Part 8
Like the horn of Roland blown in the desert and heard three hundred leagues away. After dinner, I went off to find by ear the origin of this hubbub. I went along towards the sound, and found it proceeded from a native orchestra standing on the roof of a circus building. Here two tall Sarts held in their hands horns ten feet long. They lifted these horns to the sky and balanced them on their lips; they lowered them and blasted their music over the roofs of the houses of the city; they presented them at the heads of the crowd of sightseers, and made many put their fingers to their ears and walk away: it was a terrifying and astonishing noise. It was wonderful, however, the effect of the three angles at which the horns were blown. You felt the first one went right over the town, it was a voice from the stars, it leapt from the dark emptiness of the desert on one side to the dark emptiness of the desert on the other side of the city; the second, blown at the people’s heads, was in the town and at the town, and caused the houses to tremble; the third was blown, as it were, to the dead.
These horns are traditional instruments of the Sarts, though it is said there are only a few men alive who can blow them. It needs great strength, and the degenerating race does not produce such fine men as it did. The Russians call them the “trumpets of Jericho.”
An astonishing advertisement for a circus. The sound of these horns was too much for my temperament, and I fought shy of the show, though I should otherwise have liked to go in. Still, a new stage in my journeying had been reached, and I sought diversion, found a theatre, and bought a seat to see a romance of ideal love. There were seven people in the theatre, and after an hour we were all given our money back and told that the company had gone to see the circus. I then went to the cinema to see the much-advertised “spectacle” of “A Prisoner of the Caucasus,” but I was informed that the “machine” was broken, and that the next performance would be “on Friday, if God grant”--a dark cinema-house where by the light of an oil lamp, which seemed strangely out of place, one discerned a refreshment bar, a cashier’s box, where should have been a girl selling tickets, curtains separating the waiting-room from the theatre, and finally three or four hopeful or disappointed would-be customers. I asked a Russian present if he did not find in the noise of the horns something very horrifying and suggestive, and he replied testily:
“Oh, a great deal of noise, that’s all. Very trying for those who would rather not hear it.”
He did not feel as I did about the music at all, and his matter-of-factness rather surprised me. The horns had to me the sense of calling someone, something, and they were literally terrifying.
In a depressed state of mind I wandered back to the Hotel London, and found the landlady having a nail-to-nail fight with a woman lodger. Both sides at once claimed me as a witness--the police were coming, and I would testify. The landlady had broken into the lodger’s room and told her to leave at once; the latter, a great, big, hysterical Russian woman, had replied with fisticuffs and sobs and clamour.
The landlady gave a very disparaging account of the woman lodger’s present behaviour and past career. The woman lodger, under the strange impression that she possessed good looks, tried to ingratiate me to be on her side by giving me saucy looks and knowing smiles. The yard porter had been sent for the police, and all the while there were strident cries of “the police are coming”--and the horns kept up their rumpus over the city, _terumm_, _terumm_, _terumm_.
I was sorry my room had no key and that the window was shuttered from the outside. The police came and ordered that the woman be allowed to remain till the morning, and a silence settled down on the inn--silence broken only by the sound of the horns of the orchestra a mile away. All sorts of fancies possessed my mind and wrought me to a state of terror, so that I was afraid of my dreams.
What I dreamed that night has probably little to do with Russian Central Asia, and yet I shall never think of my journey across this wild and empty land without half recalling it involuntarily. Even if I believed that dreams had never any definite prophecy or foreboding in them, this one is one I should take to a dream interpreter. Now that I know that all this summer a great war was in preparation and the dogs of lust and hate were being unloosed, I can say to myself that I at least had warning that the Devil was at large, that an evil spirit had escaped into the world.
I ought, perhaps, to tell first the dream which my friend G---- told me before I left Vladikavkaz, when he warned me of a great impending world calamity. G---- said that one night, after an arduous day’s work teaching in class and coaching private pupils at home, he lay down on his couch and dozed. Hardly had he fallen asleep, when three men of Eastern aspect, dark faced, bright eyed, brown handed, with white robes from their shoulders and white turbans on their heads, appeared to him and pronounced six words in a loud, oracular voice and disappeared. A second time they appeared and did the same. A third time they appeared and pronounced them, and this time one of them took up a pen and made as if to write. The words were not Russian, or, indeed, any language which G---- knew, but after the third apparition and disappearance he wakened up with a start and at once picked up an exercise-book and wrote the words down. They were: _Imaktúr nites óides ilvéna varen cevertae_. G---- had never been a student of the occult before, but this caused him to consider. I begged G---- to write them down for me and let me see how they looked in black and white.
“Well, what do they mean?” I asked.
“I cannot yet be sure,” said G----. “They are certainly part of a language. Of that I am convinced. I have consulted many great linguists, and whilst they cannot say what language it is or where its lingual affinities are to be found, they all agree that it has the nature of real language. I have thought, as I lived in the Caucasus in the midst of so many Eastern tribes, that it might conceivably be intelligible to one or other of them. I have questioned Ingooshi, Ossetini, Khevsuri, but none recognised any likeness to any tongue they had ever heard in the mountains. I have been to Petersburg, Berlin, Paris to try and find out what the words meant, and all to no avail. Specialists were most sympathetic, but could tell me nothing. However, since then I have made a profound study of occult language, and have arrived at some understanding of the significance of the dream. All I can tell you is that a world calamity is coming, a great cataclysm or natural subversion. We may expect great earthquakes. Germany certainly is in danger.”
The dream I had in Aulie Ata was certainly much worse than this. I thought G---- rather crazy about this dream of his at the time, and I listened incredulously to his prophecies. But if I regarded them flippantly perhaps I was wrong. Certainly, if I held there was no such verity as the occult I was wrong.
They say that Fear stands on the threshold of the occult world, and as my dream consciousness impinged upon it I experienced abject terror, a terror that creeps through the marrow of the bones and lifts the roots of one’s hair at a thought.
I lay down in my dark room at the Hotel London at Aulie Ata after the fight between landlady and lodger had ceased but whilst the Sart orchestra still blew their horns over the city. The bed was a foot short for my tired body; the shutters of the room were barred; I had no lamp, but only a bit of candle of my own. After a fortnight spent under the stars and in the immense open house of earth and heaven, it was sufficiently oppressing and depressing in this shuttered chamber. But I was tired with the tiredness of one who has tramped under a sub-tropical sun from dawn to sunset and has added an evening of town excitement to the weariness of a long journey.
I had hardly lain down before I fell asleep. At once I began to dream. I had been invited to a friend’s house, and was for a moment by myself in his dining-room; there was nothing on the table but the cruet. I was terribly thirsty, and I rushed to one of the bottles and began to drink from it, but, my host coming along the corridor and into the room, I at once put the bottle back and pretended that I had been doing nothing of the kind. This awoke me. My eyes opened, and I thought to myself: “What an absurd dream! What a dreadful thing pretending is. Why cannot we be as we are? Manners is, in a way, pretence. Every polite man who comes up to you to shake hands, if we only knew it, has been doing something the moment before as impossible as drinking the contents of the cruet. Mankind are pretenders. The spirit is truth, but the incarnation is a mask. The whole aspect of humanity is a pretending to be what it is not....”
I was rather struck by the thought, but lapsed into sleep again. And then came my terrible dream. In the depths of my sleep a voice suddenly cried out the most terrifying words I think I have ever heard, and they were: “_A great dissimulator has escaped, shut in prison from everlasting._”
At that I started up from my bed with the perspiration on my brow and the most hideous fear of the Devil. I felt that some new evil spirit was at large and was seeking a home in a man. My earlier thought came back to me--all spirits are dissimulators, whether they be devils or angels, and we men and women are all angels pretending to be men and women. But now I knew that some devil from which the world had mercifully been preserved (from everlasting) had escaped into our life, and would take the form and the appearance of a man somewhere. I had intelligence of the Antichrist. And now that we are all in the depths of this war I ask myself sometimes is there a genius of evil in all this, has the Antichrist perhaps appeared? Does not the fact that St. George and the angels (the angels, at least, of Mons) are fighting on our side suggest that the evil powers incarnate are on the other side?
It was two in the morning; the Sarts had stopped blowing their horns, there was a breathless stillness. I wakened up the hotel porter and bade him open the shutters of my windows. I lit my candle, took up pen and paper, and wrote a long letter home. I took out Vera’s ikon of Martha and Mary, and put it in front of me. I looked at it and wrote--wrote, wrote. I told all the happenings of the long day past, the tramping, the sun, the far away vision of Aulie Ata, the strange town, the Sart orchestra, the Armenian garden restaurant, the Hotel London, the fight of the two women, the dream of the dissimulator. I was afraid the candle would go out before dawn. Dawn seemed a long time coming. But at last the nightingales began to sing, _p-r-r-r-r_ ... _sweet_, _sweet_, _sweet_. A muezzin was calling through the dark night. How resonant his voice! Somehow it went with the nightingale’s song.
A muezzin from the dark tower cries Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.
Again muezzins from the dark mosques of the city. Suddenly the cocks gave an extraordinary chorus, and I knew it must be near dawn, and a cart came lumbering by. Pale rents appeared through the willow trees that hid the sky. My candle grew little and yellow and flickering, but it lasted, and I wrote on and on, page after page, till it was bright morning. Then I lay down and slept an hour, and I had saved myself, perhaps, from fever. In any case, I had lived through a waking nightmare.
By day Aulie Ata was, perhaps, less mysterious, but there still remained a sense of remoteness. It was difficult to imagine European people living there all the year round and calling it “home.” It is an oasis, it is true, but it might be truer to call it a sub-tropical swamp. It is fed by a mountain river, the Talass, which flows off and loses itself in the desert. But there is plenty of water and a great deal of verdure is possible, a very large settlement.
Aulie Ata has its cathedral standing in the midst of a pleasant shadowy garden. It has its bazaar, and its trotting-ground for a horse fair and cattle market. Here were numbers of Sartish shops where bread and hot meat-pies were sold. Scores of Kirghiz on horseback or on bulls blundered about amidst cattle and mud. Young men were trying horses and showing their paces; others were making deals in sheep and goats. The sheep for sale were tied in long or short knots, threaded by the heads as Russians thread onions.
As a general rule a sheep was reckoned as being equivalent in value to a three-rouble note, and many of the Kirghiz had brought up their sheep merely as money, and when they bought six shillings’ worth of stuff at some shop they detached a sheep from their coil and passed him on to the shopman. So I saw for the first time in my life the literal significance of _pecunia_ as the Romans understood it.[C]
Aulie Ata is subject to earthquakes, and my landlady explained how one morning she was washing the floor of her establishment, bending down over her floorcloth with her legs apart, and suddenly she felt her legs going farther apart--by which lively figure she meant to explain how earthquakes are felt.
The chief sights of the city were the caravans of emigrants toiling onwards towards the farther East. Here were no farms for them, no encouragement given to settle. For there is now no particular political need for the colonisation of Sirdaria; the Russians are far more powerful than the native population, and could never be overthrown by an uprising or mutiny. The Government encourages emigration to the points where it is politically most advantageous--that is, on the very frontier lines. The most vigorous irrigation and settlement work goes on on the frontiers of China, Afghanistan and Persia. The colonists have a long road in front of them even after they have reached Aulie Ata. I myself went on with them.
The weather changed whilst I was at Aulie Ata; torrential rain came down, rain brought down by the mountains, and only deluging their own slopes and the country in the immediate vicinity. The desert twenty miles away remained, no doubt, as parched as ever. The River Talass, in flood outside the town, presented an unwonted spectacle; the wide, black, diversified, shingly river, the lowering clouds overhead, the restless wind from the mountains spitting and promising rain, the emptiness and dreariness of the world all around, except at the place where the bridge should have been--but from which it had been lately washed away--and there, an ever-increasing collection of straw or canvas tilted wagons and carts, and of oxen, camels and horses, all the caravans of the emigrants, waiting, as it were, for a ferryman to take them to another world.
I got over at last on a Kirghiz horse, and was pretty nearly soaked in the passage. On the other side was a more desolate country. It was wilder, more broken, perhaps a little greener, but there were very few farms. Even the Kirghiz seemed of a poorer and dirtier type. I bought milk at the Kirghiz tents and bread and eggs at the post stations. At one post-house I had a chicken cooked for me. The heat was not so trying on this road, for clouds had come over and rain had laid the dust. I had a sense of travelling in the opposite direction of the way of the seasons. It had been like June in Tashkent, but here it was early May. Still, the temperature in the shade must have reached 90° Fahr.
I slept three nights in the open and tramped three days before I finally passed out of the province of Sirdaria and entered the Semiretchenskaya Oblast, Seven Rivers Land, the remotest of the Tsar’s dominions, remoter than the Far East, because there is no communication either by rail or river. On my right the great chain of mountains with snowy summits still stretched on, and on my left the everlasting moorland. More birds appeared on my way, partridges, bustards, snipe, eagles, cranes. Straying off the road and up to the first rising ground of the mountains were a species of little deer, called here _kosuli_. Marmots popped in and out of sand burrows, occasionally falling a prey to day-flying owls. The jerboa, with long tail and dainty, bird-like legs, was a pretty visitor, and among insects the green praying-mantis was noticeable, the cicada a nuisance, and various spiders and beetles the bane of night-tide. I was constantly warned against the hairy-legged _falanga_ and a black spider (the karakurt), both of which were said to have a mortal bite, though sheep could eat them without harm. Along the road laborious and stupid-looking beetles rolled their globular homes of gathered dirt.
Slow travelling out here is very featureless, and I grew tired of tramping all day, the emptiness of the life, and the dullness of mere sun and road as companions. What was my disappointment the second noon to lose a lift that would have taken me thirty versts on at the cost of a rouble. I had just got up from a siesta under my plaid tent when a countryman came along with a cart full of clover--food for his horse--and I bargained with him and got a seat literally “in clover.” We proceeded thus for a mile when we came to a mud-built caravanserai, and stopped to have tea. Up to this inn came presently another cart from the other direction. It contained all his wife’s family, the people he had been setting out to see. They had had a similar impulse to come and visit him. In that way I lost my lift, and could hardly share their joy at the happy meeting.
At Merke, however, the second colonial settlement in Seven Rivers Land, I hired a _troika_ to Pishpek, three horses yoked to an _arba_ (a native cart), the driver a Kirghiz. This is the usual mode of travelling for Russians on business in Central Asia. The _troika_ stands instead of the train. But what an impression!
The Kirghiz driver, in rags and tatters, sitting on one hip on his bare wooden driving-seat, lounging to and fro, one shoulder up, one down, flicking the three galloping horses with his whip, whistling, shouting.
The horses bounding along, neck by neck, over bump, over crevice, over chasm; up hill, down dale, never slackening (there is no brake to the wooden _arba_); coming with a great splash on to a stream, the _arba_ just floating on it as the horses plunge through it; out again, up the bank; what matter stones--even milestones? What a contrast to the way I crawled along when walking!
We go along roads that are like dried-up river beds, over roads little better than mountain tracks. Ever and anon I am nearly shot out of the cup of dry clover and hay on which I am sitting. I am flung against the sides, I grasp at the stained Joseph coat of the Kirghiz, I clasp him round the shoulders.
But the Kirghiz smiles and whistles and shouts again. The horses whisper hurried secrets to one another in their rhythmical threefold devouring of space. We go not by versts or by miles, but by leagues. There are no steamboats, trains, motor-cars, aeroplanes in Seven Rivers Land, but the _troika_ combines these all in one.
As we go along the level high road the whole country behind us is blotted out from view by clouds of our dust. We never hesitate as we dash through market-places and thronged colonial villages. What matter who is in the way; the _troika_ goes on straight ahead, always seeming likely to collide as we dash towards other carts or charge into passing horsemen, the averted horses’ faces breathing into my face as we pass.
The way is always in the view of the snowy mountains and comparatively seldom in view of houses. It is the land of the tent-dwellers, and the moors are dotted with grey pyramids and columns, the temporary dwelling-places of the nomads. Now and then a whole patriarchal family of the wanderers crosses the road on its journey from the parched plains up to the greener pasture lands of the hills. They have their tents and all their goods on camels’ backs; they drive with them hundreds of head of sheep and goats and cows and mares. They ride themselves on camels, horses, bulls; their white-turbaned wives, often four to each man, ride astride of bulls, their faces uncovered, babies at their bare breasts. Brides--girls of thirteen or fourteen--ride in extraordinary state in their midst, seated on palfreys with scarlet horsecloths, themselves clad in bright cottons, their hair in many glistening black plaits, each loaded with a silver bullet to keep it from entangling with sister plaits. They also sit astride, and ride with wonderful grace, as if conscious of being the treasure of the whole caravan. They are good to look upon.
We pass endless lines of wagons drawn by toiling oxen or little, jaded ponies, and tended by burly Russian peasants and their plump, laughing, perspiring womenkind--emigrants going to settle in the youngest of Russian colonies a thousand miles or more from a railway station. We have to turn off the road and tumble over the rough moorland in order to circumvent hundreds of such emigrant wagons. We overtake and pass the equivalent of whole goods trains--long strings of lorries and pack-carts and camels, piled with consignments of goods to be delivered all along the way from Southern Siberia on the one hand and from Orenburg and Tashkent on the other to the limits of the Himalaya Mountains. We pass, or, as it happens, get entangled in a mile of camels, each having on its back a mountain of horsehair or wool, some twenty couples of dirty camels in a company, each company led by a Chinese Mohammedan on an ass, a _Dunkan_.
We pass the mud-walled, mud-domed, ace-of-spade-like tombs of the Kirghiz; we pass ruins of ancient towers, battered caravanserais. We escape from the desert into a sort of artificial oasis made by irrigation--the Russian village or Cossack _stanitza_. We change horses.
At nightfall I overtake a lady going to the town where her sweetheart lives. She is in a hurry that brooks no delay. There are only horses for one, so I offer her a place in my _arba_. She is accompanied by many boxes and bags. She wants to go on all night, no matter----
Twilight turns to darkness, the moon comes out fair and large, opposite the setting sun. The clouds are lit with gentle light and a faint colouring. The _troika_ goes on and on. I lie full length in the _arba_, my head on a pillow which my companion has lent me, and I look up at the sky. The night is gentle and touching. The Kirghiz is silhouetted above us; the moon is now shining full upon us; in a moment it is cut off by the black line of the roof of the cart, but even then the sky is the more beautiful for a hidden presence. We sit up and look into the night landscape.
The moon gives glimmering illumination to squads of poplars, waving cornfields, silver streams, the thatched roofs of cottages, mud huts. The nightingale sings the short night through, owls hoot, dogs rush out at us as if they were fired from farm-yards, but the laconic driver flicks them with his long whip when they get near the horses’ legs, and they fall each into the rear and slink back to the dark yards whence they came.
We leave behind populous villages, and issue on to the moors. Night hides the scarlet poppies, but the air contains their odours. The moon no longer stands over the black mound of the horizon, but has climbed over the zenith. The cocks are crowing, my companion is sleeping, the bells of the _troika_ are chingle-dingling, chingle-dangling all the time.