Part 1
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA
Through Russian Central Asia
By STEPHEN GRAHAM
With Photogravure and many Black-and-White Illustrations from Original Photographs
Cassell and Company, Ltd London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1916
Contents
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
1. LEAVING VLADIKAVKAZ 1
2. WHERE THE DESERT BLOSSOMS 15
3. WONDERFUL BOKHARA 24
4. MOHAMMEDAN CITIES AND MOHAMMEDANISM 35
5. THE HISTORY OF THE TRIBES 44
6. TO TASHKENT 55
7. THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST 63
8. ON THE ROAD 72
9. THE PIONEERS 134
10. FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 156
11. ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER 173
12. “MIDSUMMER NIGHT AMONG THE TENT-DWELLERS” 184
13. OVER THE SIBERIAN BORDER 203
14. ON THE IRTISH 210
15. THE COUNTRY OF THE MARAL 218
16. THE DECLARATION OF WAR 228
APPENDICES
1. RUSSIA AND INDIA AND THE PROSPECTS OF ANGLO-RUSSIAN FRIENDSHIP 237
2. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE 249
INDEX 271
List of Illustrations
THE TOMB OF TIMOUR _Photogravure Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE CENTRAL ASIAN RAILWAY: NEARING THE OXUS 18
THE CENTRAL ASIAN DESERT 20
BOKHARA: THE ESCORT OF A MAGISTRATE 28
OUTSIDE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE MOSQUES 32
A HOLIDAY AT SAMARKAND: BOYS OF THE MILITARY SCHOOL PLAYING AMONG THE RUINS OF THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE 36
MOHAMMEDAN TOMBS AND RUINS IN THE YOUNGEST OF THE RUSSIAN COLONIES 40
A MOHAMMEDAN FESTIVAL AT SAMARKAND--THE HOUR OF PRAYER 48
CENTRAL ASIAN JEWESSES 50
FINE-LOOKING SARTS IN OLD TASHKENT 56
OUTSIDE A GERMAN SHOP IN OLD TASHKENT 58
TASHKENT: A FOOTBALL MATCH AT THE COLLEGE 60
PLEASANT COUNTRY OUTSIDE TASHKENT 64
HEARTY SHEPHERDS: ALL KIRGHIZ 66
THE RUSSIAN TEACHER: A NATIVE SCHOOL IN TASHKENT 68
A KIRGHIZ GRANDMOTHER: VENDOR OF _Koumis_ 74
RUSSIANS AND KIRGHIZ LIVING SIDE BY SIDE AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAINS 76
A TENT OF LONELY NOMADS ON A SUMMER PASTURE IN CENTRAL ASIA 80
SARTS SELLING BREAD: THE _Lepeshka_ STALL 84
THE NATIVE ORCHESTRA: SEE THE MEN WITH THE TEN-FOOT HORNS, “TRUMPETS OF JERICHO,” AS THE RUSSIANS CALL THEM 104
“PAST THE RUINS OF ANCIENT TOWERS” 120
A SETTLED KIRGHIZ: ONE OF THE CHARACTERS OF PISHPEK 130
THE IRRIGATED DESERT--AN EMBLEM OF RUSSIAN COLONISATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 136
THE SHADY VILLAGE STREET--ONE LONG LINE OF WILLOWS AND POPLARS 152
THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA AT VERNEY--AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1887 158
VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING 168
CHINESE PRAYING-HOUSE AT DJARKENT 178
LEPERS IN A FRONTIER TOWN 180
A PATRIARCHAL KIRGHIZ FAMILY 186
SHEEP-SHEARING OUTSIDE THE TENT HOME 194
IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT 198
FOUR WIVES OF A RICH KIRGHIZ 205
AT A KIRGHIZ FUNERAL 207
KIRGHIZ PRAYING 215
IN THE ALTAI: KIRGHIZ TOMBS NEAR MEDVEDKA 222
ALTAISKA _Stanitsa_: VIEW OF MOUNT BIELUKHA 230
MOBILISATION DAY ON THE ALTAI: THE VILLAGE EMPTIED OF ITS FOLK 232
MAP OF ROUTE TAKEN BY AUTHOR 270
Introduction
The journey recorded in these pages was made in the summer before the great war, and although the record of my impressions and the story of my adventures were fully written in my road diary and in the articles I sent to _The Times_, I had thought to postpone issuing my book to some quieter moment beyond the war. But the days go on, and we are getting accustomed to live in a state of war; war has almost become a normal condition of existence. At first we could do nothing but consider the facts of the great quarrel of nations and the exploits of the armies. War for the moment seemed to be our life, our culture, and our religion. But things have changed. War started by concentrating us and making us narrow, but now it is giving us greater breadth. We have become more interested in the home life of our Allies, in the “after-the-war” prospects of Europe, in the future of our own British Empire and of the wide world generally. The war has given us a larger consciousness, and we have become, as some say, “Continental.” In any case, we are much less insular. France and Russia have become real places to the man in the street, and the account he gives of them is more credible. Even our country labourer can say where Gallipoli is, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Salonica, Bulgaria, Serbia, though, indeed, I have frequently heard the latter spoken of as Siberia. “My son’s gone to Siberia,” says the countryman; “it’s a cold place.” Our imagination ranges farther afield, and young men of all classes think of making far travels when the war is over. We are not less interested in other things, but more; only less interested in the old suffocating business and industrial life of the time before the war, of the stuffy rooms, the circumscribed horizons, the dull grind. All eyes are opened wider, all hearts have greater hopes, and that which dares in us dares more. We are reading more, reading better, and, among other matters, are thinking more of foreign countries, empires, far-away climes. The war, bringing so many nations together, has touched imaginations. It has mixed our themes of conversations and enriched our life with new colours, new ideas. So, perhaps, the story of this journey and my impressions of an interesting but remote portion of the Tsar’s Empire will not come amiss just now. Moreover, during the war many problems have become clearer, especially those of the British Empire, clearer, but none the less unsolved, and I feel that a study of a vast stretch of the Russian Empire, and of its problems and its prospective future, cannot but be helpful.
Among the letters sent me care of _The Times_ there is one written about an article which has become a chapter in this book:
“Since I was a child and steeped myself in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ I have never been so enthralled as I was by an article of yours called ‘Towards Turkestan,’ which appeared in _The Times_ long since, as it seems now (last May?). I am an old, tired recluse. I have been reading for over sixty years. I’m very much extinct, but my desert also blossomed with your roses.
“Charm _inexpressible_ breathed from the roses (I think they must have been the black-red sort). Strange figures--rich garments, all solemnised by, as it were, a twilight glamour made of magical influences. All so real, yet remote. I repeat, I have never been taken away so far since I was a child. There was another article which I cut out and lost ... but I did not prize it as I did the Turkestan article, where figures both bizarre and dignified greeted you and bade you farewell with roses. And sunset steeps them in a golden haze. And they still move there whilst the traveller who has spell-bound them in his writing has gone on his way....”
I have printed this letter because it was sweet to have it, and it touched me. May the roses bloom again!
I am indebted to the Editors of _The Times_ and _Country Life_ for permission to republish portions of this book previously printed in their columns, and to _Country Life_ for permission to republish photographs. For these photographs, except those relating to the Altai, I am chiefly indebted to the professor of French at Tashkent Military School and to M. Drampof, of Pishpek. Special permission has to be obtained to enter Russian Central Asia, and, as I was going on foot, the possession of a camera might have led to the suspicion of military spying. So I had my camera sent to Semipalatinsk, which is in Siberia, and only used it on the Siberian part of my journey. My thanks are also due to Mr. Wilton, the courteous and able correspondent of _The Times_ at Petrograd, who obtained for me my permit for travel in Russian Central Asia.
STEPHEN GRAHAM.
Through Russian Central Asia
I
LEAVING VLADIKAVKAZ
In the early spring of 1914 I walked once more to the Kazbek mountain. It was really too early for tramping, too cold, but it was on this journey that I decided what my summer should be. Once you have become the companion of the road, it calls you and calls you again. Even in winter, when you have to walk briskly all day, and there is no sitting on any bank of earth or fallen tree to write a fragment or rest, and when there is no sleeping out, but only the prospect of freezing at some wretched coffee-house or inn, the road still lies outside the door of your house full of charm and mystery. You want to know where the roads lead to, and what may be on them beyond the faint horizon’s line.
So it is March, and I am walking out from Vladikavkaz on the Georgian road, and only on a four days’ journey--to the Kazbek mountain and back. Indeed, the road beyond is probably choked with snow, and there is no further progress. But I shall see how the year stands on the Caucasus.
The stillness of the morning--a circumambient silence. A consciousness of the silence in the deep of space. Three miles of level highway stretch straight and brown from the city on the steppes to the dark, blank wall of the mountains. Beyond the black wall and above it are the snow-mantled superior ranges, and above all, almost melting into the deep blue of the Caucasian sky, the glimmering, icy-wet slopes of the dome of the Kazbek. The sun presides over the day, and as a personal token burns the brow, even though the feet tread on patches of crisp snow on the yellow-green banks of the moor. No lizards basking in the sun, no insects on the wing, no flowers--not a speedwell, not a cowslip, not a snowdrop. Only little flocks of siskins rising unexpectedly from sun-bathed hollows like so many fat grasshoppers. Only an occasional crazy brown leaf that scampers over the withered fallen grass. There is vapour over the plumage-like woods on the hills, but no birds are singing. Nature can almost be described in negation, she shows so little of her glory; yet she makes the heart ache the more.
Persian stone-breakers, hammer in hand, sitting on mats by the side of the heaps of rocks; primitive carts lumbering with their loads of faggots or maize-straw or ice; horsemen like centaurs because of their great black capes joining their head and shoulders to little Caucasian horses--that is all the life at this season of the year of the one great highway over the mountains, the great military road from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis--no motor-cars, no trams, no light-rolling carriages with gentry in them, no trains.
Stopping at a sunny mound to have lunch, you hear from a hundred yards away the River Terek like the sound of a wind in the forest, the impetuous stream rushing between white crusts of frozen foam and washing greenly against ice-crowned boulders. For sixty miles the road is that of the valley of the Terek. It passes the Redant and then becomes the visible companion of the river, winding with it among the primeval grandeur of its rocks. The Kazbek begins to disappear, hidden by its barrier cliffs--its Kremlin; but for a mile or so its snowy cap remains in sight over the great lopsided, jagged crags. The blue smokes of Balta and red-roofed nestling Dolinadalin rise into the afternoon sky. The road enters the chilling shadow of the Gorge of Jerakhof, and you look back regretfully on the red sunlit strand behind you. The white-framed Terek moves in a grand curve through a broad wilderness of stones and snow. An icy mountain draught creeps from the cleft in the grey cold rocks. On the deserted road the telegraph poles and wires assume that sinister expression which they have in vast and lonely mountain tracts. The opening by which you entered the gorge becomes a purple triangle, and far above you and behind you glimmers the tobacco-coloured sunlit Table Mountain.
The road becomes narrower: on the one hand the river roars among ice-mantled rocks, on the other the black silt continually trickles and whispers. The faint crimson of sunset lights the wan towers of Fortoug, and then one by one the yellow stars come out like lamps over the mountain walls.
There are three inns between Vladikavkaz and the Kazbek mountain. I stayed at the second, at Larse, and made my supper with some thirty Georgians, Ossetines, and Russians, workmen on the road and chance travellers. Here I heard many rumours of the commercial destiny of the military road, of the thirty-verst tunnel that it is necessary to make, of the Englishman named Stewart, the “Boss of the Terek”--_Khosaïn Tereka_--who has the contract to supply the whole of the Caucasus with electricity, who will or will not make an electric power station in the shadow of Queen Tamara’s castle, needing an artificial waterfall three hundred sazhens high.
“But the project has grown cold,” said I.
“It will come to nothing,” say the hillmen; “for ten years people have been talking of such things, but nothing has changed except that we have got poorer.”
But the host is an optimist. “It will come. There will be a tramway from the city to the Kazbek. The trams will go past my door. We shall have electric light and electric cooking, and will become rich.”
We remained all thirty in one room all night--square-faced, gentle, sociable Russians in blouses; tall, Roman-looking Georgians and Ossetines in long cloaks, with daggers at their tight waists, with high sheepskin hats on their heads. They ate voraciously bread and cheese and black pigs’-liver, putting the waste ends when they had finished into the bags of their winter hoods--astonishing people to look at, these Caucasians; though half-starved, yet of great stature and iron strength, with fine, broad-topped, intelligent heads, deeply lined, cunning brows, long, beak-like, aquiline noses. They would make splendid soldiers--but not so good “soldiers of industry.” They are a people who often fail when they go to America. They all knew men who had gone there and had returned with stories of unemployment or exploitation. Scarcely one of them had a good word to say of America. They all, however, looked forward to the time when the Caucasus would be developed on American lines and hum with Western prosperity. We slept on the tables of the inn, on the bar, in the embrasures of the windows, on the forms, on sacking on the floor--the kerosene lamp was turned low, and nearly everyone snored.
We were all up before dawn, and I accompanied an Ossetine miller who was in search of flint for his mill, and we entered the Gorge of Dariel whilst the stars were dim in the sky. It was a sharp wintry morning, and as the road led ever upward and became ever narrower, the wind was piercing. The leaking rocks of summer where often I had made my morning tea were now grown old in the winter, and had wisps of grey hair hanging down--yard-long icicles and thick tangles of ice. The precipitously falling streams and waterfalls were ice-marble stepping-stones from the Terek to the mountain-top.
We entered the gorge by the little red bridge which, like a brace, unites the two sides of the river at its narrowest point. The stars disappeared. Somewhere the sun was rising, but his light was only in the sky so far above. We beheld the green, primeval ruin of Nature, the red-brown, grey, and green boulders of Dariel in varied immensity and diversity of shape, the vast shingly, boulder-strewn wastes, the adamantine shoulders of porphyry, the cold, ponderous immensities of rock held over the daring little road, the river eddies springing like tigers over the central ledges between fastnesses of ice.
My Ossetine picked up various stones and struck them with his dagger to see how well they sparked, and, having apparently found what he wanted, accepted a lift in an ox-cart and returned back to the inn at Larse. Perhaps it was too cold for him. I walked up to the square cliff of Tamara and the tooth of the wall of the ancient castle where Queen Tamara treacherously entertained strangers, making love to them and feasting them, and then having them murdered; the castle where the devil once arrived in the guise of such an unlucky wanderer--the scene of the story of Lermontof’s “Demon.”
This was once the frontier of Asia, and the romantic country of a fine fighting people. To this day, despite railway projects and the hope that the river may provide the Caucasus with electricity, Queen Tamara’s castle remains almost the newest thing. It is modern beside the antiquity and majesty of the ruin of Nature. Here the real world seems to jut out through the green turf and flower-carpeted earth into the light of day, striking us awfully, like the apparition of God the Father coming up out of the bowers of Eden. You feel yourself in the presence of something even older than mankind itself, and you wonder what differences you would note if, with the goloshes of Fortune on your feet, you could be transported back a thousand years, a second thousand, a third thousand, and so on. What did the Ancients make of this? They held that it was to the Kazbek mountain that Prometheus was bound as a punishment for stealing fire from heaven. Was that what they said when they first came fearfully through and discovered the plains of the North?
An ancient way! And then at the turn of it, the gate to the “Kremlin” of Dariel, and the towering Kazbek lifting itself to the sky within. Here is truly one of the most wonderful and romantic regions in the world. But it was not to see the Kazbek that I made this journey, but to find again a certain cave where years ago I found my companion on the road, the place where we lived and slept by the side of the river. It was there as I left it, familiar, calm, by the side of the running river, glittering in the noon-day sun, and the granite boulders held threads of ice and ice-pearls--the ear-rings of the rocks. And I would have liked to meet my companion again. But Heaven knew under what part of its canopy the tramp was wandering then. I felt a home-sickness to be tramping again, and I decided that as soon as the snow and ice had gone I would take to the road.
* * * * *
And so, the season having changed, and the cold winds and rains of spring giving way to summer, I take the road once more into new country. The season really changes when it is possible to sleep comfortably out of doors. This year I go into the depths of the Russian East, and, besides taking the adventures of the road, continue my study of Easternism and Westernism in the Tsar’s Empire. I travel by train to Tashkent, the limit of the railway, and then take the road, with my pack on my back, through the deserts of Sirdaria and the Land of the Seven Rivers towards the limits of Chinese Tartary and Pamir, then along the Chinese frontier, north to the Altai mountains and the steppes of Southern Siberia. This is a long, new journey--new for English experience--because, until our entente with Russia, mutual jealousy about the Indian frontier made it extremely difficult for the Russian Government to permit observant and adventurous Englishmen to wander about as I intend to do. Indeed, even now I may be stopped and turned back from some forlorn spot seven or eight hundred miles from a railway station, and then, perhaps, silence may engulf my correspondence for a time. All things may happen; my papers may be confiscated or lost in the post, or my progress may be stopped by various accidents. In any case, I have official permission for my journey, and the weather is fine.
The old grandmother baked me a box of sweet cheesecakes (_vatrushki_), Vassily Vassilitch brought me fruit and chocolate, another friend brought three dozen cabbage pies--thus one always starts out for the wilderness. We assembled in the grandmother’s sitting-room to say good-bye. I am to beware of earthquakes, of snakes, of having much money on my person, of being bitten by scorpions, of tigers, wolves, bears, of occult experiences.
“It is occult country,” said G----, teacher of mathematics in the “Real School.” “You are likely to have occult adventures; some enormous catacylsm is going to take place this summer. I don’t know what it is, but I should advise you to get across this dangerous country as soon as you can. Siberia is safe, and North Russia, but not Central Asia, and not, as a matter of fact, Germany.”
He had had a strange dream, and, being of occult preoccupation, ventured on vague prophecy, which generally took the form of earthquakes and catacylsms. When I met him in the autumn after my journey, the great war with Germany had broken out, and I was inclined to credit him with a true prophecy; but, with honest wilfulness, he was still figuring out earthquakes and cataclysms to be, and would not have it that the European conflagration was the fulfilment of his dream.
Another friend is charmed with the idea that I am going to Bokhara, and won’t I bring her home a silk scarf from the great bazaars? Another is touched by the dream that I am realising. To him Central Asia is a fairyland, and the Thian Shan mountains are not real mountains so much as mountains in a book of legends.
At last the old grandmother says:
“All sit down!”
And we sit, and are silent together for a few moments, then rise and turn to the Ikon and cross ourselves. The grandmother marks me in the sign of the Cross and blesses me, praying that I may achieve my journey and come safely back, that no harm may overtake me, and that I may have success. Then I pass to each of the others present and say “Good-bye.” Vera, however, looks at me in such a way that I am sure she means that she feels I shall never return. So I am bound to ask myself: Is not this farewell a final farewell? Does not this Russian see something that is going to happen to me? But she has been very kind to me, and just at parting puts a beautiful Ikon-print into my hand, and I fix it in the inside of the cover of my stiff map.
* * * * *