down through beautiful meadows, slept a night in the Cossack station of
Cherkask, lying on some felt and being almost eaten up by mosquitoes in
what the soldier host called a garden. In this village I saw a pitiful
sight--almost naked Kirghiz women treading wet mud and manure into
stuff for fuel blocks. They looked astonishingly bestial and degraded.
You could not feel that they had any soul or stood in any way above
the animals. Yet as young women they had probably been attractive and
pretty in their day, and might even have won the fancy of white men.
There was a question whether the wife in _Candida_ who soiled her
lovely fingers putting kerosene into the lamps was really degraded by
dirt, but here was something nearer reality.
I slept on the sand beside Gregoriefsky, and next day went deep into
the desert, into a land of snakes, eagles, snipe, and lizards. On
the Lepsa shore I saw forests of the gigantic reeds with which the
houses and bridges are roofed. Here were leagues of ten-feet rushes
that waved boisterously in the wind as in a cinema picture. I was
warned here against the boa-constrictor; but the worst I saw were
intent-eyed little snakes gliding away from me, scared at the sound of
the footfall. I got my noon-day meal of koumis in a Kirghiz _yurt_,
borrowed a horse with which to get across the difficult fords, one of
black, reed-grown mud, the other of swift-flowing water. All day I
ploughed through ankle-deep sand, and but for the fact that the sun was
obscured by cloud, I should have suffered much from heat. As it was,
the dust and sand-laden wind was very trying. Early in the evening I
resolved to stop for the day, and found shelter in one of twenty tents
all pitched beside one another in a pleasant green pasture-land which
lay between two bends of the river--a veritable oasis. Even here, as I
sat in the tent, I listened to the constant sifting of the sand on the
felt sides and roof.
[Illustration: IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT]
It was a good resting-place. An old man spread for me carpets and rugs,
and bade me sleep, and I lay down for an hour, the sand settling on me
all the time, and blowing into my eyes and my ears and my lips. In the
meantime tea was made for me from some chips of Mongolian brick tea.
The old Kirghiz took a black block of this solidified tea dust and cut
it with an old razor. The samovar was an original one. It had no tap,
and leaked as fast as it would pour. Consequently, a bowl was set
underneath to catch the drip. This filled five or six times before
boiling-point was reached, the contents of the bowl being each time
returned to the body of the samovar.
After tea I went out and sat on a mound among the cattle, and watched
the children drive in sheep and goats and cows, and the wives milk them
all. It was a scene of gaiety and beauty. There were many good-looking
wives, slender and dainty, though they were so short in stature, had
white turbans on their heads and jackboots on their feet. As they went
to and fro, laughing among themselves and bending over the cattle,
their breasts hanging like large full pears at the holes made in their
cotton clothes for the convenience of their babies, they looked a very
gentle and innocent creation. These women did all the work of milking,
and I saw them handle with rapidity ewes, she-goats, cows, mares,
draining all except the last into common receptacles. The mares’ milk
alone was kept separate, to be made into koumis. I must say my taste
rebelled against a mixture of sheep’s milk, goats’ milk and cows’
milk, even when made sour; but the Kirghiz were not worried with such
fastidiousness.
When the milking was accomplished fires were lit in oblong holes dug in
the earth outside the tents--the Kirghiz stoves. Bits of mutton were
cut up and fixed on skewers and placed over the glowing ashes in the
holes. So supper was cooked. I was called into a tent, and there made
to sit on a high wooden trunk, while eight or ten others sat below me
on rugs. “You are a _barin_,” said the oldest man. “You must have the
highest seat.” Seated up there, they brought me about a dozen skewers
of grilled mutton on a wooden plate and bade me eat. I should not have
been surprised to see a sheep’s head brought in to me.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s far too much for me.”
“You eat first,” said the old man. “Then we will eat.”
So I took a skewer and put them at their ease. There were in the tent
the old man, his son, two wives of the latter, several children, an old
woman, and a minstrel. Outside and in other tents were many sons-in-law
and daughters-in-law and cousins, a whole genealogical tree of a
family. Among the Kirghiz all sons remain in the father’s and father’s
father’s family; only the girls change families, sold or arranged for
in marriage. The men all wore hats, or, rather, bonnets, trimmed with
an edging of fox’s fur, and the foxes from whose thighs this fur had
been taken had been captured by trained eagles. The Kirghiz are deeply
versed in falconry, and have diverse birds for various preys: hawks for
cranes, for plovers, and for hares. They hunt the fox, whose skin is
very precious, with eagles. They carry the hawks on their wrists when
they ride, and for the support of heavy birds they have stalls or rests
coming up from their saddles to hold the bird arm, whilst they hold
the horse’s reins with the other. The most interesting man in the tent
in which I supped was the minstrel, a tall, gaunt heathen in ragged
cotton slops; he thrummed on a two-stringed guitar and improvised
Kirghiz songs till the dusk grew dark and midsummer night came out with
countless stars over the desert and the tents and the cattle and the
wanderers.
Asked whether I would sleep inside the tent or out, I preferred the
open air, and my hosts made a couch for me, a pile of rugs over an
uneven thickness of mown clover. And there I lay and watched the stars
come into their places in the sky as at the lifting of a conductor’s
baton. It was St. John’s Eve, a night of mystery and of remembrances.
A young moon looked down on me. In the twenty tents around me were
singing and music and momentary strange illuminations. Inside the
tents the Kirghiz set fire every now and then to piles of weeds, which
flared up, causing all the felt walls and roofs of the tents to glow
like strange, enormous, shimmering paper lanterns, like fire reflected
in silver. They would suddenly glimmer and glow and glimmer again, the
light would go, and the grey-white tent would be opaque again.
All night across the sleeping encampment came volumes of music from
young throats, the songs of the children minding the cattle. The
stillness of the night reigned about this music, and was intensified
by the _dun-dun_ of rusty camel-bells, the jangle of the irons on
hobbled horses, the occasional sneeze of a sheep with a cold, and the
hullabaloo of dogs barking on false alarms. I lay and was nibbled
under by goats, trying to get at the clover, and breathed at by
ruminating cows.
So the night passed. Orion chased the Pleiades across the sky. The
eyes that stared or lay open and were stared at by the stars drooped,
and eyelids came down over the little windows. Sprites danced among
us, tiptoed where we slept, breathed devilry upon our faces and dusty
clothes, and I dreamed sweetly of home and other days.
Next morning I felt the turn of the year and looked forward to the
glorious autumn and the new life coming after the long journey and the
much tramping.
I was up at the dawning and away before the hot sun rose. The old man
of the Kirghiz gave me my breakfast himself, a pot of _airann_ and a
cake of _lepeshka_, and came forward with me, showing me the track
onward towards Sergiopol.
XIII
OVER THE SIBERIAN BORDER
I crossed the Lepsa by a bridge made of old herring barrels, struck the
highway to Sergiopol at Romanovskaya, and pursued my journey along the
sandy wastes and salt swamps on the eastern borders of Lake Balkhash.
The Lepsa falls into this great lake at last. The wind blew up the
sand so that there was some chance of missing the way, and I sat some
hours on my knapsack and shut my eyes to keep the sand out. It was
dreary country, yellow and inhospitable. The odour of the bleached
grasses and herbs was almost overpowering, and food and palatable
water were far to seek. Tall, bleached and withered grasses and white
weeds and dust-laden, knobbly steppe; wind and racing sand--sand in my
eyes, in my mouth, on my body--I felt a most despicable creature, and
questioned my sanity in ever starting out on such an absurd journey as
this through Russian Central Asia. But I saw ahead of me Sergiopol,
Semipalatinsk, and a happier clime. Sixty versts north of Romanovskaya
the road, gradually ascending a long moor, entered broken country
through black and rusty mountainettes, and here was a little crooked
gorge with a stream through it, and it was possible to sit by my own
little fire and make tea for myself once more. Then more moorland, and
heavily scented grass, and enormous bustards, the size of goats, and
skinny little brown marmots, and withered mullein stalks, and comical
blue jackdaws perching on them and cocking their heads to one side
and peering at me as I passed. Then streams of colonists and their
carts. Then an official and his wife, sleeping in their night attire
in their slowly moving _tarantass_, huge pillows for their heads, and
sheets and quilts and what not--an example of the Russians’ gift for
making themselves at home. Near Ince-Agatch I met two Germans going
cheerfully along on foot--as I was--a botanist and a geologist, neither
of them speaking Russian, but feeling pretty well as much at home as in
Germany, more so, perhaps. One wonders what was their fortune at the
outbreak of war. There are certain international pursuits that know
no restriction of national or imperial ground. I do not suppose the
Russian grudges the German making a study of his flowers and rocks--if
he is not spying at the same time. Probably we ought not to lay so much
stress on purely national research in ornithology, entomology, geology,
botany, the ways of peoples, and so forth. Individuals and their work
are dedicated to their nation and their empire, but that should not
keep our practical scientists, collectors, prospectors, students to
a mere portion of the surface of the globe. Russian Central Asia and
Siberia claims greater attention from our scientific men, hunters,
and expert collectors. Russians, on the whole, do little; Germans
have done something; but it does not matter by whom it is explored,
there lies here a vast natural field for the study of mankind. These
domains are scarcely touched, except by vulgar gold hunters and rock
tappers--people of paltry greed and little imagination. The great era
of research has not even begun, and libraries of books have yet to be
written on the natural wonders and astonishing discoveries to be found
and made in this wilder and more neglected half of Asia. After the war
Siberia and Russian Central Asia will begin to draw more attention from
us.
[Illustration: FOUR WIVES OF A RICH KIRGHIZ]
Sergiopol, the last point in Seven Rivers Land before entering Siberia,
is a beautifully situated diminutive town, or, rather, village, for it
has been degraded from the rank of town. The hills and moors around it
are beautiful virgin country, bathed in pleasant sunshine and breathing
healthful air; but in itself it is but a miserable place, a collection
of wee grocer-shops and cotton stores. The shopkeepers are mostly
Tartars, doing very small trade and thinking it very large and feeling
“passing rich.” The vendors of cotton goods do the most trade, for all
the Kirghiz wear cotton and give a great deal of consideration to the
purchase of it. I met a commercial traveller smoking a cigarette in
the market-place, a man sent out by one of the great cotton firms of
Moscow, and he was carrying bags of samples to all the stores of Seven
Rivers Land. The Tartars took so long to decide what they were going to
buy that the traveller was reduced to a novel procedure. Directly he
arrived at a settlement he took from his chest eight bags of samples,
and went rapidly from one shop to another, leaving a bag at each, and
saying he would return in an hour and a half. Then he went into the
market-place and had a smoke and chat with chance comers. If there were
more than eight shops he had a second round, and distributed the bags
to the remainder after the first set had come to a decision. Not a very
good way of doing business, one would think; but, then, the Tartars
spoke in their own language, consulted their wives about materials
and colours, and liked to be free of the presence of the Russian. He
did quite a good business. He told me that his cotton goods found a
large market in China. The Chinese and the Kirghiz were extremely
critical as to the quality of the cotton and the colour and design.
You could not palm off shoddy cotton on these people. It was their
Sunday best as well as week-day, and their outer garment as much and
more than undergarment. Its quality and appearance mattered. Neither
German cotton nor their own Lodz manufacture was any use. Lodz is the
great centre for the production of shoddy cotton--so much so that the
adjective Lodzinsky is a Russian colloquialism for shoddy, and when you
say _Lodzinsky tovar_ it is more than when we say “a bit of Brummagem.”
Moscow, however, produces good qualities of cotton and good prints.
Manchester has dropped behind Moscow in this respect and tended to
compete rather with Lodz. Perhaps after the war we shall solve this
passion for cheapness, this competition with Germany in turning
out _cheap_ wares, and will revert to our earlier prejudice in favour
of British quality. It is rather touching in Russia that best quality
goods are often called _Anglisky tovar_ (English wares), even when made
in Russia. Our reputation for thoroughness survives.
[Illustration: AT A KIRGHIZ FUNERAL]
Still, I do not suppose that Great Britain will ever compete with
Russia in the supply of cotton to the interior. Russians and English
living in Russia have imported our British machinery and set up mills
which are really British mills on Russian soil, and an enormous
business has been founded. Russia, moreover, hopes to be able to grow
enough raw cotton in her Central Asian dominions to be able to make
her cotton business a national self-dependent industry. Cotton is the
material mostly used for clothing in Russia, even in the towns. The
women are still content with cotton dresses and the men with cotton
blouses. When cloth and “stuff” come in, if they ever do, the cotton
industry will tend to degenerate, but not till then.
Sergiopol is a place of little significance. But the next town,
Semipalatinsk, in Siberia, is a large colonial town, with over
35,000 inhabitants--larger, even, than Verney. But Siberia is an
old-established Russian colony, while Seven Rivers began only fifty
years ago, and was a desert. Perhaps even now it is little more than a
desert qualified by irrigation. The obstacles in the way of successful
settlement have been tremendous. Still, these obstacles are being
overcome. The result of half a century’s work is a measure of clear
success and a healthy promise. Hundreds of Russian villages have
established themselves, and the channels of small trade have been kept
open. Yellow deserts have become green with verdure, and chains of
oases have been made. Russian schools and Russian churches have arisen
on the northern side of India, and an essentially Christian culture is
spreading in a way that is clearly profitable to the Old World. The
colony sadly needs a railway, and the railway is being built quickly,
even now, in the time of the war. For the Kirghiz, who do most of the
labour, are not required for military service. When the railway comes,
more people will come with it, more colonists, more traders, and they
will take away the products which the farmers would gladly sell. We
are accustomed to think of railways spoiling districts, but Russian
Central Asia, with its empty leagues of sand and barrenness, will only
profit by the railway. The railway must go east from Tashkent all the
way to Verney, and probably as far as Kuldja, in China, then northward,
through Iliisk and Sergiopol, to Semipalatinsk, through Siberian
farms and settlements, forests and marshes, to the Siberian main line
at Omsk. This will greatly strengthen the Russian Empire when it is
achieved. It will be a wise measure of consolidation.
M. de Vesselitsky, in his able book on Russia, remarks that whereas
in 1906 the population of Canada was greater than that of Siberia,
in 1911 Siberia had two million more inhabitants. This is the more
astonishing because Canada has splendid and populous towns, whereas
Siberia has only three cities of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.
A strange contrast to European Russia, this Asiatic Russia; no Court,
no Emperor, no aristocracy, no modern aims or claims, no power--in a
sense, human tundra and taiga, though many millions are living there.
Then a power enters it, commercial capital and the Russian desire to
get rich, and Siberia begins to seek new wealth. European Russia and
the dazzling if somewhat tawdry West begins to hear of the wealth of
Siberia. Our civilisation, the centre of attraction, draws from all the
outside wilds and wildernesses gold, precious stones, skins. So we help
Siberia in the material sense and set its industrial life a-going.
XIV
ON THE IRTISH
The most interesting circumstance in the history of Semipalatinsk up
till now is that Dostoieffsky, in exile, was domiciled there. The
cities dotting the wastes of Siberia are not notable. They are young,
and things have not happened in them. But dreary Semipalatinsk held the
mightiest spirit in modern Russia--Fedor Dostoieffsky, the author of
“The Brothers Karamazof.” So Semipalatinsk, on the loose sands of the
River Irtish, has now its Dostoieffsky house, where Dostoieffsky lived,
and a Dostoieffsky street. It will, no doubt, be a place of pilgrimage
in the future for those wishing to grasp the significance of the great
Russian.
Semipalatinsk is a dull collection of wooden houses and stores, an
important trading centre functionising an immense country-side. What
struck me most were the large general shops, with their extensive
supplies of manufactured goods and all manner of luxuries. There were
at least six department stores, with handsome clocks, vases, bedroom
furniture, mandolins, violins, guitars, Vienna boots, American boots,
gay hats, silk dresses, wrapped chocolates, promiscuous and lavish
supplies of all manner of European goods. English wares seemed
noticeable chiefly by their absence, and the cutlery was Swedish, the
stoves Austrian, the wools and the cottons Russian, the note-paper
American or French, the wonderful enamel ware and nickel and aluminium
ware German. Only sanitary contrivances, cream separators, and
agricultural machinery seemed to be English. How much more of these
things might be sent. However, with all these signs of luxury--luxury
for Russians--Semipalatinsk lacks the graces of a town; has no
lighting, no pavement or public place, no theatre, only a cinema. Its
prospect is waste, loose sand, which the air holds even in calm--a
grit in the eyes and in the mouth. Its trees do not flourish, and only
people accustomed to a quiet life could go on living there from year
to year. The peasants bring most life into the town, selling their
products in the immense open market, or buying manufactured goods to
take up-country to their farms. The broad River Irtish flows placidly
onward, five hundred miles to Omsk and thousands of miles to the Arctic
Ocean, and it is navigated by a considerable number of steamers and
sailing boats. It is a great waterway--a sort of safer sea in the
heart of Asia. The wonder is that more towns have not sprung up on its
shores. In the history of the world it has not yet become a typical
river. It flows from the silences of the Altai mountains, through the
silences of Northern Asia, the noise of man hardly ever becoming more
than a whisper upon it. It never becomes
Bordered by cities and hoarse
With a thousand cries,
and it cannot be said that as we go onward to its mouth
Cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream.
It is almost as peaceful and serene as a river in an undiscovered
continent.
At Semipalatinsk I stayed some days before taking boat up-stream
to Malo-Krasnoyarsk. It was here that I read of the astonishing
intelligence of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his
wife. The Russian papers of the time devoted a great deal of space to
the details of the murder, the reprisals taken by the Austrians, the
gossip of Europe. The preoccupation of the British Press with home
affairs was astonishing, and in all the telegraphed opinions of our
representative papers there was not an utterance that overstepped the
limits of conventionality. Whether the murder was planned politically
by Germany, as has been hinted, or planned politically by Serbia
for vengeance, or came about accidentally through the passion of a
noble Serb, it was in any case a test phenomenon. It had enormous
significance to diplomatists and scanners of political horizons. By
the attitude and behaviour of Germany and Austria their intentions,
at least in the Near East, could be gauged. But it did not seem of
sufficient importance to conscious England. The Austrians tried to
spread the idea that Russia had contrived and bought the murder of the
Archduke because she feared his intentions in the Balkans. But, out of
the Germanic dominions, that did not carry weight. Austria manifestly
threatened Serbia politically, and some British people scratched their
heads and asked questions: “Shall we go to war for Serbia?” Then came
the seemingly obvious answer: “No, not for _Serbia_!” which fairly
indicates the blindness of that part of England which was vocal at that
time. In that spirit we neglected our duty in connection with the St.
James’s conference after the first Balkan war, and in that spirit we
alienated Bulgaria in the great European war which followed.