it large to indicate a town on the River Ili, but though there is
a prospect of its becoming an important trade centre, it is as yet
insignificant, no more than a village, a church, a post-station, a
market-place, and the dwelling-houses of two thousand people. I noticed
new colonists here, using their horses to tramp great slops of mud
to the proper consistency of mud dough for making the walls of new
cottages. So Iliisk is increasing in size, its population is growing.
Most of the houses here were mud huts of the swinging kind, built to
withstand earthquakes, and their roofs were very light and beautiful,
being of jungle reeds of a golden colour, each stem twelve feet long
and ending in a broom of soft plumage. The River Ili, from which these
reeds are cut, is a grateful sheet of silver, the breadth of the Thames
at Westminster, has pink cliffs, is spanned by a wooden bridge, and has
little tree-grown islets. Among the reeds on the banks lurk the tiger
and panther and many snakes. Little steamers go to and fro out of China
and into China, doing trade in wool, but held up every now and then
by the Chinese for extra bribes. In the village wagons and camels are
being loaded with raw wool--indicating the future significance of the
little town as a trade centre. The population is predominantly Russian,
though there are Tartars, Kirghiz, and Chinese Mohammedans. Near the
market-place is a Tartar mosque with a green crescent on the top of it.
My road lay eastward toward Kopal, but before taking it I had my
breakfast at Iliisk--sour milk and stale bread--at a cottage, with
Christ’s blessing, and how good!
The morning was very hot when I set out again, and I took off my jacket
and put it in my knapsack, carrying the enlarged and weighty bundle on
thinly covered shoulders. The land was sandy and desolate, being too
high above the level of the River Ili to allow of simple irrigation.
If it is to be opened up for colonisation, the river must be tapped
much higher up, in Chinese territory, but this the Chinese will not
as yet allow. I met no colonists on my road out from Iliisk, not even
any Kirghiz. Summer had scorched away whatever grass the desert had
yielded, and the nomads had retired for the season and gone to fresher
pastures higher in the hills. How frugally it is necessary to lunch in
these parts may be guessed. It is no place to tramp for anyone who must
have dainties and must have change. On the whole I do not recommend
Central Asia for long walking tours. For one thing, there is very
little opportunity of getting anything washed, including oneself; no
early morning dip, no freshness. It is not as in the Caucasus:
The wild joy of living, the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool, silver shock
Of the plunge in the pool’s living water.
At night I was fain to discard my sleeping-sack, those two sheets sewn
together on three sides; but the beetles and spiders and mosquitoes
made that impossible. On the other hand, the whiteness of the sack,
when the moon shone full on me, always made it possible that some
long-sighted Kirghiz might bring his tribe along to find out what I was.
After a night in the desert above Iliisk I came to a place which was
not a place and was called Chingildinsky, perhaps because of the
sound of the bells on horses galloping through, for scarce anyone
ever stops there, but I suppose really after Chingiz Khan. However,
at the Zemsky post-station, to which I had repaired to have tea,
I made an interesting acquaintance, a M. Liamin, a Government
engineer, architect, and inspector of bridges. He was travelling on
a long round through Seven Rivers and Western China via Chugachak--a
military-looking gentleman in the uniform of a colonel, but much more
sociable than a Russian officer is permitted to be. He was riding in
his own _tarantass_, with his own petted horses, Vaska and Margarita.
He asked me if I would care to accompany him, and we travelled a whole
day together, all day and all night. Whenever we came in sight of any
game the Kirghiz coachman took his master’s gun and had a shot at
it. In this way we brought down two pheasants and a woodcock, to the
delight of the Kirghiz and the not unmingled pleasure of his master,
who could not bear to think of animals in pain. Liamin was inspecting
Government buildings, chiefly bridges, and of these chiefly bridges
long since washed away. He had to report annually to the governor of
Semi-retchie.
“There are two hundred bridges needing repair or rebuilding. I make
my report, and the governor sets aside two hundred roubles. A rouble
apiece,” he explained, smiling. “But what is a rouble!”
We passed through remarkably empty country, but it was on this second
day out of Iliisk that I met for the first time the colonists coming
southwards from Siberia. More than half my journey was done; I was
nearer Omsk than Tashkent.
In Liamin’s _tarantass_ were all manner of boxes and padlocked safes,
map rolls, instruments, pillows, quilts, weapons. There was a soft
depth where one sat and lolled on one’s back whilst one’s knees
in front were preposterously high. It was a jolly way to travel,
and we were both sick of solitude and glad to hear the sound of our
own voices. Liamin was charming. We talked on all manner of themes.
His favourite authors were Jack London, Kipling, and Dickens. Wells
depressed his soul, because he was so pessimistic. It seemed to him
very terrible that it was necessary to kill so many people before Man
would make up his mind to live aright. The World Republic was not
worth the price paid. He had read “The World Set Free” in a Russian
translation, and he could not bring himself to believe that there would
ever be such slaughter as a world-war meant. Mankind was not so stupid.
Though he was a high-placed official, Liamin was all against the
colonisation of Central Asia, which he called a fashionable idea, and
full of sympathy for the wandering Kirghiz, who were being excluded
from all the good pasture lands and harried across the frontier into
China. At one village where we stopped we met a land surveyor and an
old, grizzled, retired colonel who both held the opposite view, and
they belaboured Liamin as we sat round the samovar.
“The Kirghiz are animals, nothing more. The Russians are men. The
Kirghiz are going to China. God be with them! Let them go! Are they not
pagans? We should be well rid of them! Just think of their cruelty;
they put a ring through a bull’s nose and tie him by that to a horse,
and by his tail to a camel! If they want to stay with us, let them
remain in one spot, become civilised, and obtain proper passports;
then their land will be secured to them. But if they _must_ wander
about like wild animals, here to-day and the other side of the mountain
to-morrow, then they must pay for their liberty and wildness.”
A grievous question, this, in Russian Central Asia. Liamin could not
make his way in his argument against the colonel. The future of the
Kirghiz tribes is problematical, but I should say that they were
certain to go over the frontier into China in ever greater numbers as
Central Asia becomes civilised by the Russians. What they will do when
Mongolia and China become civilised I do not know. But that is looking
a long way ahead.
[Illustration: VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING]
At a place called Karachok we saw somewhat of the festivity of a
Kirghiz wedding. There was a great crowd of men--the guests from
the country round about--and they all stood around the tent of the
bridegroom, while the womenfolk, apparently all collected together, sat
within and improvised songs. The felt was removed from the side of the
tent and the cane framework was exposed, so the girls and women within,
all in white and with white turbans on their heads, looked as if they
were in a cage. Kirghiz women are not veiled. They were all sitting on
the floor--that is, on carpets on the ground of the tent. They sang as
the Northern Russians sing in the provinces of Vologda and Perm and
Archangel, in wild bursts and inharmonious keening. The men joined
occasionally in the songs, and occasionally burst into laughter, for
the words were full of funny things invented by the girls. That seemed
to be the sum of the entertainment. A sheep had been roasted whole. A
race had been run for the prize of a dead goat--the national _baiga_
race. About midnight the singing ended, and the guests prepared to take
their wives away and go home; the camels and bulls and horses were led
forth, also the wives. And then broke out a quarrel. One of the guests
had stolen a silver button off the coat of another man’s wife, had
cut it off with the scissors as a keepsake, and she had countenanced
the theft. The wife, being the personal property of the husband, had,
of course, no power to give the button on her own account. There was
likely to be an outrageous fight with cudgels, but Liamin appeared in
the midst of the dispute and calmed it all away in the name of law and
order. The guests mounted and rode away, out into the darkness, by
various tracks, on horses, camels, bulls, their wives with them. It was
astonishing to see the effect of the appearance of an officer among
the angry crowd. They forgot their differences at one look and the
recognition of a uniform. Even the dogs ceased barking when they saw
the sword of my friend and they smelt his khaki trousers.
Our horses had been taken out of the shafts and given three hours’ rest
and plenty of oats to eat. We walked out over the wild and empty moor
together and chatted, came back and had tea, and then got into the
_tarantass_ once more. It was the depth of night before we moved on,
and although we had clambered in before the horses were brought back,
our object being to go to sleep before we started, we went on comparing
impressions. I told him my life, he told me his, told me about his
wife and children and his home at Przhevalsk, of his horses and his
experiments in breeding, of the horse races at Verney, of the joy of
the Kirghiz in racing, the one Russian pursuit and interest in which
they fully share, the common ground of the two peoples in the colony.
Liamin spent a great deal of the year in China and on the frontier, and
had evidently much experience of the Chinese. He considered there would
be a quarrel with China sooner or later through the progress of Russia
in Central Asia. But the Chinese would be beaten. He did not fear their
millions. They were not equipped as the Japanese were.
“What do you think of the Yellow Peril; is it getting nearer?” I asked.
“There is no danger of it whatever,” said he. “Europe is far too
warlike to be in any danger from the Chinese.”
“Do you think Europe is more or less warlike than it was; do you think
it is getting less warlike?” I asked. This was, of course, before the
Great War.
“Yes, it’s getting less warlike, I suppose,” said Liamin. “But it
will be a long while before we are too effeminate to withstand the
Mongols. But woe for us if there should ever come such a time! They
are a devilish people. At first glance they seem artless and childlike,
but you can never be sure what they are up to; they are secret and
mysterious. It is an axiom with me that all Asiatics lie; but the
Chinese particularly. You remember when San Francisco was destroyed by
earthquake the Americans discovered a hitherto unknown and underground
city run by the Chinese, and in it many white people who had long
since disappeared nobody knew whither, people who had been advertised
for and sought for by relatives and police and what not. Wherever the
Chinese form colonies they turn to devilry of one kind or another. I
remember the ghastly things the Chinese did in the Boxer insurrection,
the originality of the tortures they invented. Fancy this as a torture!
A Russian whom I knew fell into their hands, and their way of killing
him was to fasten a corpse of a man to him, and day and night he lived
with this corpse till the worms ate into him and he died of madness!
The Russian villagers don’t mind doing business with the Chinamen,
but always remember they are pagans, and many think they have direct
dealings with devils. I was at Blagoveshtchensk when the Chinese opened
fire on us, and our Siberian colonists drove all the Chinese out of the
city, thirty thousand of them, and they were drowned in the river like
rats.”
By this time the horses had been put in, Karachok left, and we were
jogging gently through the night. The Kirghiz who drove slept; the
horses also almost slept as they walked. Liamin at last, tired or made
drowsy by the movement, nodded as he talked, and fell asleep in the
middle of a sentence. The road climbed over high mountains, the moon
bathed the track and the wild and empty landscape with light. How far
on either hand stretched the uninhabited world! It was like posting
across a new and habitable planet where men might have been expected
to be living, but where all had died, or none but ourselves had ever
come. The world itself poked up, its great back was shyly lifted as if
it were some gigantic, timid animal that had never been disturbed. It
was a wonderful night; quiet, gentle, and unusual. Liamin, at my side,
slept silently and intensely. The Kirghiz looked as if cut out of wood.
I lay back and looked out, my fingers locked behind my head. So the
small hours passed. Night seemed to move over us and be left behind,
and I saw ahead the creeping dawn, the morrow, the real morrow, golden
and lucent on the eastern horizon. The sun rose and flooded into our
sleepy and sleeping eyes as we clattered over the brow of a hill. We
came to the Tartar hamlet of Kuan-Kuza, and it was morning.
XI
ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER
At Kuan-Kuza I parted company with Liamin. I went off for a walk on
the hills; he went on with Vaska and Margarita. I had now reached
mountainous country and a region of fresh air. There were green valleys
and wild flowers, streams beside which I could make a pleasant repast,
and I had a most enjoyable walk to Kopal. There were patches of snow
on the heights, and I clambered up and fingered it just for the joy of
realising the contrast to the heat of the deserts I had come through.
The road went high over a green tableland to Altin-Emel, where I came
to cross-roads for China. An enormous caravan of camels blocked all
the ways here; two or three hundred ranks of camels, roped three in a
rank, roped crossways and lengthways, bearing huge panniers of wool,
but no passengers. Chinamen and little Chinese boys were in charge
of them, and ran among the camels’ legs cursing and calling as the
strings of bewildered or purposely contrary animals threatened to get
into knots and inextricable tangles. Sarts were doing a good business
here, selling hot lunch from wooden cauldrons with three compartments,
in which were meat-pies, soups, potatoes, respectively, all cooking
at the same time over charcoal. Altin-Emel is an interesting point on
the road. Here may be seen upon occasion British sportsmen with Hindu
servants, and two or three britchkas full of trophies and large antlers
done up in linen and cotton-wool and fixed with rope. Before the war
four or five British officers passed through Altin-Emel every year on
their way to Chinese Tartary or India, or from those places, coming
home. Some were out here at the time the war broke out, and were a long
time in finding out exactly what had happened in Europe.
It is very beautiful country, with snow peaks in view in the distance
and at your feet white iris, forget-me-not, and brilliant Scotch roses,
those yellow blossoms thick on thorny stems. Then there are fields of
mullein as thick as stalks of corn after the peasants’ sickles have cut
the harvest. There are good-looking and frequent Russian villages and
Cossack stations, Kugalinskaya, Polovinka, Kruglenkoe. I passed through
a village started only in 1911, very clean, well kept, and promising.
Kugalinskaya Stanitsa was an old settlement, the land probably given to
the Cossacks when the conquest took place. This place was very drunken
the time I stayed there, though now, since the war and prohibition,
that characteristic must have vanished. The Cossacks apparently found
life rather boring; they had a marionette show in the bazaar, lotto
banks and roulette tables, where copecks were risked and bottles of
vodka staked. The public-house was full of singing drunkards. I can
imagine how cheered up the people were when war was declared.
After a wonderful night on a little green tableland covered with
mulleins, where when I spread my bed I must crush mulleins, I went
on to Tsaritsinskaya. There, on the pass over the mountains and the
Kok-sa River, I got my first soaking on this vagabondage, soaked to
the skin by mist and drizzle; but I did not seem much the worse for
it, and dried naturally in the sun on the morrow, visibly steaming.
It was quite like a Caucasus road now, steep, wild, magnificent with
gorges and passes, foaming rivulets, villages threaded with the life
of running water, the paradise of ducks and their broods. The outward
roads were marked by heaps of mud and stones, and on these I went to
Jangiz-Agatch, with its fine trees, and Karabulak and Gavrilovka;
finally, a day over great sweeps of country illumined by gorse in bloom
and yellow roses, over leagues of wolf-hunted moorland to Kopal.
Kopal is 825 miles from a railway station, and one of the last places
on earth; a town without an inn, without a barber; a place you could
run round in a quarter of an hour, and yet having jurisdiction over
an immense tract of territory along the Russian frontier of China. It
was late in the evening when I arrived there, and when I went to the
post-house I found it crowded with Chinamen; Chinamen on the two beds,
on the floor, in the passage; chop-sticks on the table. They were all
travellers on the road to Pekin, making their way slowly northward to
the Trans-Siberian Railway.
At once one of those who occupied a bed got up, apologised, and vacated
his sleeping-place, offering it to me. Despite my refusal, he took
off his blanket and quilt and spread them on the floor instead. His
humility was touching--especially in contrast to my own instinctive
loathing of a bed on which Chinese had lain. Fortunately, I did not
feel tired.
I do not carry a watch on my travels, so the idea of what time it is
gradually fades from the mind. The hour is not a matter of anxiety;
dawn, noon, sunset, night are the quarters of the clock, and they
suffice. But in the post-station at Kopal, whilst the Chinese were
officiously effacing themselves, I found myself idly looking at the big
clock hanging in a shadowy corner and trying to make out the hour. The
face of the clock was a tiger looking at a snake. When it was twelve
o’clock the hands were between the tiger’s eyes. At a quarter-past
seven the hands held the serpent. The clock was very dusty, but imagine
the start I got when suddenly I saw that the eyes in the tiger face
were rolling at me. As I stared the pupils slowly moved across the
whites of the eyes. The pendulum made the eyes roll.
It was only nine o’clock, and I had noticed as I came into the town a
considerable flare of lights, a large white tent, and a notice of a
Chinese circus. A Chinese circus was something not to be missed in this
empty and outlandish country, so I put down my pack in the post-house
and went out to see the performance. It was something truly original, a
piquant diversion after a long day’s journeying in the wastes and wilds
of the mountains of Alai Tau.
It was a circular tent, small enough for a circus tent, having only
three rows of seats around the arena. The price to sit down was thirty
copecks, to stand behind, fifteen copecks. Soldiers came in free, and
there were some thirty of them, with their dull peasant faces and dusty
khaki uniforms. Near the entrance there was a box covered with red
bunting, free for the chief of police and his friends. The chief of
police has a free box at nearly every local entertainment in Russia--he
can permit or forbid the show. There were three musicians--Russian
peasants, paid a shilling a night, I understand--and they gave value
for money unceasingly on a concertina, a violin, and a balalaika. The
public on the bare, rickety forms ringed round the as yet empty stage
numbered from 100 to 120, and were a mixture of Russians, Tartars, and
Kirghiz. All the Russian officers and officials of the town seemed
to be there, and were accompanied by their smartly dressed wives and
daughters. The Tartar merchants looked grim in their black skull-caps,
their women queenly, with little crowns on the tops of their heads and
long veils falling over their hair and their backs. There was a row
of these crowned Tartar women together; a row also of Kirghiz women,
in high, white turbans wrapped about their broad brows. There were
colonists and their _babas_--open-faced, simple-souled peasant women
who came to be petrified by the seeming devilry of the heathen Chinee.
To them the fact that the Chinese are heathen--not Christian--is
no joke, but a fierce reality. They look upon the Chinese as being
comparatively near akin to devils.
Naphtha lamps swung uneasily from the high beams of the tent, and flung
unequal volumes of light from dangerous-looking ragged flames. The
sandy arena and all the eager people round were brightly shown in the
plenitude of light.
The first item on the programme was not particularly striking. A bell
was rung, and a little Chinaman in black came out and twirled and
juggled a tea-tray on a chopstick. Then followed a Russian clown with
painted face, old hat, and yellow wig, who proceeded to be very serious
and show the public various tricks. He had three Chinese servants,
and the fun consisted in their stealing his things and spoiling his
efforts. Finally, he took a big stick and chased them round and round
the arena--to the great delight of all the children present.
[Illustration: CHINESE PRAYING-HOUSE AT DJARKENT]
The clown’s turn ended, there came forward a very handsome Chinee in
black satin knee-breeches, tight stockings, scarlet jersey, and English
collar and tie. He was rather tall, had a big, womanish face, gleaming
teeth, and long, black hair. He walked jauntily in little slippers, and
carried a handful of ten knives. Another Chinaman came out with an old
tree trunk, which he held up on end. A child came and stood up against
the trunk. The handsome Chinee then stood and flung the knives as if
to pin the boy to the wood, and he planted them between the child’s arm
and his body, over his arm, between his legs and beside his legs, on
each side of his neck, on each side of his ears, and over his head--and
all the time as he flung them he smiled. He repeated his feat, placing
all the knives round about the boy’s head, never raising the skin.
Number four was the owner of the troupe, an old fellow in a light
blue, voluminous smock and long pigtail. He conjured a platter of
biscuits and cakes, glasses, a teapot, a steaming samovar, all out of
nothingness, inviting the public to come and have tea with him, and
talking an amusing broken Russian:
“You laugh, you think this fine trick, but I show you ’nother mighty
juggle; took me ten years to learn this juggle ...” and so on.
As the applause dies down the bell rings again, and out comes the
“Chinaman with the cast-iron head.” All the time “the orchestra” plays
Russian dances, plays them very noisily. He with the iron head lies
down on the sand and puts two bricks on his temple. At a distance of
ten yards another Chinaman holds a brick and prepares to aim it at the
head of his prostrate fellow-player. He aims it, but the iron-headed
one pretends to lose his nerve and jumps up with a terrible scream,
pointing to the music. The music must be calmed down. The audience
holds its breath as the trick is repeated to gentle lullaby airs. This
time the prostrate man receives the bricks one by one as they are
aimed--square on the bricks lying on his temple--and, of course, is
none the worse, though he takes the risk of a bad shot.
The old conjurer came out again and danced to the Russian Kamarinsky
air, holding a bamboo as if it were his partner, and doing all manner
of clever and amusing turns. The young man who juggled the tea-tray on
the chopstick reappeared, and did a difficult balancing trick, raising
himself on a trestle which rested on little spheres on a table. Then
came two most original items, the dancing of an old man in a five-yard
linen whip, and the rolling round the body of a rusty eight-foot iron
sceptre.