Part 14

I crossed the Lepsa by a bridge made of old herring barrels, struck the highway to Sergiopol at Romanovskaya, and pursued my journey along the sandy wastes and salt swamps on the eastern borders of Lake Balkhash. The Lepsa falls into this great lake at last. The wind blew up the sand so that there was some chance of missing the way, and I sat some hours on my knapsack and shut my eyes to keep the sand out. It was dreary country, yellow and inhospitable. The odour of the bleached grasses and herbs was almost overpowering, and food and palatable water were far to seek. Tall, bleached and withered grasses and white weeds and dust-laden, knobbly steppe; wind and racing sand--sand in my eyes, in my mouth, on my body--I felt a most despicable creature, and questioned my sanity in ever starting out on such an absurd journey as this through Russian Central Asia. But I saw ahead of me Sergiopol, Semipalatinsk, and a happier clime. Sixty versts north of Romanovskaya the road, gradually ascending a long moor, entered broken country through black and rusty mountainettes, and here was a little crooked gorge with a stream through it, and it was possible to sit by my own little fire and make tea for myself once more. Then more moorland, and heavily scented grass, and enormous bustards, the size of goats, and skinny little brown marmots, and withered mullein stalks, and comical blue jackdaws perching on them and cocking their heads to one side and peering at me as I passed. Then streams of colonists and their carts. Then an official and his wife, sleeping in their night attire in their slowly moving _tarantass_, huge pillows for their heads, and sheets and quilts and what not--an example of the Russians’ gift for making themselves at home. Near Ince-Agatch I met two Germans going cheerfully along on foot--as I was--a botanist and a geologist, neither of them speaking Russian, but feeling pretty well as much at home as in Germany, more so, perhaps. One wonders what was their fortune at the outbreak of war. There are certain international pursuits that know no restriction of national or imperial ground. I do not suppose the Russian grudges the German making a study of his flowers and rocks--if he is not spying at the same time. Probably we ought not to lay so much stress on purely national research in ornithology, entomology, geology, botany, the ways of peoples, and so forth. Individuals and their work are dedicated to their nation and their empire, but that should not keep our practical scientists, collectors, prospectors, students to a mere portion of the surface of the globe. Russian Central Asia and Siberia claims greater attention from our scientific men, hunters, and expert collectors. Russians, on the whole, do little; Germans have done something; but it does not matter by whom it is explored, there lies here a vast natural field for the study of mankind. These domains are scarcely touched, except by vulgar gold hunters and rock tappers--people of paltry greed and little imagination. The great era of research has not even begun, and libraries of books have yet to be written on the natural wonders and astonishing discoveries to be found and made in this wilder and more neglected half of Asia. After the war Siberia and Russian Central Asia will begin to draw more attention from us.

Sergiopol, the last point in Seven Rivers Land before entering Siberia, is a beautifully situated diminutive town, or, rather, village, for it has been degraded from the rank of town. The hills and moors around it are beautiful virgin country, bathed in pleasant sunshine and breathing healthful air; but in itself it is but a miserable place, a collection of wee grocer-shops and cotton stores. The shopkeepers are mostly Tartars, doing very small trade and thinking it very large and feeling “passing rich.” The vendors of cotton goods do the most trade, for all the Kirghiz wear cotton and give a great deal of consideration to the purchase of it. I met a commercial traveller smoking a cigarette in the market-place, a man sent out by one of the great cotton firms of Moscow, and he was carrying bags of samples to all the stores of Seven Rivers Land. The Tartars took so long to decide what they were going to buy that the traveller was reduced to a novel procedure. Directly he arrived at a settlement he took from his chest eight bags of samples, and went rapidly from one shop to another, leaving a bag at each, and saying he would return in an hour and a half. Then he went into the market-place and had a smoke and chat with chance comers. If there were more than eight shops he had a second round, and distributed the bags to the remainder after the first set had come to a decision. Not a very good way of doing business, one would think; but, then, the Tartars spoke in their own language, consulted their wives about materials and colours, and liked to be free of the presence of the Russian. He did quite a good business. He told me that his cotton goods found a large market in China. The Chinese and the Kirghiz were extremely critical as to the quality of the cotton and the colour and design. You could not palm off shoddy cotton on these people. It was their Sunday best as well as week-day, and their outer garment as much and more than undergarment. Its quality and appearance mattered. Neither German cotton nor their own Lodz manufacture was any use. Lodz is the great centre for the production of shoddy cotton--so much so that the adjective Lodzinsky is a Russian colloquialism for shoddy, and when you say _Lodzinsky tovar_ it is more than when we say “a bit of Brummagem.” Moscow, however, produces good qualities of cotton and good prints. Manchester has dropped behind Moscow in this respect and tended to compete rather with Lodz. Perhaps after the war we shall solve this passion for cheapness, this competition with Germany in turning out _cheap_ wares, and will revert to our earlier prejudice in favour of British quality. It is rather touching in Russia that best quality goods are often called _Anglisky tovar_ (English wares), even when made in Russia. Our reputation for thoroughness survives.

Still, I do not suppose that Great Britain will ever compete with Russia in the supply of cotton to the interior. Russians and English living in Russia have imported our British machinery and set up mills which are really British mills on Russian soil, and an enormous business has been founded. Russia, moreover, hopes to be able to grow enough raw cotton in her Central Asian dominions to be able to make her cotton business a national self-dependent industry. Cotton is the material mostly used for clothing in Russia, even in the towns. The women are still content with cotton dresses and the men with cotton blouses. When cloth and “stuff” come in, if they ever do, the cotton industry will tend to degenerate, but not till then.

Sergiopol is a place of little significance. But the next town, Semipalatinsk, in Siberia, is a large colonial town, with over 35,000 inhabitants--larger, even, than Verney. But Siberia is an old-established Russian colony, while Seven Rivers began only fifty years ago, and was a desert. Perhaps even now it is little more than a desert qualified by irrigation. The obstacles in the way of successful settlement have been tremendous. Still, these obstacles are being overcome. The result of half a century’s work is a measure of clear success and a healthy promise. Hundreds of Russian villages have established themselves, and the channels of small trade have been kept open. Yellow deserts have become green with verdure, and chains of oases have been made. Russian schools and Russian churches have arisen on the northern side of India, and an essentially Christian culture is spreading in a way that is clearly profitable to the Old World. The colony sadly needs a railway, and the railway is being built quickly, even now, in the time of the war. For the Kirghiz, who do most of the labour, are not required for military service. When the railway comes, more people will come with it, more colonists, more traders, and they will take away the products which the farmers would gladly sell. We are accustomed to think of railways spoiling districts, but Russian Central Asia, with its empty leagues of sand and barrenness, will only profit by the railway. The railway must go east from Tashkent all the way to Verney, and probably as far as Kuldja, in China, then northward, through Iliisk and Sergiopol, to Semipalatinsk, through Siberian farms and settlements, forests and marshes, to the Siberian main line at Omsk. This will greatly strengthen the Russian Empire when it is achieved. It will be a wise measure of consolidation.

M. de Vesselitsky, in his able book on Russia, remarks that whereas in 1906 the population of Canada was greater than that of Siberia, in 1911 Siberia had two million more inhabitants. This is the more astonishing because Canada has splendid and populous towns, whereas Siberia has only three cities of over a hundred thousand inhabitants. A strange contrast to European Russia, this Asiatic Russia; no Court, no Emperor, no aristocracy, no modern aims or claims, no power--in a sense, human tundra and taiga, though many millions are living there. Then a power enters it, commercial capital and the Russian desire to get rich, and Siberia begins to seek new wealth. European Russia and the dazzling if somewhat tawdry West begins to hear of the wealth of Siberia. Our civilisation, the centre of attraction, draws from all the outside wilds and wildernesses gold, precious stones, skins. So we help Siberia in the material sense and set its industrial life a-going.

XIV

ON THE IRTISH

The most interesting circumstance in the history of Semipalatinsk up till now is that Dostoieffsky, in exile, was domiciled there. The cities dotting the wastes of Siberia are not notable. They are young, and things have not happened in them. But dreary Semipalatinsk held the mightiest spirit in modern Russia--Fedor Dostoieffsky, the author of “The Brothers Karamazof.” So Semipalatinsk, on the loose sands of the River Irtish, has now its Dostoieffsky house, where Dostoieffsky lived, and a Dostoieffsky street. It will, no doubt, be a place of pilgrimage in the future for those wishing to grasp the significance of the great Russian.

Semipalatinsk is a dull collection of wooden houses and stores, an important trading centre functionising an immense country-side. What struck me most were the large general shops, with their extensive supplies of manufactured goods and all manner of luxuries. There were at least six department stores, with handsome clocks, vases, bedroom furniture, mandolins, violins, guitars, Vienna boots, American boots, gay hats, silk dresses, wrapped chocolates, promiscuous and lavish supplies of all manner of European goods. English wares seemed noticeable chiefly by their absence, and the cutlery was Swedish, the stoves Austrian, the wools and the cottons Russian, the note-paper American or French, the wonderful enamel ware and nickel and aluminium ware German. Only sanitary contrivances, cream separators, and agricultural machinery seemed to be English. How much more of these things might be sent. However, with all these signs of luxury--luxury for Russians--Semipalatinsk lacks the graces of a town; has no lighting, no pavement or public place, no theatre, only a cinema. Its prospect is waste, loose sand, which the air holds even in calm--a grit in the eyes and in the mouth. Its trees do not flourish, and only people accustomed to a quiet life could go on living there from year to year. The peasants bring most life into the town, selling their products in the immense open market, or buying manufactured goods to take up-country to their farms. The broad River Irtish flows placidly onward, five hundred miles to Omsk and thousands of miles to the Arctic Ocean, and it is navigated by a considerable number of steamers and sailing boats. It is a great waterway--a sort of safer sea in the heart of Asia. The wonder is that more towns have not sprung up on its shores. In the history of the world it has not yet become a typical river. It flows from the silences of the Altai mountains, through the silences of Northern Asia, the noise of man hardly ever becoming more than a whisper upon it. It never becomes

Bordered by cities and hoarse With a thousand cries,

and it cannot be said that as we go onward to its mouth

Cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker incessanter line; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream.

It is almost as peaceful and serene as a river in an undiscovered continent.

At Semipalatinsk I stayed some days before taking boat up-stream to Malo-Krasnoyarsk. It was here that I read of the astonishing intelligence of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his wife. The Russian papers of the time devoted a great deal of space to the details of the murder, the reprisals taken by the Austrians, the gossip of Europe. The preoccupation of the British Press with home affairs was astonishing, and in all the telegraphed opinions of our representative papers there was not an utterance that overstepped the limits of conventionality. Whether the murder was planned politically by Germany, as has been hinted, or planned politically by Serbia for vengeance, or came about accidentally through the passion of a noble Serb, it was in any case a test phenomenon. It had enormous significance to diplomatists and scanners of political horizons. By the attitude and behaviour of Germany and Austria their intentions, at least in the Near East, could be gauged. But it did not seem of sufficient importance to conscious England. The Austrians tried to spread the idea that Russia had contrived and bought the murder of the Archduke because she feared his intentions in the Balkans. But, out of the Germanic dominions, that did not carry weight. Austria manifestly threatened Serbia politically, and some British people scratched their heads and asked questions: “Shall we go to war for Serbia?” Then came the seemingly obvious answer: “No, not for _Serbia_!” which fairly indicates the blindness of that part of England which was vocal at that time. In that spirit we neglected our duty in connection with the St. James’s conference after the first Balkan war, and in that spirit we alienated Bulgaria in the great European war which followed.

Austria threatened war, and there was clearly the prospect of Austria and Russia fighting. I weighed it up in my mind as I waited at Semipalatinsk, and more than once I asked myself whether I had not better give up my journey onward and go straight to Western Russia. But, deciding I did not want to write war correspondence, I concluded I would continue my way, and rest as I had intended--on the verdant Altai. So I left Semipalatinsk and went in a little steamer up the narrowing and rocky river, past wooded islands, grey moors, and emerald marshes. It was a long though not monotonous river journey. We stopped at elementary wooden landing-stages beside small hamlets, bought eggs, fish, fruit from peasant women and children, backed out into midstream again, making our big wave that went washing along the banks and drenching incautious boys and girls; we beat up the water with our paddle, turned, saw ourselves clear of the pier, and a widening stretch of water between us and the bank, found our course between the buoys, avoided the weirs and the shallows. Morning became hot noon, and the afternoon and twilight time came on, and then luminous starry night, and again morning and hot noon. We stopped at the little town of Ust-Kamennygorsk, the headquarters for several mining camps, a bit of qualified civilisation not unknown to British mining engineers. We had on board a couple of priests, a commercial traveller, some workmen coming back from doing a job, and two dozen raw Cossacks who had been ordered to serve on the Chinese frontier--rather interesting to reflect now how they were travelling away from the place where they would be needed. At that time all the preparations for war were going on apace in Germany; the roads were full of horses newly bought by the Government, the trains full of stores; at the military camps the last manœuvres were being worked out with full regiments and the complete panoply of war. We in the steamboat were all travelling the wrong way, away from the interest of the world--the centre--up-stream on the fast-flowing river, against the currents and the tendencies. A month later all would come back, forced by the declaration of war. Still, little we recked. We had a holiday spirit. There were several high-school girls and girl students on board--_gimnasistki_ and _kursistki_--and the deck was vocal with their chattering and laughing. They were a charming contrast to rough Siberia. The deck passengers drank vodka and sang. Down below deck was a public stove, and there sizzled a score of pots--pots with jam, with eggs, with fish, with chickens, with milk. I made my coffee there, and would frequently see it rising at the boil and be unable to pick the pot out for others tending their fish-soup and women taking the scum off their strawberry jam. At each little village people bought things to cook, so that at times you might have thought it was a sort of cooking expedition.

So we went on at this momentous time in history. The river became more rapid and difficult to navigate; it serpentined through wild gorges, where the rocks were broken and ragged and squared and angular. The steep cliffs were full of detail that was delicious to the eye. Where the cliffs were not so steep Nature had clothed their nakedness with mould and grass. We passed from placid stretches which seemed to throw the rays of the sun back on the ship, the people and the sky, and we entered the intense cold shadow of high, sheer rocks. The water became green and shadowy. The scenery changed every moment as we went round a new bend of the river and entered new territory through forbidding gates of rock. Frequently we found ourselves in foaming cauldrons from which there seemed to be no exit; we wandered round, travelling as often north as south, and catching glimpses of sun from all imaginable quarters, and found loopholes of escape to new reaches. The steamer seemed a toy beside the huge cliffs on each side, and the sunshine, when we came into it, seemed sufficient to blind the whole Altai. The higher we pursued our winding way the higher became the cliffs, till eventually we had grey crags of several hundred feet hanging over us. In the earlier gorges the greenness of the vegetation of the hills was reflected in the river in a deep, shadowy green, but in the later ones the drear greyness of the cliffs was alone reflected, and the swift-moving, placid water looked like oil. As far as Gusinaya Pristan trees--birches--but infrequent ones, and growing in haphazard ways from clefts in rocks. Besides our panting, puffing steamer, with its streamer of dense smoke and persistent showers of sparks, there were only rafts on the river--logs roped together, and peasants standing on the water-washed floating platforms. They seemed to be very skilful in managing them. On the banks we saw occasional tents and fishermen’s tackle, small fires with tripods over them, and old black pots whereby you guessed that fish were cooking. Occasional hay-making parties also visible on the wan outskirts of farms. It was a fascinating journey, and one could not take one’s eyes from the changing scene, the prospect from door after door as we passed new rocks, the delicious side views, the clefts and wounds healed with birch trees and greenery, the battered, jaggy prominences, dull blue, purple, yellow with age and many weathers.

Everyone watched curiously for the next scene, and the change was so frequent that no one got tired. Mountains, ridges--the grandeur of our rock basins multiplied upon us so that we felt we were steadily ascending a high mountain range by river. Night was wonderful, especially when we stopped to put some cargo off or to take on wood, and we got out and walked on the cliffs and the sand; the stars in the sky had their drips of golden reflection in the river, and the opposite banks and rocks were majestically silhouetted against the sky. The navigation of this river is, perhaps, one of the sights of the future. “Parties will be taken out.” But there is no romance there, no castles, no ruins--only Nature and the grey tumultuous misery and beauty of a scarred continent.

XV

THE COUNTRY OF THE MARAL

Malo-Krasnoyarsk, on the Irtish, is a hot, sandy village supporting itself by agriculture, fishing, and melon growing. It is treeless, no one seeming to have cared to plant the trees which could so easily have been grown, and the native Kirghiz are employed making fuel blocks out of manure. The stacks of these black blocks give an unpleasant odour when the wind is blowing over them. Otherwise, the Irtish is rather wonderful--deep and green and swift, with powerful currents.

From Malo-Krasnoyarsk I journeyed along the burnt road and over the vast stretches of pungent wormwood that grow on the moors. The road climbed to the mountain ridges of the Narimsky range, and along them to the Central Altai. I had given up tramping now, and an old man in a dirty crimson blouse drove me in a cart to Bozhe-Narimsky village, took me for three shillings, and was ready to drive me to Kosh Agatch, on the other side of the mountains, if I would say but the word. Kosh Agatch, according to his reckoning, would be five hundred miles, and he would have to plan a month’s journey over the mountains, hire extra horses, and buy provisions. According to him traders made the journey frequently, especially Tartars and Chinamen, buying maral horns.

On the higher slopes of the Altai the sale of the horns of the maral deer (_Cervus canadensis asiaticus_) seems to be, if not the chief, at least the most picturesque means of earning a livelihood. I was making my way into the maral country. Here the colonists, instead of farming sheep and cows, farm a species of deer with very valuable horns--the maral. The horns are not valuable as ornaments, or as bone, or as drinking vessels, but as medicine. A very curious trade. The Russians cut off the horns of the deer every spring, boil them, dry them, and sell them into China, where they sell at the rate of about a shilling an ounce, and give almost miraculous relief to women in the pains of childbirth, make it possible for barren women to have children, and many other things.

“Is it good for that purpose?” I asked of the man who was driving me.

“They say so,” said he, without committing himself.

“But do Russian women use this medicine?”

“No; it’s too expensive.”

“But do they believe in it?”

“No, they don’t need it. They are not like the Kitankas and Mongolians, who suffer very much. These Chinawomen are like the camels here. The camels would die out if it were not for the skill the Kirghiz women have in making them breed. They would die out, but the Kirghiz keep them going. The same with the Chinawomen; they need the powder of the maral horn. No Chinawoman of any importance thinks of marrying without a pair of maral horns in her possession, and if her father be too poor to purchase them, the husband must. They all use it, and you can buy the powder in any chemist’s shop in China.”

“Or an imitation?” I suggested.

My driver could not say whether the substance could be imitated. Later on, on my journey, I saw marals, both on the run and in the immense maral gardens which the Russians keep in their colony.