HISTORY OF TURKESTAN

After the Russian conquest, Tashkent was made the capital of the whole Turkestan region. For hundreds of years this part of Central Asia has been the scene of repeated invasions, of wars, turmoil, and wanton destruction. The fact that it is still inhabited or that rudimentary forms of civilization somehow managed to survive can only be explained by the natural wealth of its soil. What was once a civilized and flourishing country has been gradually turned into a desert, fit only for nomads and the exercise of unbridled despotism by unscrupulous and cruel overlords. A Danish engineer who accompanied me on my journeys told me that a geological survey he had made of the main canal supplying Tashkent with water from the bills proved that it was at least 3000 years old. In those days, according to chronicles found in Peking, the country was owned by the Chinese, who brought their engineering skill to the construction, by native labourers, of an extensive system of irrigation canals. Traces of these canals may be seen in many parts of the desert and, thanks to an increased supply of water, some of them have in fact been again brought into use. In Fergana, at about 7000 feet above sea level, there must have been a flourishing mining industry, to judge by the traces I found of expertly laid out galleries and shafts, where the Chinese extracted uranium ore more than 2000 years ago.

The Chinese were succeeded by the Huns, who at one time had a great empire in Central Asia. A Chinese chronicle tells us of the plight of the daughter of one of their emperors, who was forced to marry a king of the Huns in order to seal a peace treaty, and of all the indignities she suffered as the barely-tolerated fourth wife instead of enjoying exalted privileges as she had been promised. Her letters to her father are filled with complaints about the Huns and their way of life, about the freezing cold of their felt tents in winter and their long wanderings from place to place in summer. However, the lady seems to have redeemed her fortunes after the death of her husband, for she contrived to seize the reins of power and then to place them in the hands of her son. Her grandson was a renowned ruler, who from Samarkand reigned over a realm lying to the south of the original territories of the Huns and was probably an ancestor of the great Tamerlane.

The conflicts and battles of many races and peoples have left their trace all over this highway of human civilization, lying at the foot of the Pamir. To the north of Tashkent, in the region of the Seven Rivers, now lost in the sands, or Semirech'ye as it is called in Russian, I visited a number of ruins which, judging by their extent, must have encompassed cities of 100,000 inhabitants. The fertility of the soil is everywhere so great that civilization was able to spread very rapidly in periods of tranquillity. But, alas, prolonged peace and ordered government were the things most denied this land of strife. In a land where water spells life, all a conqueror needed to do to ensure victory was to break down the dams and destroy the canals. Only nomads could survive and adapt their life to conditions of perpetual warfare, and therefore, as time went on, what was once a civilized and cultivated country was reduced to the desert we now behold.

Turkish, Arab, and Chinese sources now available to us contain much information concerning the history of Turkestan, but a comprehensive narrative of its troubled past still awaits the historian. Only fragmentary evidence is available locally from the few remaining monuments, as every conqueror in turn sought to destroy the works of his predecessors.

Two historical names, however, are universally encountered in Turkestan: Alexander the Great and Tamerlane, called by his contemporaries 'The Scourge of God'. One meets these names everywhere in Central Asia, and often my questions about the name of a large irrigation canal, a mountain pass or an abundant well, were answered by the words 'Timurlenk' or 'Iskander'.

Under Cyrus and Darius, Turkestan was a rich and fertile province of the Persian Empire and it was in Turkestan that Alexander overtook his opponent, Darius, and himself nearly perished for lack of water. The long trains of water tanks one meets at every station of the Transcaspian Railway bear witness to the tremendous difficulties of water supply even in these days of modern transport. One can but marvel at the feats of endurance performed by Alexander's army, 10,000 strong, or by Tamerlane, who marched 100,000 men across the waterless desert to victory at Bayazit.

After the fall of the Macedonian state the country was ruled for many years by the Parthians, and later was overrun by the hordes of Huns, Avars, Turks, and Kalmyks. From a mixture of all these peoples there emerged a new race, the Sarts, who docilely submitted to and served every succeeding conqueror.' In origin they are Aryans, but with a strong admixture of Mongol blood, while their language belongs to the Tatar-Turkic group. They have settled all over Turkestan wherever irrigation makes farming possible, but the majority live round Tashkent, Samarkand and Margelan. In the wake of Islam, which came to Turkestan from the south-west, an Arab invasion penetrated as far as the Amu-Dar'ya. The natives were converted to Islam by fire and sword, and a few Arab settlements may still be found in the vicinity of Bukhara.

Arab domination lasted only a short while and was displaced by that of the Turks in their gradual march south and their victory over Byzantium. The advance of the Turks was, however, temporarily arrested by the emergence of a mighty rival in their rear. He stemmed from a dynasty older than that of the Huns and one which ruled over a kingdom situated on the shores of the Golden River, Zeravshan. The ruler and his nobles were all Uzbeks, and the name is still applied to the elite of the Kirgiz. The kingdom included the oasis of Samarkand, the northern and eastern regions of Fergana and Kashgar, and parts of Bukhara. Protected along its frontiers by mountains or the desert it had been ruled for several generations by tough and energetic men when the young Tamerlane was brought to power. He conquered Northern Turkestan and overran the land of the Seven Rivers and the adjoining regions of Siberia. He defeated the Khan of the Golden Horde. After this he set out on the conquest of India and ravaged the land as far as Delhi.

A few years later he led his armies against the Turks in response to a request for help by the Byzantine emperor. Arab chronicles mention the curious fact that about a third of his army was composed of Christians and even included a Russian contingent. This host, after crossing the desert from Samarkand to the Caspian Sea, where it was met by a Russian flotilla of barges with supplies, then swarmed over the Caucasian range into Asia Minor and saved Byzantium by routing the Turks at Angora. Syria and Egypt were conquered in turn, and an empire under one lord now stretched from Mongolia to the Mediterranean. Only death thwarted his plans to invade China.

That Tamerlane's stupendous victories should have impressed the Western world is hardly surprising. He was described as a cruel and ruthless tyrant by his enemies and those who had reason to fear him; his intimates spoke of him as a genius, a supremely talented military leader and an able administrator. This latter description would appear to be nearer the truth if we judge him by the monuments he left behind, by the skill with which he administered his domains, and by the realm he bequeathed to his descendants. The mosques he built and the ruins of the mighty aqueduct which once brought water to Samarkand still stand today, more than five centuries after his death; many of the irrigations still bear the name of 'Timurlenk'.

After his death his huge empire fell apart, like that of his predecessor, Alexander the Great, though his descendant, Babur, seems to have inherited some of his qualities of leadership. From Afghanistan, which was all that was left of Tamerlane's empire, he conquered India, and there founded another empire which was to last until the advent of the British.

After these great events a period of stagnation and progressive decay spread over Turkestan. For a time the south fell to some of the greater shahs of Persia, but slowly civilization was stamped out by plundering Mongol and Turkic nomads. All that was left were a few despots, who used the nomadic tribes to terrorize the population and bolster up their reign of extortion and cruelty.

This state of anarchy prevailed in Central Asia right up to the seventeenth century, when Russia first showed signs of expansion. The Empire, under Peter the Great, tried to put a stop to raids into the region of the Volga and to the destruction of Russian fisheries on the Caspian, two constant causes of strife between the subjects of the White Tsar and the neighbouring tribes of Turkestan. All Peter's efforts, both military and diplomatic, failed; the forces he could assemble locally at that time being far too feeble to break through the bulwark presented by a desert stretching inland for hundreds of miles. In the eighteenth century, however, a chain of small fortifications running from Astrakhan to the Siberian border was built under Elizabeth and Catherine 11 and we observe a gradual retreat of the nomadic tribes to the south-east of the Russian border. Every attempt by the nomads to break through this line of defence failed and was invariably repulsed. Very soon the Astrakhan, Orenburg, and Siberian Cossacks were the equals of their foes in the art of desert warfare, while pursuit of the enemy often led to deeper penetration and a new line of outposts on the conquered border.

In the course of this gradual penetration from west and north, which progressively brought the area under Russian control, many towns were founded, such as Irgiz, Perovsk, Ili, Vernyy, Auliye-Ata and Pishpek.

SAMARKAND: IRRIGATION

Samarkand oasis is irrigated by the Zeravshan. A large catchment area in the region ducts water along two arterial canals, one of which supplies Samarkand while the other is placed at the disposal of the Emir of Bukhara in compliance with the terms of a treaty of friendship between his country and Russia. After the conquest of Turkestan by the Russians the great dam serving both Samarkand and Bukhara was found in exactly the state in which Tamerlane's engineers had left it. Had it been built of local loess it would obviously have been washed away long ago, so some other kind of material must have been used. In Merv, for example, the great curved Sultan Dam on the Murgab river is built of special bricks, presumably imported from afar, because up to the present no clay has been found locally from which those delf-like bricks could be made.

Up to the beginning of the century the dam on the Zeravshan was a most primitive affair, built of dung and earth held together by bushes, reeds, straw, and crooked thorn branches. This construction was reinforced by piles tied together in the shape of a pyramid, weighed down with stones and driven into the river bed. At flood time, when the level of the water had to be lowered, the whole edifice was pulled down and later laboriously rebuilt with fresh material, since all the old stuff had of course been washed away.

Naturally, these cumbersome methods made a heavy demand on the available manpower, very often at times when it was most desperately needed in the fields. The ordinances requiring the population to supply an unlimited number of labourers for work on the dams, made in the days of Bukharan rule, were maintained by the Russians, who exercised little or no control over the whole system of impressed labour. Every year thousands of men were dispatched to the catchment areas where, particularly round the dams when the river was in flood, they worked for days on end waist-deep in icy cold water. The engineers who were supposed to pay these unfortunate fellows a daily wage usually pocketed the money and did nothing to improve the condition of the dams.

However, soon after the turn of the century an active governor of Samarkand took matters in hand on the advice of an honest engineer and replaced the existing installations at the main dams by modern concrete structures with hydraulically-operated, corrugated-iron sluice gates. A network of telephones was also installed, linking the larger and smaller dams so that the amount of water required at any time in a given arterial canal could be regulated and controlled. Though the native population was undoubtedly immensely impressed, the authorities and employees who administered the supply of water must have worried not a little at the threat to their incomes.

As I have said, the waters of the Zeravshan were used to irrigate both Samarkand and Bukhara. Before the construction of the new system the dam regulating the supply of water to both these regions was in Russian-controlled territory and supervised by a Russian water aksakal (supervisor), which meant that the latter was in a position to arbitrarily withhold or increase the requisite supply of water merely by making a slight alteration to the angle of flow. An alteration of a few inches was very often all that was needed to augment or diminish a supply of water to a particular parcel of land. This opportunity for graft by a minor government employee was removed when the old practice of tearing down the dams each year was abolished. The new concrete dams, and a water supply controlled through corrugated iron sluices, enabled the chief engineer to control by telephone the level of water in any canal down to a millimetre. The power held by a Chief Engineer able at will to raise or lower the level of the water by deftly operating the sluices in a country where no rain falls between March and November, and water is synonymous with life, can be clearly appreciated.

At that time the annual salary of a chief engineer amounted to 4,000 roubles including his living quarters, which were provided by the State. The temptation placed in his path, particularly in the orient where since time immemorial no one has ever obtained anything from an official without some form of a gift, is obvious. When the Engineer in Chief in control of irrigation in Samarkand was presented to me I was amazed at the collection of Bukharan decorations, all studded with diamonds, proudly displayed on his chest; they were worth a fortune. When later I expressed surprise I was told: 'You should see his wife's jewellery, all of it presented by the Emir of Bukhara. Don't forget that in Bukhara a good or bad harvest depends entirely on the goodwill of the Engineer in Chief.' Yet this man was considered relatively honest, for he refused to be bribed. To turn down a Bukharan diamond star, however, was apparently not so easy. As a result Bukhara got much more water for her fields than she had a right to ask, whereas the Governor of Samarkand was obliged to submit to restricted irrigation. The particular governor I met was also smothered in sparkling Bukharan decorations, as were his subordinates.

This plethora of diamond stars helps to explain why government officials often kept one eye, if not both, conveniently closed. But in spite of all these defects, and judging by the city's lovely shady gardens, the luxuriantly sprouting cotton, ears of rice, panicles of sorghum and sturdy clover I saw during my stay in Samarkand, there was plenty of water left over. The population was well fed and content. The opulence of the brightly coloured kaftans one saw was arresting and in great contrast to the downtrodden appearance and tattered clothing of the natives of Bukhara. There, it was obvious that the beks and valis of the Emir were sucking the population dry and successfully diverting the revenue brought in by the waters of the Zeravshan into their own and the Emir's pockets.

At a short distance from Samarkand we passed by the ruins of an aqueduct consisting of two tall, pointed arches set at an angle to each other. A third arch was said to have been standing until fifteen years before, when it was destroyed by one of the frequent earthquakes. In days gone by this was the main artery of Samarkand: fresh, glacier water from the hills, brought by Tamerlane to his favourite city. Tradition has it that it was built by some of the foremost engineers of the West, which would explain its similarity to Roman aqueducts. Now, unfortunately, the city drinks the dirty water of the Zeravshan.

A WOMAN'S LOT IN LIFE

. . . Considered from a psychological point of view these concepts lack one of the basic fundamentals of the western way of life, that of the family, which in Asia simply does not exist. This is immediately apparent in the planning of Mohammedan living quarters and houses. I have visited many of them, and everywhere I have noticed the same uniformity of structure and division. From the street all one sees of a house is a blank wall with a door to one side marking the entrance. When this is opened in response to vigorous knocking one enters a long, covered passage flanked by two high walls, usually with a built-in door-keeper's niche. At the end of the passage is another door, leading into a spacious courtyard that contains the men's quarters and stables. A ledge or bank of beaten clay, lying well in the shade of the overhanging roofs, runs round the courtyard like a gallery in front of the buildings surrounding it. This ledge is about two feet high and three to four feet broad; access to the individual rooms, each with its own door, can be gained only by stepping over it. Generally there are a few carpets lying on the ledge in place of furniture. When callers arrive cushions are fetched and visitors and hosts sit or lie on the ledge gossiping, eating and visiting. The rooms are very small and are used only for sleeping, as the day to day life of the family is centred in the courtyard. Another passage leads into a second courtyard, built on the same lines as the first though somewhat smaller, reserved for the womenfolk.

Only women and the master of the house are permitted to enter this inner courtyard. The Shariat lays down that no other men may ever come here except the closest of blood relations, and then only if the law forbids them to marry the woman they will meet. This limits the men visitors to brothers, fathers and uncles, and even they have first to obtain permission from the husband.

The Shariat also rules that every woman is entitled to a room of her own and that she may refuse entry to any person except her husband. Each woman is responsible for the furnishing of her room, which often leads to jealous quarrels between the occupants. Beautiful embroidery and carpets, mostly the handiwork of their owners, adorn the walls. Dresses and jewellery are kept in brightly-coloured chests, for there are no cupboards in Oriental houses. If a woman wishes to go out to visit her father or relations she must first obtain the permission of her husband or, if she is unmarried, her father. Then she must draw a grey dressing-gown over her head (this is supposed to represent an old, discarded dressing-gown of her husband's) and in addition wear a black or red horsehair veil over her face. I need hardly add that these mummy-like figures in the street look exceedingly ugly.

Usually the women's courtyard opens on to a garden, with a vineyard where the women spend most of their day enjoying the shade. In the evening they retire to the flat roofs of the houses, where they sleep at night.

At the age of two, boys are usually removed to the men's quarters and from then on are cared for and educated by their fathers. Like their western brothers they love running about the streets and, outside, are allowed to mix and play with girls, provided the latter are of unmarriageable age. Owing to climatic conditions girls reach puberty very young, often at ten, and then they must go about veiled and are taken into the women's part of the house.

From their earliest childhood the little girls are taught complete submissiveness to men and no girl would ever dare to lift a hand against a boy, even in play. I once watched a boy of six soundly belabouring a girl at least three years older than himself with a stick. She was in tears, yet did nothing to wrench the stick from the boy's hand though he was so much smaller. Nor did her companions do anything to help her. On another occasion, in Khodzhent, when I was showing my camera to a crowd of jolly children, a little girl of six who was greatly interested suddenly began to cry, and I saw large tears rolling down her cheeks. The boys next to her were pinching and beating her so as to shove her out of the way and get nearer my carriage themselves. When I grabbed one of the boys and gave him a piece of my mind I noticed that the onlookers were most astonished, as according to their ideas the girl should have immediately made room for the boys.

The Mohammedans believe that women, like animals, have no souls, and treat them accordingly. The Shariat authorizes the woman's husband, or her guardian, to strike her at will, while if she so much as dares to lift her hand against him she is punishable by death. This was the law before the Russians came. Just imagine a woman's life under these conditions! To begin with she is not even allowed to enjoy her children for any length of time. The boys are taken over by the fathers at the age of two; the little girls, though staying with their mothers until they are marriageable, i.e. ten or twelve, have to work and play with the children of other wives, or, like the boys, spend much of their time in the streets. Thus, women are reduced to spending their days either embroidering suzane (embroidered silk coverlets for the walls) or making carpets, but mostly killing time by gossiping. I once met the wife of a Russian Chief District Officer, a well educated woman with a university degree, who because she spoke Sart and Kirgiz fluently was able to visit the homes of many native women and had in consequence gained a thorough insight into their way of life. Her descriptions of these women were shattering. According to Madame Medyanetskiy their main topic of conversation consisted of spicy stories of a Boccaccio nature, while their mental level was far too low to enable them to apprehend the inferior status they were allotted in life.

Two factors contributing to the inferior position of women were the customary early marriages and the existing rules of divorce. For a girl to be married and a mother at nine is nothing unusual, while the husband, more often than not, may be a very old man. The generally demoralizing effect of customs like these, the moral anguish suffered in the harems, and the prevalence of venereal disease among women can well be imagined. The Shariat permits a man to divorce his wife at any time and the procedure adopted is as simple as possible. All he has to do is to repeat 'Talaq, Talaq, Talaq' three times in the presence of his wife for the divorce to become absolute, when it is there and then registered by the Kadi. At the end of three months the man is at liberty to remarry and the woman to take another husband. As a man is restricted by the Shariat to four wives and eight concubines, the informality of divorce proceedings places no bounds on the widespread practice of polygamy. Should a man, for instance, wish to marry a fifth, legitimate wife, all he need do is divorce one of the preceding four. Indeed this is quite a common occurrence, especially if the intention is to get rid of an aged wife and acquire a younger one. Withal, the divorced wife remains in the harem as a sort of servant and looks after her own children and those of the other women.

Of course, these rules mostly apply to the well-to-do classes, but when I was in Turkestan the majority of the Sarts were well off according to their standards, as living was extraordinarily cheap. It was explained to me at an assembly of mullas, which I attended for a month to examine with them certain portions of the Shariat I had had translated into Russian, that it was advisable and, in fact, a good thing to deny the women luxuries in dress and food and thus keep them from 'being as immoral as the wives of the Christians'. As it was, the mullas complained about the intrusion of luxury into the life of the harems now that rich and educated Mohammedans were able to get themselves wives in Constantinople and Alexandria though 'our own wives don't cost us much', they added.

This attitude explains the great simplicity of women's dress in rigid Muslim circles. I once visited a mulla in the company of a Russian woman of Tashkent society. We were most hospitably received and offered the traditional rice pilau and the excellencies of a well-laid dastarkhan. As an exception we were entertained close to the women's quarters, gazed at by the wives of our host, who granted them permission to look at us from a safe distance of twenty feet 'for the sake of peace and quiet', as he said. The wives were dressed very simply in long chemise-like smocks reaching down to their ankles, bright baggy trousers and embroidered leather boots. My companion was allowed to visit the harem and was there told that fresh smocks had been donned that day in honour of the occasion. This referred to the garments I have just mentioned, which were worn, so my friend said, with nothing else underneath. I noticed the same kind of dress on yet another occasion, when I was present at a wedding and had lent my camera to friends who were visiting the harem. The picture of the bride and her friends showed the same poverty and simplicity of dress.

I mention these details only to show how little there is in common between family life as we understand it and that of a native household such as I have described. Nothing ever varies year in and year out for the unfortunate women where everything in life depends on the mood of the master. As Madame Medyanetskiy said: 'They rapidly become dull-witted, and fade at an early age.' The children grow up like a pack of animals, quite deprived of any effective motherly influence.

A BOY'S EDUCATION

From infancy a boy born into such a household accompanies his father on his travels abroad and it is quite usual to meet father and son riding the same horse a great distance from home. Another kind of life, however, shorn of any family influence, starts for the boy at the age of six when he first goes to school (the mekteb), which is obligatory for every young Mohammedan. In these schools the spiritual foundations of the Mohammedan religion, its ethics and its relation to secular life, are taught in a form common to the entire Muslim world, with the result that the young Mohammedan is moulded into a well-defined type, everywhere the same. Thus the formative influence of the mektebs over the youth of a large portion of the human race cannot be sufficiently stressed. When a young Mohammedan first comes to the mekteb his mind is a tabula rasa. He leaves as a conscious member of a human society where such notions as family tradition, racial origins, geographical boundaries in fact all the things indispensable to the cultural development of man as we see it-mean nothing at all, his own interpretation of life being based on concepts ceaselessly repeated in school which he continues to cherish in after years. This is the way ordained by God's prophet and this is the way it must forever remain.

The 'new boy' is put into a room with a lot of others who may have been there for several years and who sit there monotonously repeating the precepts they must know by heart, set down in the Shariat, the Holy Law of the Prophet. When I was in Turkestan all the mektebs I saw were exactly alike - generally a room in the mosque building, the floor on which the pupils sat brightly carpeted, and the teacher usually an old man, perched on a cushion in one of the corners. In his hand he held a scroll or an old book, or sometimes a cane with which he pointed at the boy due to recite the lesson set for the day. The curriculum was supposed to embrace 'all knowledge', for all wisdom is contained in the Shariat. A boy begins by learning the Arabic alphabet, and then goes on to memorize Arabic prayers and a multitude of the Prophet's sayings, which of course he fails to understand at the time.

The impression produced both by the drone of the boys' voices reciting their lessons and the sight of them seated cross-legged on the floor is most peculiar. They are all dressed in the habitual oriental kaftan, locally called khalat (a long smock like a dressing gown, reaching down to the ankles), and have small round skull caps of satin or silk on their heads. Bent over their books, each with a flask of Indian ink beside him, they are busily engaged in tracing Arabic letters with reed pens while they repeat half aloud the lesson they are learning by heart. From time to time the teacher points his cane at one of the boys, who then starts mumbling a little louder than the others. And so it goes on for practically the whole day. How children can stand this mode of teaching and not become utterly dull-witted in the process is something to wonder at.

'But what is it the children are learning by heart?' 'Oh! Mohammedan prayers', was the answer given by the majority of the officials accompanying me, if they were unacquainted with local languages. The representatives of the Russian Ministry of Cults were equally vague on the subject, though the inspection of these schools came within their authority. Not satisfied with these answers I asked for a collection of the books, mostly old scrolls of parchment, used by the teachers at their lessons and had them translated. Unfortunately this was among my material destroyed by the Bolsheviks, so I must now rely on my memory.

From the material collected the main impression I gathered concerning the mektebs, which was confirmed by experts on local conditions, was the universal character of the instruction given to the boys. Everything they were expected to know was taught in these schools. The method of instruction was academic, the subjects being presented as God's revelations to the Prophet and the natural sciences being treated unsystematically and in a manner that was quite obsolete. Nevertheless, when the extent of that field of knowledge is taken into consideration, and also the number of years spent on it, it must be frankly admitted that by the age of fifteen a boy could not have but amassed a great deal of knowledge, and would take away, stored in his mind, a collection of fundamental propositions and a ready-made outlook on life.

Take for instance as an illustration the rules of politeness, taught almost daily and all the year round. The boy learns them by heart and keeps on reciting them from the age of six to fifteen. Gradually and unconsciously he conforms his behaviour to these rules and in this way they govern the manners of the entire population. Naturally, the rules of politeness in East and West differ greatly and are typical of their respective cultures. In the East they are founded on respect of the young for the old, whereas our Western ideas of chivalry are unknown. They teach the art of self-restraint, a valuable asset in a world where tempers are quick.

The effectiveness of the lessons taught in the mektebs becomes apparent when one observes the behaviour of any gathering, or the conduct of the crowds in the streets. There is none of the crudeness so typical of the lower classes in the West, or of the vulgar self-assertiveness of its e1ite; instead, there is a calmness and self-confidence which gives the people an appearance of dignity. Young men stand aside to let an older man pass; they are silent when their elders speak; dignitaries are greeted respectfully in the street. It is bad manners either to use bad language or raise one's voice.

I was also struck by the willing obedience of the population to some given sign. Mass discipline like this is something we do not meet in the West, but it is not the result of any outward form of coercion such as barrack-room discipline; it is the natural outcome of youthful years spent in the mekteb absorbing the reiterated precepts of the Mohammedan outlook on life. I met this form of discipline everywhere in Central Asia, whether I was visiting the tyrants of Bukhara and China or moving among the hustling crowds of Taskhent, Samarkand and Margelan. I found it among the merchants in the bazaars, and at public meetings which I addressed. The rules of good behaviour, learnt by heart, contain a large measure of sophistry, as any and every eventuality of daily life is met by a precept suitable to the occasion; for answering questions when visiting, for the street and the bazaar, for commerce and the courts, for travelling, for the garden, the fields or one's home, for feasts, for mourning and for fasting and for a gay time. These rules explain why the impression conveyed by the Asian is one of self-possessed dignity, devoid of affectation or timidity, and why he is never impetuous nor ever sheds the restraint he has imposed on the exhibition of his feelings. The same attitude was noticeable among prisoners in jail or other places of detention, and I attribute it all to the schooling of the mektebs.

The science of politeness was treated in the mektebs as a secondary subject and was described as the science of human relations. The main subject was ethics, i.e. religious instruction. The knowledge that was imparted to the student, or to be precise was dinned into him, embraced a variety of subjects. The concepts of the Mohammedan religion, its foundations and content were naturally allotted pride of place, and particular attention was paid to stressing the basic concept of monotheism: 'There is but one God and Muhammad is His Prophet'; or, 'God is the All highest and His representative on earth is the Caliph'. The tenets are contained in the 'Sayings of the Prophet', and the pupil is required to learn them in Arabic by heart, parrot-fashion, without as much as understanding a single word at first. Constantly repeated and adapted they run like a thread through all the boy's learning, and gradually, in the course of the years he spends at school, they become part and parcel of his life, dominating his soul and spirit. He is taught that strict adherence to custom is the most important prerequisite of bliss demanded by God of Man.

We Europeans may be inclined to regard the precepts which govern the life of a Muslim at every step as nothing but a collection of meaningless rules, but a little reflection will show that every one of these rules is founded on an essentially Mohammedan conception and the application of Mohammedan ethics. Take, for instance, the most striking of them, that of obligatory prayer, regulated both by the time of day and the day itself in words that every Mohammedan knows by heart. At the appropriate hour, regardless of place and surroundings, he will spread his prayer carpet before him, reverently kneel down and pray. The prayers themselves are typical. In the main they exalt the concept that there is but one God, and the interpreters of His will on earth the Prophet Mohammed and the Caliphs.

Next in importance is the obligation to fast at certain times of the year which must be known by every boy who wishes to escape heavy punishment. This obligation is also an exercise in self-discipline and has been advanced as a reason for the successes of Mohammedan armies in the field, enabling them to withstand the rigours of prolonged hunger. The daily reading of the Koran is yet another obligation taught the boys in the mektebs.

All these things added together train the boy's mind to move within the confines of an entirely Mohammedan world and help gradually to influence his political convictions. A Mohammedan's sense of nationality is blunted by the absence of a sense of family, whilst qualities that can attract a Muslim boy, youth or man to the rest of humanity (or, conversely, repel him), are closely linked with his adherence to the followers of the Great Prophet. Only problems connected with his religion are of any interest to him; everything else in the world is a matter of either indifference or contempt. For him the infidel world, the whole of Western civilization, is of no importance; not being compatible with his own outlook on life, it must be regarded as the enemy which he must oppose, and both inwardly and outwardly keep at a distance. The spiritual union between the individual and the rest of the faithful stretches over all the Mohammedan world like a net, while the measure of its effective reality is revealed by a cursory study of the Press in the main strongholds of Mohammedanism, like Alexandria, Constantinople, Algiers, or any Mohammedan city of India. In point of fact, when I was studying this problem in the heart of Central Asia I learnt more about the happenings in the Muslim circles of Turkestan from the Cairo papers than I did from official reports in Tashkent or the local press.

Because the political structure of the state was laid down by Allah, and defined by his mouthpiece the Prophet, politics, of course, was one of the subjects taught in the mektebs. The course was a very simple one and could be condensed into a single sentence: 'The will of the Caliph or of his representative is the will of Allah'. The extent to which the whole political thinking of a Mohammedan is dominated by the acceptance of this concept is little short of amazing, as is also his ability to parry any obvious contradictions by advancing a suitable counter argument. In consequence, I have often been presented with assurances of loyalty to Russia both written and oral in which the White Tsar was regarded in the light of a friend or even a vassal of the Caliph of Constantinople. 'Ak-Padishah' was the accepted title of the Emperor of Russia. Since, under his rule, peace and law reigned in the land and ancient Muslim customs were left untouched a ready explanation for the title was available: 'It is the will of the Caliph; he has entrusted the Muslim subjects of Russia to the keeping of the Tsar'. For the inhabitants of Central Asia the wars between Russia and Turkey were nothing but a long drawn out misunderstanding between friends. Even the Emir of Bukhara stressed to me the 'friendly' character of his relations with the Emperor of Russia, though in fact they were those of a small vassal with his liege lord. An unswerving allegiance to the leadership of Constantinople was so firmly rooted in the Mohammedan mind that all attempts by the Russian government to impose its own influence invariably failed. This is a subject I shall presently examine in greater detail.

History and geography as taught in the mektebs were also made to conform to Mohammedan conceptions. History was restricted to a detailed account of the life of Allah, to the spread of his teaching and the growth of his empire. In this connection some quite astounding ideas were expressed in the textbooks, as for instance that the whole world belonged to Allah and his Caliphs. The alleged fact that the King of England was often compelled to lend the Caliph his soldiers, or had on more than one occasion assured him of his loyalty, was used to prove that England was a vassal of the Caliph. The German Emperor, too, had visited him in Constantinople and paid him homage. (The Franks were less favourably mentioned.) Facts and events were not connected in any way and were mentioned only in order to illustrate or prove a given theme. A description of lands inhabited by the faithful and of the roads leading to Mecca and other pilgrim cities in Asia, Africa, and Europe was all that was learnt in geography. A little mathematics, algebra, astronomy, natural science and medicine completed the course.

Rules governing the personal life of the individual are set down in texts and are learnt by heart, like everything else in the mektebs. The problem of sex is thoroughly explained to boys only eight years old, who are also taught the rules of married life, warned of possible diseases and instructed in preventive and curative measures in explanations as detailed as any to be found in specialized and scientific works on the subject in the West. It is at this stage that the all-prevailing attitude of contempt for women is particularly emphasized.

The facts I have mentioned should help to show how the young Mohammedan mind is gradually moulded into accepting and later adopting a way of life and an outlook based exclusively on the teachings of the Koran, and also the ensuing influence and impact of this religious philosophy on the desert world of Central Asia. I must, however, add that the conflict between Mohammedanism and the Christian way of life, founded on the free development of the individual and his critical faculties, has without any doubt also left its mark upon this world.

BUKHARA: KIRGIZ NOMADS

. . . Here I should add that in Turkestan, apart from the Sarts, a large section of the population was composed of natives variously described as Mohammedans, such as the Kirgiz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, and Tadzhiks. In addition there was a balance of Arabs, Chinese, Dungans, Kalmyks, Afghans, and Persians which with the exception of the Jews consisted of wanderers or temporary settlers, divided among the two main stems, the Sarts and the Kirgiz.

Although the Kirgiz are termed Mohammedans, this definition would have been incorrect a century ago. A nomad people, wholly devoted to cattle-breeding on a large scale, they followed no particular form of religion in the past, and even today they still show no pronounced signs of religious awareness. A hundred years ago, at the time of the conquest, they were dubbed Muslims by the Russians in official reports and registers because of certain Mohammedan customs they had adopted such as polygamy, and prayers at certain set times of the day. As applied to the Kirgiz chiefs and their immediate entourage the definition was in part correct, as most of them were in fact Mohammedans. Among them, even before the Russian conquest, it had been considered the right thing for anyone pretending to a higher cultural level to pose as a Mohammedan, and all of their sultans and manaps outwardly professed Mohammedanism. They kept Sart or Tatar mullas in their settlements, and while praying to the God of Mohammed they continued to observe a form of religious ritual influenced by fetishism. In addition they possessed a holy law of their own, the Adat, whose tenets often differed widely from those of the Shariat and, consequently, from Mohammed's Koran. Within the last century, however, Mohammedanism gained much ground among the Kirgiz, thanks largely to the policy of the Russian authorities, who supported the mosques and their dependent medresehs and virtually barred the message of Christ from reaching the people. Missionaries were required to obtain official permission for their work and even so, were restricted to the Orthodox clergy by a decree of the Holy Synod. Unfortunately the Orthodox church was no longer imbued with a missionary spirit because of its long subservience to the state, and its obstructive attitude to any form of initiative. This is why the process of conversion to Mohammedanism of the nomads in Turkestan was expanding under Russian domination and proceeding apace even at the time of my visit.

The contrast between the family life of the Sarts and the Kirgiz was of particular interest. The former meticulously obeyed the tenets of the Shariat and had in consequence reduced the status of the woman and mother to the level of a soulless being. The Kirgiz, on the other hand, were inclined to monogamy, if simply for the reason that wealthy tribesmen were the exception rather than the rule. While a bride might still have to be bought by the groom (payment was usually by instalments) and the kalym, or post-marriage morning gift, have to be laboriously collected and paid to her father; whilst the widow might be regarded as a chattel to be inherited, and be forced to marry the heir in line; whilst the wife might be expected to saddle her husband's horse and hold his stirrup as he mounted, or was barred from sitting at meals with the men and must meekly stand by her husband and hand him his food, gratefully accepting a juicy bone as a token of his goodwill - nevertheless a nomadic life of wandering across the desert made the woman so important to the welfare of the household that her position as mistress and mother of the children, whom she and not the father reared, was firmly assured.

The whole structure of Kirgiz life was founded upon race and tribe. The elders of the tribe were its masters, and it was precisely in the sphere of tribal life that the influence of the woman was most felt. Numerous indeed were the agreements, measures, disputes, and decisions that the Russians were able either to conclude, adopt or avoid thanks to the influence exercised by the Kirgiz women. The outward appearance of a Kirgiz woman immediately reveals the difference between her status and that of her Sart sister. She never veils her face, and she is free to talk to and deal with strangers; her spiritual independence is shown by the temerity with which she frequently refuses to follow an unloved husband to whom she has been sold by father or brother, by the dignity of her bearing, and by her forthrightness in a court of law. The Kirgiz way of life, based as it is upon the family, involuntarily gives Kirgiz Mohammedanism a distinctive imprint of its own, and one which differs strikingly from the Sart interpretation. Nevertheless the teaching of the Shariat is slowly spreading throughout the Kirgiz steppes, mainly owing to the influence of the mullas. The wealthier tribesmen are adopting Sart customs, the mullas are preaching the desirability of relegating the women to the harem, and the sense of oneness of tribe and family is being superseded by a feeling of religious community with the rest of the Mohammedan world - a realization of its solidarity and power.

BUKHARA: PRISONS

. . . Again, during the hour preceding the official banquet, when we were supposed to be resting in our rooms, some members of my suite had taken a stroll in the courtyard. There they met the Emir's falconer, who, it appeared, had lived in Russia and was delighted to air his Russian. They were amazed at his contempt and positive hatred for the Emir, which he made no effort to disguise. 'Look at this bird to which I am chained,' he said, pointing to his falcon. 'It is just like my mister, unloving and selfish, and it gorges itself on flesh; I don't know how many times I have been beaten on this wretched bird's account, and if it should ail I'll be thrown into prison, where a man dies like a beast. The Emir is a wicked fellow.' The man was quite frank, and spoke out openly in the certainty that none of the natives present understood any Russian.

When his words were reported to me I paid little attention to them because at the time I knew nothing of the conditions that prevailed in Bukharan jails, but they came to my mind six months later when I visited the prisons of the capital. These conditions I shall now describe.

Imagine a deep depression at the foot of the citadel, surrounded by high, grim-looking walls and towers. At the bottom of the depression a few parallel trenches have been excavated, each about 18 feet across and 120 feet long, and between 42 and 48 feet in depth, so that looking down one has the impression of gazing into a well. Stretched over the trenches on a level with the ground is an iron grating. Emaciated listless human beings are discernible in the depths, moving about like animals in some menagerie or lying stretched out on the filthy straw matting, 'waiting to be remembered by the Emir', as I was told by the Bukharan notable who accompanied me. At the citadel's outer gate street vendors had urged us to buy flat barley cakes and large loaves, the Russian Diplomatic Agent hastening to explain that it was customary to distribute this bread among the prisoners as one of the good deeds prescribed by the Shariat. I purchased a few basketfuls, but when I saw the look of awful greed with which the prisoners watched me I quickly had more of them fetched. The bread was then thrown down to them, and I was horribly reminded of the bears' feeding time in a zoo. But even in these foul surroundings the oriental upbringing was never forsaken. There was no stampede, no rush for the bread. Instead, every one of those wretched human beings stretched out a limp hand to pick up the bit that was nearest, then rose, and with hands crossed on his breast and his gaze upon us, murmured 'rahmat' (thank you), before sinking down exhausted.

What a contrast to the behaviour of prisoners in our European jails! In the course of my career as a civil servant I have visited many prisons, and have everywhere observed a uniform spirit of outward discipline and concealed defiance among the inmates. Everyone of them knows, of course, for what reason and for how long he has been sentenced, yet, if you ask, you are overwhelmed by excuses and proofs of alleged innocence. When there are several prisoners in a cell together the weak will certainly be robbed of their food by the strong unless watched by extra guards. In Bukhara it was all very different. Here the old were served by the young, and none knew how long they would have to languish in jail. The customary: 'Until the Emir in his mercy deigns to remember him' took one back to the days of Jacob and Pharaoh.

When a prisoner was being jailed, several bars of the iron grating were moved aside and the wretch was then lowered by a rope. My wish to go down and talk with the prisoners and my efforts to do so were balked by difficulties put in my way such as the time it would take to open up the grating, the difficulty of obtaining a ladder, etc., and on that occasion my time was indeed limited by a very full list of engagements. Moreover, my escorting officials were profoundly shocked at the idea and added the weight of their own arguments to those of the Emir's servants, doing their best to frighten me off with lurid descriptions of vermin and the risk of infection. Even so, I did succeed in exchanging a few words with the prisoners through my interpreter and was thus able to gain some idea of the Emir's conception of justice, though in the majority of cases it was well nigh impossible to get a definite reply to my questions. The usual answer was: 'I don't know'; or 'according to the Shariat' or simply 'such is my fate'. Eventually my interpreter, a Russian lieutenant from the Caucasus, got the prison overseer to show me a few prisoners who he thought would soon be released, as the amounts of their ransom had been recently fixed by the Emir. One of them was supposed to be among the richest merchants in Bukhara; he, it appeared, was being mulcted for money because he had fallen foul of the Emir's finance minister, the almighty Kush-Begi. (A few years later the latter's extortions caused such a riot that he was forced to flee and seek refuge in Persia.) When I asked the Russian Diplomatic Agent why he had not attempted to enforce better treatment of the prisoners, and had allowed conditions to prevail which were quite incompatible with the civilizing influence Russia was trying to exert, he proudly pointed to a contraption of reeds stretched over the open grating. This, he said was a measure he had caused to be put through during his tenure of office. Previously, the prisoners had either been stifled by the merciless rays of the sun as it beat down upon them, or had been frozen and half drowned by the rain and snow in winter.

One shuddered at the mere thought of what those unfortunate beings had to endure. It was obvious that a few days as the Emir's prisoner were worse than any length of confinement in our jails.

HOLY TREES

. . . Certain localities, alleged to possess some particular form of curative properties, were held in great esteem and became centres of pilgrimage. Thus, in the courtyard of a mosque in Kokand I was shown a withered tree ten inches across, which had a long branch projecting at right angles to the trunk about two feet from the ground. The bough was supposed to possess the miraculous power of helping barren women. All they had to do was to come to this particular tree as pilgrims, seat themselves astride the bough and slither down its length as far as the trunk. The tree was an ancient plane tree, some 400 years old, and its timber, hard as iron and further hardened by the hot rays of the sun, was absolutely polished by the thighs of the countless women who had slid down its length, handsomely contributing to the revenue of the mosque in their zeal. Many other mosques owned similar fetishes; for instance, a hair from the Prophet's beard, or from the tail of his horse, both of which were considered objects of exceptional veneration, while a detailed story of how this or that relic came into the possession of the mosque was always forthcoming from the mulla in charge.

On one occasion at breakfast-time I was greeted in a mosque with an exceptionally lavishly spread dastarkhan. The table was set in full view of the public on a terrace under one of the arches which often mark the approach to a mosque. To decline this token of oriental hospitality in so sacred a place was out of the question, so we sat down and got ready to face the food which was being brought in. As a matter of fact we were all very hungry on that particular morning and I frankly admit that the rich pilau of rice, raisins and lamb tasted wonderfully good. If only we had stopped there! Unfortunately for us, however, the pilau was followed by shashlyk with kavardak sauce and kumys. Kavardak is a thick sauce made of goat's milk, vinegar, mustard, slices of cucumber, raisins, sheep's kidney fat, pepper, spices, apricots and peaches; in fact a mixture of things both possible and quite impossible to digest. Kumys is fermented mare's milk, usually served from a kurdyuk, a sheepskin used in the desert as a container for liquids. To wash down this feast we, the kafirs, were even treated to a libation of French champagne. Towards the end of the meal I took out my cigarette case, but was politely requested by the mulla to refrain for a while from smoking. He then proceeded to open a small glass door fitted into a recess in the wall by which we were seated, and, having covered his head with a silk kerchief, he brought out a small casket. Then, turning to me he said: 'Please, smoke now; I am removing the hair of the Prophet to an inner chamber.' It appeared that although eating and drinking (even champagne-drinking by infidels) in the presence of the Prophet's hair were acts considered particularly blessed, smoking was tabu; why, I failed to understand.

In the courtyard of yet another mosque, a few dead trees were festooned with the ribs and skulls of horses. They were holy trees beneath which missionaries, the messengers of Allah, had preached, and the bones were those of their battle chargers. Pilgrims to these holy places believed that when the trees once again burst into leaf this would herald the dawn of Mohammed's kingdom on earth and the resurrection of the holy men, seated on their chargers. In other places rebirth of trees was linked with the end of the world. The origin of many of these fetishes can be traced to the days of Arab or Mongol domination, though some are even more ancient, dating back to heathen times. However, these saintly relics are by no means the sole source of attraction and do not explain why some mosques in particular become the centres of pilgrimage.

SAMARKAND: THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE

. . . Today, however, it is not the mosques but the crypt where Tamerlane lies buried which is the centre of attraction in Samarkand. This crypt is situated within the confines of the mosque called Gur-Emir ('The Tomb of the Lord'), and is reached by a long flight of steps leading up to the building through a grove of cypress trees. I was ceremoniously met by the mullas at the foot of the steps, and slowly led up to the top, supported under the elbows. Access to the tomb is gained through a small door surrounded by the most beautiful arabesques, then through a dimly lit passage, and finally through another, darker room.

The mausoleum proper is a dome-shaped room, at first glance rather unimpressive both in size and ornateness, in marked contrast to so many of Tamerlane's other works. Closer inspection, however, reveals the costliness of the materials of which it is built. The walls are lined with onyx or some similar stone, and the dome, of Moorish design, is decorated with alabaster stalactites, obviously the work of Spanish and Arabian craftsmen. In the centre lies a solid slab of polished nephrite three metres long, engraved with Arabic lettering. Both the mausoleum and crypt were built, on Tamerlane's orders, during his lifetime; the nephrite block, according to legend, being carried from China by thousands of men. How they succeeded in bringing it through the passes of the Tyan'-Shan' and the desert is hard to imagine. This species of rock is exceptionally hard; it must have taken years to chisel out the lettering. The onyx lining of the walls is of foreign origin and reputed to have come from Tibet.

The floor of the mausoleum is covered by a thick carpet designed in such a way as to leave a space in the middle for the green-veined tombstone. It is unique in that it fits the circular building exactly, and is not four-cornered like other Oriental carpets. It must have taken years to weave, and it is quite impossible to guess how many women laboured over it, or where they came from. The design is strikingly original, following none of the usual oriental patterns neither the Kaaba lines of Turkmen and Bukharan ornamental rugs nor the floral designs of Persian and Smyrna carpets. This 600-year-old treasure is protected by a linen cover over its entire surface, and it is on this cover that the mullas tread when they go back and forth to their prayers, tourists being allowed to approach the tombstone only after they have put on slippers made of felt. The cover having been removed in my honour I was able to admire the lovely ancient design of arabesques and flowers, woven into a white background. The achievement of an evenly-shaded white background is much prized even at the present time, because only naturally bleached wool is used and this requires perfect matching if a blotchy effect is to be avoided.

A narrow flight of steps leads from the mausoleum to the crypt, where Tamerlane lies buried exactly beneath the nephrite stone. According to tradition some of his friends and contemporaries are also buried in the crypt. The grave of the mighty conqueror, shorn of any splendour of the golden ornaments or precious stones so favoured in the East, is as unpretentious and simple as was his personal life. Yet, centuries later, this very simplicity produced an immense effect.

All the work that this man accomplished, all that he tried to achieve, is in process of decay. His mighty empire exists no longer, his buildings lie in ruins. The limpid waters he brought to Samarkand no longer flow, the arches of his aqueducts lie broken. The irrigation canals he traced in fields and garden are but and ditches, and the despised kafir reigns in his beloved city. The faith for which he fought, and which was carried to lands where his dreaded name was but a rumour, now faces extinction, because the concepts upon which it was based have proved barren and have brought to the world nothing but misery and ruin. In the end, enforced conversion, hatred of the infidel deliberately fostered in order to create a state of religious awareness, a general massing of humanity under the Creator of the World, and the welding of all true believers into a solid phalanx of fighters against sin and injustice failed. Life made a mockery of these exalted ideals because the chief attributes of godliness-love, compassion and the exercise of free will toward good-were plucked from the human breast.

Nevertheless, we do sometimes glimpse something of the lofty ideals which Tamerlane pursued, and see how he applied them to his personal life. There was the day he halted his armies during a victorious campaign and retreated to Samarkand simply because no man, as he said, should hold too exalted an opinion either of himself or of his aims. His tombstone, by his own order, was cleft in two, to show that nothing created by man is ever perfect. Again, we read that it was his custom on the eve of battle to listen to a recital of a defeat suffered by one of his forebears as a result of self-satisfaction and lack of preparation.

These traits explain the preservation in Central Asia even today of the memory of Tamerlane's ideals, of the great tasks he strove to accomplish and the results he achieved, coupled with memories of his mighty feats of war, his astounding victories and the enormous booties he levied. In this part of the world any evidence of the great and the sublime, be it the remains of a perfect irrigation system, the ruins of some splendid bridge spanning a raging torrent, or something exalting the Mohammedan faith in manuscript or work of art, is invariably associated with the name of Tamerlane.

FERGANA

Riches and treasure characteristic of the whole of Central Asia are to be found in the lovely valley which lies at the foot of the Pamir and Alai mountains. But there also are to be found many of the economic problems which beset the entire East.

When I visited this region the journey to it was fairly simple. At first we followed the main railway line to Samarkand and Bukhara as far as Chernyayev Station and then branched off to the east, heading straight for a line of mountains. When at last we reached Andizhan we had the impression of facing a gigantic wall of stone, topped by a massive white roof. Its height is so enormous that the summit is invisible if you look straight before you at the horizon; you have to crane your neck to get a view of it. This is the Pamir, 'The Roof of the World'.

These mountains have a contour quite unlike that of the Alps with their easily distinguishable peaks presenting a profile of serrated mountain tops. In the Pamir, and in the Alai range which lies at right angles to it, the mountains are too huge and the distances too great for individual heights to be picked out. The Pamir is 10,000 feet higher than Mont Blane, and most of its peaks are about the same height. Standing at the foot of this gigantic mountain mass one sees in the foreground a chain of small hills (or so they seem), partly cultivated. Farther back is a second chain, sparsely wooded, its upper slopes covered by emerald green fields and pasture. This particular chain, which stands out very vividly against a darker background of higher mountains, holds most of the many ores buried in the soil of Fergana. Another range, snow-capped in places, can be seen farther back still, and beyond are the eternal snow-covered peaks of the main mass of mountains. Behind the Pamirs and concealed by them lie the Himalayas, and the mind of the traveller is involuntarily drawn to tropical India still farther beyond.

If we turn our backs to the Pamir the Alai range is on our left, joined further north by the Tyan'-Shan' mountains which border on China. One of the spurs of the Alai, which run parallel to the Pamir in a westerly direction, bars the entrance to the Fergana valley. A powerful stream, the Kara-Dar'ya, runs down from the mountains and spills its waters over scree and boulders into the valley between two enormous rocks of porphyry. At this point the stream is barred by a very large but primitively constructed dam and directed into two large canals which were cut several thousands of years ago. By following the line of foothills these two canals enclose the entire valley, and by means of smaller canals they supply the water needed for its irrigation. By now the beds of the two main arteries have been so washed away that if it were not for the dam they might be taken for two rivers, each about forty metres wide.

The province owes its wealth to this complex system of irrigation excavated centuries ago, presumably by Chinese and Aryan labourers. There being no rainfall between the months of March and October, the area would otherwise be nothing but desert. In this region water is treated as something holy. Litigation over land rights, political scheming, advance in culture - in fact the whole of man's work and activities centre upon the question of water supply. The soil is the famous loess produced by dust-fine particles of lime, porphyry and other minerals swept down from the mountains by the wind. Yellowish-grey in colour, and in consistency resembling lime, when damp it can be easily moulded into any shape, thereafter setting as hard as gypsum. Mixed with water, it rapidly dissolves into sludge. For five or six hours after flooding, the fields are quite impassable and as yielding as a bog, yet on the following day the upper crust has solidified to a depth of a few inches into a rubbery layer strong enough to support men and horses without caving in. It is into this layer, before it has had time to set hard, that the seed is quickly sown, an operation usually performed with the aid of the ketmen. During the hours of daylight the temperature is at hothouse level, and germination is very rapid. When the young shoots come up they protect the soil from the rays of the sun and draw the moisture necessary for growth from the sub-soil, where it has been stored as in a reservoir.

Every village has its 'water expert', who arbitrates on all matters dealing with irrigation and against whose decisions there is no appeal. Long before the Russian conquest, these officials (the aksakals) were elected by the kiqhlaks or villages, with but rare interference by Khan or Emir. The whole matter of irrigation is so desperately important that even the enforced labour which it may sometimes entail is willingly accepted by the local population. Indeed, a break in a dam on any given aryk, is a calamity comparable to a similar event in Holland, with the difference that the resultant losses are caused not by flooding but by the wholesale draining off of precious water into the bed of the Kara-Dar'ya and consequent drought.

A ration of water to any particular farmer is generally spread over several weeks at given intervals, his neighbours and other villages being supplied in rotation. By the time the water reaches the termini of the canals the supply in the upper stretches is probably practically exhausted, and great care must be taken in distributing it between the secondary and smaller canals. The job of inspection and checking is entrusted to head aksakals under a chief aksakal appointed by the Government.

A village usually possesses an aryk of its own, the width and depth at the point where it joins the main canal having been carefully laid down. The angle of flow, on which the rate and volume of water depend, is also carefully fixed. Permission to divert water into this aryk is given for certain days and at set times, the villagers then allocating it among themselves according to old established custom. They apportion the supply by hours, even quarters of an hour, and sometimes even by minutes. At the appropriate time each villager excavates a small aryk from his field or garden and joins up with the main canal serving the village, these smaller ditches being usually sealed off at one end by a diminutive dam of mud. The fields are perfectly flat and about half an acre in size. They are mostly surrounded on all four sides by small dams less than a foot high. The actual amount of water used to flood a given area over a stated period is designated by various names, the one I have heard most commonly used being su - the ordinary word for water. The concept of su as a precise volume of water has a definite and generally accepted connotation. Thus land owned by a farmer is not reckoned, taxed or evaluated in hectares, desiatins, or any other surface measure, but solely according to the quantity of su. The term is in general use, and the value it implies perfectly clear to every native.

The amount of water supplied by the Kara-Dar'ya depends upon the amount of snow which thaws in the mountains. The warmer and dryer the season the more water there is to distribute, and in the event of an overflow the surplus is returned to the Kara-Dar'ya, exactly as in our millraces in Europe. When this has to be done, a section of the dam is broken down by great numbers of men impressed from the villages. As yet, no Russian engineer had mastered the intricacies of these operations and when they became necessary had invariably to rely on the advice and help of local experts from among the natives.

The main dam, the 'Kampyr-Aravat', is situated about two kilometres downstream from the porphyry rocks through which the river gushes into the valley. Here I was shown how its waters were diverted into one of the smaller aryks, by a gang of some fifty men who had ridden in from a distant settlement to irrigate their village. When I arrived in the morning the bed of the aryk was still dry and sealed off from the dam. The men, I noticed, had brought large bundles of twigs and reeds, tied to the flanks of their horses. Laden with these, about twenty men forming a chain resolutely stepped into the ice-cold waters of the Kara-Dar'ya, then threw the bundles down and started treading them in, adding to their own weight with stones passed to them by their comrades on the bank. The chain worked at an acute angle to the current, and soon the main stream was being diverted toward the mouth of the aryk by the growing dam of bundles, the strength of which was being continually increased by sand and gravel lodged between twigs and reeds by the rushing waters. The man at the end of the chain kept on adding to the length of the artificial dam by sinking bundles handed down to him from the bank, the aryk was opened with a blow of the ketmen and the waters gushed into the canal.

As far as I remember, this particular village had been allotted six hours within which to flood and irrigate its fields and was then required to remove the temporary dam. This was quickly done by chopping it away with ketmens, all the material, of course, going to loss.

What I had witnessed illustrated the primitive form of economy existing in Fergana, the so-called 'cotton-land of Russia', where every extra drop of water meant a specific extra quantity of precious fibre. But this was the way things had always been done and, according to the natives, there was no sense in adopting new methods. Besides, had not the aksakals from time immemorial made a living out of controlling these operations, with which they were so well acquainted? There were, of course, any number of foreign contractors who could point to dams they had constructed elsewhere by modern methods. None, however, would agree to work except at the price of large concessions in return for the water they could save, and this was contrary to the principles laid down for Turkestan by the old administration of General Kaufman. Backed by Imperial sanction, he had ruled that 'no foreign capital was to be invested in Turkestan and that any undertaking in the region was to be defrayed by Russian State or Provincial funds'. Nevertheless, at the time of my tour of inspection many applications were being submitted. None of them ever came to anything because of the cut-throat competition among the applicants, all of whom were too intent upon getting all they could out of any proposed scheme for an efficient irrigation system. Thus everything remained as it always had been, and cotton, to the satisfaction of our bureaucrats, 'was nevertheless produced'.

When I visited the region in 1908 and 1909 the value of cotton supplied by Turkestan to the spinning mills in Moscow, previously supplied by imports from the United States, amounted to 300 million roubles. Shortly before the 1914 war cotton production in Central Asia was on the increase, the bulk coming from Fergana. In other regions, like Syr-Dar'ya, it had only just started, while in Samarkand it was hindered by the unresponsive attitude of the natives. On the other hand the Turkmens inhabiting the oases of the Transcaspian region had taken up the cultivation of cotton as early as twenty years before the war and were among the keenest producers. The best fibres came from the Khanate of Khiva owing to the exceptional productivity of its loess soil.

The conditions for cotton-growing in Central Asia to a latitude stretching a little north of Fergana are ideal, and the possibilities limitless. Everything here depends upon an adequate supply of water, for any stretch of desert will produce cotton provided it is irrigated. Two large watercourses flow through the region: the SyrDar'ya and the Amu-Dar'ya. In addition there are several smaller rivers in Turkestan, which do not reach the sea but peter out in the sands or dry up in the summer through evaporation, such as the Tedzhen and the Murgab in the Transcaspian region and the Zeravshan in Bukhara and Samarkand. The natives also make use of every lake and every mountain stream which comes tumbling down from the hills, and they collect water in wells during the periods of rainfall to irrigate their valleys. The local systems are of course more primitive than the larger ones, and are usually the work either of individual communities or else smaller manaps and sultans, while the material employed to seal off the valleys is very crude and therefore often washed away or destroyed. Moreover, they are not easily adaptable to any form of systematically organized cultivation, relying as they do on the rainfall whereas the only really reliable sources of water supply are the glaciers. This is one of the reasons why Fergana enjoys a privileged position, the level of the Kara-Dar'va being less subject to variation in the dry season than that of other rivers.

The system of irrigation I have described, which was introduced in the first place by the Chinese several thousand years ago and then taken over and handed down by the Kalmyks, is admirably suited to the peculiar properties of the pliable, loess soil - the collecting and storing of water in its subsurface. The advantages gained by the terracing of fields, so common in Italy, have never been appreciated by the natives of Central Asia. Water, after it has been utilized, is allowed to drain off into low lying ground which no one takes the trouble to cultivate, where it forms large areas of swamps. Marshy depressions caused by this waste are found in the vicinity of practically every village. The whole of Fergana, in fact, is surrounded by a belt of swamps, which explains the prevalence of malaria in Central Asia.

In the course of my investigations I examined many plans for terracing the fields, for improved drainage and water conservation, but all would have necessitated a prolonged period for the re-education of the population and the abandonment of old established techniques, while the novel methods introduced by Russian irrigation engineers had so far yielded very meagre results. Unfortunately, there was in Russia no establishment of university level where agricultural science was properly taught. General Kaufman had at one time intended to found a technical college at Tashkent for engineers specializing in irrigation, but had to abandon the idea for lack of funds and because of the difficulty of finding a properly qualified teaching staff. In consequence the majority of the Russian aksakals assigned to the region were either former railway and mining engineers who had learnt the science of irrigation in situ, or, at best, men with a technical education at secondary school level. Under these conditions mistakes and failures were unavoidable, like the failure of the grandiose Hungry Steppe irrigation scheme in the Samarkand region. The establishment of a correct profile for a main irrigation canal was, apparently, the best our European engineers could achieve. Direction, fall, and the network of distributary canals in relation to the size of the area to be irrigated were matters they did not worry about. It took them years to master the properties of the local soil. Generally, the canal trenches were either too steep, in which case the beds were washed away and blocked the passages lower down, or else they were too shallow and did not provide for a sufficient flow of water and everything got silted up. The native technicians, for their part, simply started their trenches at the point of junction with the main artery and then proceeded, without levelling instruments or mathematics, cunningly to use a trickle of water in a parallel runnel both as a gauge and guide. These men were all self-taught, the art being transmitted from father to son, and in the main their work was faultless. One could not say as much about the efforts of our European engineers, nor could one be surprised at the lack of faith in their work shown by the local inhabitants.

In the eighteen-eighties the late Emperor Alexander III founded an experimental station on 400,000 acres of Crown land in the Transcaspian region, near Merv. It was originally proposed to restore the ancient dams built by Tamerlane and his successors, and to start a school for practical research into modern methods of irrigation. After twenty-five years of work, much of it experimental, and consequently often unrewarding, an efficient system of main irrigation canals was laid out on the estate. New concrete dams were set up, and the flow of water used to generate hydraulic and electric power. The smaller, intermediary canals were all provided with sluices and corrugated iron lock-gates and were interconnected by telephone. Unfortunately, the actual cultivation of the fields as well as the harvesting was left to native share-croppers, who carried on in the old way, following methods with which they were familiar. The system of terraced fields was not introduced and the surplus water after irrigation was still drained off onto low-lying ground, where it formed the customary swamps. Though only partially successful, the project nevertheless did serve a useful purpose by furnishing much needed experience to engineering candidates who wished to obtain local appointments. The success or failure of this lofty scheme had little or no bearing on the methods pursued by the local inhabitants; one could hardly hope for better husbandry from the natives without the incentive of proven results and the adaptation of exemplary systems which they could then have been required to follow. At the time of my visit to Fergana, this was but a vain hope, as even in Russia the necessary techniques had not yet been evolved.

However, by the adaptation of American strains, the quality and yields of the cotton harvest had been vastly improved since the days of the conquest. When the Russians arrived upon the scene cotton growing in this part of Asia was already very popular, but the quality of the produce was poor, as seed of Asian origin was the only kind used. When ripe, the seeds were contained in a tightly closed pod, in appearance rather like the unopened bud of a large rose. The petals of the pod were brittle and brown and got mixed up with the cotton during harvesting. The fibres of the indigenous plants were short and hard. The American and Egyptian strains had an open pod, about the size of an orange, the ball of cotton in which the seeds were embedded being easily separated from its supporting petals. In America this is done by very practical machines, called gins. Small circular saws separate the cotton from the seeds and thresh the latter. The whole process consists of feeding the pods of raw cotton into the machine, which throws the cotton out at one end and the seeds, resembling coffee beans coated in white velvet, at the other. Hydraulic presses then press the cotton into bales weighing about 3.5 hundredweights each, and the seed is processed by removing any adhering fibres of cotton. Later it is heated and pressed into oil cakes, the residual oil being collected, filtered and used for human consumption.

The economic value of cotton, as a primary factor in the economy of the newly conquered region, was quickly realized by General Kaufman. When numerous attempts to improve the local strain had failed, American seed was imported and thoroughly tested for suitability to climate and soil, and the best kinds retained. The immediate result was a fourfold increase in yield. The natives were ordered to sow nothing but American strains, while the smallholders were given the seed free and granted loans for the provision of working capital. During the next years production rose sharply, every suitable bit of soil being put under cotton, and because cotton crops brought in better returns the cultivation of grain was allowed to decline. The diminution of acreage under cereals in its turn brought about a growing demand for imported grain from Siberia, which travelled to Central Asia overland until it was replaced by cheap grain from the Volga region after the completion of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway and the progress inland of the Transcaspian line built by Annenkov. From then on American cotton became the staple crop in Central Asia, as well as the universally accepted commodity of barter.

From Russian Turkestan its cultivation spread to Afghanistan, Kashgar, and Persia, where it developed into the best money spinner the agrarian population of those countries had ever known. Indeed, so enthusiastic did the Afghans become that they used up all the available water in the upper reaches of the Amu-Dar'ya and the Murgab, greatly to the annoyance of the inhabitants of Russian Turkestan living downstream, who were now deprived of their customary supply.

One great difficulty, however, beset cotton-cultivation; this was efficient marketing of the harvest, hampered by inadequate railway communications, a shortage of rolling stock, and the absence of solid, properly constructed railway bridges. At the time no quick solution of these problems could be found. The peculiar properties of the loess soil rendered the construction and regular functioning of the railways extremely difficult, while the greatest obstacle of all was, of course, the universal shortage of water. To overcome this difficulty it had become accepted practice to lay the lines parallel to the valleys of the larger rivers at a distance of about eight kilometres from the main channels and to pump the water to the stations up pipelines. But because in this part of the country the rivers frequently change course, a pumping station that had been built close to the bank might, the following year, find itself far removed from its original source of supply. The constant shifting of pumping stations to new sites was expensive and laborious, and the engineers thought they could solve the problem by trying to confine the two biggest rivers, the Amu-Dar'ya and the Syr-Dar'ya, to permanent, artificially created channels. Resort was also had to artesian wells, but these proved a failure, as the soil of the Central Asian plateau, being mainly composed of dust-fine rock particles, either yielded no water at all, or water so salty that it was unfit for operating the railways. The best results were obtained by reverting to the established system of aryks, which rapidly transformed the stations into small, flowering oases wherever they were used. In spite of all the ingenious methods devised, there still remained long stretches of railway which could only be supplied by the system introduced by General Annenkov, which was to haul trains of water-tanks mounted on railway trucks to the stations.

Reverting to the question of soil - this in summer was as hard as iron; in winter, during the rainy season, it was soft and yielding; whole stretches of railway seemed to run over a kind of morass and were sometimes engulfed by the frequent subsidences. During the rainy season the permanent way was in constant need of repair until the later frosts came to the rescue.

The habit of the rivers of changing their course rendered the correct siting of projected crossings unbelievably difficult, and preference was usually given to places where the banks were reinforced by conglomerates. Also, in those days and under the prevailing local conditions the sinking of bridge pylons was an extremely hazardous and complicated business. For instance, during the preliminary work on the bridge over the Amu-Dar'ya at Chardzhou, a solid bed of rock for the caissons was never reached, the laws of friction as applied to the marly soil having mercifully maintained the pylons in position from that day to the present time. The thirty minute crossing by train of the bridge over the Amu-Dar'ya, one of the longest in the world, affords a good opportunity of appreciating the difficulties which faced the engineers in their attempts to curb nature in Turkestan.

When General Annenkov was building the railway, so vital to the strengthening of Russia's hold on the newly-conquered region, he was driven by a compelling sense of urgency. Thus, when he came to the Amu-Dar'ya, the Great River, he wasted no time in building a permanent bridge. Instead, he built a wooden lattice bridge resting upon wooden caissons, much resembling the temporary bridges built during the war. Hailed at the time as a notable engineering feat, the bridge stood for many years and safely carried the trains which crawled cautiously over its enormous length. Only when it was destroyed by fire was it replaced by a permanent steel bridge. The problem of confining the Amu-Dar'ya to one channel was one which had beset the engineers from the early days of the wooden construction. The waters were constantly breaking through the banks either east or west of the bridge and leaving it standing high and dry. Continuous strengthening of the banks proved unavailing; finally a row of dams in a fourteen-kilometre stretch near Chardzhou solved the difficulty by ensuring the river's even flow.

No sooner had this obstacle been overcome than a new one arose. Previously, nobody had worried about the drifting sands of the desert. Now it was found that they were piling up against the railway and river embankments and threatening to wreck the laborious work of the engineers. An attempt was made to stop the sand drifts by planting trees and bushes along the embankments, but with limited success. More practical results were obtained with a kind of desert herb. When this was sown it quickly produced strong roots which gripped the dry loamy soil and held it fast. Within a few years a firm swarth of green ran parallel to the embankments, in which trees could safely be planted.

Fuel was yet another difficulty. Though the coal fields in Turkestan, and especially those of Fergana, produced coal of good quality, at the time of my visit they had only just commenced operating and the best of the seams were still untouched. As the quality of the coal locally produced was unsuitable, the fuel used by the railways, especially during the early stages, was wood. Extensive use was made of the roots of a shrub called saksaul, -which grows profusely in the desert and in appearance and height resembles the juniper. Its roots spread over a wide surface and are often as thick as the limbs of an oak, while in calorific value they produce as much heat as good quality coal. In no time at all the desert along the line was stripped of every bush, and further supplies had to be brought on camel back. This of course, was uneconomical, as a camel can carry only about six or seven hundredweights. Wood fuel was superseded by crude oil, easily brought to the Turkestan harbour of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian from the oil fields of Baku. Subsequently, large quantities of oil were found in Fergana, but the output of the wells promptly acquired by the Oil Trust, was purposely restricted to prevent a fall in world prices.

The rate of railway construction in Turkestan increased as, one by one, the difficulties facing the engineers were overcome. The two main lines, built and completed by the state, were in full operation when I first visited the region. One, begun by General Annenkov in 1879, led from Krasnovodsk on the eastern side of the Caspian, via Ashkhabad, Merv, Chardzhou, Bukhara, and Samarkand to Tashkent and Andizhan. The other, several thousand kilometres long, started from Samara and ran via Orenburg and Perovsk to Tashkent, bridging the Volga, the Ural, the Syr-Dar'ya and several other rivers. On either of them- four days could be spent in travelling within the borders of the Turkestan region. Merchandise in large quantities was brought to the railheads, and the amount of freight offered rapidly surpassed the most sanguine estimates. Cotton was, of course, the main item of export to Europe, but there was no lack in other kinds of local produce, including minerals such as uranium and ozokerite. A great trade in fruit soon developed, whole trainloads of it being taken to European Russia where it commenced to displace foreign imports. Shortly before the war the construction of another trunk line was taken in hand. Many thousands of kilometres long, it was to run from Arys via Vernyy and Semipalatinsk till it joined the great Siberian trans-continental railway, thereby on the one hand providing an outlet for the cereals, fruit, furs and minerals which abounded in the northern parts of Turkestan, and on the other supplying the cotton-growing regions with cheap grain.

These railways were really only the first meshes of a vast network which, it was intended, would convey the produce of torrid Central Asia to the markets of the world.

One of the results of the rapid expansion of the cotton market in the last few decades preceding the 1914 war was an increase in wealth of the local population and a concentration of capital, calculated literally in millions, in the hands of the inhabitants. At first, there appeared to be no outlet for all this money, as the mere spending of it on luxuries made little or no appeal to a people accustomed to a patriarchal and modest form of life. There is, after all, not such a great difference between the mode of life of a wealthy Kirgiz or Sart and that of his less fortunate brother. At best he might perhaps own a few more wives. But a larger harem called for no heavy expenditure if one thinks of the long established tradition of a self-sufficing economy. The frequent earthquakes confined both rich and poor to a uniform type of adobe dwelling and precluded the possibility of building luxurious and many-storied buildings. The women's attire did not fall heavily upon the purse of their lord, as their dresses were of home-spun material and cost him next to nothing; while their diet, if I am to believe the stories I was told, was vegetarian. Only on special occasions when there was feasting in the men's quarters were the women favoured with a few morsels of roasted lamb or goat graciously sent to the harem by their lord and master. A stage was eventually reached in the early days of this bonanza when the wealthy Sarts, Turkmen, or Kirgiz literally did not know what to do with the piles of roubles which kept flowing in from the sales of their cotton. One must remember that they were reared in a tradition by which every petty despot was always on the lookout for plunder at the slightest sign of affluence. Accordingly, the safest thing to do with money was to tuck it away where it could not be detected. A Turkmen once told me the story of how he had appealed for help to the District Officer against the mice which were devouring the paper money he had secreted in his garden. When he went to the bank, as advised, and there emptied his sacks and salvaged the valid notes, he found himself the possessor of well over half a million roubles.

However, it was not long before the wealthy natives, particularly the Sarts, ventured into commerce and in no time built up a flourishmg trade in local produce. Sarts and Bukharans became a common sight at the great trade fair of Nizhniy-Novgorod on the Volga, where they exchanged their wares against Russian manufactured goods for resale in the markets of West China, Persia, and Afghanistan. Russian china, in particular, cleverly designed to suit the local taste, was highly prized in these countries.

The growing commercial activity among the natives soon attracted the attention of some of the larger banking houses in Russia. Credit on generous terms was offered, local branches opened all over the region and a local bank was founded in Bukhara shortly before the war. Savings accumulated at the banks, and the natives, progressively mounting in financial stature, now turned their attention to mining, industrial undertakings, and the building of narrow-gauge railways. Cotton-cleaning and pressing mills sprang up like mushrooms all over the country, and at the time of my visit to Fergana the majority were owned by native capitalists. It was, however, the narrow-gauge railways which presented the greatest attraction to native capital because of the huge dividends they yielded. The fantastic crops of cotton harvested in the relatively constricted irrigated area of Fergana, where the population is as dense as in Belgium, were crying out for rapid means of removal. Roads and light railways were the answer. Consequently, any money invested in the construction of a narrow-gauge railway was assured a profitable and rapid return. Native capital seized upon this chance, and in the last decades preceding the war a whole network of approach railways spread over the province, all owned by the natives. One of the most important was that put through the district of Namangan. At the time of my visit, and before the line was built, the only link between the district and its market town at Old Margelan on the Tashkent-Andizhan railway was the caravan route over the Amu-Dar'ya, where camels, horses, and carts were laboriously ferried across the river. Another route, 100 kilometres away and over a ford usable only in favourable weather, was unpopular because of the mountainous country through which it led.

Cotton is harvested in October. It takes a month to clean, bale, and pack it. Transportation to the market centres, therefore, never begins before November or December, when the rivers are usually swollen and much time is lost in ferrying the cotton across. The ferries are really flat rafts made of tree trunks lashed together, and the accepted modus operandi is as follows: first, the loaded ferry is pushed for about half a kilometre upstream by a collection of men armed with long staves who shove it laboriously against the strong current. It is then allowed to drift down and is steered diagonally across the river by means of a long tiller to a point on the opposite bank, approximately facing the original point of departure. Here it is grounded, and the tricky business of unloading begins. As soon as the ferry approaches the bank all hell seems to break loose: swearing men, anxious to be the first ashore, bucking, stubborn beasts refusing to step into the shallow water, snarling camels snapping at each other-the whole scene is one of unmitigated confusion and noise. I had at one time a snapshot of a caravan of camels waiting to be ferried across the river. Thousands of them were stretched out along the bank, flank to flank, for as far as the eye could see. Beside them, squatting on the ground, were their drovers, resignedly waiting their turn to be ferried over the river, which could not be before a few weeks if the traffic was heavy. Stacked alongside were the bales of precious cotton. The time wasted was incalculable, and nowhere but in the Orient would such conditions be tolerated.

Narrow-gauge railway construction, then, on a large scale, especially in Fergana within the last five pre-war years, was the factor which contributed most to the expansion of cotton-growing in the district as against a noticeable decrease of production between 1905 and 1910. Originally, following General Kaufman's farsighted policy, cotton-growing had been given a powerful fillip by the settlers from European Russia. Banks had been granted special facilities for financing the production of cotton and for erecting cleaning and pressing plants, and under these conditions the necessary funds, liberally voted by the directors, were always available. To increase their turnover the mirs themselves offered all sorts of credit facilities to the local producers for the purchase of cotton and corn, the whole bringing about a steady expansion of the area under cotton during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Every available parcel of irrigated land was put under cotton, with a resultant shrinkage in the acreage under cereals. There arose a shortage of corn, and consequently of bread, which in this region had previously been ridiculously cheap. Bread prices rose, and cereals once again came into their own.. At about this time, too, the banks ceased to be as interested in cotton as before, having found a lucrative investment for their funds in the mining industry and in the overall technical development of the region. Added to this, at the turn of the century, the soil in the irrigated areas best suited to cotton-growing had become virtually exhausted by haphazard and unsystematic methods of cultivation. Irrigation, although encouraging the productivity of the soil, could not restore the precious elements of which it had been robbed. The crops dwindled, and fell to half their previous yield per hectare. Salvation lay in the supply of fresh loam, but this had to be brought by cart and spread on the fields, a costly operation impeded by the rise in the price of labour, in its turn dependent on increasingly expensive bread.

It must be remembered that cotton production had never developed into a properly regulated industry. Instead, it depended entirely on the cumulative efforts of a multitude of small producers, usually poor and devoid of any capital resources. Any calamity or any failure of their crops, whether due to natural causes or a plague of locusts, at once brought about their ruin or placed them at the mercy of the unscrupulous usurers, both large and small. Henceforward the unfortunate debtor, slaving the year round to keep these sharks at bay, could no longer call his soul his own.

I was anxious to inform myself of the true nature of the debtor-creditor relationship existing between an owner of a typical holding and these money-lenders, and called for a report on the extent of indebtedness of the inhabitants of a specific district. Anyone living in an ordered society would be amazed at the terms of credit established over years, as revealed by the report submitted to me; 60 and even 100 per cent was admitted as a fair rate of interest and one for which the debtor was supposed to be grateful to his creditor. 1 well remember, for instance, the case of a village in the Namangan district where the debts of the inhabitants registered by the Kadi amounted within one month to 800,000 roubles. To remedy the situation I proposed to establish a chain of banks to be devoted entirely to the granting of petty credit facilities. The scheme was sanctioned and in every way encouraged by the Ministry of Finance in the capital, but never bore fruit because of the outbreak of war in 1914. Notwithstanding the chaotic conditions I have described, the banks were able to take an active and lucrative part in the financial life of the region; I was once told by the manager of the local branch of the Russo-Asian Bank that he had never had occasion to protest a bill of exchange issued by a native, and that as far as the inhabitants were concerned the 12.5 per cent interest charged by his bank was considered by them as a veritable boon. It is, however, to be regretted that much of the credit granted in this way went to large scale usurers who had no scruples about extorting exorbitant rates of interest from the small fry lower down the scale of money-lenders with whom they dealt.

That the Russian Government's rooted policy of excluding foreign capital from participation in capital investments had a crippling effect on Turkestan's economic development cannot be denied. An effort was made to induce the natives to place their accumulated, and by now considerable, savings in the local Savings and sundry smaller banks. Two years before the war, a magnificently laid out bank had been founded in Bukhara for the purpose of financing large irrigation projects connected with cotton-growing and with the development of vast landed estates.

As we have seen, the possibilities open to the cotton-grower owing to the peculiar properties of the soil in this region are practically unlimited. Throughout a vast area of Turkestan, hilly ground apart, every single hectare produces a bumper crop provided there is sufficient water. As with the Nile in Egypt, the two main rivers, the Amu-Dar'ya and Syr-Dar'ya, might have been utilized to enrich the soil had there been a proper system of irrigation. The whole thing was a question of money, and shortly before 1914 a great deal of capital was being invested in irrigation works. This occurred a few years after my tour of inspection. Whilst I was in Turkestan private capital still shrank from this form of investment, mostly from a feeling of insecurity since there was no established government policy for regulating the supply of water, a factor which might otherwise have encouraged and even guaranteed private investment in an enterprise of this kind. What capital was being invested went into the mining industry, which was both more lucrative and easier to develop. That the valley of Fergana and its surrounding mountains did indeed offer an attractive field to the enterprising investor I was able to see for myself when I visited the main mining centres of the province.

This was in June 1909, just after the three weeks I had spent in Tashkent presiding over the gathering of mullas with whom I had been examining the Shariat and the Holy Sunna of Mohammed with the object of translating the Arabic text into legally precise Russian. The recollection of those ascetic, long-bearded leaders of Mohammedan thought is still very vivid in my mind, though I must admit that for a European it was no easy task to sit day in day out in a temperature ranging round 100' and keep one's mind fixed on a spate of legal intricacies. What a relief it was, after the work had been completed and the resultant material checked and rechecked, to be seated once again in my saloon car and to watch, as we rolled to the hills, the flourishing gardens and cotton fields gliding by, an eloquent testimony to the unquellable forces of nature and to the toil of the industrious population.

On this occasion our destination was Andizhan, the terminus of the railway which ran via Kokand and Margelan. As we drew nearer to the hills the air became lighter and it was easier to breathe. And at night, with our windows down, it was as cool as in Europe. Pleasant as this was, there were certain drawbacks to our enjoyment. The malarial mosquito, for one thing, is particularly vicious at night in Fergana, as I was shortly to find out.

We were halted for the night at the main station in Margelan. It was blissfully cool and I was fast asleep when I was aroused by a terrific commotion in one of the neighbouring compartments. A few minutes later my secretary rushed in saying that his room-mate, a State Counsellor of the St. Petersburg Supreme Court attached to my suite by the Ministry of Justice, had suddenly gone mad, was raving and had tried to strangle him. I turned out, and after a lengthy search was able to find a local doctor who at once diagnosed the case as one of cerebral malaria. He practically had to fight the patient before he succeeded in giving him an injection of quinine the size of which would have made a European doctor's hair stand on end. In the morning, the Counsellor was quite well and we made haste to continue our journey. I later found out that he had served as a young barrister in Margelan about fourteen years before, and had suffered at the time from this form of malaria. The doctors could do nothing for him and he had sought refuge in European Russia. Though in the intervening years he had suffered only occasional bouts of fever, the three days he spent in Margelan before my arrival bad been enough to bring about a recurrence of the disease.

We reached Andizhan in the evening, and after a brief tour of sightseeing on the following morning proceeded on our journey to Osh, our party comfortably distributed in ten troikas. The Governor, with whom I rode, was a real 'Turkestanian', a man risen from the ranks to his present position on merit alone and who had spent his life in the region. A fluent linguist, he read and spoke Sart, Kirgiz, Tadzhik, and Turkmen and could even write in these languages.

The road, as it gradually ascends from Andizhan to Osh, leads through some of the most fertile parts of Fergana. Seventy kilometres long, and ordered on each side by four rows of plane trees providing a most welcome shade, the highway is a modern engineering feat originally started by General Skobelev at the time of the conquest. In those days human life and toil were not worth much in Asia, and Skobelev adopted the accepted method of impressed labour regardless of the human toll exacted. As we bowled along in our troika mounted on rubber-tyred wheels I was told by the Governor that this wonderful highway, eighty yards across with a metalled strip of black porphyry in the centre sixty feet wide and laid three feet deep, had not been repaired for the past seventeen years. The surface was splendid despite the fact that the road was the main artery for the exchange of goods between Western China and Europe and an endless stream of caravans and Chinese arabas flowed along it on their way from Kashgar.

We were escorted by a convoy of superbly mounted local notables and white-bearded chieftains, decked out in the most gorgeous satin kaftans embroidered in gold, with snow-white turbans and the most handsome ceremonial swords and daggers, sheathed in gold and silver scabbards. Their saddles, bridles, and stirrups were also heavily inlaid with gold and silver. The horses, thoroughbred Arabs with beautiful heads and intelligent-looking eyes, were decked out in saddle cloths made of brightly coloured material and, although slightly overladen by all this finery, presented a gallant and striking sight. When we halted and our escort dismounted, green, blue or red blankets were thrown over the horses to protect them from the noonday heat.

A horseman bearing a green silken banner preceded our cortege. All along the road from Andizhan I had the impression of driving through one long settlement, so near were the villages one to another.

The individual houses, Asian flat-roofed structures of plaster, were surrounded each by its own orchard of fruit-laden trees, apricots, peaches, pears and apples. The tinkling sound of water running down the irrigation canals accompanied us on our way, while to the right and left of us, fields of maize, corn and sorghum, standing proudly erect, alternated with the bright green of rice and the deeper hues of the cup-shaped and purple-rimmed blossoms of cotton in bloom. On the emerald green mountain meadows great herds were grazing; high above them and through the clouds sparkled the glaciers of the Tyan'-Shan' range, while the majestic Pamir stretched its immense roof right overhead. 1 would willingly change places with my readers if they might thus enjoy the full beauty of the scene, the golden rays of the sun and the deep blue of the cloudless sky, for no words are adequate to describe the radiance of the landscape that lay before my eyes.

The highway follows a gentle gradient rising imperceptibly along a valley which gets narrower and narrower the higher one mounts. A few miles from Osh it meets an icy-cold mountain stream which comes tumbling down over enormous rocks of green tinted porphyry.

Osh is a small district centre lying on both sides of a valley running through the mountains. It is renowned throughout Turkestan for its genial climate and complete freedom from the malarial mosquito, and is a local spa to which hundreds of Europeans come every year to recoup from their own trying climate and to enjoy the wonderful mountain scenery. It is also famed for its kumys and is visited by many sufferers with lung and chest troubles.

The officers' mess of the battalion garrisoned in Osh is located in a grove of oak trees and is built like a Swiss chalet with large verandas from which there is a splendid view of the whole valley and the surrounding mountains. But for the flat-roofed houses one might easily think one was in some picturesque mountainous region of central Germany or Switzerland, and not in distant Fergana. The impression was heightened as we sat by moonlight on the veranda with dark green woods of oak and plane trees on either side and at our feet the silvery streak of the river, making its precipitous journey down to the valley.

On the road again next day we no longer kept to the highway but drove straight across country, following the slopes of the mountains at first through clearings in the oak woods and later, as we ascended higher and higher, over mountain pastures, our ponies keeping up a steady trot over the springy ground. Osh was soon far behind us, deep down in the valley, and no sooner had we clambered over one ridge than we were confronted by another just ahead, as if waiting to be vaulted. It was like an endless game of slithering down slopes, seeking a way through some narrow defile and climbing again. When at last we left the tree line behind us the snow-capped mountains seemed much nearer, their summits having gained in height and now towering above us.

After more climbing we reached a long, narrow valley with walnut trees growing thickly on both sides. The trees were small, bushy, and resembled hazels. These were the famous state walnut forests, where the Mennonites I have mentioned were employed as foresters. A sponge-like growth on the trunks was, it appeared, a source of considerable revenue to the State, being much prized by wood turners abroad, especially in France. After being carefully removed by contractors it was packed and exported in whole trainloads.

A picturesque spot on the side of a mountain overlooking a vast expanse of country was chosen as the site for our camp at nightfall. We had a hearty meal splendidly prepared by our cook over a cheery fire at the foot of a nearby mound and then relaxed in the luxurious yurts put up for us on the flat expanse of ground, enjoying the cool of evening and the wonderful scenery. Far beneath us we could see the fertile valley dotted with villages and minarets, the fields framed by mulberries and poplars. Farther up, the long valley stretched into the mountains, narrowing in the distance into a deep gorge. Above us the glaciers glowed in the sunset. Far away on the horizon a small black cloud rested on the summit of one of the peaks.

We had unexpected visitors at our meal, among them a Ukrainian, one of the earliest pioneers in Turkestan, who had come to the country in search of gold. Though unsuccessful in this quest he had found many other deposits of valuable minerals which, however, he had not taken the trouble to exploit, but had sold off as soon as he could in order to resume his search for the elusive precious metal. Another of our visitors was an Armenian businessman, keen and conceited, who had just begun to work a coal mine for which he predicted a glowing future. The third, tall and handsome, was a gentleman by the name of Kennedy, who introduced himself as the owner of a coal mine about half a day's journey from the camp. The Governor told us that this Englishman had turned up in the region about three years before, claiming to represent a powerful and influential financial group in Moscow. He was a plausible fellow, though in his puttees and well-cut sports clothes he looked much more like an officer than a rough mining engineer. According to the Governor he knew everybody in the administration in Margelan and was a welcome guest at every party. Later in the evening, when we were discussing future plans, he surprised me by his intimate knowledge of every pass and byway in the vicinity.

After sitting up for some time we retired to our yurts, and the camp was soon deep in peaceful slumber.

I was jolted out of my sleep by a terrific thunder clap and a roaring wind; looking around hastily I saw the walls of my yurt were swaying and bulging in a most dangerous manner. I rushed out clad only in my night attire and found twenty men desperately hanging on to the guy ropes of my tent, which looked like being blown away at any moment by a wind of hurricane force. Not a moment was lost in emptying my tent of its belongings; camp bed, saddle, and the rest were hurriedly carried out, while I made my way in my slippers to another yurt farther down where room was made for me for the rest of the night. All hope of saving my former shelter was given up, and it was allowed to blow away into the night. It was the small black cloud I had noticed earlier on which had wrought all this havoc and unleashed over our camp a storm more severe than anything I had ever experienced in Europe. Mercifully, the remaining yurts were better sheltered than mine, and protected by a shoulder of the mountain we were able to snatch a few hours' sleep. These sudden storms are apparently quite usual in the region.

Early next morning we set out to visit several mines I wanted to see, in particular the one owned by Kennedy, which lay close to the Armenian's pits and not too far out of our way. Three hours' driving over rough country brought us to the mines. Evidence of civilization appeared as we drove through the approaches: miners' houses, canteens, and even a hospital. The mine manager treated us to a sumptuous meal, after which we went down one of the shafts. The field we visited was fairly shallow, as far as I remember, lying some 400 feet underground. The coal extracted was pitch black and looked much like the lighter kinds of Polish coal. It was unsuited to the making of coke but enjoyed a good demand as house fuel and for use in samovars, where it burnt as well as charcoal. A narrow-gauge railway led to the valley, the company intending to link up with the main line later on. The coal was brought down on flat trolleys, each accompanied downhill by two horses which pulled the empty trolleys back to the coal pits. There was also another field, 100 feet deeper, where the coal was of better quality, but work here had only just commenced.

Later in the day I was taken to another mine. The installation was primitive, though it was evident that exploitation had originally been planned on a fairly vast scale. An overhead cable railway stopped two kilometres short of the station where the coal was to be unloaded, the construction having been halted through shortage of funds. It was an incongruous sight-the solitary pylons sticking up to no purpose in the desert-like country, and the trolleys, forlornly suspended from the cables, seeming sleepily to watch the flocks of sheep and goats that grazed in the valley below, tended by their shaggy Kirgiz herdsmen.

We were delayed in a mountain village by a deputation of local inhabitants mustered to extend their greetings, and night was approaching when we sighted the buildings of Kennedy's mine, which I was resolved to visit. Earlier on I had been subjected to a concerted attack by Kennedy and the local District Officer, who at all cost wanted me to abandon my original plan. All sorts of excuses were advanced, such as the great distance (a paltry ten kilometres), the lateness of the hour, the hazards and dangers of the road in the dark, the desirability of inspecting something more interesting, etc., etc. However, I was adamant in my decision and told them to move on. Now Kennedy came at me again, making excuses for his mine and saying that in fact he really had no mine in the accepted sense of the word, that he had only sunk a few bore holes and that there was really nothing to show; he was sorry, but there had been some hitch about the transfer of money by his company; he would have it by the autumn, straight from London. The Governor wryly remarked that Mr. Kennedy had been expecting a transfer from London for the past three years, yet apparently the only thing he did was travel round the country and prospect. Here I gave up, for by now the true nature of his activities was perfectly clear. Not in the least abashed he accompanied me for another few days, was a most charming travelling companion, an expert at roasting spitted mutton over a coal fire, and had a better knowledge of the mountain trails than any of the local guides. He made no secret about his wanderings through most of the Altay passes, the Pamir, and Afghanistan. He spoke Russian and Kirgiz fluently. As the agent of an allegedly Russian company he had apparently obtained permission from St. Petersburg to prospect for minerals in this region, though in my opinion there was very little doubt as to his identity: quite obviously, he was a British Intelligence Officer.

On the morrow we had a most interesting day. We started off by driving deep into the mountains till we came to a high-lying meadow, traversed by a rapidly flowing stream. We pitched camp on one of its banks, close to a house built like a Swiss chalet and belonging to the Ukrainian gold-prospector who had visited us two days before. A couple of years earlier, when he had come on a new kind of ore in the neighbourhood, he had rented the meadow from the Kirgiz owner and started building a house for his family. He had named the place 'Olgin Lug' (Olga's Meadow) after his wife, and proudly explained that it was the highest Russian settlement in the world. By sunrise on the following morning he had us mounted on brisk mountain ponies and riding up precipitous paths through wild and fascinating country. It required a strong head to keep to what looked like mere goat tracks winding along the ledges of rugged precipices. Every now and again a halt was called to allow our ponies to get their breath, the stops becoming more frequent as our long string of riders mounted higher and higher, the horses having a hard time in the rarefied atmosphere.

After several hours we reached our goal, a small plateau containing the entrance to a cave. The entrance had been enlarged, and the way led down a long tunnel, fairly even at first and terminating at a row of steps hewn out of the rock and going steeply down. By the dim light of wax candles held by our guides we negotiated the steps with some difficulty, as each was well over a metre in depth. We descended for some time and came to another passage, narrower than the first, which brought us into a second cave, with a dome-like ceiling. The ground at our feet was perfectly dry, without a trace of moisture. In the light of the candles the walls all around the cave glittered with a bright, multi-coloured metallic sheen which reminded me of the fairy stories of my childhood.

Here I heard the most extraordinary story from the prospector, in answer to my questions about the origin of his find. This is what he said: 'In the course of my travels on horseback all over the country I was once told by a wandering group of Kirgiz of certain caves in which the spirits were supposed to have hidden quantities of gold, and was eventually brought by them to this place. At the time I had befriended a French mining engineer, then down on his luck mainly through drink, who sometimes helped me in my work. He and I crawled through the mouth of the cave, which was then much narrower than it is now, clambered down the steps and came to this chamber. We at once realized that the place had been worked at an earlier stage, but had no inkling as to the kind of ore it contained. You see those red and blue veins running down the walls, and also the yellow streaks? Well, we took samples of the yellow rock and hoped it contained the gold we were searching for. Further exploration led us to the beginnings of a shaft, blocked by a subsequent fall of rock. After we had cleared this away we found a curious-looking pick, apparently made of iron, and perfectly preserved in this airtight chamber though the handle had long since crumbled into dust. We fitted a haft from one of our own picks to our find, and used it to break up the ore we wanted to take away. To our amazement the metal was like the best quality steel. We removed the pick and the samples and the Frenchman analysed them in his diminutive laboratory in town. It turned out that the ore was uranium, and that the pick was made of an alloy of uranium and iron. We concluded that some earlier inhabitants, most probably the Chinese, had used uranium from this mine to reinforce their steel and had then abandoned the works because of some political upheaval.'

Outside, he showed me another shaft, about two metres deep, from which the metal had been mined and also abandoned, probably at the time when the Chinese were driven out by the nomads, approximately 2,000 years B.C.

The wretched prospector had sold the proprietary rights in the mine for 20,000 roubles to a limited liability company which in the first year of its existence had made a clear (net) profit of 200,000 roubles from it, although at that height the mine could only be worked for three months in the year.

The ore was brought in tin containers to Andizhan and from there was shipped to St. Petersburg, where the uranium was separated from the other components.

As we were taking our leave the next day the prospector turned to me and said: 'It doesn't look to me as if I'll ever find any gold. I've been after it for more than thirty years now. But never mind, I have sons, both born in this land. I've sent them to the mining academy and they'll find it, all right. I just haven't the technical knowledge. After all, I ran away from home when I'd only done four grades at school. The Lord knows, I've found rich deposits of iron, copper, sulphur, rock salt, quicksilver, and heaps of other metals all over the place. But gold, no! Only a little, in the rivers. D'you know, the earth here is so full of treasures that any enterprising man could easily make his fortune. For my part, I'll stick to gold; and meanwhile, my family and I will manage somehow.'

Here I should like to explain the provisions of Russian legislation as it affected the prospector. Following a law laid down by Peter the Great and still in force, the finder of any mineral deposits, wherever they might be, was entitled to claim ownership providing the claim was clearly staked out, at once reported to the nearest office of a Crown Lands administrator, and that no previous claim had been lodged by someone else. The location was then entered on a special map and the claim to a clear title chocked. This procedure established the finder's title to ownership and left him free, if he so wished, to sell or cede his rights to a third party under the obligatory condition that exploitation of the deposits would commence within two years, failing which the proprietary rights reverted to the Crown. This stipulation could, of course, only be complied with if the finder obtained the consent of the owner of the land on which the deposits were located to proceed with the work. Because of these antiquated provisions, and the difficulties and misunderstandings they entailed, our friend never retained his finds but sold his rights to eager capital investors for amounts far below their real market value.

Though I wasted a whole day in visiting the uranium mine the impression left by the excursion there was quite unforgettable. Never have I seen such wonderful mountain scenery, not even in Switzerland.

The descent from these heights was not negotiated without some risk. (We were right up against the glaciers, in a region covered in thick snow by August, when all work is brought to a standstill.) We followed a trail which in places ran along the very brink of a deep precipice, where one false step would have meant certain death and where we had to lie practically flat on the backs of our ponies for what seemed hours on end pressing for all we were worth against the stirrup irons. Our party of forty, which included a few ladies and looked from a distance like some huge snake, laboriously wound its way over ridge after ridge and reached camp late in the evening, dog tired and very ready to enjoy a wonderful meal of mountain partridge we had bagged on the way. This, together with the local wine, fiery and heavy, and some enormous peaches, soon dispelled all traces of fatigue and helped to waft us into other, less prosaic worlds.

When all was quiet I slipped out of my tent unnoticed. It was a heavenly night. The mild mountain breeze was spiced with the smell of the honey-laden meadows which stretched out before me as I followed the silvery line of the stream on its tempestuous course from boulder to boulder to the valley below. When I reached a spot where the stream thundered into the valley between two huge rocks I stopped, arrested by the beauty of the scene. The gap between the black porphyry rocks, tall as a cathedral spire, looked quite narrow and one felt that by stretching out one's arms it would be possible to touch both sides at once. Next day I found that this was only a trick of my imagination, for the rocks were well over one hundred feet apart. But at night the slit between them looked like the narrow entrance into another world. To add enchantment to the scene the moon suddenly appeared from behind some clouds, turning the rocks into two sentinels guarding the portals of a distant fairyland. The silvery rays of the moon gliding over the gushing waters, the long reach of the Alpine meadows, clad now in sombre green, our camp fires in the distance above me and the lofty peaks clad in their eternal vestments of white, banished the cares and worries of everyday life into a soothing remoteness as I stood in this dreamland of beauty, this realm of the Spirit of the Mountain and his buried treasure.

When I returned I found the camp in a state of uproar. My absence had been duly discovered by the guardians of the law, who just could not understand how and whither I had so mysteriously vanished.

At daybreak on the following morning we were once again seated in our troikas rolling over meadows along the course of the stream and heading, somewhat to my surprise, straight for the gap between the two guardian cliffs. How we were supposed to get through was something I did not even pretend to solve. But, nothing daunted, we plunged into the river, bouncing and careering over boulders and stones, the water reaching up to our horses' bellies and splashing over the floors of our coaches. After driving like this through the narrow and dark defile with only a strip of sky visible far above us for over a kilometre we emerged into another valley, where we faced another climb. Our escort dismounted, harnessed their horses to our victorias with horsehair traces, remounted, and charged the mountain at a gallop, each carriage drawn by sixteen panting and sweating animals. This unusual operation was followed by a gruelling and jolting descent negotiated without any brakes, the middle horse of the troika alone bearing the full weight of the carriage.

Five or six hours later we reached the plain, or rather a plateau. The landscape had changed and was more like a desert, with only an occasional tamarisk shrub here and there, and the colour of the soil was gradually changing from a yellowish grey to a dirty blue. Once, when I got out of my carriage I noticed fragments of sea shells, shaped like snails, in the marl under my feet and all along the route there were large oily patches on the surface. The whole region was dotted over with marked and numbered poles.

We had reached the region of the Chimion oil wells. In the far distance we could see the outline of the drilling rigs, and smoke pouring out of tall stacks.

The first man to find oil in Fergana was a railroad engineer called Kovalevskiy, who was employed in the construction of the Tashkent-Andizhan line. In partnership with a colleague, Maksimov, he tried to exploit his discovery but failed through shortage of funds. The two men hoped to raise the money by inviting the co-operation of the cotton kings in nearby Kokand but discovered that the latter were in no way interested in mining and that they thought the whole scheme was nothing but a colossal swindle. Eventually, however, Kovalevskiy and Maksimov somehow contrived to form a limited liability company with a paid-up capital of 300,000 roubles and started working the Chimion wells in earnest. For themselves they reserved 8,000,000 roubles' worth of shares without paying a penny for them, and distributed gratis another 200,000 roubles' worth among the authorities and stock exchange brokers, so ensuring a friendly and sympathetic attitude toward their undertaking.

They were lucky. At the second drilling they struck oil. The entire region was at once overrun by a crowd of adventurers and every patch of oil on the surface was immediately pegged out and the claim registered. But Kovalevskiy and Maksimov were still well in the lead. From the large revenues flowing in from their wells they built a pipeline sixteen kilometres long to the nearest railway station and there erected a refinery to extract petrol and paraffin (kerosene). There followed a contract between the Chimion Co. Ltd., and the administration of the Central Asian Railways for the delivery of fuel oil at twenty-five kopecks per pood (40 lbs.) of oil, guaranteed, like all similar contracts with the State, by a clause imposing heavy forfeits for non-fulfilment. The price of twenty-five kopecks per pood was a boon to the railways, which previously were paying the Nobel Company fifty-four kopecks for fuel hauled all the way from Baku.

It would appear that in signing this contract Kovalevskiy and Maksimov, like true railway men, had the interests of the railways more at heart than those of their own shareholders. Nevertheless the company rose in status, and now figured as a competitor of the large oil companies in Baku. The oil produced in Fergana and Baku differs in quality. There is a greater content of kerosene in the Fergana oil, which in consequence is less fluid, and heavier.

Of the oil-producing regions of the province, I have already mentioned the one at Chimion. A second, in the district of Namangan, was brought into production at the instance of the former Minister of Communications, Khilkov, in opposition to the wishes of the oil companies in Baku-Nobel, Mazut, Rothschild and Lianozov. These companies, which supplied the Russian and, in part, the European markets, claimed that the Fergana oilfields were economically unprofitable. While taking out large concessions in the province they were careful to limit annual production to a paltry few poods per individual well, just sufficient to safeguard their concessionary rights. (It will be remembered that according to Russian law, if a registered claim remained undeveloped within a period of two years, ownership of it reverted to the Crown.)

Another oil-bearing region of considerable extent is located in the Caspian District of the Transcaspian Province, extending from the mainland on to Cheleken Island, where it is particularly rich.

At Chimion we were received by the management with the customary pomp, treated to the usual sumptuous repast, the inevitable caviare, champagne, and official speeches, and then taken to inspect the installations. At the time, things were not going well with the company; the main well was out of production and the yields from the secondary wells were poor. During a recent strike a charge of dynamite had been exploded in the main well, destroying the lining and blocking the flow so that the drop in production had nothing to do with natural causes but was solely the result of sabotage. According to information conveyed to me by means of anonymous letters and other sources, I was meant to think that the action was the work of competing firms. However, I inclined to the opinion that dissatisfaction was endemic, its roots lying in the far too rapid development of most of the undertakings which were springing tip like mushrooms all over the province.

But to revert to the Chimion Company. The labour force it had recruited under pressure of production was composed of ne'er-do-wells sacked successively by every major and reputable industry round the globe. In the circumstances there was no chance of building a solid, responsible core of steady and trained workers, nor had it been possible in the short time available to make the necessary provisions for the men's welfare. They were housed in long, wooden sheds with two rows of bunks along the walls. I must admit that the sight of the human bodies I saw stretched out on the rough bedding was anything but reassuring. Russians, Caucasians of every tribe, Persians, Afghans, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, and Turks-in fact a motley collection of every race under the sun. With low pay and a twelve-hour working day of two shifts, the human material at hand was quite obviously ideal for any form of propaganda. As soon as the company began to prosper the workers went on strike, accompanying their demands for better conditions with acts of violence. I am confident that the fellow who tossed the stick of dynamite into the well never for a moment thought that he was killing the goose which laid the egg, even if it were not the proverbial golden one, nor that he was sounding the company's death knell.

The strike was, of course, suppressed, the more restless elements thrown out, the improved labour conditions demanded by the authorities hastily promised, and a higher scale of wages introduced, But the soap bubble had burst. The oil obstinately refused to flow, and protracted new drillings overtaxed the company's slender financial resources. The contracted monthly deliveries to the railway could no longer be supplied; the railway administration invoked the heavy fines stipulated, and debited the company with fifty-fouikopecks per pood for the oil it was forced to purchase from Baku. The price of the company's shares came tumbling down and it was forced into bankruptcy.

As soon as this happened, one of the large Baku oil companies struck like a shark. It bought up a small number of Chimion shares for a few roubles, got in touch with our friends the engineeers Kovalevskiy and Maksimov, acquired their holdings (originally obtained gratis) for 400,000 roubles, voted a new board of directors at the next general meeting, and turned Chimion into a subsidiary branch of the parent company in Baku. The old, old story was then repeated. Naturally the company saw no reason for flooding the Asian market with cheap Fergana oil at twenty-five kopecks per pood when it could sell its own oil from Baku at fifty-four kopecks. This it did. The output from Chimion was limited to a nominal 100 poods per annunl, the Central Asian market was secured for Baku and the wells in Fergana allowed to stagnate.

All this happened after my departure. At the time of my visit to Chimion things had not yet reached this stage. The old management was still at the helm and was resorting to all sorts of expedients to retrieve the situation. Messrs. Kovalevskiy and Maksimov were not in evidence, and it seemed that they took little interest in the company's affairs. The firm's business was being run by an extremely able and efficient technical manager, who conducted us round the installation and drillings. After the strike he had sunk several experimental wells but all his efforts were dogged by bad luck. He explained a new method he had adopted in order to hasten the work, but water which seeped into the stratum of oil-bearing shale greatly reduced the content which he brought to the surface. He had also tried to restore the main well by chiselling out the shattered lining and replacing it by a new one, but in this, too, he was unsuccessful, as I was later informed. Shortly after our departure the majority of the labourers were dismissed.

Our next visit was to the up-to-date refinery, joined to the wells by pipeline at the nearest railway station about ten kilometres away. The manager who took us round had tears in his eyes when he spoke of the shortage of supplies and the threatened closedown of the Chimion plant. He was desperately keen on his job and insisted that the petroleum he was refining was the best in the world. At the time we were standing by two tanks. Pointing to one of them, he said: 'The petrol in this tank is of the highest grade by European standards, yet I issue it to lorries. But this', he continued, indicating the second tank, 'really is something you will find nowhere else in the world.' Whereupon he pulled out my handkerchief, and, opening a cock before I could stop him, swamped it with petrol and shoved it under my nose. 'There,' he exclaimed, 'doesn't it smell like violets? I keep it exclusively for use by chemists.' While I was making the expected laudatory remarks I could not help wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with a handkerchief saturated in petrol. But all was well. The stuff was as clear is water and the smell evaporated very quickly.

We left Chimion in the evening of the same day and once again set out for the mountains, this time in order to visit some caves of rock salt mined for export. The plant was of fairly recent date, but on the way we were able to observe a whole encampment of Kirgiz engaged in winning cooking salt from a stream by a very ancient and primitive method. We were travelling through some pretty desolate country with hardly any grass and only scanty signs of vegetation. On our way up, our straining horses drawing us over rough boulders and stones, we caught sight of a great throng of people encamped by a stream and surrounded by their herds of horses and goats. A tall column of smoke rose from the midst of the site and it was some time before we realized what all these people were doing. About 500 or 1,000 Kirgiz were gathered together on a slope on the banks of a stream that wound a tortuous way downhill. I was given some of the water to taste, and one sip was enough to show how very salty it was. Several hundred small clay cooking stoves had been set up along the course of the stream. On these, flat copper cauldrons about two and a half feet in diameter and four inches deep, filled with water from the stream, were boiling, tended by the women of the tribe, both old and young. Pails filled with water were set beside each woman, who was responsible for three stoves and whose business it was to ladle water into the cauldrons, where it evaporated leaving a deposit of clear white salt at the bottom. Saturation point between the cauldrons was reached in stages, and was so timed that the liquid in one of the containers was usually the consistency of a thick brew. While the women were engaged day and night in raking the fires, their men folk kept them supplied with fuel. This was brought down from great distances in the mountains by strings of pack horses and yaks led by a rider on horseback whose own mount was also laden. Young women and children a little farther away were busy breaking up the salt, which was then packed into sacks and dispatched for sale to the towns and bazaars. The Governor told me that the administration of the State forests had repeatedly complained to him about the wastage of timber involved, yet the livelihood of so many families depended on the trade in salt that he could not bring himself to put an end to the practice. Besides, he thought the archaic procedure followed by the nomads was bound to die out in competition with the modern methods being introduced.

During the next few days I visited several other mining plants, the majority of them small undertakings, usually undercapitalized and primitively equipped technically. I was also shown a number of derelict mines that had been destroyed either by flooding or fire, particularly the coal mines. The cause, generally, was either inefficiency or carelessness, for there was at that time no proper technical inspection of mines in Russian Asia. With some of the engineers overseeing districts as large as Germany, slapdash methods were the rule. In most of the workings good profits were earned in the early stages, as the ore usually lay near to the surface; but as soon as difficulties were encountered the enterprise failed and was simply abandoned and allowed to fall into a state of decay.

The size and potential wealth of the coal fields in this region are quite fantastic, and coal of every kind is to hand from brown and light to anthracite and the heavy varieties suitable for making coke. As I saw it the main obstacles in the way of developing all this wealth were the lack of adequate communications, the ban on foreign capital investments imposed by the Government, and the low cultural level of the native population.

During this tour, undertaken with the purpose of gaining an insight, however superficial, into the mining potential of the region, I visited the beautiful city of Kokand, the former capital of independent Khans. One of its brightly painted minarets, which still stands erect pointing to Heaven, is renowned in history through the cruelty of Kokand's most fabulous tyrant, Khudayar, who had his victims hurled down from its summit. According to legend one of his wives was murdered like this in his presence, and he sat gloating over her agonized cries as she writhed for three days suspended from a cornice that is still exhibited.

The cruel Khan's palace, still well preserved, has lofty halls, and walls adorned with superb carpeted mosaic. The throne room, converted by the Russian conquerors into a Greek Orthodox Church, still retains the original quotations from the Koran, set out in gaudy mosaic Arabic lettering.

Like all other cities in Turkestan, Kokand is divided into native and European quarters. The native part of the town is dirty, fun of narrow streets, mosques, and windowless houses. The European sector is most imposing, with wide, straight streets lined with rows of trees planted four deep, and many-storied houses. The life of the town is dominated by the cotton kings thanks to whom the European quarter was built with the rapidity of an American mining city. I was greatly impressed by the District Officer in Kokand, who read and wrote fluently in several local languages while his wife was an authority on Mohammedan customs and well acquainted with many of the native women in the harems.

We stayed in Kokand for one night only and set out on the following afternoon to inspect a copper mine, this entailing an easy journey of five hours in my saloon railway coach to be followed by a drive of fourteen kilometres overland. We alighted from the train towards dusk and after the usual dastarkhan and reception by local deputations drove off seated comfortably in landaus with rubber-rimmed wheels, escorted by jigits and Sart notables decked out in picturesque oriental finery and mounted on superb Karabairs.

For the first seven kilometres the road ran through well-kept cotton fields and painstakingly irrigated gardens, but as soon as we reached the boundary of the irrigated area the country took on a desolate aspect. (In Central Asia one soon becomes accustomed to these rapid transitions of scenery.) Meanwhile, night had fallen, and by casting a reddish glow over the landscape the rising moon strangely transformed the scenery around us. We were following the valley of the Syr-Dar'ya, and from afar its silvery waters looked like a glittering white streak on the horizon, while the yellow sand under our feet took on a red-tinted, golden hue. On both sides of the road jagged rocks of sandstone rose up in tall, irregularly shaped pillars, looking for all the world like antediluvian monsters. Some resembled fantastic bears, formed from two gigantic outcrops coupled by a third joining them together; others, monstrous stags shaped out of heavy boulders uncannily rearing up on spindle-like supports; or yet again, serrated rows of dragons' teeth pointing to heaven. I was reminded of a painting I had once seen, by an abstract painter, depicting the end of the world, where everything was supernatural, parched, and bathed in carmine rays.

After driving like this for about half an hour, with the glittering line of the Syr-Dar'ya now appreciably nearer, we caught sight of a row of lighted windows in a long, rambling, flat-roofed building. As we approached we were confronted by the spectacle of an elegantly clad Westerner in the act of alighting from a shooting drozhki, very like those one meets in Prussia or Poland, parked alongside a European veranda. The vehicle was harnessed to a pair of handsome Ardennes horses in Cracow-style trappings, with a liveried coachman in a top hat seated on the box. It appeared we had arrived at the farmstead of Count K., the Polish director of the mine, who had driven out to meet us and who now proposed to escort us to the works. It would be difficult to think of anything more contrasting than this Western outfit amid the bewitching scenery around us, the Russian troikas and our white-turbaned escort in gold-spangled kaftans. As we drove up to the veranda three more gentlemen clad in European dress hastened to bid us welcome, in perfect French. They were the other directors of the mine, all Poles and belonging to some of the best Polish families, the sons of landowners, who had taken up engineering as a profession and had come to this remote region of the Empire to make their fortunes. In the hall we were received by several women in low-cut Parisian evening gowns, who very kindly invited my companions and me to dinner.

The room to which I was conducted to tidy up before the meal was luxuriously furnished. There were soft chairs, bright French woollen window-curtains and a pale blue Aubusson rug on the floor; on the walls hung beautiful reproductions of pictures of the Madonna. But this was typical of Asia, where one is so often unexpectedly brought back to Europe.

The 'modest' dinner to which we had been graciously invited turned out to be a sumptuous meal and a triumph of French culinary art; it was, of course, preceded by Polish starka and the inevitable bowls of fresh caviare. At table only French and Polish were spoken, out of regard for other members of the administration and their wives who understood no Russian. Champagne was served immediately after the soup, and really there was nothing to indicate that we were feasting on the banks of the Syr-Dar'ya in the heart of Asia. But after dinner, over coffee and brandy served on the veranda, the noise of the crickets, the silhouettes of our jigits pacing along the river, and the snow-capped mountains in the distance dispelled the illusion and brought us back to the foot of the Pamir.

At sunrise on the following morning I was taken to inspect the mine. During our walk there of about half a kilometre along the banks of the Syr-Dar'ya, streaks of green were plainly visible in the sand, a sure sign that we were in the presence of copper. Next we were faced with a descent down a shaft some six fathoms deep. There was no hoist, nor even a lift of any kind, and the workmen suggested lowering me down seated in a bucket attached to a long rope. The mining engineer who accompanied us apparently did not relish the idea of entrusting my person to so primitive a method and eventually we all went down the thirty-six feet by means of ladders. We soon reached a long gallery, where the unwonted absence of pitprops was accounted for by the exceptional plasticity of the soil, precluding any danger of cave-ins. We were supplied with lamps, and the light, refracted from the walls, gave the scene a warm, roseate colouring. The ventilation was perfect and after the great heat above it was even unpleasantly cool, nor did I see any signs of water, as in the coal mines.

The excavated gravel was loaded into trolleys, then hoisted up in buckets, reloaded into another set of trolleys and brought to the bank of the river. Here, in a long building roofed in against the burning rays of the sun it was emptied onto a flat, moving, and vibrating conveyor-tray where it was sluiced by powerful jets of water, the lighter gravel being washed away while the heavier particles of copper remained on the conveyor. These particles contained admixtures of other metals not exceeding ten per cent. The copper thus obtained was granulated, and varied in size from grains as big as peas down to fine dust. The ore was then smelted and refined in a coke-fuelled oven erected nearby, the water necessary for the whole installation being pumped straight from the Syr-Dar'ya. Production costs were thus reduced to a minimum. On enquiry I was told that profits were lower than had originally been expected and were somewhat disappointing, but this was explained by the heavy downgrading in the price of copper imposed by the Trust. The directors were, however, optimistic about the future. They told me of their difficulties in getting suitable labour and in housing their workers when they had them. An attempt had even been made to import labour from home, but this was hampered by the enormous distances involved.

The inspection lasted a full day. As I was about to take my after-luncheon siesta a delightful sight met my eyes. Outside, a group of my host's children aged from eight to fourteen were playing robbers, mounted on diminutive ponies. They had nothing on except narrow loin cloths round their waists and rode bare-back, like circus performers. Most of them were fair-haired, but their sturdy little limbs were burnt to a dark brown. Later Countess K. told me that the local climate was absolutely wonderful for children and that her daughter, who in Poland had been anaemic and sickly, had so improved in two years as to be hardly recognizable, thanks to the sunlight.

The visit to the small copper mine terminated my short tour. I photographed much of what I saw in the mountains of Fergana, but now, unfortunately, have nothing to show. However, I cannot but stress that Fergana, with its immense stores of minerals, is a land full of exceptional promise for the enterprising mining engineer.

So long as the country was ruled by despotic Asian tyrants the treasures it contained lay dormant and fallow, and the native population, in spite of all the inborn thrift, initiative, and industry of the Sarts, could do no better than merely exist under the miserable conditions forced upon them by grasping, tithe-collecting Beks. The improvement in the people's standard of living under Russian rule, brought about in a matter of years by the introduction of the basic principles of Western civilization, was truly remarkable. It is sad to think of all those gains now being wasted by a system of government which has so much in common with the despotic methods previously common to Asia. Under normal conditions Fergana could have been turned into a fertile field, richly rewarding both for the application of the Westerner's spirit of enterprise and the development of his technical knowledge.

KHIVA: HORSES

. . . Few people in Europe are aware of two super strains of horses bred by the Turkmen in the course of centuries of independence. Both are of Arabian blood and probably descend from stock left by the Arabs at the time of conquest.

For centuries the Turkmen lived on the booty gained in raids on their neighbours - the Persians, Afghans, and Bukharans living beyond the protective mantle of the desert. These raids went by the name of 'alamans'. The timing of them was decided by the elders of the aul and the young men and horses selected put to a rigorous course of training, for success depended exclusively on speed and the ability to fall on a peaceful population unexpectedly.

Distances of as much as 100 kilometres across the desert were sometimes covered in a single day and followed immediately by a speedy retreat to the initial starting point. The 'alaman' horses were all specially picked, fed and trained, and never used for any other purpose. An original strain was thus evolved, very swift-footed and of immense powers of endurance over long distances. Today the Turkmen horse looks like an English thoroughbred, is of about the same size and differs only in the finer lines of its head and limbs, more resembling those of an Arab. Later, a second strain bred from the same stock was evolved, providing pack-horses for the 'alamans'.

These facts explain the immense popularity of racing among the Turkmen. I noticed that traditional rules and form were strictly observed, while the riders handled their mounts with the skill of professional jockeys, holding them back for a final effort and then suddenly dashing forward with a surge of speed at the finish.

The scene was very colourful. Everyone present was dressed in his best. There were kaftans of pink and striped silk; tall, shaggy fur caps of the finest Persian lamb, perched on clean-shaven heads; heel-less boots of soft morocco leather which are pulled like stockings over the foot. Sparkle and glitter were added to the scene by saddles embossed all over in silver, bridles studded with precious stones, silver stirrups and gaily-coloured saddle blankets, bejewelled yataghans and pistols, tucked into silver sashes, and curved swords in gold and silver scabbards.

I left in the evening, to the sorrow of the elders, who lamented the fact that not all the members of their tribes had been notified in time. There were so many other things they wanted to show me, they said, particularly hunting with falcons, and a jiran (gazelle) hunt with their swift-footed greyhounds (a very graceful native breed), all of which had been planned in my honour.

This sounded tempting, but I could not spare the time. His Majesty expected me back in St. Petersburg with a verbal report on the inspection of his domain and, besides, I was anxious to pursue my task of unravelling the threads of the myriad abuses I had uncovered, many of which led straight to the capital.

KHIVA: BACHEH DANCERS

. . . The banquet, served in the cloisters of the main court, was much like the one I had attended in Bukhara, and lasted for two or three hours. After coffee the Khan retired, and his son, the heir, asked me if I would like to see their national ballet. Tired as I was, I could not refuse. Cushions and rugs were fetched, on which we gratefully reclined, great carpets were spread over the court, the natives puffed at their narghiles, politely offering them to us, and the famous Khivan bachehs made their entrance. Backstage, an orchestra mainly composed of twin flutes, kettle drums, and half a dozen man-sized silver trumpets took up its stand. Opposite us a door left slightly ajar led to the harem quarters. We caught a glimpse of flashing eyes as the inmates thronged to the door to have a good look at us and watch the performance.

The orchestra started up with a curious, plaintive melody, the rhythm being taken up and stressed by the kettle drums, and four bachehs took up their positions on the carpet.

The bachehs are young men specially trained to perform a particular set of dances. Barefoot, and dressed like women in long, brightly-coloured silk smocks reaching below their knees and narrow trousers fastened tightly round their ankles, their arms and hands sparkle with rings and bracelets. They wear their hair long, reaching below the shoulders, though the front part of the head is clean shaven. The nails of the hands and feet are painted red, the eyebrows are jet black and meet over the bridge of the nose. The dances consist of sensuous contortions of the body and a rhythmical pacing to and fro, with the hands and arms raised in a trembling movement. As the ballet proceeded the number of dancers increased, the circle grew in size, the music waxed shriller and shriller and the eyes of the native onlookers shone with admiration, while the bachehs intoned a piercing melody in time with the ever-growing tempo of the music. The Heir explained that they were chanting of love and the beauty of women. Swifter and swifter moved the dancers till they finally sank to the floor, seemingly exhausted and enchanted by love. They were followed by others, but the general theme was usually the same.

In between, we were treated to other types of dances, also accompanied by the orchestra, which were really more like circus turns than anything else. I remember a small boy who was tossed like a hall high into the air by his partners and who never failed to come down on his feet, bowing gracefully to the audience. There were also war dances, with drawn swords glittering in the moonlight. Though I thought the performance very long, my hosts were very excited and seemed to enjoy themselves enormously.

However, the whole scene was most poetic: the cloistered courtyard with its beautifully carved columns lit up by torches held high by grim-looking belted warriors in shaggy fur caps, the dancing shadows imparting a wild fierceness to their features; the disturbing effect of the bubbling fountain, and the sweet smell of burning rosin mixed with the scent of roses. In the intervals between the music sounded the gentle murmur of running water, and the shrill chirping of myriads of the crickets so typical of Turkestan, filling the night with their unending song of love. In the distance were the sounds of the city, of caravans wending their way, of songs on the flat roofs of the houses, the unmelodious braying of donkeys, the barking of dogs and the yapping of jackals. Over the entire scene stretched the jet-black heavens, the astonishing brightness of the Milky Way, the mysterious light of the gentle moon. And everything was permeated by the sensuous melodies of Eastern music. Those melodies continued to haunt me for many a day long afterwards.

SEMIRECH'YE

The Russians call this province 'The Land of the Seven Rivers'.

It might equally well be called 'The Land of Milk and Honey', for it is a region lavishly endowed by nature, where riches are to be had for the picking, where the labourer is rewarded a thousandfold for his work in field or garden, where prosperity and justice might reign with ease, where very little need be done to ensure full development, perpetuating a state of universal plenty. And yet, looking around, one is amazed at the extent of man's ineptitude, at his inefficiency, at what he can do to hem in, arrest, and even partly destroy the wonderful work of nature.

Semirech'ye is the most northern of Turkestan's five provinces. Its western borders lie along the steppes that stretch eastwards from the Ural. In the North it almost touches the southern confines of Siberia. In the east it is cut off from China by a dividing wall 24,000 feet high formed by the Tyan'-Shan' mountains, and in the south it joins the two 'sister provinces', as they are called, of Syr-Dar'ya and Fergana.

The southern part of Semirech'ye is all steppe, divided in two by a spur of the Kara-Tau running from south to north. Small rivers spill down from the heights of the range, flowing from east to west till they peter out in the sands of the Ural steppes. These are the 'Seven Rivers' that the Russian conquerors had to cross on their way from the north, but it was not difficult since in the hot season all are fordable and barely a foot deep. Slightly to the north another and much bigger river, the Chu, comes down from the glaciers of the Tyan'-Shan' and flows through the land in a large are before it, too, gets lost in the sands as it reaches the lake of Balkhash. Here the whole region is one vast marsh overgrown with rushes tall enough to conceal a man on horseback and forming an impenetrable jungle which houses the tiger and wild boar and the malarial mosquito, making it untenable to man. But for the hunter this stretch of country is a veritable Eldorado teeming with pheasants, geese, duck, and countless other game, not to mention wolves, jackals, and snakes.

For ages the Chu has been one of the most important rivers in Turkestan, and must at one time have emptied into the Caspian Sea. The dried-out bed of the river, which the natives call the Jan-Dar'ya, can still be traced in the steppe, and salt-water fish such as sturgeon are caught in the Chu. I was told that seals inhabit the lower reaches of the river, where it turns into marshland, but I think these are more likely to have been otters.

All along the dried-out bed of the Jany-Dar'ya, which in the summer months is bone-dry, are many ruins of ancient cities, and traces of extensive irrigation. This would seem to indicate that the region was at one time inhabited by a highly-cultured people, farmers and fruit-growers who were at some later date compelled to leave because of unfavourable climatic conditions.

In its upper reaches, is it comes down from the glaciers of the Tyan'-Shan', the Chu follows a southerly course at first, but twelve kilometres from Lake Issyk-Kul' it makes a right-angled bend and goes on to flow from east to west. This sudden change of course is caused by a stony ridge stretching over the whole twelve kilometres, which prevents the waters of the Issyk-Kul' from spilling into the Chu where it flows, twenty metres below the level of the lake. Only during the rainy season, when the level of the waters in the lake is high, does it overflow into the Chu along a bed running over the ridge.

It is the opinion of an engineer, supported by survey data of the Chu, that attempts were made at some time to deepen this bed and regulate the flow of water. He also thought that in the distant past the Chu must have flowed through the valley of the Issyk-Kul', gathering on its way the waters which now form the lake and which are rapidly evaporating, and was thus able to reach the sea. There were signs, he said, that after the volcanic upheaval which threw up the barrier between the river and the lake the inhabitants had made superhuman efforts to avert the catastrophe which threatened their valley by trying to pierce the twelve kilometre-long ridge. Apparently the task was insuperable with the technical means then available and the inhabitants were driven out of the land and settled elsewhere. The engineer claimed to have studied the ancient Hindu Vedas, and said that their description of this part of the country unmistakably pointed to the Jany-Dar'ya and the Chu. The theory that the plain covered by Lake Issyk-Kul' was once inhabited is further strengthened by the many domestic articles washed ashore in stormy weather, such as fragments of quaint-looking barrels, copper vessels of all sorts, etc., now exhibited in the museum at Przheval'sk or to be seen in the posting inns strung along the shore of the lake.

After the withdrawal of the Aryans the land became a desert and for centuries was overrun by nomadic Mongolian and Finnish tribes. Some of the old chronicles in the Kaufman Library in Tashkent mention a Chinese domination of Semirech'ye of several hundred years' duration. This was succeeded by a large Hunnish state which sprawled over the whole of Turkestan, causing the Germanic tribes to migrate and starting them on their trek to the West. The Kalmyks then appeared on the scene from Mongolia and Eastern Siberia, pressing the Huns and sending Attila to ravage Europe. Genghis Khan's Tatars followed, and having broken the Kalmyks, they took over the land. After the death of the great conqueror his realm fell asunder and splintered into puny sultanates. Genghis Khan was the last to incorporate Semirech'ye into a unified empire; after him, all semblance of order vanished for centuries. Nomad peoples, stateless and recognizing only the ties of tribe and kinship, roamed the land, never settling anywhere but just driving their herds before them, following the seasons in their quest for pastures. Such, then, were conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The nomad population was of Kirgiz origin, divided into three distinct stems: the Kara-Kirgiz in the east, the Kaisak-Kirgiz (or Kazakhs) in the west, and between them a third stem of no definite name. The tribal elders were known as sultans or manaps, and were blindly obeyed by their kinsmen. The frequent raids north made by the Kirgiz, and their infringement of the grazing rights of the Kalmyks, who were Russian subjects, prompted the southward push of the Russians from Siberia. To counter the Kirgiz raids the Russians successfully applied colonizing tactics developed over a couple of centuries in struggles with border nomads. Small forts were built in the steppe, far ahead of the frontier, to which Cossack villages (stanitsas) were after a time transferred by order of the sovereign.

COSSACKS

Most of my readers probably know that the Cossacks were an armed militia, obliged to put cavalry regiments into the field in time of war. Every Cossack owned his mount, the distinctive uniform of his unit and all his accoutrement, only his rifle being supplied by the state. Against this duty the Cossacks paid no taxes and enjoyed a large measure of autonomy in the management of their communal affairs; and every mounted man was granted 200 hectares of land. The whole of the Cossack structure in Russia was divided into separate 'cossack hosts', named after the regions they inhabited. Each host was militarily under the command of an 'Ataman', appointed by the Emperor, while each village was represented by an elected ataman but administered by an elected village council. Following an age-long tradition, long upright poles indicated the approach to a Cossack village. When set alight, the bundle of straw fixed to the top of these poles used to serve as a signal that the enemy was approaching and as a call to arms.

As time went on, whenever there arose a need for a standing force on some distant frontier the Cossacks were allotted new areas, and thus new Cossack 'hosts' were brought into being such as the Siberian Cossacks, the Amur Cossacks and, in the course of the nineteenth century, the Semirech'ye Cossacks, the latter originating in the manner I shall now describe.

By order of the Ataman of a given Cossack host 'voluntary' emigrants would. be called for. Wives and children would be left behind for the first few years, while the men went off to the designated region where they would found a new settlement, bring the soil under cultivation, defend themselves against unruly tribes and even wage war against them.

An old Cossack of Semirech'ye told me the story of his experiences.

'I was twenty years old at the time.' he said, 'and had to leave my young wife behind me in the stanitsa in Siberia. The authorities ordered every stanitsa, according to its size, to produce so many young men for emigrating to Semirech'ye. We were promised good land, and I and twenty other youngsters came to this stanitsa, on the river Ili. The younger generation have no idea of what we had to put up with. We were told that we were expected within three years to build a sufficient number of houses, and to lay in supplies of corn and oats sufficient to provide bread and fodder until the next harvest, for three times our number together with their and our own families. Those were hard times. We toiled in the fields by day, spent the night chasing off the Kirgiz who grazed our lands and raided us, built houses and dug wells. It took ten long years to make life more bearable.'

When I visited it, his stanitsa was a flourishing village. Every Cossack owned cattle and horses; the sons and daughters of several were studying in the gymnasium or at a university. The houses were spotlessly clean and well-built; some even had pianos, and every home was surrounded by its own orchard.

All through the nineteenth century the Cossack cordon round Semipalatinsk went on extending farther south. The towns of Kopal and Vernyy <note: Vernyy is the present-day Alma-Ata> were founded, and gradually populated by Russian townspeople. I need hardly say that these pioneers were a mixed and motley lot, deriving from the most varied strata of European Russia, many of them with records best left uninvestigated. There were also quite a few keen tradesmen, who bartered their goods with the natives and piled up huge profits, as well as some craftsmen and intellectuals. In metropolitan Russia police surveillance at the time was pretty thorough; out here the authorities were less inquisitive, prepared to accept anyone as a citizen and to register him under any name he chose to adopt. What he was called at home was not their business, neither was his marital status. Under these conditions many a shattered life was forgotten for good and a new life built up under the benign protection of a rapidly growing province.

After a few years of life in Vernyy, Pishpek, or any of the local townships many of the settlers wandered off into the open countryside, prompted either by homesickness, a spirit of adventure, or just plain lust for gain. Some of them had made contact with the Kirgiz, who pretended to ownership of the vast stretches of country over which they grazed their herds and were taken seriously. Deals were struck and land rented for next to nothing. Houses went up in the valleys, farming was started, high-lying land was ploughed up, summer crops were sown during the spring. By the following July the settler knew whether his crop was worth harvesting, whether there had been enough rain to justify his labour. Simultaneously, new methods of cultivation were adopted, such as the 'dry method', where the seeds were sown so sparsely that the blades stood more than a metre apart. This, it was found, enabled the corn to withstand the drought better.

The settlers also took up cattle-breeding on a large scale. Land was available in hundreds and thousands of acres; all around the valleys there was an ample supply of grass for grazing which the manaps were quite willing to rent to the Russians. In the process the Kirgiz learnt something new: haymaking, and the laying in of supplies for the winter. At first they treated the idea as a huge joke (hadn't God provided animals with hooves for raking away the snow over the frozen grass in winter?). But when, in frosty weather following a thaw, the steppes were covered with a thin coating of ice which the cattle could not break, their beasts died by the hundred, while the Russian herds came through unscathed on the hay made in summer. It took several decades to convince them, but when I was there most of the Kirgiz had provided themselves with scythes bought from the Russians, and some of the manaps even owned horse rakes and mowing machines.

There was also another branch of farming in which the Russians excelled and which the natives were not long in copying: this was beekeeping. Some of the settlers went in for this industry, at which they were experts at home, from the very beginning, turning it into a profitable business. An added inducement was the fict that some of the grasses and shrubs growing on the mountain slopes in northern Semirech'ye were particularly rich in honey. This explained the large apiaries set up in many of the valleys. One beekeeper I met, an ordinary Russian peasant now registered as a citizen of Vernyy, alone owned 1,200 beehives. In 1909, when I was in the province, the maximum price of a pound of honey was six kopeks, yet even at that price a good apiary brought in quite a considerable income. The winters were short; the bees went about their work for nine months of the year, or even longer, while the revenue from each hive was anything but negligible. The Kirgiz lost no time in following suit. Out hunting near Przheval'sk I met one of them, who pointed with pride to his 600 hives and the field of buckwheat, covering several hectares, which he grew to feed his bees.

A TARANTASS

Has the reader any idea what the vehicle called tarantas in Russian is really like? Capable of being driven over rocks, boulders or, as a matter of fact, over any imaginable surface, it must have been invented in the days when no roads existed at all. It consists of two long, springy poles, about four inches thick, placed parallel and bridging the two wheel axles to which they are attached. A large wicker-work body, broad enough to hold two people, is placed between the two poles in the centre between the axles. A light seat is sometimes fixed inside the body, and the more luxurious tarantasses are provided with a hood. The coachman perches on a small seat over the fore-axle and the whole contraption is harnessed to three horses, the one in the centre running between two shafts. When passengers are about to leave a posting inn, a mattress covered with a feather blanket is spread over the bottom of the body. With a little luck one is able to snatch some sleep stretched out at full length provided the doing is not too rough. In theory, the springy poles are supposed to take up the bumping, but in actual practice they are usually so stiff and strong for the sake of solidity that one is mercilessly jolted about or bounced to and fro if the pace is hot. Because of this, and the fact that as an inspecting Senator and consequently an important personage I was always driven at top speed, we called the tarantass a 'horse-powered liver-massaging device'.

After the comfort of the saloon railway-carriage which had conveyed our party to Kabul-sai the transition to the mode of locomotion I have just depicted was something of a shock. We spent a considerable time in stowing away our travelling impedimenta and securing everything properly with ropes of plaited horsehair under the watchful eyes of my valet and cook, whom I had brought with me. The cook in particular took great pains to see that all his paraphernalia, such as saucepans, pots and pans, were nicely bedded in hay and placed in strong wooden crates. Before we had gone a few kilometres every crate was smashed to splinters and with great amusement we watched the cook distributing the contents among the native horsemen. Anything more ridiculous than the sight of these wild-looking sons of the desert each gingerly trying to balance a coffee-can or some other cooking utensil is hard to imagine. At the next inn everything was repacked into felt blankets and stowed away inside the tarantasses.

Our departure from the inn was quite dramatic. First I was asked to take my seat in one of the unhitched vehicles, and then a Kirgiz coachman appeared and mounted the so-called box. He was dressed in a long kaftan, which looked for all the world like a dressing-gown, round which was wound a broad sash. On his head he had a small cap made of white felt and shaped like the little paper-boats we used to make as children. Round the top of the cap was a broad black band, much favoured by the local coach-drivers. Next, he made ready with a length of measly-looking horsehair rope, presumably the reins. Suddenly a door, of what looked like a keep or fort, was thrown open and out rushed three shaggy horses, wild-eyed and neighing, with about eight men hanging on to each-screaming, yelling, and trying to hold them in. This first glimpse of a scene later to become so familiar was really very diverting: the kicking and rearing horses, the little brown men in long kaftans doing their best to get at the horses' heads, the hubbub in a foreign tongue and the utter phlegm of the onlookers. After a lot of hard work the middle horse was at last backed into the shafts which were then quickly strapped to the collar and secured by the duya (a curved wooden bow over the horse's head). The coachman threw the reins to his assistants, who tied them to the bit; the off-horses were rushed up, their traces fastened, and, with a loud 'Aida!' (forward!) from the driver we set off. The entire harness was made up of knotted bits and pieces, like the reins, and how it held is a mystery; but anyway it stood the strain of the first wild jerk into a gallop and continued to hold as we drove off as fast as the horses could carry us.

There was no question of skilful driving. The tarantass went bumping up and down like a boat on a rough sea and the only thing we, the unfortunate passengers, could do was to sit tight and try to avoid being hurled out. After about three kilometres the horses calmed down and took up a steady trot. Mercifully, the driver had somehow managed to keep to the road, a mere track consisting of two ruts. The worst roads in western Europe are better than anything one meets in Turkestan. 'Road' is really not the correct word; one just drove anywhere, following well-worn ruts leading in the right direction. When things got too uncomfortable and jolty one turned aside and drove over the sun-scorched grass of the fields, the meadows, or the steppe. The amount of dust raised by the fine, loamy soil would horrify a Westerner. A following wind smothered one in a thick layer which clung to hair, beard, and clothes, turning one into the parody of a powdered actor and colouring one's face a sickly yellow-brown. If the road was stony, as was often the case, the tarantasses bounced all over the place; the number of screws, bolts, clamps, and spokes we lost is past reckoning. The one thing 1 am certain of is that at the end of the journey I was presented with a handsome bill for repairs and that at every posting inn there was a lot of hammering, joining, and repairing.

We kept to a steady pace of from fifteen to twenty kilometres per hour and usually stopped at a posting inn every twenty or twenty-five kilometres to change horses. At all these inns there was a clean waiting-room where one was handed a long fresh towel to rub the dust off one's face. Washing, I was told, was not recommended, for fear of blisters. There was also a boiling samovar, and tea on request was dispensed by a friendly, motherly creature. At the beginning of our journey we used to get out of our carriages at these roadside inns to avail ourselves of the comforts they offered, but after a while we became indifferent to the dirt and dust and sat patiently in our respective carriages, thereby speeding up the change of horses.

Following the established Russian custom, the local Chief of Police preceded us when we drove out of Kabul-sai. He was also the head of the native community, mounted and accompanied by a whole troop of horsemen. The appearance of this worthy was rather comical. As the son of a very wealthy Kirgiz manap he considered that it befitted his dignity to ride carrying an immense open umbrella of raw silk which contrasted oddly with his velvet, gold-embroidered kaftan and the assortment of weapons with which he was festooned.

From Kabul-sai the road runs east for seventy kilometres through one of the most and deserts of Turkestan till it reaches the district town of Chimkent, lying in an oasis of the same name. It took us three hours to cover this distance, including the time spent in changing horses.

SEMIRECH'YE: MORE KIRGIZ NOMADS

. . . In the coarse of my narrative I have often touched upon the customs and life of the Kirgiz. In Semirech'ye the age-long traditions of steppe life, and the written tenets of the Mohammedan law that differ so widely from our European concepts, were of particular importance. The way of life of the Kirgiz is wholly based on the Adat brought down from the hoary past, and in many respects it differs little from that obtaining in the times of Abraham. These rules, which regulate the whole economic and social life of this people, are the outcome of geographical and political factors forced upon the native population by the insecure conditions under which they were constrained to live.

The Kirgiz, as I have already mentioned, live in tightly-bound tribal and family groupings. Inside these groupings the authority of the head is supreme, and he commands the blind obedience of his younger brothers, children and wives. In the economic field his decisions are final. The buying and selling of land, its rent and hire, the changing of grazing sites and removals to other areas, all rest upon his word. The individual tribes winter in the same locality year in, year out, in settlements known to the Russians as zimovki. Encircled by mud walls used as a shelter during the winter storms, they usually cover an area large enough to house the cattle belonging to the entire tribe. A section of the enclosure is set aside for the yurts or felt tents in which the tribe lives. Each family has its own set of tents, every woman having the right to a tent of her own. In winter the cattle are turned out into the open steppe and feed as best they can by grazing on the grass under the snow; recently, however, the Kirgiz have begun to follow the example set them by the Russians, and they now lay in small supplies of hay. In spring a few oats are sown round the zimovki and are irrigated by water brought down from the hills in narrow, crude canals. The areas sown per family are tiny and just sufficient to meet the yearly need. As long as the steppe is green, grazing goes on round the zimovki, but as soon as the grass is scorched by the sun the yurts are dismantled, the tents, rugs and poles loaded onto camels or horses, and the whole encampment together with all its herds moves northward. The head man and the women ride on ahead and the animals follow at a slower pace until a new grazing site is found, where a halt is made for a few weeks. In this way the whole tribe moves from one pasturage to another all through the summer, looking for greener fields higher up in the mountains.

Usually, several related families or tribes build their zimovki close together, forming a kind of village, called an aul. The oldest member automatically becomes the head of the combined settlement, is recognized by the Russian authorities as such and is treated as the aul's representative. Several auls inhabited by Kirgiz belonging to one particular stem might unite into a kind of clan and here again the stme rule would be followed. The oldest member of the clan would become chief and commanded the obedience of his clansmen just as did the old Scottish and Irish chieftains. These lordlings were called manaps or sultans. The next step in the ascending ladder was an agglomeration of clans under a Sultan or Khan - the name depending on the stem - who wielded the powers of an overlord or ruler.

The areas used by any one branch were clearly defined by tradition and no infringement of them by herds belonging to other branches was tolerated. In cases of dispute the ruling of the Sultan or Khan was final.

The way of life described was common both to the Kirgiz and Kalmyks and was centuries old.

. . . In my report to the Emperor I suggested that the land which the Kirgiz farmed in the vicinity of their winter settlements, plus additional areas of pasturage, might be handed over to them and their titles of ownership to these lands fixed by law. I was opposed by the Emigration Authorities, who wished to settle emigrants on land already farmed and irrigated and then to compel the Kirgiz to make fresh areas arable by digging new irrigation systems. The legal basis for this point of view rested on the right, recognized in Central Asia, of the overlord to the ownership of the land and the assumption that the inhabitants of the land were there on sufferance. This policy was bitterly resented by the hitherto loyal Kirgiz; many tribes left Semirech'ye for good and wandered off, settling ultimately in China.

. . . A few kilometres from the town of Dzharkent I was given a tremendous greeting by Yoldash, the chief of the Taranchi tribe of Kirgiz, who gave us a marvellous meal inside a gigantic silk tent.

On the table, and erect on its four legs, stood a whole sheep fresh from the baking pit, its blistered skin still glowing red. This original way of serving mutton in no way detracted from the taste, as was very soon proved. The modus operandi, as far as I could gather, was as follows. The bottom of a deep pit is filled with stones, the larger ones at the bottom, the smaller ones placed on top. A great fire is built over these and allowed to burn until it turns into ashes. A slaughtered sheep is then carefully skinned and the bowels are removed, after which it is stuffed with oats, rice, onions, and sweetsmelling herbs; the belly is stitched up again and the carcass placed standing on its legs in the ashes. It is further covered with laurel leaves and herbs and left for several hours in the ashes inside the pit, which is topped with earth. When removed the meat is perfectly cooked, the hot stones having acted as an oven. The outside parts are beautifully roasted and as tender as a well-cooked turkey and the whole roast is saturated with fat.

When tea and the welcoming speeches were over, Yoldash drew his yataghan from its sheath, carved the choicest pieces of the roast with amazing skill, and handed them to us with a deep bow. His apparel was most picturesque, consisting of a short jacket of brownish-gold Chinese silk reaching down to the hips; richly-embroidered, baggy white silk trousers, and a broad scarf. On his head he wore a yellow Frisian-shaped hat, trimmed with sable.

Yoldash was the recognized chieftain of the Taranchi tribe of the Kirgiz. In Chinese or Tibetan 'Taranchi' means sheep, and is synonymous with 'farmer', an appellation applied to this particular tribe because of its fame in husbandry. At the time of conquest, when the Russian troops took possession of the entire Kuldzha plain up to the rivers of the Tyan'-Shan' range, the Taranchi were a subjugated people. Their origin is still obscure, and supposedly a mixture of Sarts and the very early inhabitants. The language they use is certainly akin to the Sart. Under Russian rule they quickly began to prosper, and by laying down a good irrigation system around Kuldzha and planting vineyards and orchards, they soon became a wealthy people. This happy situation changed radically when the Russians handed back the province of Kuldzha to the Chinese, who returned animated by a spirit of revenge. By treaty they were supposed to honour the obligations to which the Russians were committed, and to respect the liberties that had been granted to the population. Instead, they butchered those inhabitants who remained faithful to Russia. By raising Yoldash to the rank of mandarin and making alluring promises they succeeded in winning him over to their side. He even went so far as to restrain his clansmen from moving to the remaining Russian sector of Kuldzha and persuaded them to stay in the Chinese part. The mandarins then set other tribes against the Taranchi, provoking them into tribal warfare. Yoldash and his clansmen fled to the Russians. They settled near a small Russian military outpost at Dzharkent, twenty-eight kilometres from the Chinese border. Two years later they had gardens and fields irrigated with water diverted from the Ili. Gradually the place was adopted by the Russian authorities, and Dzharkent eventually became the centre of a district. Yoldash, quite rightly, acquired great status and prominence; he was awarded several Russian orders, visited St. Petersburg once or twice and was received in audience by the Emperor, though his official title was still that of elder of his tribe. Needless to say, he loathed the Chinese.

ISSYK-KUL'

. . . Three days later I was on my way back to Tashkent. But before returning I had to visit Issyk-Kul', that mysterious lake, and the town of Przheval'sk, famed for its hot mineral springs.

For the first twenty kilometres we drove along an excellent road as far as the 'Golubovskaya' stanitsa, a charming Cossack village. Then we followed a formidable stretch of country, a hundred kilometres in length, lying in the valley of the river Ili. Some parts were covered with tamarisk, but mostly it was overgrown with immense rushes as thick as a forest and tall enough to conceal a mounted horseman. The road's surface was terribly bumpy and at every inn where we changed horses it took a blacksmith hours to repair the damage suffered by our tarantasses. Tigers are reputed to infest the region and we were even provided with rifles in case of an encounter. Needless to say we saw nothing, and I am inclined to think that the ferocious tigers were invented for our benefit by the escorting Kirgiz.

I did however get a shot at another kind of game. We had already covered over a hundred kilometres from Dzharkent and I had decided to extend the halt at the next inn as I could no longer bear the sensation of being thrown about like a sack from one side of the tarantass to the other. Suddenly a magnificent cock pheasant rose a couple of paces in front of our carriage and settled on the road a little distance away. I snatched up a shot-gun, rammed two cartridges into the breach, and jumped out. As soon as he rose I fired and brought him down. He was a magnificent bird, a lovely specimen of Manchurian pheasant, blue-breasted with a white circle round his neck. I handed him over to the cook, who plucked him on the way, and we ate him roasted on a spit at our next halt. What a wonderful respite after the cruel pommelling we had endured all day!

Mercifully, after this the road improved and we were soon rolling over a fairly even stony surface.

Twenty hours after leaving Dzharkent we reached a high-lying pass. We had been climbing steadily for the last six hours, usually drawn by five horses to each tarantass and thus able to keep up a brisk canter most of the time. The pass, called Timurlyk, lies 9000 feet above sea level and is the only means of entry from this side to the beautiful Karkara valley, 200 kilometres long and fifty kilometres wide. I shall never forget our entry into this valley over the pass. By the time we topped the last ridge of our painful drive up the hills on our way from Dzharkent it was quite dark. The whole length of the valley lay before us, bathed in moonlight, with the snowcapped summits of the Tyan'-Shan' rearing up through the clouds. Far below we could see the silvery streak of a river running through the valley, the crimson glow of camp fires in the small town, and the wavering torches of a Kirgiz escort and delegates from the fair on their way to meet us. On this same spot the great conqueror Tamerlane had stood several centuries before, watching his army of 100,000 men filing past on its way to the conquest of China.

One of the wheels of our tarantass was made fast by a rope to the fore-axle and we started on our descent, zigzagging down what looked like sheer precipices at a brisk trot. Our Kirgiz driver must have had the eyes of a lynx to follow all the twists and turns of the road down which we were being hurtled, while at every bend I was sure we would topple over and fall into the abyss below. The escorting Kirgiz, who had their work cut out to keep up with us at the gallop, rent the night with piercing yells in order to inform those coming up to meet us of our approach. Altogether, it was a mad drive.

In the valley we were awaited by a dastarkhan, deputations, and, finally, rest.

The Karkara valley has the most lovely mountain pasturage I have ever seen, its soil of rich humus covered over its entire length by luscious, emerald-green grass. Thousands upon thousands of sheep, goats, cattle, camels, and horses were driven here by the nomads every year at the height of summer. Traders from all over Asia assembled here at that time also, and a great trade fair was held. A sprawling and picturesque encampment sprang up in the middle of the valley, where a few permanent buildings made of clap-board were used to warehouse a fantastic amount of assorted stores. Flags of many nations fluttered in the wind. Wares included tea from China, valuable furs from Tibet, bright-coloured and gossamer-like scarves from India, bales of tea and rugs from Bukhara and Kasligan, stacks of the finest Chinese porcelain and, beside them, cotton goods from Moscow, copper cauldrons, articles of steel, handicraft wares, arms, and swords.

Right in the centre an American and a German flag flew over a wooden shack, and huge lettering in it least five languages informed the world that this was Singer's Depot. The age it told me that every year he sold a great number of sewing-machines to nomads from all over Asia, mostly on credit and deferred payment terms, yet he had never had a bad debt, as responsibility for payment was assumed by the purchaser's tribe. He showed me his books, and I was amazed at the amount of monies outstanding. Many of the buyers came from as far afield as West China, Tibet and Kashgar, from the whole of Turkestan and from West Siberia. The fair lasted for about six weeks, until rain and snow threatened to close the passes leading to Karkara. Then the whole assembly dispersed, the nomads and their herds continuing on their way and the traders returning to their distant homes.

This spot, only suitable for grazing, was now coveted by the Colonization Authorities, who wished to split it up and hand it out in allotments to the settlers. In his report to the Minister, Mr. Veletskiy waxed lyrical over the possibilities of wheat-growing on these 100,000 hectares lying 8000 feet above the sea. He also boasted of a trial plot which I drove out to see. The Colonization agriculturalist who came with me explained that, because of the failure of summer wheat lower down, they had sown winter wheat in the valley. This was three weeks ago. What I found was a miserably tilled field with unploughed sods of grass all over the place, the grain apparently having been just strewn over the ground and roughly ploughed in. Naturally enough, nothing had come up and none of the seeds in the ground had germinated. The thin blades of green that 1 saw were grass. It was only with difficulty that I managed to keep my temper.

These, apparently, were the same methods that had been used a couple of years earlier to dupe the unsuspecting and office-trained Under-Secretary S., sent out by the Minister.

The following morning, after visiting the fair, we were once again on our way and ready to tackle the Santash Pass, notoriously dangerous in winter. At the top of the pass we drove into a thunderstorm and heavy rain, the first I had met in Turkestan since the previous autumn. We, at any rite, were grateful to the wicked Santash, which claims so many victims in winter, for this kind of greeting, reminding us as it did of home. On the other side of the pass we drove over an extensive plain, largely cultivated, which lies in the valley of the river Ili. There were vineyards on the slopes, and numerous Cossack villages.

After the gruelling work we had all been doing, I was firmly resolved to take a rest of two days and forget all about official papers and dusty files. We therefore halted in one of the colonists' villages and went to bed early. Next morning we rode out into the mountains in the hope of bagging one of the large roebucks known locally as Ilik. The two days that followed provided me with the most interesting hunting experience I have ever had in my life.

We began by climbing up the mountains for several hours, mounted on tough and shaggy little ponies. Their sureness of foot was amazing; like mules, they never put a foot wrong, picking their way up the steepest of climbs and neither slipping nor blundering even when taking a swift mountain stream at a brisk trot. We were placed at the foot of a steep slope while a hundred Kirgiz horsemen, stretched out in line, began a drive down the mountain side from about a kilometre away. The mountains here are wooded but there are large stretches sparsely covered by balsam spruce, rearing up to the sky like tapers. From our stand we could observe the whole row of advancing horsemen, and watch the deer bounding gracefully from crag to crag. The antlers of this species are about three times as large as those of the German roebuck. I managed to get three bucks.

Later, we had breakfast in a lovely meadow with a wonderful view of the Tyan'-Shan', while at our feet lay the immense expanse of Lake Issyk-Kul'. We were very high up and could even discern the buildings in Przheval'sk on the far horizon. I was, however, soon to learn how sudden changes of altitude can affect the human body. On the second day of our hunting expedition, when we were still 11,000 feet up and just about to start on our return journey, I was overtaken by a fit of such severe shivering, giddiness, and weakness that it took me several hours to recover. It was all the more aggravating as I had been looking forward to a fine supper prepared by my cook from the assortment of game with which we had so lavishly supplied him.

Next day we were in Przheval'sk, named after the famous explorer. It was from here that he used to start out on his voyages of discovery, and it was here that he returned to rest, and restore his health by bathing in the healing waters of the place he loved so well. Przheval'sk lies on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul' and outwardly is very European, like many of the other towns in Semirech'ye; in its suburbs are many villas used by visitors to this Asian spa. The memories I took away from it, however, were not very pleasant, coming as they did after those heavenly days spent in the hills. It was difficult to get back into harness and resume the tedium of office work, rendered doubly distasteful by an investigation into the conduct of a dishonest district officer whom I had to hand over to the courts.

Our way was to take us along the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul' for 150 kilometres, when we should reach the Buam Pass. After covering about half the distance we halted at a monastery, several hundreds of years old, standing at the end of a long spit of land running into the lake. According to tradition, St. Matthew the Evangelist lies buried within its walls.

As far as I could ascertain the monastery was founded by the Nestorians who spread in this locality in Parthian times, and was later left undisturbed by the Mongol overlords. The Russians restored and rebuilt it after the occupation of Turkestan and added to the number of brethren by bringing monks from monasteries in metropolitan Russia.

The monastery buildings were spacious and there were two churches, a large and a smaller one. Surrounded by gardens, the settlement runs down to the shores of the lake, and has a magnificent view reminding one of Lake Geneva. We were greeted by the pealing of church bells and the singing of the choir, and after a Te Deum for the Emperor we went for a walk in the gardens accompanied by the Abbot. Later, we were served tea at the lakeside.

The evening was delightfully cool and we sat admiring the view on the opposite shore, which was of foothills surmounted by a green belt of forests above which, towering to a height of 24,000 feet, was the crenellated outline of the Tyan'-Shan'. Beneath us stretched the glassy-surfaced lake, with neither ripple nor sail to dispel the mystery in which it is shrouded or to weaken the belief in the legend we had just heard about the four vanished cities that are said to lie beneath its waters. In the monastery we were shown a fine collection of articles that had been washed up on the shore-ancient glass fragments, Etruscan-looking earthenware vessels, bronze spear-heads, and a variety of copper utensils.

In the evening we were invited to an opulent meal of eight courses, preceded by the obligatory Russian zakuska. However, the three hours we spent at table were not particularly diverting, for according to monastic rule the entire menu consisted of fish and vegetables, cooked in vegetable oil instead of butter. Moreover, it turned out that Lake Issyk-Kul' possesses only two variety of fish, one called sazan and the other uneatable and even alleged to be poisonous. So all the eight courses consisted of sazan. We had sazan boiled, roasted, stewed, fried, smoked, pickled, and salted. And then more sazan. The fish belongs to the carp family and has a rank, bitter taste quite impossible to conceal, even with the best of goodwill.

The monotony of our repast was relieved by a profuse variety of wines and champagne, and I was hard put to it to keep within bounds without offending my hosts.

We left by moonlight, in the most romantic of settings. The troikas were drawn up at the entrance of the church where we had attended a short evening service, the darkness around being illuminated by the flood of light that poured through its wide-open doors. The Abbot, surrounded by his monks, came out from the building and, raising aloft his golden cross, gave us his blessing. The brethren began chanting the 121st Psalm, gently at first and then louder, enveloping us in the lovely harmony of the chant. The well-trained voices sounded beautiful in the night, especially the tenor of a young monk, slim and tall, with long hair falling down to his shoulders, and dark brown eyes. I can still see his face as he sang those lovely words: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' The background to this wonderful scene was the broad expanse of the Issyk-Kul', and the snow-capped mountains. We bareheaded travellers bowed reverently to the cross, and behind us, in kaftans and shaggy caps, with lighted torches in their hands, was a row of wild-looking Kirgiz sitting astride their richly-caparisoned ponies. When the singing was over we slowly mounted into our carriages and drove off, following the line of the shore. Sitting upright in my tarantass I was soon fast asleep.

Opening my eyes only at sunrise, I found that we were still near the Lake, bumping over a stony terrain with steep, high mountains about fifty kilometres away to our right. Hares in numbers I have never seen before were jumping up every minute to right and left of the road; at one time I counted fifty of them. They belonged to a species known as stone hares. Smaller than the snow hare, they have sharp pointed heads, and their flesh is reputed to have a bad taste.

THE BUAM PASS

By evening we had reached the end of the lake, and we then drove for twelve kilometres along the dried-out bed of a river which had at one time flowed into the Chu over the depression we were following. We were now at the foot of the Buam Pass, and we halted at a posting-inn owned by a very worthy Cossack renowned as a horsebreeder. His stallion was a very valuable animal and his stud consisted of more than a hundred horses.

We spent the night at the inn and were supposed to leave at five o'clock on the following morning. I got up at sunrise, ready to start at the appointed time, and was very surprised at the sight of our carriages standing in front of the house unhitched. I had a long journey before me and was impatient to get away, but could do nothing but wait when told by my servant that the horses penned in for our use the previous evening had broken out and had galloped off into the steppe. The owner, his coachman, and hands had all departed and were trying to round them up. There was nothing for it apparently but to go inside and resign myself to a glass of tea.

After about an hour I heard the welcome sound of horses trampling, the cries of the drovers, and a choice collection of Russian and Kirgiz swearwords. I got hold of the only member of my staff I could find, the others having seemingly joined in the round-up, went outside and seated myself in my tarantass. After a lot of bucking and rearing, five splendid horses were harnessed to the carriage and we literally tore out of the place. A young Cossack boy rode postilion on the front pair of horses, and the rate we were going at can be gauged by the fact that we covered twenty-five kilometres in less than an hour and a half without a single stop. What was even more remarkable, the horses looked quite fresh when we pulled up at the next inn. It also transpired that those five horses had never been harnessed together as a team but had just been picked out at random from the drove in the steppe, as the best. The whole team was a joy to look at, half-bred Cossack Kirgiz with a strong admixture of English blood by a thoroughbred stallion that the owner had bought for a moderate sum from a British officer.

After leaving the inn and driving for about four kilometres we entered the Buam Pass. Negotiating it was quite an adventure. Tamerlane is supposed to have christened it with the dirtiest name he could think of in his disgust at the death of all the camels assembled by him in Samarkand on his way through the pass to China. Here the river Chu flows between two walls of rock, high and forbidding and in some places absolutely vertical. It reminded me of the St. Gotthard and the Devil's Bridge. The gorge, which is fifty kilometres long, is only as broad as the river and there is no room for any sort of road along its banks.

The feat performed by the Russian engineers is truly remarkable. The road they built, broad enough for two vehicles to negotiate comfortably, runs half-way up the mountain side, some sectors having been hewn straight out of the rock-face, with of course no railing or parapet anywhere. Where the walls of rock are too steep, the road crosses to the other side over a swing bridge.

To a Western traveller these bridges are perfectly horrifying. It would seem that the engineers who built the road with such skill, using the cheapest form of impressed labour, ran out of funds when it came to building bridges. Two poles were thrown across the gorge, the ends secured by heaps of stone. A thick layer of willow branches, some still in leaf, were then placed over the poles and fastened down with osier twigs. That was all. One drove over these contraptions at the gallop, wondering how they might best be described, for bridges they certainly were not. The District Officer who accompanied us insisted at first that I should cross them on foot as a matter of precaution, but I soon found that this was a none too pleasant mode of crossing the chasm. One's feet got tangled up in the branches as one stumbled forward, and neither the glimpses of the river hundreds of feet below nor the sight of the following carriage swinging and swaying to either side of the bridge were in any way reassuring and merely made one terribly giddy. I had no time to waste and could not afford these senseless delays, so after a time I just remained where I was and trusted to luck. 'Aida! Nichevo!'-and we were over! As you see, the bridges held.

. . . The landscape on the other side of the pass was very pleasant, a well-inhabited zone stretching along the Chu, well irrigated and farmed by the Kirgiz. In Tokmak, the next town on our route, we halted for a short while, just long enough for me to receive and interview a few Kirgiz deputations headed by their tribal chieftains, who complained to me about the unjust treatment meted out to them by the Colonization Authorities. I found it heart-breaking to listen to the tales of woe of these wretched people, who were being evicted from their homesteads. In days gone by many of them had stood fast by Russia in the wars with the Khanate of Kokand. Some had even been decorated; others had been presented with ceremonial kaftans as a gift from the Emperor or given officer's rank in the militia. They simply failed to grasp how government officials of that same Tsar could now be bent on depriving them of the land they had 'brought to life' by irrigation of their fields and their zimovki.

SEMIRECH'YE: RUSSIAN COLONIZATION

. . . I pushed on, then, with my journey, anxious to see the other divisions farther down the Chu which, according to the statements of the Colonization Officer who accompanied me, had been freshly settled two or three years before by genuine emigrants. We arrived, and I was duly shown the three divisions. With regard to the first; on checking the actual number of emigrants against that entered in the register I discovered that half of them had gone away, after drawing their housing and inventory grants. When I investigated the remaining two divisions an amazing picture was revealed, the circumstances which had led to it being described to me by the neighbours of the settlers in question and by the local police officer, who was accompanying me. I found a village earmarked for eighty settlers, and eighty allotments had been properly marked out and entered on a map. But instead of eighty there were only seven homesteads, and this is the story I was told.

Three years before, ten families of Ukrainians had arrived claiming that they were scouts for a far greater number of emigrants who were due to follow shortly. The ten heads of family drew the authorized grants, while some were given their passage money home to enable them to report on their findings. My informant, the police officer, persuaded the good-natured Kirgiz voluntarily to cede to 'the guests of the Tsar' some of their irrigated fields of lucerne. Within the first year three of the ten families had left for good. To placate the Colonization Authorities, whose proteges the settlers were, the Kirgiz further donated to each family a few head of cattle, sheep, and goats as well as some horses for the use of the community as a whole. After this act of generosity the natives departed on their annual wanderings north. At once, the settlers set about building themselves quite comfortable houses, while spending the week-ends merrily carousing at fairs in the capital of the neighbouring district on the grant-money they had been given. Strangers who showed any wish to settle in the locality were frightened off by tales of poor soil fertility and Kirgiz raids, or they were just driven off by threats. This explained the absence of new arrivals during the following two years and the fact that only seven families occupied an area intended for eighty. When their funds began to run low the settlers sold the livestock given them by the Kirgiz.

Upon their return in the autumn the natives found that the settlers had harvested their oat-fields and appropriated the seed. Two years later the settlers claimed the land as their own and told the Kirgiz that they might either surrender their zimovki or pay rent for the use of them as well as for that of their lucerne fields. Some of the natives accustomed in general to treat Europeans as their masters, submitted to the demands, though some wandered off and laid out new fields of clover farther north. The position I found when I had completed my investigation boiled down to the fact that the seven families now owned a considerable landed property which they refused to share with anybody else, although a further seventythree settler families were entitled to live in that division. 1 found, moreover, that not only did the squatters not work the land, but they made the Kirgiz do it for them and pay them a rent to boot. Also, they enjoyed in the district capital a fabulous reputation for the lavish way in which they spent their money. This story rounds off the account of conditions as they really obtained in the Chu allotments so much advertised by Mr. Veletskiy.

THE CHU RIVER: STILL MORE KIRGIZ

. . . I took a few days off, and camped in the lower reaches of the Chu, where I used to spend a few hours immediately after sunrise on short shooting expeditions. Our camping site was located where the river gradually peters out into desert sands in a series of vast marshes overgrown with rushes as tall and as thick as those of the jungle in India and inhabited by a fantastic variety of game: boar, tigers, wild cats, wolves, all kinds of duck, pheasants and bustards, with an occasional stag. In fact, a hunter's paradise. We rode out to the shooting grounds and returned to camp at about ten o'clock. I then took a short siesta, after which I worked for the rest of the day. I was aware of the risk I was taking by camping in the marshes, but the hunter's blood in my veins got the better of my judgment. However, I did not escape the consequences, and paid for my rashness by contracting malarial fever and going down with the first of what were to be many bouts. In spite of this it was a wonderful holiday. We lived in yurts, just like the Kirgiz, experiencing at first hand both the romance and hardships of their mode of life.

One morning I rode out accompanied only by an interpreter, and a Kirgiz jigit to take care of our horses when we dismounted. On that day our target was a stretch of marsh about ten kilometres away, teeming with pheasants. In rice fields along our route threshing was in progress, performed in a most primitive way. The rice was first spread out in a layer on the ground, then threshed by roughly hewn stone rollers drawn by horses driven round in a circle. The straw chaff, and grain were then raked into a heap and winnowed by being thrown into the air off wooden spades. The wind carried away the straw and chaff, while the grain fell to the ground. The quality of the rice obtained by this method was pretty poor, but the natives maintained that this was due to a shortage of water.

The pheasants were plentiful in the rice fields and stubble, and we flushed four coveys. The problem was to bring the birds down so as to prevent them from falling into the thickets of rushes growing close by, where even our excellent retrievers often failed to find them. By nine o'clock I had bagged twelve splendid cocks, greatly to the amusement of the interpreter, who could not understand why I did not shoot the hens.

It was getting very hot, as we had gone much farther than we originally intended and the sun was fairly high in the sky. A little distance away I saw a few scattered yurts of a Kirgiz aul and wandered over, entering one of the tents in the hope of being able to rest for a while. The owner was out, but we were very hospitably received by his wife. I should add that, in contrast to their Turkmen and Sart sisters, the Kirgiz women are not forbidden to talk to strangers, nor do they wear the same kind of horsehair veil. Instead, they wear a large white turban, the ends wound round the neck and fastened under the chin. Their dress, too, is very picturesque. Generally, it consists of a loose, white woollen smock with broad sleeves reaching down to the knees and handsomely embroidered at the edges, worn with baggy ankle-length trousers and high boots of soft leather dyed in different colours and also embroidered.

Our hostess was a comely, large-eyed woman of under forty, suntanned and round-faced, with the typical high cheek-bones of the Kirgiz. My request for permission to rest for an hour was met by the production of fine-looking rugs, hauled out of a large trunk standing in the yurts and gaudily ornamented with a floral design. A mound of cushions, all made of carpeting, followed, and we were soon comfortably reclining on the floor enjoying a drink of cool kumys that we bad brought with us in our flasks. After a while we were joined by the woman's brother, accompanied by his pretty sixteen year-old wife and his second, older wife, and a few other couples. We conversed at a great rate thanks to my excellent interpreter and soon all of us were on the friendliest of terms. Our hostess pointed with pride to two plump, healthy looking babies playing unconcernedly at our feet, and told us they were her twin boys, two years old. She was still nursing them though they were running around and were babbling away quite happily. The interpreter told me that it was the custom of the Kirgiz women to nurse their children until they were fully three years old. The two children, one of who was slightly duskier than his twin, reminded me of the story of Jacob and Esau. I amused them by showing them my watch, gold cigarette-case, and a few trinkets I had in my pockets. Everyone wanted to know all about them and how they worked and they were all much intrigued by my cigarette-lighter.

When I was told that the villagers intended to slaughter and roast a sheep in our honour I quickly dispatched a Kirgiz and my jigit to our camp with instructions to the interpreter there to send us some lunch, for I realized that I would not get away before nightfall otherwise. The messengers, accompanied by two other horsemen, were soon back and we sat down in the shade to a copious and pleasant meal watched by a smiling crowd with whom we shared its surplus. The thermos flasks packed in the luncheon baskets were a source of endless surprise. That hot tea and coffee could come out of a stonecold container was too wonderful for anything. When friendship had been well established questions came raining fast. 'Where did you get those shaitan (devil) flasks from?' 'What are those funny looking knee-high laced boots you have on?' 'How much did you pay for them?' 'How much does your watch cost?, And how much did you pay for your gold cigarette case?'

When in reply to this last question I said 'Four hundred roubles', one of the men pointed out that this was a lot of money and that for the same sum I could have bought myself two wives. Every object was, apparently, valued in relation to the price of a wife. When I asked the brother of our hostess how much kalym (bridal money) he had paid for his pretty wife, he told me sadly that she came from a very poor family and that because of the meanness of her dowry in carpets, suzanes, and dresses her father had let her go for only fourteen sheep. The others maintained that this was still a stiff price to ask, but then, she was a very pretty girl. I enquired of our hostess if she had any other children.

'I have those two boys', she said.

'Any daughters?'

'Yes, two,' she replied disdainfully. One of them, fifteen years old, was an accomplished needle-woman, who demonstrated her art by skilfully embroidering a strip of linen with coloured silks. We then drew a few flowers for her; she reproduced them at once in the most lovely colours without even tracing the design on the bit of cloth in her hands. Her sister, aged ten, was a delightful child, with large, laughing brown eyes set in a red-cheeked and deeply-tanned little face. She was called Kalipa and was a trusting little soul. Her eyes filled with tears when I asked her if she owned one of those fine fur caps worn by the unmarried Kirgiz women of better families, a cap of sable adorned with heron feathers. Her mother quickly said: 'We are too poor. My husband owns only a hundred horses and two camels. But the elder girl has one.'

She showed me the cap in question, bringing it out of the trunk. At a suitable moment I expressed my admiration for the plaits of Kalipa's sister, which fell below her knees. A heavy key and a pair of scissors were suspended to the ends, while the braids looked like a needle-woman's work-basket, for they were full of needles of different sizes, and silks, all tucked into the meshes. Weights were attached to Kalipa's long plaits as well. This, the mother explained, was always done to girls to make their plaits grow thicker and longer.

The price of one of those fur caps, I was told, was sixteen roubles, and the sable could be bought from the Chinese. I gave the mother the money and told the ecstatic Kalipa that she would now have a cap of her own. Some time later, via the interpreter, I sent our hostess a box of scented soap-a present, it appears, enormously valued by Kirgiz women-and in return received a long letter of thanks, suitably translated. As proof that my commission had been faithfully carried out a photograph of the whole family was enclosed: the father, the two boys, the two sisters, each wearing a fur cap, and the mother with the box of soap on her lap. We took the most touching leave of our hosts and were accompanied the whole way to the camp by the entire family including the girls, on horseback.

Though we had been given a charming picture of nomad life, I could not but feel sad at the thought of poor little Kalipa. For some years past she had been promised in marriage by her father to an old Kirgiz who had agreed to pay him a substantial kalym and who had already enriched him with a goodly number of sheep in payment on account.

To a Westerner the concept of kalym is quite revolting. A bevy of girls is a source of guaranteed income to the head of the family, while the idea of a dowry instead of the kalym is never even considered in the steppe. A man must buy his wife; that is the rule and he must stick to it. Should the suitor be unable to pay the full sum outright he is allowed to pay by instalments spread over a number of years, but he gets his wife only when he has completed payment of the contracted sum, just as with Laban and Rachel. In the event of death his right to the girl passes to his heir - uncle, brother, or whoever he may be - who assumes the obligations of the deceased, and according to the Adat the father of the bride is obliged to hand her to him as soon as the stipulated kalym has been paid in full. The girl's consent is never sought.

It often happens that the father promises the girl to a second bridegroom and takes a down-payment from him on account, a procedure generally leading to hard-fought litigation and often developing into vendetta and bloodshed. I was told by an expert on Kirgiz affairs that disputes over kalym lead to more murders, robberies, and raids than any other cause. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that the girl follows the promptings of her heart and allows herself to be stolen or abducted by the man of her choice with no payment of any kalym. In that case, though the young couple may flee a great distance into the steppe, it is surprising how unerringly the natives are able to discover their whereabouts, always lending their sympathy and support to the outwitted father who has been deprived of his just kalym.

. . . Poor little Kalipa! I often wonder what became of her. She was such a friendly and confiding little soul, that day I spent in the intimacy of the Kirgiz family circle.

END

. . . No Westerner, I am sure, can appreciate the feeling of utter exhaustion to which one is reduced after bumping and driving over endless stretches of road in the steppe, smothered in dust or mud, roasted by the heat, and plagued by mosquitoes. However great one's original interest in nature and the scenery, even that is gradually deadened and ultimately lost. My mission in Semirech'ye was fulfilled, and I was anxious to get back to Tashkent and to renew contact with the civilized world. But four long days and nights of unbroken driving over familiar ground were still before us.

All of us were obsessed with the wish to move on with all the speed we could. When, slowly ploughing our way through heavy sand, we first caught sight of a long fine of telegraph poles following what was unmistakably a railway embankment, about eight kilometres from Kabul-sai, we felt like the warriors of Xenophon when they shouted Thalassa! on seeing the waves of the sea. We felt we should never get to the end of those eight kiloinetres, and I believe it was the only time during the whole journey that I kept urging the driver to go faster.

Our progress in the sand was slow. However, there at last was our dainty white saloon-coach, and letters from home with news from our near and dear ones in neat little piles on the writing desks of our respective compartments. Then came the unbelievable joy of fresh, clean water, and a bath in the luxuriously appointed bathroom of our coach. ln the evening, dinner, seated at table-a wonderful meal which started with a clear pheasant broth prepared by my chef as a final tribute to our adventures, accompanied by tasty little patties and followed by a succession of dishes that were the outcome of a culinary art learned in Paris.

For the first and only time during the whole tour of inspection the junior members of my staff were given permission to concoct a peach cup of real German Moselle wine. We were back in Europe!

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Last Updated on August 14, 2001 by Sylvia