the arena in splendid circles and waves, and he was ever in the midst
of it. The juggler of the sceptre contrived to roll the strange-looking
implement all over his body, about his back and his shoulders and his
stomach, and never let it touch the ground and never touched it with
his hand--and at the same time to dance to the music. This was a most
attractive feat, and was as pleasant to watch as anything I had ever
seen in a large city.
[Illustration: LEPERS IN A FRONTIER TOWN]
There was an interval and a great buzz of talking and surmise. After
the interval came wrestling matches and trick-riding on bicycles.
A clever little Mongol had no difficulty in disposing of those who
offered to wrestle with him, and a Russian cyclist who rode on his
handle-bars received great applause from the people of Kopal, most
of whom had not seen a bicycle before.
So the entertainment ended, and everyone was well pleased. The juggling
was a great mystification to the simple Russians, and I heard many
amusing comments from those behind me and beside. The conjuring forth
of the steaming samovar was especially troubling to the minds of the
peasant women, and I heard one say to another:
“God knows where he got it from.”
And the other replied seriously:
“What has God got to do with it? It’s the power o’ Satan.”
* * * * *
I returned to my post-house in a pleasant frame of mind; it was one by
the clock with the tiger face, and I took out my sheets and blanket and
slept in a wagon in the yard. All the Chinese were snoring.
I said Kopal had no barber, but next day I found a Sart who shaved.
I entered a dwelling in the bazaar, half home, half cave. Picture
me sitting on a rag of carpet on the floor of a mud hut, a red
handkerchief tied tightly round my neck. A bald-headed old Mohammedan
holds in his hand a broken mug containing vinegar. He dips his thumb
in the vinegar, and then massages my cheeks and chin and neck. It was
queer to feel his broad thumb pounding against my skin and chinbone. He
made no lather, but he thought that he softened my skin with his hard
thumb and the vinegar. Then he brandished a broken razor over my head,
and fairly tore the hair off my face with it. He gave me no water with
which to rinse, but as he finished his job he put into my hand three
inches of broken mirror so that I could survey my new countenance and
judge whether he had done well.
The Chinese at the post-house behaved like Christians, or, rather, as
Christians should, with great humbleness and altruism, giving up the
samovar to Russian visitors, fetching water to fill the washing-bowls,
cleaning and drying the dishes after their breakfast, and sweeping the
post-room floor before they went away. The postmaster’s wife said there
was a constant flow of Chinese, and they always behaved in that way.
Kopal, four thousand feet above the sea level, is in the midst of fine
scenery, and the frontier all the way to Chugachak and the shoulder of
the Altai mountains is wild and desolate. The boundary is marked by
numbered poles, but there are few soldiers or excisemen to question you
if you cross either way. There is a certain amount of smuggling done,
one of the articles brought through from China being Havana cigars, of
which the local bureaucracy is said to be fond.
Sportsmen on the road to Kuldja sometimes put up at Kopal. They
are given facilities to make such journeys and receive honourable
treatment, their names being forwarded to all the postmasters on the
way and instructions being posted in all the post-houses along the
road. It was interesting to read on the post-house walls notices of
the following type:
“There will pass this way” (then would come an English name). “You are
to give him horses and all of which he may stand in need. In the case
of his being hindered for any reason, you will be severely punished.”
These English often possess their own _tarantasses_, and sleep in them
at night. In that way they avoid the unpleasantness of sleeping in a
room full of Chinese. On the whole it is better to sleep out of doors
than in.
XII
“MIDSUMMER NIGHT AMONG THE TENT-DWELLERS”
I walked forth from Kopal on a broad moorland road, and after several
hours’ upland tramping came to the Cossack village of Arazan--a typical
willow-shaded settlement with irrigation streamlets rushing along the
channels between the roadway and the cottages. Here, at the house of
a herculean old soldier, I was offered for dinner a dish of hot milk,
ten lightly boiled eggs, and a hunch of black bread--the typical meal
of the day for a wanderer in these parts. In the pleasant coolness of
five o’clock sunshine I passed out at the other end of the only street
of the village and climbed up into the hills beyond. I turned a neck in
the mountains, descended by little green gorges into strange valleys,
and climbed out of them to high ridges and cold, windswept heights. All
about me grew desolate and rugged. It was touching to look back at the
little collection of homes that I had left--the compact, little island
of trees in the ocean of moorland below me and behind me--and look
forward to the pass where all seemed dreadful and forbidding in front.
In such a view I spread my bed and slept. The hill-side was covered
with mullein stalks, and as it grew dark these stalks seemed to grow
taller and taller and blacker all about me till they looked like a
great wood of telegraph poles. The vast dark masses of the mountains
dreamed, and in the lightly clouded heaven stars peeped across the
world, rain-laden winds blew over me, and I had as lief it rained as
not, so dry was everything after weeks of summer heat. But no rain
came, though the winds were cool and the night was sweet.
Next morning, with great difficulty, I collected roots and withered
grass enough to boil a pot and make my morning tea, and I sat and ate
my breakfast in the presence of Mrs. Stonechat and her four fluffy
little youngsters, gurgling and chirping and not afraid to sit on the
same bank with me, while their mother harangued them on “How to fly.”
While sitting there the large raindrops came at last, and they made
deep black spots in the dust of the road, the lightning flashed across
my knife, the thunder rolled boulders about the mountains, and I sped
to a cave to avoid a drenching shower.
I was in a somewhat celebrated district. The Pass and the Gorge of
Abakum are among the sights of Seven Rivers Land, and are visited by
Russian holiday-makers and picnickers. All the rocks are scrawled with
the names of bygone visitors, and by that fact alone you know the place
has a name and is accounted beautiful. When the rain ceased, and I
ventured out of the cave again, I saw a Russian at work writing his
name. He had a stick dipped in the compound with which the axles of
his cart-wheels were oiled, and the wheels of the cart were nearly
off for him to get it. For the first time I saw how these intensely
black scrawls of names and signatures are written on the rocks. We are
content to scratch our names with a bit of glass or a nail, or to chalk
them, or cut them with a pocket-knife; but the Russians are fond of
bold, black signatures two or three feet long, and they make them with
this pitch and oil from the wheels of their carts.
It was a pleasant noontide on the narrow road, between crumbling indigo
rocks and heaped debris. The stony slopes were rain-washed, the air
fresh, and all along the way these dwarf rose bushes which I had seen
on the road to Kopal, thorny, but covered with scores of bright yellow
blossoms on little red stems. The jagged highway climbed again high
up--to the sky, and gave me a vision of a new land, the vast dead
plain of Northern Semi-retchie and of Southern Siberia. Northward to
the horizon lay deserts, salt marshes, and vast lakes with uninhabited
shores, withered moors and wilted lowlands. I saw at a glance how
uninteresting my road was to become if I persevered straight ahead
towards Semipalatinsk, and I resolved to keep to the mountains in which
I found myself, and follow them eastward and north-eastward to the
remoter town of Lepsinsk.
[Illustration: A PATRIARCHAL KIRGHIZ FAMILY]
From that height, which was evidently the famous pass, I descended
into the pretty gorge of Abakum. The road was steep and narrow, the
cliffs on each side sheer. A little foaming stream runs down from the
cliffs, over rubbish heaps of rocks, and accompanies the highway in
an artificially devised channel. A strange gateway has been formed in
a thin partition of rock, and through this runs the stream below and
the telegraph wire overhead; there is a footway, but carts are obliged
to make a detour. At this gateway and on the rocks I saw a further
intimation of commercial Siberia. Commercial travellers had scrawled:
BUY PROVODNIK GALOSHES AT OMSK
and
BUY INDIAN TEA AND GET RICH
which was almost as if I had seen in the midst of the wilderness
something like “Owbridge’s Lung Tonic: 4,000 miles to London.” Still,
these advertisements of galoshes and tea were scrawled, not printed,
and were done voluntarily by enthusiastic travellers who probably
received no fee for doing such a thing. In England you cut your
Rosalind’s name on the tree; in Russia your own name; in America you
write what O. Henry called “your especial line of graft,” and all the
New World is scrawled with hand-written advertisements of trade. So
in the far-off gorge of Abakum I saw a suggestion of the America of
the future-great commercial Siberia, to which perchance, some day,
Americans will emigrate for work as the Russians emigrate to America
to-day.
I felt this pass and gateway to be the entrance to Siberia, though,
politically, the frontier is about three hundred miles distant. After
six or seven turns the road issued forth upon a level strand of green
and grey--the Siberian southern steppe. Lepsinsk, my next point, was
the first town with a name ending in “sk,” and there are scarcely more
than four towns in Siberia not ending so. None of the emigrant carts
that I now met were coming from the south, but all from Siberia, and
many of the emigrants were Siberians discontented with their northern
holdings. They seemed poor people, and the caravans were rather
woebegone. There is a good deal of land offered to the emigrants in
the neighbourhood of Lepsinsk, most of it contiguous to the Chinese
boundary; but, though it is green and fertile, it is as hard a land
to settle as the plains in the south. The Siberians missed the pine
forests, the shelter and the fuel of them, and it was a sight to see
the straggling procession of women behind the dust-covered wagons--they
had to spread themselves about the moor and the roadway, and search for
roots and splinters of wood with which to make a fire at the end of
their day’s journey. All the women held their aprons or petticoats up,
and gathered the fuel into their laps. It took them nearly all day to
get enough for the fires to boil the nightly soup.
For me, however, it was a green and joyous road from Abakum eastward
to Sarkand, keeping to the mountain slopes and not faring forth upon
the scorched plain that lies away northward. I did not repent that the
cross-roads tempted me to go eastward, hugging the mountains. Long
green grass waved on each side of the road, and in the grass blue
larkspur and immense yellow hollyhocks. I was in the land where the
Kirghiz has his summer pasture, and often I came upon whole clans that
had just pitched their tents. It was a many-coloured picture of camels,
bulls and horses, of sheep swarming among children, of kittens playing
with one another’s tails, of tents whose framework only was as yet put
up, of heaps of felt and carpet on the grass, of old wooden chests
and antediluvian pots and jugs of sagging leather lying promiscuously
together, while the new home was not made. On this road the Chinese
jugglers overtook me and camped very near where I slept one night. I
was amused to see the old conjurer who had juggled the steaming samovar
out of thin air hunting mournfully for bits of wood and roots to make
that same samovar boil in real earnest.
Next day I came to the village of Jaiman Terekti and its remarkable
scenery. The River Baskau flows between extraordinary banks, great
bare rocks, all squared and architectural in appearance, giving the
impression of immense ancient fortresses over the stream. These
squared and shelved rocks are characteristic of the country-side
and the geological formations, and they give much grandeur to what
otherwise were quiet corners. The gateway of Abakum itself owes its
impressiveness to this geological rune.
At a village hereabout I fell in with four boys going up into the
mountains to study for the summer. They were students from some
large engineering college, and, as part of their training, they
had been sent out to study irrigation works and bridges in this
colony. At every bridge we came to on the road they stopped and gave
it their consideration, and made notes as to its structure and its
necessities, and at each village they considered the control of the
mountain streams, the canalisation of the water, and the uses to which
the natural supplies of water could be put. They called themselves
_hydrotechnics_, and would eventually blossom, perhaps, into irrigation
engineers. Their trip was costing them no more than one hundred
roubles--say, ten pounds each for the three months of summer. Their
headquarters was to be a village on a river about a hundred miles north
of Lepsinsk; there they would pitch their tents and camp, cooking their
meals, arranging expeditions, and making good their study. Altogether
about three dozen young students would turn up at their camping-ground,
and make up the equivalent of a summer class.
The four young men had in their protection a lady in cotton trousers,
a tall young woman of athletic appearance and good looks. She
and her two little children were on their way to the husband, a
Government engineer, who had charge of the building of the new town of
Lepsinsk--the nearest railway point to Old Lepsinsk. She was a very
striking figure in her _sharivari_, and the natives collected round her
and stared in an absurd fashion. She told me she had bought the print
for 1 rouble 87 copecks, and made them herself just before starting
out; skirts were so inconvenient for travelling in and collected
the dirt so. But she drew thereby an enormous amount of attention to
herself, it must be said. She was rather a crazy Kate. It tickled me
to think how her husband would pitch into her when she arrived at her
destination. But perhaps I was mistaken, and he was so homesick that he
would not even laugh when she appeared. She was a regular scapegrace,
with light blue, torn, openwork stockings, and button boots, one of
which was fastened with a safety-pin, the other with two shirt-buttons.
But she was very naïve and had bunches of smiles on her lips--the sort
to which much is forgiven. When she tried to smack her children, they
went for her tooth and nail, and the little boy, aged two, continually
imitated someone, probably the father, and addressed his mother thus:
“_Akh tee somnoi ne zagovarivaisia_” (“Don’t stand there talking to
me.”)
“_Bross!_” (“Stop it!”)
“_Pliun!_” (“Spit!”)
I was called upon to imitate cats and dogs and sheep and pigeons and
camels, and make-believe generally to an unlimited extent.
The lady told an amusing story of a banquet to which the Kirghiz had
invited her husband and herself. It should be explained that the
Russian for the head of an animal is _golovo_, and for the head of an
expedition or band of workmen is _glavny_, the adjective derived from
_golovo_, a head. At this banquet in the Kirghiz tent the engineer was
put in the highest seat, and was told that the dinner was coming.
Suddenly a Kirghiz appeared with a roast sheep’s head, and carried it
to the Russian, saying:
“Please, eat!”
“What’s this?” asked the engineer. “The head for me; that won’t do at
all. I don’t want the sheep’s head; you must cut me something more
tasty.”
“No, please,” said the Kirghiz. “You are the head man, and you must eat
the head.”
“That will never do,” said the Russian. But they besought him to honour
their custom and permit the rest to eat, for until he had started on
the head nobody else might begin.
All the engineer’s workmen were Kirghiz, for he was working in Kirghiz
country, in a district as yet untouched by Russian colonisation. The
wife and her babies turned off at a mountain track, and were taken to
her husband’s camping-ground by a Kirghiz. We were loath to let the
woman go, for she had given much gaiety to the road.
* * * * *
Lepsinsk is what the Russians call a _medvezhy ugolok_ (a bear’s
corner), a place where in winter the wolves roam the main street as
if they did not distinguish it from their peculiar haunts. It is by
post-road 945 miles from Tashkent on the one hand, and 1,040 miles from
Omsk on the other--roughly, 1,000 miles from a railway station. It is
high up on the mountains on the Mongolian frontier, and lives a life of
its own, almost completely unaware of what is happening in Russia and
in Europe--a window on to Mongolia, as a local wit has called it.
In the course of the next five years a railway is to be run from
Semipalatinsk to Verney, and as Lepsinsk is the largest town on the
way, it should in justice pass through it. But Lepsinsk is high. When
the news of the projected railway came, the burgesses made a petition
to the authorities asking to be informed where exactly the railway
would be, and they would remove Lepsinsk thither. Everyone who had any
business would transfer his stock. They were informed, and in a year,
or a year and a half, Lepsinsk promised to remove itself fifty miles
westward. Building operations were in full swing on the new site, land
having been allowed by the Government free; and the engineer whose wife
we had met was in charge. If the war does not preclude the continuation
of the railway construction, Old Lepsinsk will be abandoned.
I spent four days in the town in the company of the young
_hydrotechnics_. We were given rooms free at the Zemsky guest-house,
and I stayed three nights there before resuming my journey toward the
Irtish. The students quickly found and made friends with people in the
town. We found a family that came from the same country-side as one of
the young men, and spent the whole evening in a big farmhouse, drinking
tea, trying musical instruments, and singing Russian choruses. Next day
we went to the colonists’ information office, made friends with the
young man in charge, and went and played _pyramid_ with him in the
town assembly rooms; several other folk came in, young and old, and
joined in the game of billiards till we were a dozen or more. After
billiards we all sat down to a crude lunch of boiled and undisguised
beef, without vegetables, but with jugs of creamy milk to drink. The
conversation went on cards, billiards, the coming Sunday-night dance.
Couldn’t an orchestra be made up to supplant the usual gramophone to
which the people danced on Sunday evenings? Had the cinematograph films
come, and that had been so long expected? What would happen if one
showed a cinema film backward--wouldn’t the story be often more funny?
[Illustration: SHEEP-SHEARING OUTSIDE THE TENT HOME]
Sunday morning we spent in the domain of the colonists’ information
bureau, and interviewed peasants for the manager whilst he was still in
bed. What a litter there was everywhere--tea glasses, cigarette boxes,
picture post cards, electric lamps, old letters, forms issued by the
Government, maps--the same in the bedroom as in the office. There was a
typewriter, and I amused myself trying to write English sentences with
the Russian type, there being a fair number of letters in the Russian
language resembling our own. The people who came for information had
various pleas. One was ill, another had quarrelled with her husband.
An old man pushed in front of him a rather downcast young woman, and
commenced his appeal to us in these words: “I recommend this woman to
your mercy. The land which is hers is being stolen away from her.”
She had fallen out with her husband, and had fled to her father’s
house. But meanwhile the husband was trying to sell the land or raise
money on it--at least, so the father said. But we pointed out to him
that that was nonsense; the land was not yet the unqualified property
of the husband, and he could not sell it; he could only give it back
to the Government, and so on and so on. On Sunday evening we all went
to the assembly rooms, and saw Lepsinsk in its Sunday best, talked
vociferously in crowds, listened to a gramophone, watched peasant
girls and young men dance melancholy waltzes--there was no Russian
dancing, but the people were glad to think themselves “European.” I
made acquaintance with the _ispravnik_, or whoever he was who ruled
Lepsinsk, and with the local rich men--a remote, obtuse, provincial
set, whose only interest was cards. They were very keen on playing me
at _preference_, a complex Russian card game which I have generally
thought it worth while not to learn, and I was amused to hear that
they would teach me, and what I lost would pay for my lesson. I talked
a little about England. They got their daily papers three weeks after
issue, as a rule, but they read them as new when they came. Their
chief idea of our British activities was that the suffragettes were
assassinating, murdering, bombing, expropriating, and they chuckled
over the fact that our men were not able to manage the women.
Lepsinsk is an out-of-the-way place, and, as far as the road is
concerned, a blind alley among the mountains. I was much exercised
to know which way I should go next, and I did not want to retrace
my steps to Altin-Emel. The map and my route was another topic of
conversation among the worthies of Lepsinsk. Everyone gave me a
different account of the roads and the ferries. Eventually I decided to
cut across country and take the risk of marshes or rushing water lying
in my path--a rash decision, as I might after a day or so be forced to
walk back to the town and try some other way; but it turned out to be a
perfectly happy decision. On this track I saw more of the Cossacks and
of the Kirghiz, two races in striking contrast, and I spent Midsummer
Night--always a festival night--under very beautiful and unusual
circumstances.
Lepsinsk is a Cossack settlement. All the young men are horsemen,
have to serve their term in war, and are liable to military service
without any exemption or exception. All Cossack families and Cossack
villages are brought up on these terms. The children are taught to get
on to horseback and ride as we teach our children to walk. They learn
the songs which the regiment sings as it comes up the main street
on horseback, bearing the black pikes in their hands. The women,
whose children and husbands go to the war, are patient as the mother
of Taress Bulba. War is the normal condition of life, and the mere
manœuvres are taken so seriously that the opposing parties frequently
forget that it is only a friendly test, and do one another serious
injury. “The Cossacks get so enraged, and they can’t stop themselves
when they are called upon to charge the sham enemy,” said a Lepsinsk
boy to me.
On the Monday morning I said good-bye to the students, and, shouldering
my knapsack, set off in a north-westerly direction to find Sergiopol,
forded the Lepsa river, and climbed out of the green valley where
Lepsinsk lies as in a cup. The mountain-sides were rankly verdant, and
the purple labiate was thick as in spring-time. It may be remarked that
strawberries were not expected to ripen in Lepsinsk for three weeks,
whereas six weeks ago in Tashkent they had been a penny a pound.