly. The students kept more to themselves; but they
had a _Semi-retchinsky_ club. All students from Seven Rivers lived
together, and they had musical evenings and dances. It was pleasant;
the _Semi-retchenski_ were great patriots in their way.
At Pishpek I had a delightful meeting with a Government
topographer--Nazimof, a man of thirty, of gentle birth, elegant,
graceful, old-fashioned. I met him at an inn. I had been put into his
room by a grasping landlady who would not confess she was full up and
could take no more visitors. After somewhat of a “scandal,” raised by
the topographer, it was agreed that I should share his room. Every
corner was occupied with his professional equipment--long iron map
cases with padlocks, chests of instruments, tent poles, carpet chairs,
rolls of canvas, boxes of books, papers and clothes.
“Excuse all this,” said he. “I am taking it up into the mountains as
soon as I get news that the snow has melted a little.”
He explained that he was on Government service, charting maps. He
was going to live the whole summer up among the mountain passes and
literally bathe in snow. He would rig up his tents by the aid of the
Kirghiz, hunt, shoot, survey, chart, discover, without any other
fellow-European with whom to share fellowship.
We spent two days together in Pishpek, and talked of many things. His
brother had been sent to Jerusalem this year by the Orthodox Palestine
Society to inquire into the conditions under which the peasants
journeyed and the exploitation of the aged pilgrims by the steamship
company and the Greek monks. He had brought back just such a tale of
woe and of happiness as I had myself to tell after my pilgrimage. A
good deal is going to be done to better the conditions of the pilgrims’
journey, and there is even a proposal that the Government take the
pilgrims on their own boats. I wondered whether it was worth while
interfering, and I told my own experiences on that journey and gave my
impression; the telling introduced me.