Part 7
The road was really four roads, each separated by streaks of trampled grass-grown mud, now dried or drying after many thunder-showers. On the southern side you are accompanied by snowy mountains for hundreds of miles. You would think that you could walk to them in half an hour and get a handful of snow, so clear is the atmosphere that shows them, but they are at least twenty miles distant. They are, first, the Alai Tau, and then the Alexandrovsky Mountains, and then what is known as the Trans-Ilian Alai Tau, and many of their peaks are over ten thousand feet high, but are not named and little known. On the north side of the road stretches the desert in spring, now green to the horizon, but already turning yellow here and there under the blaze of the sun. On either hand one sees far-away clusters of grey tents of the Kirghiz, and near them their herds of cattle-black patches that are horses, red patches that are cows, grey, white and brown masses like many maggots, and they are sheep. There are also many camels far away on the hills, looking like little twists of thick rope with knots in the middle.
Nearly all the traffic at this season is going eastward, and each morning, when the horses are put in and the wagoners make up the caravan once more, it is with eyes and faces toward the dawn.
The emigrant caravan starts an hour before sunrise; the camp breaks up and the oxen and horses are put to, and the long day of creaking and blundering and toiling onward commences. I was regularly wakened up by the road which had wakened before me, the moving caravans and the traders’ carts.
The stars are setting and the caravan Starts for the dawn of nothing. Oh! make haste!
I generally slept at a distance of about a hundred yards from the actual highway, in order to avoid being run over at night. Even so, I was frequently in some danger of being trodden on before dawn, and at least sure to be wakened early by the traffic on the road. Upon occasion there were whole hordes and patriarchal families on the roads, with their camels and sheep and horses, their white-turbaned women riding on bulls, and pretty girl-brides on caparisoned palfreys.
We journeyed from village to village, and each was an artificial oasis made by the Russian colonists and irrigation engineers. Every ten, fifteen or twenty miles there was a substantial Russian village; the farther I went the more distance there was between these settlements, but still the actual chain was kept up unbroken to the far east of the colony, and the maps which we have of these deserts are unrepresentative in that they show blank spaces with a scattering of Tartar names of places. The map should now be well marked with Russian names. Each village is a shady shelter, alive with the running water of the irrigation canals, wherein are trailing families of ducks. There are long lines of splendid poplar trees, solid houses, schools, shops, a church, post office, municipal buildings, and so on. A notice-board tells the number of souls and the date of the foundation of the village.
When the long caravans of new colonists came to a settlement they tied their horses and oxen to trees, repaired to inns, sought out people who had come from their part of Russia, and made merry with them. The village was a great sight when one of the long caravans had come in.
A little respite from the hot road, and then on once more. I see a Kirghiz riding with reins in one hand and a hawk in the other. The Kirghiz are great hawkers, using different hawks for different game. I meet a Sartish cart in which are five soldiers coming home from Verney, where they have received their discharge--several hundred miles from a railway station--and they have hired a native cart, and are asleep in the bottom of it. At last I come to a tumbling mountain stream, and it is good to have a swim and make myself tea in the shadow of the great bridge which takes the high road across the water. When a great band of colonists arrives here, there is an astonishing scene of peasant men and women bathing. They take to the water as if their very bodies were thirsty.
We pass through Mankent, one of the few native towns remaining, and that tending to be swallowed up by Russia also; and there, at a Sartish shop, stay for koumis--very bad koumis compared with what the Kirghiz gave me in their tents. Coming out of Mankent I fell in with a band of rich emigrants going from Stavropol, in South Russia, to beyond Kopal. They had twenty-four ox-drawn carts and twelve drawn by horses, and in the carts were their household goods--tables, chairs, beds and bedding--agricultural implements, reaping and binding machines, ploughs, grindstones, saws, axes, even metal baths, barrels, guns, pots and what not in such miscellaneity and promiscuity, mixed with mothers and babies, that it was touching to see. The oxen, in their wooden yokes, were fine beasts, and the emigrants tended them on foot. Every wagon was accompanied by one or two on foot, who flicked off the flies and encouraged the oxen along, sang songs, and shouted to one another. Every wagon had buckets swinging at the side. One wagon had several cages of doves fixed on to it; to another a poor old dog was tied, and came along unwillingly. In short, everything they could bring from Mother Russia to the new land the emigrants had brought.
I accompanied them up on to a wild moorland, on to a great plateau, where we spent the night after passing out of Mankent.
* * * * *
As I tramped thus across Russian Central Asia the great event that should change everything was hidden behind the screens of the future. The gentle and innocent present was more interesting than past or future. It is touching to go over my diary and see how guilelessly and unsuspectingly I and everyone was walking the time road that led so soon--if we only could have known it--to the precipice of war. The every-day was friendly, even though it contained storm or adventure or privation. We were familiar with mornings and evenings as with long known and trusted friends. As we look back at them they have a sinister aspect as of police conducting us by stages to some frontier. It is with these feelings that I look back now to my long tramp to the mysterious city of Aulie Ata, a famous shrine in the days of Tamerlane. Each night I slept under the stars, each day journeyed pleasantly forward under a tropical sun.
One night, near the new Russian village of Antonovka, there was an appalling sunset--through a barrel-shaped thundercloud into a sea of fire; and directly the sun went below the horizon the lightning became visible in the cloud, and I watched it running through the dark veils of vapour in ropes and loops and flying lassos of silver. The thunder rolled lugubriously, and far away I could see the rain pouring in continuous flood, the black fringe of the cloud torn from heaven down to earth. I wondered had I not better pack up and go down to the village. But a little wisp of clear sky, containing one pale star, expanded itself slowly and drove away the great lightning-riven barrel and banished every cloud, and it was clear and the thunder was not, and the night was dry and starry. Dawn next morning was clear and cold, and at the sound of cart-wheels on the highway below me I gladly took the road again--quick march to get warm. In an hour, however, the sun was already too ardent a friend, and I took shelter in a caravanserai, a cubical mud hut with neither chair nor table, and from the samovar steaming on the floor I prepared my morning tea--put some tea from a packet in my knapsack into my pot, and then filled up with boiling water from the samovar. The village street outside was full of life, crowded with wagons and wagoners standing half in the bright new light of day and half in the deep, damp shadow of mud walls and banks. I sat down opposite the village school. The school door was wide open, and I saw all the village children sitting in desks round the mud-built room. There were about thirty children, and they were a pretty sight, the boys in turkey-red cotton trousers, the girls in red frocks, with their black hair in plaits. There was only one row of desks, but it went right round the room. In the middle space were two teachers squatting on a carpet spread on the floor. Each and every child was saying his lessons at the top of his voice, and sing-song--but not the same thing, all different, according to the page the boy or girl was at, some far behind, another far in front. These were all Sart children.
I walked all day after this with a damp towel hanging from under my hat, and as fast as the towel dried I made it wet again from my water-bottle. Everyone on the road was thirsty and hungry, and I said to myself: “The next village is called Cornucula; let’s hope it will turn out to be Cornucopia!” And it was indeed a horn of plenty, and I shared there a roast chicken and a pitcher of milk with a companion of the road, a poor old horseman who had a horse but who had no money, and was begging his way home to Aulie Ata.
“How much did you give for your horse?” said I.
“It cost thirty-five roubles originally, with saddle and bridle and bags. I don’t know what it’s worth now. It’s peaceful, that’s the main thing, and it lives on grass.”
This is really the country where wishes are horses, for you see beggars riding. What a lot of wishes astray on these mountains!
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Looking for a job.”
“Where?”
“On the new railway.”
“Couldn’t you get one?”
“No; there were thousands waiting, and they only took on two hundred, and these at the lowest wage piece-work.” He mentioned some figure the cubic foot.
“How much can a man earn in a month if he goes at it hard?” I asked.
“Twenty roubles (two guineas), not more,” said my acquaintance.
Imagine it--for a job of ten shillings a week, bestial labour, in the desert, under the Central Asian sun, something like a twenty to one excess of supply over demand of labour, and the people waiting weeks, months, on the chance. Surely nowhere but in Russia could such a phenomenon be noted. There, as nowhere else in the world, is a tremendous superfluity of white men’s hands. A firm of contractors has this job from the Government; according to their schedule, labour was to be paid for at a certain rate--a very low rate--but, seeing the expectancy and the sad plight of the mobs of unemployed waiting at the starting-point of the new line, they quite cheerfully make a handsome reduction in favour of themselves.
After our meal the beggar horseman went off on his nag, and I wandered through the village on foot. Among other establishments in the village was a photographer’s, and outside his little house was a notice:
THOSE WISHING TO HAVE THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN MAY HAVE A SHAVE FREE
I went in to the photographer, and saw many photographs of shaven colonists, all very stiff and serious looking. These were chiefly pioneers and passers-by, the people of the caravans. It is strange how unhappy everyone looks in a provincial portrait. The photographer, however, did a good business.
I settled down for the evening and the night in the sight of lovely mountains. The sky cleared of wisps of cloud and discovered the stars. The new moon, born surely that day, was but a hair of silver in the west, and sank an hour after sunset, followed by a beautiful attendant star. As I lay on the heath and looked upward, the first constellation just formed, and it was the seven stars, delicate and lovely in the half-night, as dainty as a maiden’s ornament. Showers of meteors, half observed, slipped out of the dark into the dark; long single meteors left, as it were, phosphorescent trails of light behind them. The Asiatic mountains drew their cloaks round them, hardened their faces, and slept as they stood away in the background. It became a night of countless stars, each star a jewel set in the darkness. The night wind came waving over the grass, full of health, gentleness and warmth. It was never still all night, but never cold, and never a cloud touched the vast glittering sky.
Next night before falling asleep I witnessed an unusual phenomenon. Away in the north a strange black ribbon seemed to be let down from a cloud, and it fluttered in the air. I thought of America and advertisement devices and of aeroplanes all in a second, and then remembered I was in Central Asia, far away from the inventions of civilisation. The ribbon came nearer, and as it passed overhead took a wedge-shaped formation, and I saw it was composed entirely of birds. They were flying across the heaven at a breathless speed, now in the clouds, now out, and never breaking up their ranks, the big birds seeming to be thick on top of one another in the front. On approaching the line of snow peaks in the south, they defiled into a long, single line, looking like some aerial train, and then easily, rapidly, passed over Talas Tau and Hindu Kush to India, as I surmised, just four hundred miles as they fly. The moon that night was a crescent of pearl, and stayed a little longer in the sky. I watched her night by night till she was full grown, and rose in the east the time the sun was setting, and reigned in the sky the whole night. How pleasant and serene the night weather remained! All night long the breeze rippled and flapped in my sleeping-sack and crooned in the neck of my water-bottle. Far up on the hills lights twinkled in Kirghiz tents, and in the illumination of moonlight I faintly discerned black masses of cattle beside which boys watched all night, playing their wooden pipes and singing their native songs to one another.
As far as High Village (Visokoe) the road remains with the Russians, and their villages abound. After Visokoe there is forty miles of moorland to Grosnoe, and then for a hundred miles there is not a Russian settlement except the town of Aulie Ata. Journeying became very difficult when the road was over deserted, empty moorland. The sun poured down, there was not a glimpse of shade anywhere, seldom any water, and seldom anything to eat. Even the grass was disappearing, and the Kirghiz everywhere were moving, following the spring, with their tents and their cattle and their camels, away from the scorched plains up to the fresher slopes of the mountains. Often I rigged up my plaid as a tent, often sat in the pale grey shadow of an ancient ruin or a tomb. The emigrants who tended the oxen on the road were fain to climb into the canvas-covered wagons and sleep, leaving the slow cattle to trudge with the extra load through the dust. Russian Ascension Day came, and the road was perfectly empty--for no one would travel on a festival. All day long I met but one man, a native on a camel. For a long time we walked within sight of one another, he allowing the camel to graze when it felt inclined, but every now and then giving it a kick, to which it responded by a plaintive groan and a jangling of the bell round its neck.
One might ask where is Tamerlane, where the warriors, the robbers, the camp followers of the hordes? The Easterns you meet are all gentle as children. No one needs to carry a weapon. Where is the old spirit of fighting? The answer might be found, I suppose, in the thousands of Cossacks and Russians who, later in the same year, returned along these roads to fight against the Germans.
The day before reaching Aulie Ata, in the heat of noon, I came in sight of a green patch on the moors, and sought and found a bubbling spring of clear water. “Here is the place,” thought I, “to make my long-deferred cup of tea,” and I cast my knapsack on the moor and looked around for a spot on which to make a fire. I had gathered a few sticks along the road in case of need, so I had the foundation of a little blaze. With what trouble did I keep that fire going till the kettle boiled, rushing about for wisps of withered weed, hunting for roots, for a straw, for anything that would burn, and all the time anxious lest in my absence the pot should capsize. At last, as I stood over the fire, there were symptoms of boiling, and I was just rejoicing. Then suddenly all grew black around me, and I lost control of my body and fell down. Such was the effect of the burning sun on my neck and head. Perhaps this was something in the nature of a sunstroke. Be that as it may, even at the moment of falling I got up again. For what was my vexation to realise, even at the moment that I fell, that my kettle had capsized. The fact brought me to my senses. I hardly touched the ground before I started up again to save the water and the fire. No luck; the water was all spilt, the fire out, and the kettle lying in the ashes. I did not trouble to pick the kettle up. I sat down by the spring, soaked a handkerchief, put it on my head, took out my mug, and drank water--such a lot of water.
What a day! I was to feel the effects of my sunstroke. A great thirst took possession of me, and when I got to Aulie Ata a touch of fever, which I had to fight.
Aulie Ata the ancient, the tomb of the Holy One, is a mysterious and umbrageous city. I became aware of its trees on my outward horizon early one afternoon, when the mighty sun had just passed the zenith and was beginning to beat on my shoulders. I had made my siesta at noon in a tent I contrived with my plaid. I tied one corner to a telegraph pole and tied stones to the other corners, and somehow made a canopy, and I lay in a blaze of diffused light on the hard, dry, sandy steppe. Though the wind blew, it was burning hot, and my right hand was swollen and smarting, for I hold a strap of my knapsack with it as I march. I drank the last drain of water in my water-bottle and made the melancholy reflection that Central Asia is not a land to tramp in. I heard the jun-jun-jun of camels, but did not care to put out my head to look at them. I wished I had a tent, or a stout and voluminous umbrella.
Still, one couldn’t stay in this spot all day, so I untied my blanket from the telegraph pole and the stones, packed my knapsack, and set off again into the dazzling brilliance of the open country. In about half an hour I espied an old ruin in the wilderness, and ran along to it, and found at the foot of the blanched wall three feet of intense shadow, in which it was just possible to sit and keep in. A villainous-looking scorpion seemed to be of the same opinion as I was, but I was too lazy to kill him, so I just flicked him off into the sun. Oh for some water, or some milk, or some koumis, but not a Kirghiz tent was to be seen all around. The Kirghiz were twenty miles away up in the green valleys of the Alexander mountains, where was pasture for their herds.
On the road once more! And then like a mirage I saw the long dark streak of Aulie Ata on the eastern horizon. It was twelve to fifteen miles away, but I thought it to be quite near. So clear is the atmosphere, so prominent in the wide emptiness of the desert are the trees of the Russian settlements, that one is constantly deceived as to the distance of the place in front of one. And I greatly rejoiced when I saw Aulie Ata; and although I was tired I resolved to get there without further resting by the way. I walked and walked and my shadow grew longer as the sun went down in the west behind me; but still the line of trees seemed as remote as ever. Several times I asked myself: “Am I not nearer?” and I was obliged to confess that I seemed no nearer. It was like walking towards the horizon. “There is something of magic about this city,” I thought.
It was long before I came even to the irrigated fields of the settlers, and only late in the dusk I arrived at the first outlying streets of the town, and went in with the procession of cows returning from the steppe to be milked in the yards of the colonists. In the midst of the clamour and dust I arrived. As I hadn’t had anything to drink since noon, and I daren’t touch the water of the irrigation canals, I was just about as thirsty as it is possible to be. I determined to stop at the first caravanserai, and there I had a big teapot and five or six little basins of tea and a bottle of koumis, and I stopped at the next caravanserai and had a bottle of lemonade and seltzer water. Tired as I was, however, I did not seek a night’s lodging, but went first to the post office, about two miles from the entrance to the town, and I obtained the telegram I knew would be waiting for me from Russia. I had arranged a little code so that certain things I wanted to know could easily be told me “by wire.” Letters take weeks. It had been pleasant to look at the wires by the roadway as I walked and reflect that a message to me was, perhaps, winging its way past me. And, sure enough, at the little post office my telegram was waiting.
After the post office I found a place at which to stay, a Russian inn called the Hotel London; and so, to justify its name, took a room in it and felt glad to have reached a city, even Aulie Ata the ancient.
Aulie Ata is a strange town hid behind the foliage of its long lines of trees. The running water courses along the canals, and, as at Chimkent and Tashkent, bull-frogs croak in chorus. The foundation of the settlement is Mohammedan. It was once a great holy place of the Moslems, the shrine of some antique teacher. But Russia has taken the upper hand and given a different aspect. There are scores of mosques lifting their slender minarets above the verdure of the trees, but most of the houses are Russian houses. And there are hotels, cinema shows, restaurants, theatres, as well as farmhouses, shops, _sarais_, mud dwellings, and fixed Kirghiz tents.
Darkness had long since settled down on the town when I went forth to find a restaurant. Here every restaurant is a _sad_, or garden. It is fenced with bamboo; the tables are set among flower-beds and gravel paths, and there is trellis-work with festoons of greenery hanging from it, strange light and shade betwixt the moonlight and the lamplight and the darkness.
I found a garden kept by an Armenian, and had dinner by myself at a table under a fruit-laden cherry tree luridly illumined and yet only partially illumined by the blaze of a huge spirit lamp. Moths whirred into vision and descended towards the white table-cloth, and heavy beetles and locusts stunned themselves against the spirit lamp, and all manner of winged vermin and midget danced in the light which seemed to hang like drapery from the tree.
A waiter had taken my order, and a cook far away was cooking what I had ordered, and I sat and rested and considered the day which at noon had been ablaze in my improvised tent on the steppe and at night was here in a lighted but shadowy restaurant-garden in a city.
My dinner was brought, and all the time I was eating my _shashleek_ (bits of lamb roasted on a skewer over charcoal) I listened to an unearthly hubbub of bands--or of fire hooters, I could not tell which. Every ten minutes there was an awesome silence, and then there outbroke the blast of a horn, three times repeated, that sounded like the trump of doom, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_; then came the sound of bagpipes and a throbbing of many drums, the horns breaking through the lesser music at intervals and lifting the roof of the sky. This was an appalling accompaniment to my meal. I had never heard anything like the sound of that horn:
_Terum--m--m, Terum--m--m, Terum--m--m._
It was like the blast
Of that dread horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, Which to King Charles did come, When Roland brave and Olivier, And every paladin and peer, On Roncesvalles died!