yrriiiJni ^7^3^MV.cm^^ ■tJ'ywi3AiMn.att\> ^DJVMflnv^ *j1 "^UDNVSOl^ ;umvER% f :iINIVERS/A ^lOSANCflfx^ jDNvsov^ "^jaaAiNnmv A^lllBRARY^^ ^H!BRARY- ^lOSANCElfj^ '%a3AINfl-3ftV^ ^lOSANCEl£n> t ' ^lUBRARY^y^ ^OFCAIIFO/?^ ^ •&Aavaan#' •>&Aavaan#' ^j^dnvsoi ^lUBRARYQ^ <^IUBRARYG^ ^OfCAllFW/i^ ^OF'WUFOR^ ^5MMJNIVER5/^ j^lOSANCflfir^ ^fl)NIVER5/^ ■^MAiNn-av^^ ^O^CAUF0«^ ^OFCAUFOff^ -;#^ «:"* THE REGULAR SIBERIAN STATION widespread rushy hopes of next summer ! Not only bulrushes, but every kind of high-water grass and reed, the whole gamut from grass to bamboo, wave and whisper and whistle in wide beds. At last you have under your eye the real country for the Marsh-King's Daughter. Hans Andersen, who knew marshes as no one before him or since, who has left in every teachable mind that reads him some enduring sense of their poetry, would have loved this part of Siberia. What romance could he not have written of these bowed birches, "the white ladies of the I 138 ALL THE RUSSIAS forest," with stems of silver, here positively frost-white, and fine purple twigs weeping evenly to the northward. He would have peopled these thickets of black alder with a weird water-life. And suddenly, after days of it, in a second it is swept away ; alder, birch,willow,and reed-bed alike disappear, and, as though planted by the hand of man in a straight line across this worldscape, the Siberian cedar, to be readily mistaken for an ill-nourished fir-tree with a yellowish tinge about the needles, springing from a rich madder-coloured bed of heath and heather, usurps the scene. It is after twelve o'clock by local time ; enter the Siberian cedar at some mysterious nature-cue, exeunt birches and the rest that have followed us so faithfully from the western verges of Russia. We are now to have nothing but Siberian cedar all day. For a thousand versts this Siberian plain hardly changes its character. The silver birches are always by our side, and some- times the woods take on a more solid shape. Round the settle- ments herds of black and white cows graze, and for a few miles we pass through stubble fields, and great heaps of grain, in sacks, covered with tarpaulins, are piled up at the stations awaiting transport. But these oases of industry hardly count in the long monotonous steppe. Once a picturesque group of Tatars, come back from gold-washing, attracts attention, and again we see the devastated track of a forest fire. Occasionally we take a meal at a station, for the buffets are everywhere excellent and put to shame the wretched railway counters in the heart of populous England. The stations themselves are all beautifully built of wood, neat and clean, surrounded with pretty palisades, each having its water-tower and fire-engine house, and offering to the third-class traveller free boiling water for his teapot and cold boiled water to drink. ' We pass a train of convicts going to Irkutsk, all the windows barred with iron, and a sentry with fixed bayonet at the entrance of each carriage. By showing my official letter to the colonel in command I get permission to pass through the train. The prisoners consist of convicts, in chains, and simple SIBERIA FROM THE TRAIN 139 exiles, the wives and children of the latter accompanying them. Their accommodation is warm and comfortable, and except some of the convicts, who are obviously savages, they seem in good spirits. Several times, too, we meet trains of returning colonists, who have either been to Siberia for the harvest, or are returning disappointed and dissatisfied. This latter category includes a regular percentage of all who emigrate voluntarily. The vast agricultural plain is, of course, the predominating impression left by this journey ; indeed, there is no other such Sii;i:kian ri.As.w i.s vvatciiim, •1111. ii^ai.m plain in the world. Statistics of the size of Siberia may be found in every book of reference, but it is impossible not to reproduce some of them when describing a journey through the land. It is, then, over 5,000,000 square miles in area, half as large again as the whole of Europe ; it covers 32 degrees of latitude, and no fewer than 130 degrees of longitude ; it possesses a magni- ficent series of rivers running with fan-like branches north and south, with a total navigable length of 27,920 miles ; some 140 ALL THE RUSSIAS ■of these rivers have been proved to be easily navigable with care from the Arctic Sea, and so astonishingly complete is this natural network of waterways that, with the aid of one canal, steamers of a considerable size have been built in England and taken under their own steam to Lake Baikal, nearly 3500 miles east of Mos- cow. The zone of colonisation lies to the south of 64 degrees north latitude, for above this is the zone of polar tiindra — a wilder- ness of marsh and moss, with stunted bushes for its only vegeta- BUILDIXG A HUT IX THE TAIGA tion, frozen during the greater part of the year, and incapable of supporting any life except that of the scattered tribes of Arctic natives who roam about and manage not to perish in it. But south of this there is in Western Siberia alone a cultivable area of six thousand geographical square miles. The landscape changes a third time between Moscow and Irkutsk. This is at Taiga, whence a branch line of fifty-four miles leads to Tomsk. The word Taiga means primeval forest. A couple of years ago this place was but a name and a stopping- place for the trains ; to-day it is a smart little town and growing fast. Beyond it the line plunges into the virgin woods. The SIBERIA FROM THE TRAIN 141 first passenger train left it, eastward bound, on New Year's Day, ICS99, and the bridge at Krasnoyarsk was only finished in March of the same year, permitting trains to proceed without a break to Irkutsk, the present terminus. Our train has no longer an engine with air-compressor for the Westinghouse brake, there- fore our speed, never great, dwindles to a crawl, and for nearly a thousand miles, from Friday till Monday, we dawdle along, almost always through an unbroken forest of silver birch, pine, larch and cedar, with occasional clearings and innumerable little stations. From the train only Fmall timber is in sight, but back in the forest there is an inexhaustible supply of serviceable trees, and a special department has been recently created for the eco- nomic deforestation of these Siberian provinces, the outlet being a great timber port to be formed at the mouth of the Ob. At each station we make a long halt. They are charming places, admirably built, and prettily decorated, and round each of them a circle of civilisation is spreading. At last, at noon on Monday, nine days and 3371 miles from Moscow, after passing a zone of rolling country with Highland scenery, we come in sight of a large town encircled by a great river, its churches and public buildings visible from far away. This is Irkutsk, the end, for the present, of the Great Siberian Railway, the boundary of Eastern Siberia, the junction of Europe, so to speak, for trade by land with Peking, and not much more than a hundred miles from the frontier of China. CHAPTER IX SIBERIAN CIVILISATION THE chief towns of Siberia are naturally still those that had grown up and flourished before the railway was constructed — Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk. Others will, of course, soon be created, and in several cases they will supersede the old ones. After a thousand versts of the Si- berian plain, the first im- portant station, Omsk, is a genuine surprise. At dusk you pass over the great river with a well-lit passenger steamer plying upon it — pass over it by a handsome girder bridge. Then a promising net- work of sidings begins, and, after the manner of Siberian trains, you steal very slowly into the electric-lit station of Omsk. A neat and pretty brick building greets you, the silent, impassive figures of peasants in sheepskins grouped about its doors. You pass into the usual hall which is waiting-room and restaurant combined ; well-set tables with tall palms — imitation palms of course — standing in them, and tall crystal candelabra veiled in red muslin. At one side is the tea-counter, its brass samovar purring softly ; at another a display of hot dishes to tempt the hungry, with 3.cJiefoi smiling face and much-starched linen waving his knife above the baked meats. The proffered THE TOWER OF THE FIRE-WATCH, IRKUTSK. SIBERIAN CIVILISATION AS meal was so attractive that we took it here instead of in the res- laurant-car, and nothing could have been better. The town of Omsk is only Tomsk on a smaller scale, and Tomsk has a mystery of its own. It was originally selected for the administrative and educational centre of Siberia, and its public buildings were erected on this scale. Its university is splendidly housed; it has an am- bitious theatre ; one of the three Government gold laboratories is there ; the prison was the principal distributing station of Si- beria ; it is lighted by electricity ; it is the focus of a great agri- cultural district ; it has over 50,000 inhabitants ; there was every reason to suppose that its happy development would be parallel with that of the railway itself. To-day it is going down-hill, for the simple reason that the railway is fifty-four miles away — a journey of five hours — and that even then the station is a long drive through the woods from the town. I heard many explana- tions of this extraordinary arrangement : that the land around the town was too swampy, that too costly bridges would have had to be built,.that the engineers who laid out the line left the town aside because its inhabitants would not agree to certain con- ditions advantageous to the proposers. Which is true I do not know, but it is certain that Taiga, the station for Tomsk on the main line, was only a couple of tents in the wilderness three years ago, and that to-day it is a considerable settlement, growing rapidly into a town, destined beyond question to thrive at the expense of the city so proudly planned to be the heart of Siberia. Tomsk reminds one of a rapidly grown Western Ameri- can town, except that it has several far finer permanent build- ings. The streets are its least civilised characteristic, for, except in winter, they are either ankle-deep in dust or knee-deep in mud, and winter comes so suddenly that the tov.aispeople some- times wade through mud to the theatre and find the roads frozen solid when they come out, while by next morning there are thirty degrees of frost. Omsk, to my thinking, v.dll necessarily become the chief Si- 146 ALL THE RUSSIAS berian town, because of its magnificent waterways, its surround- ing agriculture, its gold-mining, and, above all, its proximity to the colossal deposits of coal that have been discovered to the south of it, the copper-mines not far off, and the probability that some day a railway will run south-east from it to connect Siberia with Central Asia. For the present, however, Irkutsk is a more important place, and indeed, at first sight, as it nestles within the embrace of the broad Angara, it is charming, and one is astonished at the pro- portion of imposing buildings rising from the flat brow'n mass of wooden houses. A second surprise is that the suburb where the station is situated is called Glascow. But when you drive away through mud a couple of feet deep, in which the droschky rolls about so alarmingly that people invariably ride with their arms about each others' waists, you fear that first appearances were de- ceptive. The streets, in fact, are awful, and the local paper of the morning after my arrival told how two little boys returning from school fell in the middle of the street and were only just rescued from drowning by some passing carters. Your first im- pression, however, returns and remains when you have seen more of this remote Siberian capital. It is an astonishing place. Here are a few plain facts to begin with. Irkutsk has 51,464 inhabitants. It spends ten per cent, of its municipal income on primary education. It has five hospitals and thirty doctors. There is an astronomical and meteorological observatory, of which the magnetic observations possess peculiar importance. Its theatre, a handsome building of brick and stone, cost over ;^30,ooo. There is a museum, an offshoot of the Russian Geo- graphical Society, w^ith an extremely interesting ethnological collection, as well as almost complete collections of the birds and animals of the district. From its telegraph-office mes- sages can be sent to any part of the world in any language, but I must add that a telegram sent to me from London on Monday was only delivered at midday on Friday. There is a perfectly SIBERIAN CIVILISATION 147 organised telephone service, and the outlying manufactories, one of them as much as sixty miles away, are all connected with the city by telephone. A fire-extinguishing service is excellently equipped with an English steam fire-engine among other appa- ratus, and I saw some smart drill. Finally, besides an imposing cathedral, Irkutsk boasts no fewer than twenty Orthodox churches, one Roman Catholic and one Lutheran chapel, two synagogues, and two monasteries, for in Siberia a greater re- ligious tolerance exists than in Russia, That is not a bad list for a town which, until a few months ago, could only be reached THE TECHMCAL SCHOOI , IRKUTSK by an exhausting journey of several weeks, driving at full speed day and night. There is an air of well-being about the place, however, which says more than any catalogue of facts. I have seldom been more surprised than when, on the evening of my arrival, I started out to make a few purchases. I wanted some sardines and sugar and similar supplies, and I found myself in a shop which for size, arrangement, and variety of stock would compare with those of the West End of London, except, perhaps, such exceptional pur- veyors of luxuries as Morell's and Fortnum & Mason's. Next I wanted some photographic materials, and the first thing that caught my eye was a complete assortment of Zeiss lenses, of the latest pattern — the most expensive lenses in the market. Two 148 ALL THE RUSSIAS stationers' shops and a chemist's were certainly equal to the average of such places in any of the capitals of the world, and in another I saw such a stock of guns, rifles, revolvers, cutlery, and electric fittings as I have never seen in one place before. I should be at a loss where to look in London for such a selection of tele- phones, for instance, of every make and size, as were displayed in this Siberian shop. Such things would not be brought all these thousandsof miles unless there were peoplewho understoodthem and could afford to buy them, and it is this inference which causes the surprise. Similarly, the outsides of the houses, with their thick wooden walls and stoutly barred gates, do not suggest wealth and culture ; but when you have passed some of these outer barriers you find yourself in homes which, for luxury and taste, are in no way behind rich men's houses elsewhere in the world, and where you are entertained with a hospitality as lavish and as elegant as that of Mayfair. These belong to men who have made great fortunes in Siberia and who are happy to re- main there. They are generous men, too, and there are prob- ably few towns of its size in the world with so many monu- ments of private beneficence in the shape of schools, hospitals, orphanages and the like. Irkutsk, however, is not saved by its churches from an amount of crime, actual and potential, that would be considered excessive in a new mining-camp. The night before I arrived a church was ransacked of its plate ; the night of my arrival the principal jewel- ler's shop was robbed ; a few days later a flourishing manufactory of false passports — a peculiarly heinous crime in Russia — was raided by the police; the day I visited the prison a man clubbed nearly to death, who never recovered consciousness, was picked up in the street ; a short time previously the mail, carrying gold- dust, had been ambushed and three of its armed guards shot ; and no respectable citizen would dream of passing alone through its suburbs after dark. Indeed, people often fire a revolver-shot out of the window before going to bed, to remind whom it may con- cern that a strong man armed keepeth his goods. I do not know SIBERIAN CIVILISATION 149 how many police there are in this city of 50,000 people, but during the week of my stay I saw only two or three, and once, when I had to drive across the town at nine o'clock at night, I did not see a single living thing out of doors. The principal shops and the best houses are all in one street, and as the side streets get farther from this they become poorer and rougher. There is something suggestive of China in long stretches of wooden walls and heavy gates. There are, of course, hundreds of Chinese about, and rows of Chinese shops, where ^-■^-•«8es«--.,.»,,-Trr THE MUSEUM, IKKL IsK. the furniture, the clothing, the tea, and the various culinary and medicinal abominations dear to the Celestial mind are for sale. Stolid Mongols, too, hung with silver, have come through with their caravans from China, and every now and then you see a tired passenger stretched out in a tarantass amid his heteroge- neous luggage, who has probably been driving day and night for a week or two, for Irkutsk is the focus of five great post roads. The hotel is a trial to mind and body, but a new one, the Metro- pole, is just completed and will apparently offer more civilised accommodation. Living is, of course, very dear, as everything, except meat and flour and beer — an enterprising German is coin- I50 ALL THE RUSSIAS ing money by brewing excellent lager — has to be brought so far by rail. One of my most interesting visits was to the Government Gold Laboratory, where the director was kind enough to have a special operation of weighing and smelting the dust carried out for my benefit. Gold is disposed of in Siberia in a wholly different manner from elsewhere. Every grain of it has to be sold to the Government, and heavy penalties attach even to the private possession of raw gold. But as "illicit diamond-buying " exists at Kimberley, so illicit gold-buying flourishes at Irkutsk, and the Chinese merchants are the offenders. They hang a few furs outside a shop, or put a few chests of tea in the window, but this is merely a blind, for they make big profits by buying gold- dust, in quantities from a pinch to a pocketful, and smuggling it across the frontier into China, where there has long been a great market for it at Blagovyeshchensk. The mines pay a small rent to the Government, and a varying percentage upon their output. Ordinary mines pay three per cent., more productive ones ten per cent., while those situated upon the Emperor's private property pay as much as fifteen per cent. In leather bags containing about a poud each (36 lb.), the dust is sent by mail, the post undertaking the insurance of each bag for about 14,000 roubles. At the laboratory it is weighed, mixed with borax, and melted in crucibles (Morgan's, one of the few things of British make I saw in Siberia), the ingots assayed and weighed, and an ** assignat " for the value at Government rates, less the tax, a charge for laboratory fees, the cost of transmission to St. Petersburg, and a certain small margin, given to the owner. This "assignat" can be cashed immedi- ately, or can be used as a bank-note. When a large quantity has accumulated, it is sent in a special waggon, under an armed guard, to St. Petersburg, and when the Irkutsk weights and assays have been verified, the margin is paid to the owner. The strong-room contained tier upon tier of bright ingots, weighing from a few pounds to more than I could lift. This treasure, it SIBERIAN CIVILISATION 15^ seemed to me, was very insufficiently guarded, and when I remarked upon this to the Director, he told me that for a good many years a force of Cossacks kept watch every night, but since they once stole the whole contents of the strong-room a couple of civilian guards have been employed. The laboratory at Irkutsk was built in 1870, and since that time it has received a total amount of 1,173,456 lb. avoirdupois of gold, or, I suppose, considerably over ^^60,000,000. There are THE CATUKDRAL, IRKUTSK three such laboratories in Russia, the others being at Tomsk for Central Siberia, and Ekaterinburg for the Ural district. In 1896 Russia produced io| per cent, of the gold of the world. Up to the present year, from 1754, when she began to find gold, she cannot have taken much less than ^250,000,000 from her own, soil. The production of gold, however, is decreasing in Russia and in Siberia thericherminesaregivingsmallerreturns. Against this must be set the discovery of valuable gold-fields farther north ; the willingness of the Tsar to lease to private companies some of his own very valuable mines that have hithertobeenverv 152 ALL THE RUSSIAS inadequately worked ; and the fact that the science of gold ex- traction has made such progress of late that the mines supposed to be worked out by the first-comers many years ago, can now be made to yield a handsome profit again. The chief difficulty in Siberian gold-mining is labour. There is no skilled, personnel to be had, and the conditions of life at points remote from civili- sation are so disagreeable that labourers often leave as soon as they have amassed a small sum. I may add here my belief that Russia has secured in Mongolia a tract of ex- tremely rich auriferous ter- ritory, but this is jealously held by a group of Peters- burg capitalists, under of- ficial protection, and the foreign investor is not likely to secure an inch of it. But for the disturb- ances in China, I believe that these gold - fields would have been sensa- tionally heard of before now. Irkutsk, of course, is typical only of the civilisation of Siberia in the towns. The little settlements tell a different tale. Many of them are doing well enough as regards agriculture, but the extreme loneli- ness of the life, and the length of the winter, are producing POOR SIBERIAN PEASANT SIBERIAN CIVILISATION 153 a peculiar Siberian type of people— silent, morose, inexpres- sibly sad. Among the lowest classes, too, these conditions, with the presence of so large a proportion of criminals, inevit- ably breed their own series of crimes. The future of Siberia, however, obviously depends upon the success or failure of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and this is a question asked with great earnestness in Russia and of almost equal interest else- where. Will it pay ? Will this gigantic enterprise be a suc- cess — financial, commercial, strategic ? Russians themselves are by no means unanimous in reply. There are those who declare that it will not only give Russia the ultimate mastery of Asia, but that it will also pay a handsome dividend. On the other hand, I have heard it called a white elephant, a huge humbug and a finan- cial millstone. I may admit that I approached the railway with many prejudices against it. Some years ago I studied its begin- ning^ in Vladivostok ; I have since been over the whole of the line that is open, and as far as Lake Baikal on the uncompleted section ; and I had many conversations with engineers and officials closely connected with all parts of it. I have therefore some grounds for an opinion, and I have certainly come to the conclusion that the enterprise is of vast promise to Russia, and of equal significance to Europe, and to Great Britain most of all. As regards the financial prospects of this gigantic railway any opinion as yet must, of course, be of the nature of a guess. It is fairly obvious that through passenger traffic will not pay at the very low rates now charged, while if the rates are raised to a paying standard they would be prohibitive to most passengers. Neither can through goods traffic be profitable, as few classes of merchandise, except tea, and perhaps silk, could support the cost of upwards of 5000 miles of railway transport, in competition with an alternative, if much longer, sea route. It is the enlight- ened policy of the railway authorities, moreover, to charge as little for goods proportionately as for passengers. For example, bar steel is carried from the Gulf of Finland to Krasnoyarsk, in 154 ALL THE RUSSIAS Siberia, say, 3300 miles, at the charge of about £t^ per ton. This figure was given to me by an English merchant in Krasnoyarsk. Machinery between the same points costs ;^^io per ton. Such rates make for the development of the country, but not for the dividends of the railway.* When we look at local traffic, however, a very different pic- ture presents itself. Already the demand for transport far ex- ceeds the supply. Acres of sacks of wheat lie piled up, waiting for the railway to take them away. Agriculture here is still in its infancy, yet in 1898, the latest statistical year, Siberia pro- duced 1,000,000 tons of wheat, 730,000 tons of oats, 2,500,000 tons of grain of all kinds, and 325,000 tons of potatoes. Already last 3^ear 2500 American agricultural implements were sold in Siberia — more to the cultivated acre than in Russia ; McCor- mick's posters are in every village, and Deering machines have a strong foothold ; in Tomsk there is a central depot where four- teen agricultural implement makers are represented. British firms, unfortunately, are conspicuous by their absence. I travelled for a time with the able and experienced representative of an American firm of agricultural machine manufacturers, who was delighted, and with good reason, at his prospects in Siberia. If the microbic fertilisation of land becomes a success, its influ- * An attempt is announced to establish a connection between the Russian and United States Railways, via Bering Strait. A company called the Trans-Alaskan Railway Co. is stated to have been incorporated at Seattle, Washington State, with a capital of $50,000,000, its avowed object being the construction of a line through Alaska to some point near Cape Prince of Wales. Mr. Harry de Windt, the well-known traveller, who nearly lost his life on a similar previous journey, is said to be planning, with the assistance of the Russian and American Govern- ments, to start from Irkutsk, in December 1901, for Yakutsk, 1800 miles by sleigh ; thence to Nijni Kolymsk, the most remote Russian settlement, where the population is chiefly composed of political exiles, another 1600 miles by reindeer teams ; and thence to the shore of Bering Strait, which is only about 36 miles wide at its narrowest point, and which he will cross either on the ice or in an American revenue cutter, returning to civilisation by the Yukon or Mackenzie River. Such a railway enterprise appears wholly chimerical, and it is incredible that the Russian Government should seriously contemplate it while so many more promising parts of Russia are in great need of railway facilities. SIBERIAN CIVILISATION 155 ence upon Siberian agriculture, where chemical manures are out of the question, will be incalculable. There is a new world of agricultural and mineral wealth waiting beyond the Baikal. A new railway, to connect the Trans- Siberian with the Trans-Caspian, will be built before many years elapse, bringing new supplies, creat- ing new demands, and providing a new safeguard against famine. The gold output of Siberia, of which 1 have already given the striking figures, will be largely increased when the present mining laws are modified, and the mines thrown open to the improved methods and ampler capital of the West — a state of things which Russia is ready to welcome. At a place called Ebikas- tuz, near Pavlodar, to the south of Omsk, and only sixty-six miles from the great Irtysh River — to which a line of railway was finished two years ago, and three Baldwin loco- motives sent — are coal deposits which an English engineer declared to me to be the largest in the world, a seam running for miles of the almost incredible thickness of three hundred feet. Vast quantities of coke will be produced here, shipped down the Irtysh to Tiumen, and thence transported to the Urals for the ironworks — a supply the importance of which will be appreciated by those who know anything about the iron industry. Near this are very rich copper mines, and it is certain that minerals will be dis- PROSPEROUS SIBERIAN PEASANT 156 ALL THE RUSSIAS covered in other parts. The transportation of convicts to Siberia will shortly cease, and last year 223,981 emigrants of both sexes crossed the Urals, making a total of close upon 1,000,000 since 1893. I have perhaps now said enough to justify in some degree my own belief that the development of Siberia is destined to be a handsome reward for the efforts and expenditure so lavishly devoted to it. CHAPTER X THE PRISON OF IRKUTSK FROM gold, which H. E. General Goremykin, Governor- General of the Irkutsk Government — whom I must not forget to thank for all the facilities he afforded me — calls " the enemy of Siberia," it is a natural step to crime, and of course I spent some time at the famous prison of Irkutsk. It is a great, square, whitewashed brick building, surround- ing a courtyard, with a number of smaller wooden buildings adjacent, the whole enclosed, except on the front, by an enormous wooden palisade of logs, twenty feet high, sharpened at the end. I went into every part of the prison that I could see, including the hospital, the workshops, the laundry, and the kitchens, and visited every one of the large rooms and almost every cell. In all these I saw but two things to find fault with — the practice of herding together criminals of all ages, tried and untried, and the long time, in some cases amounting to two years, which many of the prisoners spend there before their cases are finally judged. This latter evil is caused partly by the great difficulty of collecting evidence from many parts of Siberia, but chiefly because the central authorities do not supply magistrates enough to cope with the numbers of those arrested. An additional difficulty is the variety of languages spoken by the criminals themselves : three times during my visit was the governor, who accom- panied me most of the time, obliged to send to another part of the prison for a prisoner to interpret a request made to him as we passed. 158 ALL THE RUSSIAS The prison is supposed to hold only 700 criminals, but it contained 1024 men on the day of my visit, 12 women, and 10 children accompanying their mothers. Of these no fewer than 621 were awaiting trial, 138 were condemned for definite periods not exceeding three years, which they will serve in this prison, and 286 were "in transit," mostly either to the great convict prison of Alexandrofsk, forty-six miles from Irkutsk, or to the island of Sakhalin. The convicts condemned to long periods or to Sakhalin had half the head shaved, as shown in the group photographed on page 160, and a number of the worst characters were in chains. The majority of the prisoners were there for theft, and robbery with violence ; a number for unnatural offences, and several, in solitary confinement, for using forged passports, or two, for instance, who had exchanged identities and passports — a serious offence in Russian eyes. Two other men I saw separately confined were unidentified prisoners, who had no passports, and refused to say who they were, or where they came from, the natural inference being that they had some- thing serious to hide. The cells were large, clean, and fairly light, and all the prisoners were dressed in loose coats and trousers of grey felt, with apparently such underclothing as they happened to possess. Those not separately confined were in long rooms, lighted by a row of small windows high in the walls, entered by one heavy door, and having down the middle a sort of enormous plank-bed, sloping from the middle down to each side. Upon this they slept in two rows at night, and sat during the day, for the space between the end of the boards and the wall was only just big enough to hold them all when standing up to receive an official visit. Four such wards did I enter, seeing perhaps six hundred prisoners of all ages, from youths to very old men, of all the nationalities which Russia contains, and charged with all the crimes in the code. Every one of these prisoners THE PRISON OF IRKUTSK 159 was awaiting trial, and 1 was told that many of them would be there as long as two years. Certain considerations, however, may modify our disapproval somewhat. In the first place, these men arc assuredly better clothed and housed and fed than they would otherwise be — indeed, at the approach of winter, a large number deliberately get them- selves arrested. In the second place, the proportion of criminals in the whole population of Siberia is so very large, and the police are so few in number, and so lax, that the chances are much stronger against an innocent man being arrested than in more civilised regions. Thirdly, it was impossible to pass about among these men, looking care- fully into their faces, and not to feel that it was better for Siberia that most of them should be where they were. When the door of one of the large rooms was thrown open and I was invited to step in among two hundred of them, I confess at first I hesitated. There were only four of us — the governor, the head-warder, the doorkeeper of the room, and myself, with nobody else even within hail, while in one case there were but two doors between them and the street, and an old man keeping watch. In an English prison those men would have been outside in a couple of minutes. Never has it been my lot, though 1 have visited prisons, civilised and uncivilised, in many parts of the world, to see human nature at such a low ebb, and the faces of these men, from wild beast to vacant idiot, haunted me for days. Guilty or innocent of any particular crime, they could hardly be other, with few exceptions, than a curse to society. From this point of view Russian criminology has a task unknown in countries where civilisation has reached a higher average development. The convicts, curiously enough — that is, men condemned to considerable terms of hard labour before being set free as exiles, forbidden to leave the district to which they are i6o ALL THE RUSSIAS assigned — were on the whole of a rather better type, although they were disfigured by having half of the head shaved. Each man had a rough parcel of his personal belongings, and they were all strangely cheerful, considering their destination. Nothing, however, strikes an English visitor, who has seen the rigid military discipline of our own prisons, A group of convicts to he " distributed" so much as the good feeling, not to say familiarity, which prevails between the officials and the prisoners. The Inspector-General of the Prison, M. Sipiagin, who accom- panied me, seemed to regard his charges rather as children than as criminals, and they behaved to him with the confi- dence, never wanting in respect, of school-boys toward a master. He never failed to remove his military cap, and say " Zdrasti !" (Good health !) when he entered a ward, and a simultaneous cry returned his greeting. As we walked up THE PRISON OF IRKUTSK i6i and down, man after man stepped up to the inspector, asked him questions about themselves or their sentences without the least trace of fear or embarrassment, and even took him literally by the button-hole and turned him aside from us when they wished to make some private remark to him. One man going to Sakhalin produced a paper showing that he had a small sum of money to his credit in a prison in Moscow, and the particulars were noted down and orders given that this was to be sent after him. Another wished the doctor to examine him again before he started for Sakhalin ; the Inspector spoke a word to his orderly, and later in the day I saw this man sitting at the hospital door awaiting his turn. Those who think that everything in the Russian prison system is savagery may say that all this was rehearsed for my benefit, but I am not a child in such matters, and I say that it was impossible to accompany M. Sipiagin on this tour of inspection and not to be struck by the entire absence of terrorism in any form. The Russian convict system has its terrible side, of which I am now more than ever aware, but there are few signs of it in a prison like that of Irkutsk. To find this nowadays one must look farther north and east. There was no political prisoner there at the time ; at least, I was assured that this was the case, and later I saw the official report for the day, in which no such prisoner figured. I saw a number of " politicals " elsewhere at various times, but they were all earning a good living as clerks and book- keepers. Of course I did not get as far as the terrible little town of Kolymsk, a thousand versts north of Irkutsk, where the worst political offenders are exiled to a living death. But from all I saw I was not surprised to learn that at the beginning of each winter an influx of minor offenders takes place into prison, where they get warm quarters, plenty of wholesome food, and no work. And as I have said, I saw 1 62 ALL THE RUSSIAS clearly that the Russian authorities have to deal with a stratum of population far below any that exists with us — a brutish, hopeless, irreclaimable mass of human animals. A few figures will show to what an extent the human refuse of European Russia has been emptied into Siberia. In 1898 — the latest statistics available — 7906 men and 314 women were exiled to Siberia. These were voluntarily followed into exile by 1683 men and 3275 women. The first-named exiles were divided into classes as follows : 1281 men and 68 women condemned to hard labour ; 128 men and 3 women sentenced to banishment; 52 men and 158 women simply deported ; and 3848 men and 3 women, peasants whom their village communes had refused to receive back after condemnation and punishment for various offences. The convict headquarters is the island of Sakhalin, in the China Sea, which very few foreigners have ever visited. It is crowded now and can take no more, and its condition is said by Russians themselves to be very bad. Indeed its prisons, which will not hold half the convicts, are admitted in the official report itself to be " dans un etat de vetuste trcs avancee." It is evident to anybody who studies the state of Siberia that this wonderful country can never enjoy its due develop- ment until the whole system of convict transportation is done away with. Not a week passes without a murder in every Siberian town. Two emigrants had been killed in the Siberian train shortly before my visit. The head of one force of free labourers upon railway works was in Siberia for an outrage upon a child ; the boss of another was a murderer. The porter at my hotel in Irkutsk was a murderer from the Caucasus. Theoretically, when bad characters are deported they are forbidden to leave the district to which they are assigned ; practically, they leave as soon as it suits them, and their first object is to kill some peasant for his THE PRISON OF IRKUTSK 163 clothes and passport. Indeed, if they did not move away they would starve, for in many cases the autiiorities simply turn them out and leave them to their fate.* The political exiles have made Siberia what it is, for they have been among the most educated and energetic classes in Russia ; but the criminal exiles are a fatal bar to further progress. Siberia will therefore eagerly welcome the good news that the commis- sion appointed by the Tsar to consider the whole question of criminal transportation has just reported against the Siberian system, and recommended the construction of great convict prisons in Russia. The cost of these to the State will be enormously greater than that of criminal Siberia, and assuredly the lot of the convict will henceforth be harder, but the decision was inevitable if one of the richest parts of the Tsar's dominions is to attain its proper prosperity. * " De fait, la situation du forcat etait, sous maints rapports, mieux assuree que celle des condamnes a la deportation simple ou a la relegation. Tandis que le premier, en etant astreint au travail, avait souvent son propre menage, certains deportes, abandonnes a la merci du sort, dans un pays presque inhabite, avaient de la peine a trouver de I'occupation pour assurer leur existence. On conc^oit par consequent I'importance de la recente loi qui a supprime la deportation, et avec elle ce genre special de proletariat vagabond. La prison contemporaine n'est cer- tainement pas I'ideal du regime penitentiaire ; mais son effet sera toujours in- finiment moins nuisible que celui du vagabondage pour ainsidire force qui vient de supprimer la loi susmentionnee." — Report of the Central Prison Administration, reproduced in the Gazette de St. Pctershouro, March i8, igoi. THE GREAT WATER-WAY CHAPTER XI "LITTLE MOTHER VOLGA" RUSSIA has two great Asiatic railways, each destined to play a vast part in her commercial and political future. One of them runs, speaking roughly, from St. Petersburg to China, the other from the Black Sea (by the Caucasus and the Caspian) to India. The commercial objects of the two are different, but a political aim they have in common : together with other lines shortly to be built they form part of the net which Russia is throwing over Asia. Having seen the Great Siberian Railway, as described in previous chapters, my next object was the Trans-Caspian Railway, and the heart of Asia to which it goes. But Russia is a country of magnificent dis- tances, and practically the whole of it separated me, in the north of Europe, from Asia Minor, in the south, with a great mountain chain, crossed by no railway, intervening. To make the whole journey by rail would have been long, dreary and roundabout, whereas if I could get down the Volga, it would be not only a comfortable but a very interesting one. But snow had begun to fall in Siberia, and the freezing of the Volga was close at hand. Fortune, however, was kind, for on the platform at Samara I learned that the last boat of the season was to leave the same night. The traveller from Western Europe reaches the Caucasus most pleasantly by steamer from Constantinople to Batum, or if he is already in Russia, by steamer from Odessa. It is only when you are coming from Siberia that your best route is down the Volga to Tsaritsin, and thence by rail to Vladikavkaz. "LITTLE MOTHER VOLGA" 165 Samara had both plague and famine for its neighbours of late, but there were no signs of either. It is a typical Russian provincial town, defying description. Its houses range from wooden hovels to well-built, handsome structures, public offices and business premises. Its principal sight is, of course, a statue of a Tsar. Its best streets are paved and the others are a welter of mud. Its chief industry and the source of its prosperity — though this has suffered from the succession of bad harvests in the Volga provinces, and has still, 1 fear, to suffer more — could be learned from a glance round the store of Messrs. Koenitzer & Co., where every kind of agricultural tool and machine was displayed. Incidentally I have to thank this most courteous German firm for very timely assistance, and a word about this may be of use to future travellers in provincial Russia. My letters had been addressed to the Samara branch of the Volga-Kama Bank, and I had a personal letter of intro- duction to them from a Moscow banker, besides my official letter of recommendation from the Minister of Finance him- self. Under these circumstances, when I approached the manager of the bank with London and Westminster circular notes, I imagined that cash would be forthcoming. It was a vain hope. The manager of the principal bank of this im- portant town of 100,000 people, situated at the focus of traffic where the greatest railway in Russia crosses the greatest river, looked at my tinancial documents with amiable curiosity, as if they had been a Papal Bull or a portrait of the Emperor of China. As for advancing money upon such things, the very idea raised obvious and painful suspicions in his mind. After long discussion I inquired if he could suggest any means whereby the solvency of the London and Westminster Bank could be made manifest in Samara. He thought that if he telegraphed to Moscow, and Moscow telegraphed to St. Peters- burg, and St. Petersburg telegraphed to London, the deed 1 66 ALL THE RUSSIAS might ultimately be done. How long would this take ? Perhaps a week. I left, with the intention of seeking the nearest pawnshop, when the firm of Koenitzer & Co. arose like a star in my financial night, and, having the usual know- ledge of the methods of credit and exchange common to civilised countries, was kind enough to give me in two minutes all the money I wanted. Let this be the record of my thanks, and a warning to other travellers in provincial Russian towns THE VOLGA where the constellation of Koenitzer may not be in the ascendant, to carry their cash in a belt, as one does in Korea, for instance. At the foot of a steep hill, at the end of a broad street, the great grey Volga flows past Samara. A paddle-steamer, looking like a row of two-storey houses, lay at a wharf piled high with goods — sacks of corn and flour, thousands of wooden cases, cart-wheels, the kind of dug-out canoes in which linen is washed in Russia, in fact, a miscellaneous mountain of merchandise, all asking urgently to be taken south before the frost blocked the long waterway. And a shout- "LITTLE MOTHER VOLGA" 167 ing, pushing, perspiring mass of peasant humanity, with its belongings, personal and professional, in innumerable great bundles. We were off before the hour struck, and an excel- lent meal and a large and verminous cabin awaited me upon the bosom of what geographers know as the biggest river in A TIMBER-BARGE ON THE VOLGA Europe, and what Russians affectionately call " little Mother Volga." This gigantic waterway, 2300 miles long, over eleven miles wide in the spring at Nijni Novgorod, draining a country three times the size of France, with a delta of seventy-two miles, is a disappointment as regards scenery. The Rhine, the Hudson, the Yang-tsze, and the Thames all surpass it in their different aspects. Its left bank is an unbroken fertile plain, edged with willows and dwarf oaks, and when the sandbanks, bordered with a green strip, come down to the river, one could think one's self on the Nile. The right bank is an uninterrupted cliff, worn steep by the river in geologic time. Every now and then, when its angle is acuter. 1 68 ALL THE RUSSIAS a little village clings to it, the mud-coloured houses rising one above another on the mud-coloured slope. The important town of Saratof extends for a mile or more, and very quaint is the view of it from the steamer. Its centre is a mass of red-brick buildings, and on each flank is a long suburb of wooden houses, tailing out at last to a fringe of poverty. High white churches with green roofs are dotted over the city, and all the wide main streets fall precipitously to the water's edge at a right angle, looking at a distance more like streams than roads. The river is covered with busy life. Tugs are slowly haul- ing whole fleets of barges upstream, some loaded high above the water, some flat-decked and black — these are filled with petroleum from Baku. Most picturesque are the immense barges of timber drifting down from the north ; these are as big and as high as a house, and on the top of them are the solidly built cabins in which their crews live during the long quiet voyage. Every few hours we meet another steamer like ourselves, its one scarlet boat slung at a slant, nose upwards, at the stern. Near Saratof we made fast to a huge oil barge, and 1 think this was the most interesting incident of the Volga. No fuel but oil is used upon the river or near it, and the consumption is increasing so fast that, although the supply is increasing also, the price is steadily rising. It is not, of course, petroleum or kerosene as we know it, but the heavy residue left after these light oils are refined. The residue, for its fuel value, is worth more than the illuminating oils, and indeed I was told that the whole industry exists practically to produce this residue. As soon as we were made fast, a long wooden sluice was run aboard, one end of which was under the canvas pipe leading from a huge tank on the deck of the barge, and the other end over the opening of our own oil cisterns amidships. The word was given, and instantly a thick, darl^ green, almost "LITTLE MOTHER VOLGA" 169 inodorous stream rushed down the sluice. In less than an hour we had taken on board some forty tons, enough for four days and nights of consecutive steaming. When we cast off again I went down to the stokehole to see what became of the oil. There were four large cylindrical boilers, each with apparently an ordinary firebox but without any grate-bars. In each furnace door was an opening a few inches wide, and two pipes, about an inch and a half in diameter, descended from the roof and coalescing in a joint with two taps, like that which unites the oxygen and hydrogen cylinders of a magic lantern, projected a little way into the firebox. The principle is precisely that of the familiar ozoniser or scent-spray, the oil coming into contact with a jet of steam and being driven into the furnace in the shape of a blast of petroleum vapour, which burns fiercely with a deafening roar. The heat is intense, the inside of the furnace being red-hot all round, but it is astonishing to see a perfectly empty firebox, with all the boiler- tubes in full sight, and not a cinder nor a trace of smoke. The stokehole is as clean as any other part of the vessel, and the two stokers stand quietly, each before a pair of boilers, holding a little wooden mallet in his hand. This is to tap the steam and oil cocks, as they are too hot to touch. A few taps, and one of the boiler fires is extinguished. A few more taps and a torch thrust for a second through the opening and it is alight again. Half a dozen taps and one furnace is burning with a blaze and a heat and a roar positively alarming. The contrast between this simplicity and cleanliness and the bang- ing, the dirt, the sweat and the cinder-shifting of an ordinary stokehole is extraordinary. When I went on deck there was not even a suggestion of smoke from the one broad low funnel, and the captain told me that he could get up steam from cold water in a little over half an hour. The combination of perfect river transport, connected by canals with §t, Petersburg and Moscow, and the abundance of I70 ALL THE RUSSIAS such a convenient and cheap fuel, is obviously destined to pro- mote manufactures of all kinds in the Volga towns. At Saratof it was easy to see that a number of the factories were new, while at Tsaritsin a French company is setting up ironworks on a great scale. It is safe to prophesy that many other similar enterprises will take shape hereabouts in years to come.* At Tsaritsin I left the steamer after three days on board, and next day took train for Vladikavkaz, another three days travel. It is a long and monotonous railway journey across a plain with no elevation on it bigger than your hat, green in spring and coming gradually under cultivation — though you never cease to wonder how the little scattered villages can hold inhabitants enough to till it — and brown as a nut after the summer heats. After a time you cease even to look out of the carriage- window, and doze or read through the long hours, while the train itself seems to go to sleep, so slowly does it move. Distances look insignificant upon the small scale map of Russia, but, in fact, they are very great, and nearly a week had elapsed since I left the railway in the north, on my return from Siberia, before I came in sight of the great range. But at last I looked up and saw suddenly a startling prospect — nothing less than an army of dazzling snow-white mountains, marching, as it were, in close order over the mud-coloured plain. A few hours later we were in Vladi- kavkaz, whose name means the Mastery of the Caucasus, "" This year the navigation of the Volga has been attended with very great diffi- cuhy, arising partly from the failure of the light-buoys, resulting in many barges running aground and blocking the channel, and more from an extraordinary low- ness of water. It is said that no less than 15,0x30,000 pouds of petroleum and petroleum residue are stranded in barges between Astrakhan and Saratof, while 40,000,000 pouds are lying at Astrakhan, and will probably have to be stored there during the winter. The lack of this enormous quantity of material for light and fuel will evidently cause the most serious embarrassment. The dredging of a deep navigable channel in the Volga is a matter which demands the immediate efforts of the Government on a much larger scale than that at present pursued. Probably the authorities would welcome foreign cooperation in this great undertaking. "LITTLE MOTHER VOLGA" 171 just as Vladivostok means the Mastery of the East, though, like Gordon's "ever-victorious army," such appellations con- vey an aspiration rather than a description. Here the plain and the monotony and the West come to an end, and the mountains and the wonderland and the East begin. Like all such Russian towns, it has a cosmopolitan centre of a more or less pretentious kind — the hotel, and an insti- tution or two, any of which buildings might be found enclosing the smug bourgeoisie of the Erench provinces, or per.suading F^crdinand of Bulgaria that he was still in his Austrian home. After this kernel, the streets gain in dirt, in colour, in that frank indecency of procedure which marks Oriental life, and the first houses you pass as you enter the town, and the last as you leave it, are square, crumbling wooden caves with all the messy food-products or the garish cottons hanging in them that characterise the customs of Eastern peoples. It is a cold and bright October day, and the great blue mountains that appear at every southern street-end of Vladikavkaz are powdered with snow. I have not seen mountains trust themselves so near a plain before. They seem a company of noble travellers, these huge peaks, always at the same point of arrival, walking into the town and toward the plain. The snow upon them is not more than the generous sugaring upon a birthday-cake, and their deep fissures keep an indigo gloom. They disdain foot hills and approaches and slopes and shoulders, and only a green grass ridge seeded thickly with sheep, and a wooded hill or two, russet and orange at this autumn moment, lie between them and the steppe. My road leads over them, 8000 feet high, by the most famous mountain-highway of the world, THE CAUCASUS CHAPTER XH THE FROSTY CAUCASUS FROM the Oxus to the Arctic Circle, and from Kars to Kamchatka, the Tsar rules many strange peoples and countries, but the Caucasus is strangest of all. Indeed, any one who averred that the Caucasus is the most interesting land of the world would be able to back his opinion with good reasons. The range is a wall across the narrow isthmus which joins Europe and Asia, and the Gorge of Dariel is the door in this wall through which have come almost all the migrating peoples between East and West since men began to move at all. From many of these migrations stragglers remained, some in one valley, some in another, and their new homes lent themselves so well to defence against all after-comers that the original settlers were able to increase and multiply and keep their race intact. Hence the Caucasus contains to-day the direct and not greatly changed descendants of peoples otherwise lost in the mists of remote antiquity. It is, in the words of Mr. Douglas Freshfield, the first explorer and climber of the mountains, " an ethnolo- gical museum where the invaders of Europe, as they travelled westward to be manufactured into nations, left behind samples of themselves in their raw condition." TheGermans, destroyers of sacred and profane legend, do not accept this theory, and Professor Virchow declares that it is disproved by the fact that the Caucasus could not have been a highway when the ice- fields came down lower than they do now, and that the languages of the Caucasus are not related to languages elsewhere, as would have been the case if the speakers of them were remnants of THE FROSTY CAUCASUS 173 greater nations that had passed on. But the theory of human samples is so attractive, and the races of the Caucasus are so original and peculiar, that for my part I share on this occasion the willingness of the American humorist to "know some things that are not so." At least the sceptical Germans may leave us the classic belief that Kasbek was the scene of the martyrdom of Prometheus, and the Christian legend that Abraham's tent and Christ's cradle are still to be found hidden on its slopes. The Cau- casus, in fact, was des- tined by nature to be the home of myth, for in ancient times it was the barrier beyond which no man could go, and therefore the gate of the land which man populated with the offspring of his dreams — the land " of Gog and Magog, of gold-guardingGriffins, one-eyed Arimaspians, and Amazons — of all the fabulous creatures which pass slowly out of the atlases of the learned into the picture-books of the nursery." History is so romantic,however, in the Caucasus, that myth can be dispensed with. It tells us how Alexander the Great conquered Georgia; how the legions of Pompey, and, long after- ward, those of Justinian, fought at the mouth of the Dariel Pass, but that neither soldier nor merchant ever passed up from the south, while the Scythian barbarians to the north were equally CAU( ASIAN rvri. 174 ALL THE RUSSIAS unable to push their way down. The history of the people who held the Pass begins in the third century B.C., with King Phar- navaz, and goes on, in ah unbroken and often bloody story, down 1300 years till the swords of the Crusaders had so weakened the infidel hordes that King David II. (1089), whose descent from the Psalmist is commemorated by the harp and the sling in the arms of Georgia, drove out the Turks and laid the foundations of order and civilisation upon which, a hun- dred years later, Queen Tamara of immortal memory built up the Augustan age of her country. If half that is told of this lady be true, she was one of the most remarkable women that ever filled a throne or broke a heart. So beautiful that Shahs and Sultans competed for her hand ; so gifted with poesy that she celebrated her glorious victories in ever-memorable verse ; so humble that she earned her own living every day ; so pious that she set aside for the Virgin a portion of all her spoils of war ; so brave that she defied a Persian threat, backed by 800,000 warriors, she spread the fame and the fear of Georgia through all the accessible world. But the flowers had not bloomed often on her grave ere that invincible scourge of Asia, Genghiz Khan, came to Georgia, and her son went down before his victory-glutted Mongols, while her daughter's beauty, like her own before, brought rejected suitors seeking revenge at the head of their armies. Georgia became the cockpit where the rival Mohammedan sects of Persia and Turkey fought out their everlasting quarrel ; it was divided by its own rulers, and for many a generation its story is of pillage and poison and murder and the putting out of eyes. Then came Irakli the Great, the contemporary of Frederick the Great, who said of him, '' Mot en Europe, et en Asie t invincible Hercule, roi de Georgie."* Finally, when Georgia was helpless at the feet of Persia, came Russia, nominally mistress of Georgia in 1801. She had to defeat both Persia and Turkey before her conquest * War drop. THE KROSTY CAUCASUS 175 was consolidated, and to suppress many a rising of hei new sub- jects. Tlie latest of these was the revolution led by the prophet- patriot Shamyl, who raised the entire Caucasus against her and held her whole might at bay for sixteen years, destroying , y-rn - -, -rrrTTvuKX-eBTi CAUCASIAN TYl'ES— A TEKKIN FAMILY several Russian armies, until he was hopelessly surrounded in the highland fastness of Gunib in 1859 and surrendered. In the public gallery at Tiflis there is a huge painting repre- senting Shamyl with head thrown back and scarlet beard, brought before the Russian commander, seated under a tree amid his staff. As I looked at it a Georgian peasant, who, of course, could not read the inscription below, timidly 176 ALL THE RUSSIAS approached me and asked, " If you please, is that Shamyl ? " "It is," I repUed, and his deep, long-drawn " Ah " showed how poignant the memory of this lost leader is yet. And when I left the gallery half an hour later he was still gazing upon the man with whose fall all the hopes of his people, with their history of 2000 years, fell finally too. /Z^But the interest of the Caucasus is by no means confined to its romantic history, nor even to its ethnological variety also — its once gallant Georgians, who so long championed the Cross against the Crescent, its wild Lesghian highlanders of Daghes- tan, its savage Suanetians, but lately tamed, its Ossets, the arm- makers, " gentlemen of the mountains," its Abkhasians, who migrated to Turkey en masse rather than remain under Russian rule, its vain and handsome Circassians, its lazy Mingrelians of the fever-haunted coast, and all the other races whose namessug- gest a philologist's nightmare — Imerian,Rachan,Gurian, Lech- gum, Laz, Pshav, Khevsur, Ubych, Shapsuch, Dshiget, Ingush, Galgai, Kist, Tush, Karabulak, Kazi-Kumyksh ! Its mountain scenery is unparalleled for grandeur except by the Himalayas, and offers many a virgin peak to the adventurous Alpinist. The sportsman may find ibex and stag and boar and wild bull, and game-birds to satiety, for, in contrast with other places, game is becoming more abundant because of the high price of licences — so abundant, indeed, that, according to the T'lfiis Li'sfok, bears and wolves rob the shepherd before his eyes, and wild boarscome to the fields in droves. It is a botanist's paradise : between the arid plain and the snows is a belt where men on horseback can play at hide-and-seek amid the flowers, " survivals of the giant flora of past ages." It contains the other great oil-fields of the world, and its mineral wealth, already great, only awaits de- velopment to astonish an age little apt to enthusiasm over the treasures it drags from their hiding-places in the earth. Finally, to the student of politics its very atmosphere reeks with interest, since someday the vast armies of Russia will pour through it THE FROSTY CAUCASUS 177 again to another death-grip with the Turk — the great fortress of Kars is fortified only on the south side — and who knows what scenes it may witness if Britain and Russia draw the sword, and the masses of Moscovy march singing across it, to the Cas- pian, to find their graves on the banks of the Indus? ' Yet this httle land, in spite of its surpassing in- terest from every point of view, remains compara- tively unknown. It can be reached almost in luxury, and on its main routes the most delicate dame need suffer no undue discomfort. In the whole of Russia there is not an hotel so clean and pleasant as the Hotel de Londres at Tiflis. I cannot think why the enterprising and well-to-do tourist, who has exhausted Europe, does not turn his steps thither. Per- haps these pages may in- duce him to do so. And as Mr. Freshfield, who justly claims that he and his companions " took the first step toward converting the prison of Prometheus into a new playground for his descendants," says that he cannot enforce his recommendation better than by echoing the exhortation of Mr. Clinton Dent, so, assuredly, neither can I. "If you worship the mountains for their own sake ; if you like to CAUCASIAN TYI'ES — THE REAL CIRCASSIAN 178 ALL THE RUSSIAS stand face to face with nature, where she mingles the fan- tastic and the subHme with the sylvan and the idyllic — snows, crags and mists, flowers and forests — in perfect harmony ; where she enhances the effect of her pictures by the most start- ling contrasts, and enlivens their foregrounds with some of the most varied and picturesque specimens of the human race — go to the Caucasus. If you wish to change, not only your earth and sky but your century, to find yourself one week among the pastoral folk who once peopled Northern Asia, the next among barbarians who have been left stranded while the rest of the world has flow^ed on ; if it attracts you to share the bivouac of Tauli shepherds, to sit at supper with a feudal chieftain while his retainers chant the old ballads of their race by the light of birch- bark torches — go to the Caucasus." I would only add, go to the Caucasus also if you would visit a city where seventy lan- guages are spoken, and where you can step aside from the opera- house and the electric tramway and in five minutes be drink- ing wine from an ox-skin and talking politics and revolution and war with mysterious men of the real old hopeful, all-know- ing, all-plotting East, the while you bargain for a turquoise from Tehran, or a Turkoman carpet, or a pinch of that perfume of strange potency which is one of the very few things that the East does not willingly give for Western gold. But the traveller in the Caucasus would be unwise to let his attention be monopolised by its romance and picturesqueness, to the exclusion of its practical and commercial interests. These, however, are hardly inferior to its more dazzling side, and they are growing, and destined to grow, in amazing fashion. Nature has endowed the country with a climate in which anything will flourish, and the soil holds mineral wealth in vast variety and infinite quantity. At present Russian official methods seriously handicap production, but M. de Witte's influence is gradually THE FROSTY CAUCASUS 179 removing obstructions and hastening procedure. If he hves, and no war comes to strain Russian resources, the next ten years will see all the world astonished at the commercial development of the Caucasus. The progress of the oil industry of Baku every- body knows, and I give the astonishing figures in a subsequent chapter. The export of manganese ore, an essential of the steel industry, the Caucasus furnishing exactly half of the world's ^P^l'j:^^^J^^ ,'*W-. supply, was 426,179 tons in 1900, from the two ports of Poti and Batum. As regards other productions, the British Consul at Batum, Mr. Patrick Stevens, who speaks from intimate know- ledge, says that if the uncertainty that hangs over Russian official methods were removed " there can be no shadow of doubt that the boundless resources of this country, so richly endowed by nature, might be developed very advantageously both for the capitalist and the population," for " its'mineral wealth is practically unlimited, copper, zinc, iron, tin, and i8o ALL THE RUSSIAS many other metals being found throughout the region, in most cases in exceedingly extensive deposits." Round the shores of the Black Sea are several Imperial Estates, known as " appanages," where excellent wine is produced in large quantities, and this is an industry which might be greatly extended by experienced and skilful wine-growers with capital. The wine of Kakhetia is already drunk all over Russia. Around Batum are flourishing tea-plantations, and the two crops already gathered are said to have been very satisfactory. Hitherto Chinese tea has alone been grown, but on an estate of the Imperial family Indian tea has been successfully planted, and further plantations of this are now to be made near Sukhum and in Mingrelia. A British company has just been formed to develop new oil-fields. And one more eloquent fact in conclusion : the railway across the Caucasus, from Batum on the Black Sea to Baku on the Caspian, six hundred and twenty-one miles in thirty hours, showed a net profit of revenue over expenditure last year of nearly ;^i,ooo,ooo — $5,000,000 ; and yet the rolling-stock is so inadequate to the traffic offered that a large amount of freight is now going by rail round the mountain range, via Petrofsk and Vladikavkaz, to the port of Novorossisk, instead of to Batum. At present agriculture alone is languishing in the Caucasus, but this industry has its ups and downs every- where, and when it is less prosperous there is the more labour available for commercial enterprise. CHAPTER XIII THE GEORGIAN ROAD THE traffic over the great Georgian Military Road, which connects Europe and Asia across the Caucasus, is in the hands of contractors who work under strict official rules and tariff.* You visit the office at Vladikavkaz, inspect a series of photographs of all the available types of vehicle, make your choice, pay the charge, and receive a ticket which you show en route. I selected a carriage in shape something between a small victoria and a small barouche. It had a long and heavy pole for its size and was built for two horses, but for the Pass we have an extra horse hung on at each side by rope traces. All four are grey, with the pretty Russian harness of thin straps dotted with brass buttons. It does not look strong enough to hold a refractory horse for a minute, and even the four single reins the driver holds in his hands, though thick and double, are so twisted and hardened by weather that they might be expected to snap, like all unnourished leather, in a moment of emergency. Snugly packed in, well folded in furs and rugs, and our lighter belongings tucked about us and tied on wherever there is space for them, we rock away through the rugged streets of Vladikavkaz, and soon we have passed its most eastern limit and are in the country. All mountain ranges have the same begin- nings in the plains — a gentle ascent, rolling foot-hills, a zig- * The charge is four kopecks (a penny— 2 cents) per horse per verst, and the distance is 201 versts (132 miles). The total cost for a two-seated private carriage works out at about ;^6— say S30— for the trip. Prince Hilkoff, Minister of Railways, has just made the journey in a motor-car, and it is proposed to use these for carrying the mails across the Pass. 1 82 ALL THE RUSSIAS zag road, white peaks on the horizon drawing ever nearer, a dashing, splashing river-keeping company, a rocky descent beside the narrow road, and then of a sudden a chill in the air which may be intoxicating to the mountaineer, but causes the plainsman to draw his wraps tighter about him. Our horses travel splendidly, and we do not yet seem to be mounting sensibly ; now and then a cream-coloured sheep- dog, in shape a small St. Bernard, with black muzzle and cropped black ears, flings himself at the outer horses with a deep and savage bark, but these, as we are to learn presently, have brought their troops and troops of sheep out of the high mountains for the winter, and some of them are still too tired to get up out of the roadway. For Fortune gave us a wonderful experience in thus cross- ing the Caucasus. By chance we had hit upon the very day chosen by the shepherds to bring down their flocks from the summer mountain pastures to their winter quarters in the plains — it may have been a Saint's Day, sacred by tradition to this change, or perhaps the first snows of winter gave the signal. From Vladikavkaz to the top of the pass, however, we met these flocks in such numbers as I had never dreamed of. Shall I be believed when I say that during that day we met a hundred thousand sheep and goats ? I fancy it was much more, and during our first day we thought of little else. The whole long simple business of sheep-rearing, more archaic to-day in its pursuit than the breeding and keeping of any other animal, is deeply interesting from many a point of view. I am delighted to add another sheep silhouette, so to speak, to memories I have gathered of " the meek-nosed, the passionless faces " of sheep in other parts of the world. The Caucasian sheep — like every other inhabitant, brute or human, of these mountains — abounds in character. Unlike other Eastern sheep, it is mainly a white beast, with fawn-coloured THE GEORGIAN ROAD 183 ears and fawn-coloured feet, and a light dash of freckles upon its white nose ; but beyond this pretty colouring only the buttocks are remarkable, and these because they carry what look like superfluous cushions of wool, similar in shape, if I am permitted the illustration, to the "bustles" of twenty years ago, but which prove to be lumps of fat between which VLAI)1KA\ KA/, AT THE FOOT OF THE CAUCASUS depend their short and modest tails. The rams, of which there are numbers, have horns that curve in double curls, and though they are relatively small like the sheep they are beau- tiful and walk with pride among the flock, stamping their feet and barking from time to time. Deplorably mingled with the sheep are goats — goats of all sorts and styles, black, brown, white, and mottled ; goats with great horns sweeping upward and over their backs, or wide- spread to each side, or even malignly twisted one over another. Nothing will ever mak& S ^oat look a good animal. Even a kid, 1 84 ALL THE RUSSIAS in his moment of prettiest play, is impish as a lamb cannot be. Nobody knows why this is. From the first a goat has been used as an emblem of sin — though nobody who knows goats can understand why they should be tolerated upon the left hand, where, after all, you can smell them just as much as if they were upon the right. And a goat is not morally sensitive ; it will not realise any indignity in being allowed only upon the left hand, while a sheep is too stupid to appreciate any compliment in being placed upon the right. However, this is no moment for theological discussion. I was about to say that in the classics, in the Scriptures and by the old masters, a goat has always symbolised evil, depravity, and general vileness. The moment you see goats, you understand this. Their cross-set agate eyes of salacious regard ; their flat, ironical noses always a-snuffle, their thin, wicked mouths at the end of long lascivious faces — the thing is stamped upon them : goats are irremediably and immemorially bad, and it is only the deep invulnerable stupidity of sheep which has pre- vented them from knowing it and being corrupted by it, and has preserved to the world immaculate, snow-pure, the per- sistent, inalienable innocence of lambs. It was beautiful to watch these flocks, quitting the fast- nesses that have harboured them all summer, and now, ere the sparse vegetation of the high pastures is bedded with its first coverlet of snow, hurrying down to the open plain and the shelter of the reaped maize-fields. Jammed tight together, pouring along like a flood, running like a frothy river for a quarter of an hour at a time between the horses' legs and the wheels of the carriage, the whole road was blocked with them. Their backs were a woolly sea, the patter of their innumerable feet was like the tide upon a stony beach. One grew giddy as they surged by. What a reckoning there will be, when they reach the pastures by the river below, to see how many more the herds number when they come back in the autumn than THE GEORGIAN ROAD 185 when they went up in the spring ! The bronzed shepherds in huge brown felt cloak, black fur hat the size of any tea-cosy on their swart heads, bashlik draped at hazard in lines of inex- tinguishable grace upon their powerful shoulders, and ten-foot staff in hand, walk at their head, amidst them, and at the end behind the least and the weakest of the lambs. When they see our carriage, the sheep halt — halt as sheep always do, neatly, feet together very even, almost in the " first position " of the- dancing-class. Then the shepherd cries, in harsh and sharp falsetto — is it the cry of the hawk to call their woolly wits together, to assemble such odds of cunning as may have been given them for the eluding of their enemy the falcon or the eagle ? — and the flock hurries forward at this cry, their little feet poaching the dirtied snow and making that delicate sound which belongs solely to the passing of many sheep and has something timid and feminine and diffident about it. Some- times one startled, foolish face pokes between the legs of our horses, and at once a blind, unreasoning dozen of foot- followers dare the passage, so that the horse starts and screams in fright and is shouted at by the driver. When the stream is flowing evenly past the two carriages the shepherds whistle encouragingly and the cream-coloured dogs, with their sinister faces turned our way, pass with mis- trustful feet. They are too wearied to make any adverse demonstration ; for days they have been harrying the flock upon the mountains, collecting stragglers, constraining obsti- nate climbers, circumventing the astutely divagating goat, now dog-tired and sullen they are wending with the rest to the plain, their puppies — soft, furry love-pledges of a wild summer — looking over the edges of the saddle-pockets of the flock- donkey or the shepherd's horse. How innocent and frank and pretty are the puppy-faces ; how charmingly they extri- cate first one then another soft, supple paw, and hang it out till the shepherd sees them and hurriedly crams it in again and i86 ALL THE RUSSIAS binds the edges of the pocket tighter round the puppy neck. I was so enchanted by these creatures, even by the open enmity of their large savage parents, that I priced a ravishingly beautiful puppoose (that would be a nice word) and learned that its price was above roubles, and not even for five would its master part with it. Perhaps had I shown him a gold-piece of THE GEORGIAN KOAl.) — A WGGLLV WAVE five I should at this moment be cluttered, as the Yorkshire people say, with a cream-coloured Caucasian puppy of Circas- sian beauty and a latent savagery to terrify a whole English county. I dwell overlong upon these by-sights of the road, l)ut in- deed most of our first day went in passing that sea of sheep and goats, and the dogs and the humble flock-donkey, bridleless and bitless and burdened with all the huge hairy felt mantles of the shepherds, pattering meekly among the crowd, were always THE GEORGIAN ROAD 187 with us. After a spell of a dozen versts or so, we drew up at a post-station. These, like the excellent military road, are maintained by the Government, and entertainment can be had at them of a modest character. In the barrack-like building, very grey and cold, we passed instinctively toward a door on which was the word " Buffet," written phonetically in Russian letters to rhyme with " muffet." A little bar, with " snacks " of sausage, herring, and Caucasian cheese in front, and bottles of vodka at the back, rewarded us. The shadow of the mountains fell upon this posting-house, and in the sharp cold a camel and a scatter of bristly pigs made an odd group. Soon our fresh horses were harnessed, and this time, as we followed the course of a little river in a large and gravelly bed, we felt ourselves at last among the mountains. The vegetation of the valley was interesting, and I indulged an old habit of collecting berries of shrubs and trees that were new — a thing that looked like a willow and had many orange-berries clustered tightly to its stem and long spines — also a spray of barberry, thinner and pinker than ours at home, to grow in my own far-away garden. Turkey oaks, falling now to yellow, crowded and hung from the cliff upon our right, and the usual sorts of rock-ferns nestled in the damp seams of the stone. The engineering of the road was masterly, and, like all mountain-roads that have presented great difticulties, it every now and then made light by serious risk by running close to huge overhanging lumps of mountain which, if not to-day on my head, then to-morrow on yours, will descend convincingly. Everywhere the greatest care is taken of this most important military highway — Russia's avenue mto that country she coveted and fought for so long. It is easy to understand her passionate desire to possess this great range, this fine race or tangle of fine races, this fertile country on the southern slopes. If I were Russia, and as fiat as Russia, with only the Urals to M 1 88 ALL THE RUSSIAS point to as Russian mountains, I should have wanted the Caucasus just as badly, and I would have sacrificed the men of whole provinces of plain life to possess them, as Russia did. Eight miles from Vladikavkaz is the posting-station of Balta; eleven miles farther is Lars ; and five miles farther is the world- famous Gorge of Dariel, the " Caucasian Gates " of Pliny, the dark and awful defile between Europe and Asia. Gradually, as we drive on, the hills rise and close in on us till at length they fall almost sheer to the edge of the rushing Terek and the narrow road, leaving only just room for these at the bottom of a rocky cleft, 5000 feet deep. The air strikes chill as a vault ; not a ray of sunshine enters ; the driver stoops low and lashes his horses ; instinctively we lapse into silence. The geologist calls this gorge a "fault," for it is not a pass over the mountain-chain, but a rent clear across it. To the imaginative traveller, how- ever, it is a fit scene for the most wonderful highway in history. Seventy years ago it was a perilous road, for avalanches, or the sudden outbursts of pent-up glacial streams, swept it from end to end, but the Russians have spent twenty million dollars upon it and made it safe. In 1877 nearly all their troops and stores for carrying the war into Turkey and Asia came by this road, and it will be used again for the same purpose, although to a much less degree, for there is now direct railway connection from Moscow to Baku, at one end of the Trans-Caucasian Rail- way, and therefore to Kars itself, -oid Tiflis ; and equally to Kars from Datum, at the other end, to which fortified port steamers would bring troops and supplies from Odessa and Novorossisk in the Black Sea. The gorges of the Yang-tsze may be as impressive — I have not seen them — but there is nothing in Europe which produces so profound an effect of dread upon the mind as this lonely, silent, gloomy, cold abysm of Dariel. You do not wonder that any people holding it could bar the way to the i-est of the world — the only cause for surprise is that before the present road was constructed anybody ever THE GEORGIAN ROAD 189 got through it at all. It even said, "Thus far and no farther," to Rome herself, and marked the limit of her dominion. The gorge ends suddenly, as we dash at a right angle over a narrow bridge, and find a most picturesque sight before us. The valley has now a flat floor between its two rugged walls of rock, and man has turned such a narrow mountain-gap to his own uses, as was inevitable when Europe is at one end and Asia THE GEORGIAN ROAD — RUSSIAN FORT IN THE PASS at the other, for suddenly, where the road widens to a few flat acres, a Russian fortress springs into view — a square building, with corner towers, battlements and loopholes, precisely the fortress of the fairy-tale and the box of bricks. The guide- book, even the trusty Murray, points out that the fort of Dariel is commanded by the surrounding mountains, but adds that "an enemy could not draw any cannon up their sides." This is quite true — unless they took their cannon up in balloons. A Cossack I90 ALL THE RUSSIAS sentry lounges before the gate and scrutinises me suspiciously as I stop the carriage and get out my camera, but there is no other sign of life. The choice of such a spot, however, to dispute the passage of the Pass was anticipated long, long ago, for on the summit of a peak high above the modern fortress stand the ruins of a greater ancient castle, the rocky and im- pregnable home of the Princess Tamara — not her of history, but her of immortal legend, in which truth and fancy can never again be plucked apart. It is said that hither came all her lovers, an ever-flowing stream, since she was of resistless beauty, and that when her fancy tired of them they were hurled into the torrent below. In this castle passes the action of Lermontof's play " The Demon," but he has none of this gruesome story, though Tamara's beauty is there : Witness, thou star of midnight, witness, sun, Rising and setting, king upon his throne, Nor Shah of golden Persia, e'er did kiss, A face so bright, so beautiful as this ; No houri in the noontide heat did lave A form so perfect in the fountain's wave, And lover's hand, since Eden's days, I trow. Ne'er smoothed the wrinkles from so fair a brow.* But as one gazes up at these ruins in the spot of all the world apt to breed the romance and passion and war of days when life was thick-set with such, one earnestly longs to pierce the trivial veil of legend and poetry, and know what really happened there — just the daily life of the men and women who looked along Dariel from that high-built eyrie. These battlemented and loopholed towers repulse or yield to attacks which change with the changing years, but the stronghold of the heart knew then, as it knows to-day, but one plan of sap and mine, and it is rarely safe from treachery within. Princess Tamara, did your lonely castle in this gorge, so cold and dark * Storr's Translation. THE GEORGIAN ROAD 191 at midday, keep you safe from the insidious foe ? I would give much to know your story. The day was done when we came up to the post-house called after Mount Kasbek, and round us, in a close group, rose the splendid peaks of which he is the chief. Kasbek is to my eye more beautiful than Elbruz with its divided peaks; it is steeper, with terribly sheer slopes, gorges, and glaciers around it, itself ending in a savage spike of rocks against the sky, while Elbruz, really much higher and more difficult to climb (Elbruz is 18,470 feet and Kasbek 16,546*), has larger and milder-looking summits. This is a mistake in a mountain ; the proper mountain is the blue and white kind, of which you can see at least ten thousand feet " out of the ground," so to speak, with a peak offering room for no more than the two feet of one climber at a time, and he so perilously placed that he must hold a cloud by the tail if he would stay there. This is the character of Kasbek — from below. The post-house is again a bleak white building, with a large square yard behind it, round three sides of which are stables to accommodate the numerous horses required for relays. In the middle of this yard another huge old camel is standing, his head balanced upon his absurd neck and his mouth supercilious as are all camels in the desert, seen against this snowy back- " Kasbek and Elbruz were first climbed in 1868 by Messrs. Douglas Freshfield, Corny ns Tucker, and Adolphus W. Moore. When near the summit they sent back their guide, and his statements were at first received with absolute in- credulity. But when the three Englishmen reappeared from the opposite valley, having gone up one side of the mountain and down the other, even the unwilling natives had to admit that the impossible had been accomplished. Elbruz was again climbed in 1875 by Mr. F. Crauford Grove, and in 18S4 by M. de Dechy, a Hungarian Alpinist. But the curious jealousy of foreigners makes local writers still loath to admit the fact, though repeated descriptions have made the ascents familiar to all the world. In his "Guide au Caucase," published in 1891, M. J. Mourier has this amusing sentence about Kasbek : " Trois anglais: Fresch- wild, Mour et Tecker, membres du club alpestre de Londres, pretendent- etre parvenus jusqu'a sa cime le 18/30 Juin 1868." 192 ALL THE RUSSIAS ground there is something irresistibly incongruous about his appearance. He prowls about, ungroomed, loose, ignored, padding silently where he is not wanted, thrusting his horrid nose into what does not concern him. At first I thought this beast was merely resting between loads, but when he re- appeared regularly at the end of each stage, I saw he served THE CASTLE OF PRINCESS TAMAKA IX THE GORGE OF DARIEL, GEORGIAN ROAD some curious purpose. It is this : droves of camels come from time to time over the Pass, and unless the horses were accus- tomed to the sight and smell of these misshapen creatures they would take fright, perhaps where the way was narrow and the cliffs steep, and a catastrophe would result. Therefore at each station lives a camel, whose only business in life is to scare each passing horse into the contempt which familiarity breeds. Perhaps he understands this, and that is why he stalks THE GEORGIAN ROAD 193 unheard up to a panting, sweating animal quenching its thirst, and suddenly thrusts his long hairy face at it, just as naughty children say " Boo ! " to each other when they meet in the dark. It is one of those simple explanations which yet strike one as ludicrous, and at each post-house I am smitten anew by this strange exigency, and this fresh proof of Russia's boundless ethnological complications. We are to stay over-night at Kasbek, and we make our- selves comfortable in the barrack-like chambers that are placed at our disposal. When we descend to the bufTet for dinner, our enthusiasm hurls us in the direction of the national plat of shashlik — the delicious Caucasian mutton, cooked a la broche over a wood fire. We wait in happy impa- tience for its arrival, stemming our hunger with a zakushka of raw herring, with brown bread, and draughts of quaint Cauca- sian wine, which we profess determinedly, if with some effort, to find delicious. By-and-by a profound and searching steam of rawish but not quite raw onion invades the buffet ; this is onion at its very worst moment ; raw onion is tolerable, cooked onion is palat- able, onion that has merely suffered a heat-change is devastat- ing in its effectuponthe soul of the feeder. W^ebecome nervous, and when a Circassianpersoncomesinbearing that onion which is apparently allied to the hoped-for j-Zmj-Z/ZzX', we wince palpably. Some roughly chopped loin of mutton, smoked without and crude within, smothered in the aforesaid onion, manifests itself, and timidly we address ourselves to it. Fork and knife recoil simultaneously from each knobby piece, and one mouthful (which never gets any farther) contents each inquiring palate. The meat, hacked without any relation to its fibre, its grain, or its bones, is absolutely fresh, is also quite uncooked, and only hours of stewing could have made it fit to eat. " Would you try the plat national again ? — it might be better here," says some one, a day or two later. " Not again," 194 ALL THE RUSSIAS is the reply ; " let us wait till we get to England ; my cook does it beautifully : N'avets de mouton a la hroche. No more Circassian shashlik baa-ing at me, if you please." I made plans at Kasbek for an early ride up the mountains opposite, to see the little ancient church, 1400 feet above us, of Tsminda-Sameba, not that of itself this presents much in- terest, but the view of the mountain, and especially of its great THE GEORGIAN ROAD — ROUND THE MOUNTAIN SIDE black side where Prometheus was chained (though the legend is inaccurate after all, for yEschylus distinctly speaks of Pro- metheus' rock as above the sea and far from the Caucasus), was said to be beautiful, and I wished to enjoy a ride in true Cau- casian spirit. A quarter to seven was the hour fixed, and I retired early, to be ready. When I arose at six, it was upon a world of snow that I looked out. Everything was white, and that broad-fiaked, Christmas-card kind of snow we used to have in England, was falling. The stables and the yard were white ; THE GEORGIAN ROAD 195 the poor camel even had httle drifts between his humps, and absurd tufts of it all over him ; you could not see fifty yards away, and all the mountains had retired within the veil. This put off my ride, and even alarmed us somewhat about the Pass and its condition. There was no mistake — the snow had come to stay ; it was winter snow. What I saw fall as I looked out of the window would be there till next April. We started at once, the hood of the carriage up, and little visible beyond the back of the driver in his thick pleated woollen gown, but all round in the grey air the broad flakes were in suspension, appar- ently falling with that slow deliberation, that incredible downy light- ness, and that incalcul- able vagary of direction that characterise real snow. Suddenly, out of the grey mystery in front of us, a troop of Cossack soldiers came riding, a couple of hundred of them, returning from their service on'the Armenian frontier to their little villages in the plain. These men are supplied with rifles and ammunition by Government ; their wiry little horses, their armoury of sabres, knives, and pistols, are their own. Shrouded in the black, shaggy, felt cloak that descends to the horse's tail, and nearly covers their big felt boots in the short stirrups, cowled each in his pointed basklik, a hood with two ends wound round the neck and falling down the back. rm-; gi:(.)Kgi.\x koah, 'ihk ■i'oi'_;^of''the pass- old ROAD 196 ALL THE RUSSIAS they seemed like some ghostly procession of warlike friars passing in slow defile. Each cone-shaped silhouette upon his high saddle, with wild face — and what faces they were ! — looking straight in front of him was the incarnation of all that is picturesque, romantic, in a word, Caucasian. Presently the veil was lifted ; the flakes grew slimmer and finer, the sun flashed out, the hood of the carriage was thrown back, and there beside us, mantled in a flawless ermine, was Kasbek and his court of peaks, bright and glittering against a heaven of Italian blue. In his winter majesty, every seam and fissure of yesterday, filled and smoothed with one night-fall of snow, he was scarce to be looked on by his subjects. And now, with many a zigzag, the road mounted in good earnest ; we en- countered the immobile oxen yoked to the snow-ploughs, we came upon the artificial tunnels, made to accommodate ava- lanches. These places where the road suddenly runs under a stoutly timbered roof built against the mountain side, bringhome to one the chances of winter, and the eventualities that may — and often do — overtake the faithful post-waggon with its Euro- pean mails for Tiflis. As we approach them, I can imagine the tons of snow and loosened boulders plunging down the steeps toward the river, here growing slender as a thread, and the awful thunder of them exploding over these man-made de- fences. Like all such work, and much of the construction work I have seen in Russia, these avalanche roofs are splen- didly built ; there is no trail of the contractor over them ; whether the Government does its own work or contractors are different here, I know not, but assuredly the highway by which Russia's Empire is moving sedulously forward is made to endure, and to carry the great weight of her power. At the top of the Pass is a small cross upon the hill-side, standing out in black relief upon a snowy shoulder. Many gene- rations ago it was set to mark the summit — 7977 feet, and by THE GEORGIAN ROAD '97 the road is one of later date. This, then, is the second time during my present journey that I have crossed a mountain- range from Europe into Asia. No Alpine pass, except the Stelvio, which is 9040 feet high, is so high as this. Seldom can it be given to any one to see great mountains in more exqui- site aspect than I saw these at the top of that pass. Peak CROSSING THE SUMMIT OF THE GE(;RGIAN ROAD after peak biting the sky in sharp outline ; snow but a few hours old, sun and heavens dazzlingly clear and deeply blue ; the air keen and intoxicating ; once more the never-failing though so often tasted intoxication of the East in front — it was one of the days of a lifetime. Then came the wild rush from the water-parting to the val- ley. Two fresh horses and a hilarious driver, whom I encour- aged by the promise of a rouble if he drove well, carried us at breakneck speed down a road zigzagging likethelacingof a foot- 198 ALL THE RUSSIAS ball. On the north the range is barren and deserted, on the south it is green, with quaint villages nestling in fertile valleys and little haystacks by the thousand telling of a fragrant sum- mer past. At full gallop down the slopes, with asickening swing round each corner, both inside wheels off the ground, we came, the driver, shouting in glee and swishing his savage little whip, looking back with a smile for approval as we just escaped going wholesale and headlong over the cliff at each turn. Having promised him one rouble to go fast I would gladly have given him several to go slow, but his own enjoyment was far too keen to heed our breathless protests. The vegetation on this southern side began with a sudden- ness almost unbelievable ; first that obstinate and crouching little tir-tree, ascetic as a fakir, and nourished upon escarpments of pure rock and dark dreams not given to trees in whose branches birds nest and sing ; then pines and oak-scrub ; among these presently little sun-soaked hay-fields whose harvest, in pointed cocks, stood out oddly upon the snow. Then villages or colonies or farmlets of dwellings, half underground, and with the square, open cave-like front which marks all Eastern dwell- ings ; flat-roofed, of course, and chokedandhuddled roundwith straw-stacks and mounds of winterfodder. I was much tempted to stop and explore one of these little places where the foot-sole of its occupants never knows what it is to stand upon the fiat ground, save when indoors on the trodden earth of the humble living-room. With a swoop almost hawklike in its sheerness and its sud- denness, we drop into the considerable settlement of Ananur, beside a river which is carrying the grey glacier water to the south. Here we are to harbour for the night, and only two general chambers, one for men and one for women, are at the disposal of travellers, for it is one of the smaller stations. The food is in that particular transition stage between archaism half-disdained and civilisation half-comprehended, THE GEORGIAN ROAD 199 which is the most trying of any ; but again the wine of the country and its bread give sustenance to travellers who have never been in slavery to tables dhote. In the morning a Caucasian gentleman with white hair and a self-possession princes might envy, came and poured water upon our hands and face from a jug, while we juggled with sponge and soap in a vain effort after even precarious cleanliness. In this ^^ ... HOW THE GEOKUIAN KOAIJ CO1ME.S UOVVN AT iH.ElT matter we agreed that they do things handsomely in Ananur. None of us had ever been washed by a Circassian prince in full uniform before. (I think I am right in describing him as a prince; you are a prince in the Caucasus if you possess four sheep, so Russians say, jokingly, and I cannot believe that our friend had a fleece less.) We wandered up to the strange little castle ; it dates from the fifteenth century, and the shells of its square and tapering towers frame and crumble round a church of later date. 200 ALL THE RUS§IAS Nothingaboiitthischurchjsavesomehalf-obliteratedfrescosand the arabesques lettered beside its door, interested us, but in the river, a special breed of bull-trout mocks the prowess of the pass- ing fisherman, and there were smooth places beside the tails of water and sudden-coming " races " in the hollows of banks where I should have delighted to see the dry-flies of a certain Liberal statesman friend alluringly floating. That day we made the second ascent of a smaller pass, this time always among cultivated slopes where the wheat was already sprouting, the big, blue-grey buffaloes ploughing, and the little flat-roofed houses, all scraped out of the hill- sides, comfortably fronting the southern sun. Visiting some of them, we found the cave-dwellers to be a handsome race indeed ; the men tall, strong, and martial, bearded and bronzed and covered with weapons ; the women gay in bright colours of blue and red and crimson, holding up babies whose small heads were covered with henna-tinted hair. Cocks, hens, cats, dogs, and a few little fluffy buffalo-calves all clustered in the shelter of these house-fronts, and on the roof huge oval baskets of maize-cobs shone golden, very often with the owner seated smoking beside his store of winter provender. At Dushet we spent some time trying to get into the castle of Prince Tschliaief, which stood upon the hill, white, castel- lated, looking proudly across the valley at the little town with its grim, plain red boxes of new Russian barracks. In point of appearance, the Prince's palace, which was also employed as a Police Station, was easily first in its expression of martial capability. Dushet is charmingly situated, and as it is within easy reach of the cosmopolitan pleasures of Tiflis, it is the place I should recommend for a prolonged spring or autumn stay on the Georgian Road, Ancient history pervades the Caucasus, and the last town on the road is a strange link between past and present. This is Mtskhet, the ancient capital of Georgia. The race to which o w H c/i < O o Q J. O w H THE GEORGIAN ROAD 20I it belongs — or rather belonged — believes it to be the oldest town in the world, founded by Noah's great-great-great grand- son, while even sober historians recognise it at the beginning of the fourth century. Here lived and reigned all the Tsars of Georgia ; hither came the Vandals of Tamerlane and rased the cathedral, but Tsar Alexander I. of Georgia rebuilt it, and under its aisles lie Georgia's rulers and wise men. The cathedral .sll()l,l.\G A.N )X l.\ llil. LALLAsr itself was built originally in 328 A.D., over the spot where Christ's seamless robe, brought from Golgotha either by a Jew or by the Centurion Longinus — the legends differ — and given by him to his sister Sidonia, was found. She wrapped it around her, fell dead, and as it could not be detached from her body, she was buried in it, and until it was carried off to the Cathedral of the Assumption at Moscow, a holy oil exuded from the very stones above the precious relic. Such was old Mtskhet. To-day it is a railway station on the line from Batum to Baku, the point where the military road meets the military railway — a plain village, but ennobled by the ruins of palaces and churches telling of the wonders of the days when Tsars lived here, before the proud name went north. CHAPTER XIV TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 1" T HE German philologist, Pro- ^^ fessor Brugsch, has calcu- lated that seventy languages are spoken in Tiflis. That simple state- ment, pondered long enough, might almost suffice to describe the city. It is the modern Babel, the meeting place of Europe and Asia, the cross- roads of the great routes north and south, and east and west, the focus of a scoreof keenly trading peoples, tlie conglomerate deposit of two thousand years of busy history. Over this complication Russia rules easily and well. It is an excellent example of how she carries civilisa- tion to Eastern peoples. Externally, half of Tiflis is a little Paris, or a prettier Bucharest. A mass of tin roofs, painted in pale green and Indian red, makes a pleasant colour impression as you approach the city from the moun- tains, but to see it in its real and remarkable picturesque- ness, as shown in my illustration, it must be viewed from the remains of the old fortress, or the Botanical Garden beside it, at the other end of the town. It lies at the bottom of a brown, treeless valley, between steep hills, on either side of the river Kura. This may not sound very attractive, but there is an abruptness about the contours THE nOURKA TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 203 and a serpentine twist about the river that make it one of the most strikingly placed towns I know. In summer, as might be guessed from its position and from the additional fact that it has a phenomenally small rainfall, Tiflis is stifling and in- tolerably hot, but in winter the same conditions render it a delightful residence, perfectly sheltered from the cold winds that sweep from the mountains and the plain to the south- ^.jBiafc- St^sajgg.-^ ^'"'"•^'■^■P^ \^ ^5^^ f ^ ! 1 Ei9iKdS£»» ■^^^K^M .- ^--y* "1 . ^m ^ ti^^^^i^^^H^^^^H ^"H^lft . ■ i"- 4^1 p.t "■' ' w - - " ^^^ m^W inj^UBF/^^H ^:^ ■ WKm east, and by its dry atmosphere admirably suited to people with weak lungs. It is a place of great importance to modern Russia. It forms, to begin with, the end of the military road across the Caucasus, which, though the railway now goes round the eastern coast to Baku, is still the quickest way to Europe, and all the mails come over it by fast coach. It is midway between Baku and Batum ; that is, between the Caspian and the Black Sea, be- tween Europe and Asia when you go east and west, as well as when you go north and south. The railway is now open to Kars, N 204 ALL THE RUSSIAS that frontier fortress which, not long ago the Russian objective, will some day be her base for an advance into Armenia and far beyond. Tiflis, in fact, is thinking of the future, as you are reminded when you go to the topographical department of the General Staff to buy the magnificent maps they sell, and see a dozen officers working busily over their drawing-boards. And Russia has developed her Caucasian capital in a manner worthy of its importance. In the modern town the streets are wide and paved and lighted by electricity, the shops are large and handsome, there is a public garden with winding walks and fine trees, excellent tramways run in all directions, and the public carriages, leather-upholstered and rubber-tyred, are far superior to those of St. Petersburg or Moscow — in fact, the best I have seen anywhere. The official buildings are numerous and imposing — Russia always takes care of this. The cathedral is a magnificent edifice, the Governor-General's palace dignified without and splendid within, there is a new and elaborate opera- house, and of course a number of military buildings. The mu- seum is extremely interesting for its collections of all the animals and birds of the Caucasus, all the geological products, and a fascinating series of figures and domestic implements illustrating the ethnology of all the local races. While I was there an agri- cultural exhibition was held, and the quality and variety of pro- ducts shown were astonishing. Some of the vegetables were so remarkable that I wrote and asked for seeds, which were sent promptly by official post and are now germinating under the surprised eyes of a Hampshire gardener. In matters like this, let me remark once for all, the Russian authorities are courtesy itself to foreigners who approach them courteously and are genuinely interested in what they are doing. Finally, the Hotel de Londres is the first really civilised and comfortable hotel I have found in Russia — and this is in Asia ! I dwell upon these matters because the striking fact about Tiflis is that Russian rule has made a handsome, clean, safe, civilised, and TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 205 merry little town out of a jumble of dirty, jarring Eastern races, outside her European frontier, and far from anywhere. But one does not go to Asia to see Europe, and Rostom, the guide, in Circassian costume, with long poniard and war-medal, haunts the hall of the hotel. To test the German philologist, I ask him how many languages he speaks. He does not remember, TIFLIS AND THE RUINS OF THE CITADEL but proceeds to count them upon his fingers. Russian, Mingre- lian — his native tongue — Georgian, Armenian, Persian, Lesghian, Gruznian — I can't remember them, and I don't know how to spell them, but it is an extraordinary list. And he needs them all in an hour's stroll through the bazaar. Ten minutes in a tramway from the hotel door transports you into a piece of Baghdad or Tehran, and one of the very few Eastern bazaars I have seen which has not its eye fixed, so to speak, upon the Western purchaser. A few things in the silversmiths' shops are 2o6 ALL THE RUSSLVS for the foreigner, hut otherwise, if you go there, you go as the native goes, you see what the native sees, you haggle as the native haggles, and you get what the native gets. This is re- freshing when one remembers the bazaar in Cairo, for instance, where the tourist buys with solemn precautions and secret glee things specially made for him in Birmingham or Germany,which an Oriental passes with a contemptuous shrug. If one half of Tiflis is like Europe, the other half is purely Oriental. Narrow, steep, ill-paved streets ; mysterious houses hiding the life within behind closed doors and shuttered win- dows ; the merchant sitting among his wares — the silversmiths in one street, the arms-makers in another, the shoemakers, the carpet-dealers, the fruit-sellers, the perfume-venders, each trade in its own quarter. And what things to buy, if one has money and time — the two equally essential components of an Eastern bargain ! Through this low doorway and behind this common- place shop is a dark warehouse piled high with carpets in moun- tainous profusion. Here is every fraud ready for the unwary or unknowing purchaser, but here, also, if your eye is sharp and your tongue smooth and your experience trustworthy and your time and patience without limits, is a brocade from the palace of one of the old Khans of Nukha, vassals of Persia in time gone by; this is a silken carpet from Isfahan, in the golden days of Shah Abbas, two hundred years old, priceless ; that rug was woven by Tekke girls in the tent of nomad Turkomans, a pattern never copied but preserved in memory from the times of Tamer- lane; this drugget issued long ago from the loom of Kurdish women of Erivan; the roll of rainbow-coloured silk came slowly to light, like a dragon-fly above a reeking pond, in a mud hovel of the torture-town of Bokhara, fieriest hot-bed of Mussul- man fanaticism. The merchant will show you, too, turquoises — handfuls of them, all small or of the worthless greenish hue. Many times you ask him if he has not bigger turquoises and he shakes his head. At the back of his iron strong-box, wrapped TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 207 in a dozen crumpled papers, he has a great one, of that mar- vellous and indescribable blue which nature has produced only in this stone. Will much persuasion wheedle it into sight for a moment, or much money secure its possession for ever ? Maybe, but I have my doubts, and they are based upon the unchanging truth that at last, between East and W^est, pride of race is stronger than greed of gold. To console you, how- evei-, for the imat- tainable azure, you may find and carry off a blue scimetar li-om Daghestan, a \vi"()ught-iron sta'.f surmounted by an oxhead with which some old Persian otftcer has led his men to battle, a Georgian pistol in- laid with silver iiiello work, and a choice bit of gold- encrusted ivory from Kazi-Kumyk. But Tiflis, this "precipitate of history," these cross-roads between Europe and Asia, excites your wonder and enchains your recollection chiefly for its human conglomerate. Most of the speakers of its many tongues have their distinctive costume, and indeed their own well-marked faces. There is no mistaking the Tatars with their A BIT OV OLD TIFLIS 2o8 ALL THE RUSSIAS hats in the shape of a truncated cone, the aquiline-featured Lesghians, the swarthy Persians with their long-pointed hats of astrakhan fur, the Armenians with their flat caps, the Turko- mans in huge shaggy hats of sheepskin, the Wi^irtembergers of the German colony in the old Swabian costume, and most marked of all, the Georgians in the icJicrkess, with the kJuizir, the row of cartridge-cases, across ??| the breast. The native gentle- * man, an officer of high rank and long service in war, who strides into the hotel dining-room in his uniform of chestnut and Indian red, jingling with small - arms and hung with medals even as a Zulu is strung with cow'ries, is certainly one of the most striking figures I have ever seen. In fact, I do not remember to have been in the society of so many dis- tinguished-looking people in my life before; a grotip of princes of the blood, ambassadors and commanders -in -chief would have everything to learn from A CAUCASIAN TYPE— RosTOM THE GUIDE thcm lu thc mattcr of dcport- ment. No matter who they may be — the Smiths and Joneses, possibly, of Georgia and Dag- hestan — their manners and their clothes hit off the choicest expressions of dignity and distinction. That full-skirted woollen coat, flying round the fine riding-boots, and hiding trousers of carmine silk; that tight-fitting body-part, open at the breast to TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 209 show a shirt of richest cream-colour, hooked smartly over the ribs and narrowly girdled at the waist by a belt of chased metal, worn very tight, from which hang silver-worked poniard, sabre, pistol-holster and other strange httings, combine to form a costume of infinite spirit, to which the row of cartridges, sewn on a cunning slant on each side of the breast, are a splendid finish, even though the cartridges are but dummy bits of wood, with gold or silver heads. Added to all this, the port of the head in its black sheepskin hat, and the whole martial bearing, make every man a field-marshal and the hero of a hundred fights — to look at. Are the women of Georgia as beautiful as we have always been told ? When they become matrons, which is at an early age, they are too stout and broad in the beam for beauty, but in their youth, I should judge from glimpses at windows and passing faces, there may well be extraordinary loveliness among them — the loveliness of perfectly chiselled features true to the racial type, large calm dark eyes, firm, full mouth, alabaster skin, in- digo-black hair — the precise antithesis of the piquancy of irregu- lar features and nervous temperament which generally passes for, beauty among ourselves. These are women, you feel, whose lips would whisper passionate love or, if times allowed, sing high the song that sends their men to battle — whose fingers w^ould grasp the dagger or fall lightly across the strings of the lute, with equal aptness. Dagger and war-song, however, are out of date in the Caucasus to-day. One of the quaintest sights of the whole bazaar is its wine. The district of Kakhetia, not far from here, produces red and white wine, and a wine neither red nor white, but of the colour of tawny port and the taste of brown sherry. This is for the well-to-do ; the people's wine, costing incredibly little, is thin and acid, but quite pure. Of course I have seen in many Eastern countries wine-skins and water-skins, but a w-hole ox filled with wine took me by surprise. There he lay at the ditkJuni door, on 2IO ALL THE RUSSIAS his back, his feet and head cut off and the holes tied up, bloated, enormous. You call for a glass and the lace is loosed from his foreleg and out pours the wine. The wine-shop itself is below the street, and below it is a deeper cellar where a match shows row upon row of these truncated wine-filled beeves, a bovine cata- comb. In the ditkJiaii nearer the Persian bazaar I spent some rare hours, eating black bread, smoking tobacco from Isfahan, drink- ing the slender vintage from the foreleg of the biinlxiiki, and listening to thrilling tales of Shamyl from one who had fought against him for ten years. Another experience of Tifiis is the bath. It is a luxurious, modern, tile-fronted building in the heart of the Armenian ba- zaar, belonging to a prince whose name escapes me. Abundant springs of water strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydro- gen supply it, and in its vaulted chambers, far below the street, there is no sound but the splash of the fountain and the rolling echo of one's own voice. The iiiassciii; however, distinguishes A WANDERING BEGGAR, TIFLIS TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 213 the bath of Titlis. He is a Persian, speaking but a word or two of Russian. His head is shaved, round his waist a rag is twisted, and his feet are dyed orange. First he rubs you like the sham- pooer of Jermyn Street,then suddenly, as you He face downwards on the marble slab, he is upon your back, his heels dug into your spine, his hands grasping your shoulders to increase the pres- sure, and slowly, with skilful appreciation of the lie of every muscle, his feet grind up and down your back — they encircle THE SHAMPOOER OF TIFLIS your neck — ^they are on your head 1 Then he vaults lightly off, and in a moment, from a linen bag filled with soap, he has squeezed clouds of perfumed bubbles, and you are hidden in them from head to feet, as completely as if you had fallen into a snow-drift. So far, all is tolerable, if rather startling, but when, wrapped in linen and beturbaned, you call for a cigarette and he brings one, lights it between his own lips and would put it between yours, the prejudices of the West arise, and you re- pulse the well-meant attention of that orange-footed Oriental. The bath costs you six shillings, but cleanliness is always a luxury in the East. It will occur to many readers, no doubt, to ask what is the 2 14 ALL THE RUSSIAS political condition of these strangely mingled and once vigorous nationalities, and howthey are affected towards their great rulers. In spite of the enthusiasm they evoke, the small nationalities almost disappear politically in the face of the colossal interests of the Great Powers which control them directly or indirectly, and the Caucasus is no exception to this rule. Before the Russo- Turkish War the Georgians stood high in Russian favour ; they held important public offices, and the social relations between them and Russian officials were cordial. During the war doubts arose as to their loyalty, and the Armenians took advantage of this to push their own interests. Their well-known trading and financial gifts were of much use to the Russians and very profit- able to themselves. Bnt the Armenians have shared the fate of the Georgians, for the Armenian troubles in Turkey bred a cer- tain amount of real political agitation, and evoked fears of a great deal more, with the not unnatural result that the Russian au- thorities now cry a plague on both their houses, and exclude Georgians and Armenians alike from office and influence. This action, again, is naturally being followed by a recrudescence of national feeling, especially among the Georgians. The national costume, once almost abandoned, is now the fashion ; the national literature is being fostered; and Georgian women talk less gossip and more politics. But all this has no serious significance. Mr. Oliver Wardrop, in his ''Kingdom of Georgia" (1888), wrote : " Should Russia ever become involved in a great war, Georgia would undoubtedly declare her independence and endeavour to seize the Dariel Road; the Armenians and Lesghians would also revolt each in their own way." My own opinion is that any enemy of Russia that counted upon this would be disappointed ; the time is past for a Georgian political nationality, unless, in- deed, Russia should be already so hopelessly defeated as to break up of her own weight. I doubt much whether, in spite of their good looks and their martial clothes, the Georgians possess capacity for any struggle or for the organisation which it would "^ots-aaeiwr; a A CHAT AT THE WINE-SHOP. TIFLIS TIFLIS OF THE CROSS-ROADS 217 necessitate if successful. Sporadic risings there might be if Russia were defeated once or twice, but they would be crushed without the slightest difficulty, and the only chance of success they might have would be when Russia was too exhausted even to attempt to put them down. Moreover, I saw no reason why the Georgians should wish to revolt, for they are not oppressed in any way, they have practically all the chances that Russians themselves enjoy, they are treated very gently as regards mili- tary service, and it is perfectly certain that if for any cause Russia should cease to protect them, some other Power would have to do so, for they are now incapable of taking care of themselves or standing sword in hand, as they once did, between Europe and the pressing hordes of Asia. In a word, the little nationalities of the Caucasus present no political problem. In a previous chapter I showed how the inevitable trend of Russia is to the sunrise and the warm weather. The Caucasus affords a further striking example of this. As may be seen by a glance at my map (which shows railways projected and under construction, not to be found, 1 believe, elsewhere), Russia is stretching out her arm rapidly to the south, toward Persia and its warm and commercial gulf which leads straight to India and the East, in the shape of roads and railways. Already a railway runs from Tifiis to Kars, and several other schemes are on foot for further facilities of transport in the same direction. A railway is already begun, and will be finished in three or four years, from Karakles, below Alexandropol, down the valley of the Arpa-chai to the valley of the Aras (Araxes), then by the side of the Aras to Erivan, and on to Nakhitchevan and Julfa on the Russo-Per- sian frontier. Another railway is under survey and considera- tion from Baku to y\stara and Tabriz, with an alternative scheme from Yevlach, on the present line, through Jebrail to Tabriz, An important military road, about which not much is heard, runs from Batum to Artvin, thence to Ardanautch, thence to Ardahan thence to Kars, It is nuetalled from Batum to Artvin, and is 21 8 ALL THE RUSSIAS being widened from Artvin to Ardanautch. It has been metalled and in use for some time from Ardahan to Kars. Plans and performances like these, at a time when money is scarce in Russia, mean only one thing. And I believe, though much secrecy is observed upon the matter, that the railway which Russia hopes to lay through Persia to the sea, the route of which has already been roughly surveyed, is intended to start on the frontier at Julfa, and run, via Ahar, to Tabriz, Tehran, Isfahan, and Yezd, and past Bunder Abbas to the Indian Ocean. But this railway raises an international question of extreme delicacy, to which I return later.* Such is the Caucasus, in its various aspects — a rapid glance at a great subject. I hope I have gone a little way, at any rate, toward justifying my remark at the outset that it is perhaps on the whole the most interesting land of the world. It has been, as I said, unaccountably neglected, but I feel sure in advance of the thanks of any, whether travellers in search of new scenes or capitalists on the look-out for new enterprises, who take my advice and visit it for themselves. '- See Chapters XVII. and XXIV. The Times has just learned, "from a trustworthy source," that the Russians have decided to proceed at once with the construction of a railway which will connect their Trans-Caspian line with the Persian province of Khorassan. This line will start from Askhabad and be carried to Meshed, and the construction is expected to be pushed forward rapidly. The line will enter Persian territory at Kettechinar, runup the Deregez Valley, and keep along the river side until it strikes the existing main road to Meshed between Durbadan and Imamkulich. A large party have been at work pegging out the line, and attached to this party have been M. Stroieff, Dragoman of the Meshed Russian Consulate, and the Ikram-ul-Mulk, late Karguzar of Kuchan. Difficulties were met with in passing through villages, but it is said that these have been arranged, and the Ikram-ul-Mulk has been given 12,000 roubles as a present. It is understood in Askhabad that the money for the railway has been sanctioned and is ready, and that the Russian Bank will open a branch almost immediately in Meshed to assist the financing of the works. A gentleman from St. Petersburg was named manager of the bank in Meshed, another official was to come from Teheran, and AH Askar Khan, the interpreter of the State Bank, Askhabad, was also under orders to proceed to Meshed. " There is,"' the Times adds, " a feeling of great uneasiness amongst the official classes in Meshed, as it is impossible to predict what the advent of this railway means." It means that Russia is hurrying upon her " historic mission ' ' in view of Germany 's haste upon the enterprise described in Chapter XVII. CHAPTER XV THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU FATE has thrown a good many strange sights in my way, but I think the oil-wells of Baku are as strange as any. Directly after reaching the hotel I was called to the telephone, and invited by Mr. Tweedy, at Balakhani, six miles away, to spend the night there and see the wells next day. So I found myself, after dark, driving from the little station of Balakhani to the headquarters of the Russian Petroleum and Liquid Fuel Company. The mud was a foot deep, there was no road in par- ticular, but the droschky-driver took the direction which prom- ised the best chance of escaping an upset, and we rocked about till I was quite resigned to find myself floundering. The sur- roundings were positively weird. Every few yards a pyramidal structure, huge and ill defined in the dark, towered up; within each was machinery hard at work, and mysterious hangings and splashings issued ; in boiler-houses the lurid glow and fierce roar of petroleum furnaces made night alarming ; and the whole air was thick with the reek of oil. I longed for morning to bring some sort of unity into this peculiar Hades. With daylight came not only unifying knowledge, but also fascination. To a man with imagination the business of petro- leum-getting must combine in itself the things which delight the gold prospector, the sportsman, the surgeon, the mechanician and the gambler. Like the prospector, the oil-seeker may look long in vain, and then suddenly run full tilt against riches. Like the sportsman, he may have the quarry just within his reach, and then in a second lose it. Like the surgeon, he uses instru- 220 ALL THE RUSSIAS ments to perform strange and delicate tasks in the dark, guided only by a fine sense of touch and a knowledge of the body in which he is working. Like the mechanician, he must always be inventing new and more ingenious tools. Like the gambler, he ranges headlong over rising and falling values. After the pen, I think the oil-borer would be my choice of implement where- with to solve the great problem. To leave generalities and come to plain facts, this is in brief the story of an oil-well. The mysterious processes of nature, whether animal or vegetable —probably the former — which pro- duce petroleum in the bowels of the earth, have taken place in an unusual degree under the eastern shore of the Caucasian peninsula, wherethe town of Baku has risen — and where, I may incidentally add, this town has increased by twenty-five per cent. in fifteen months, where house rents have doubled in the same time, and where you may see a string of camels crossing a tram- way line under an electric light. This petroleum-bearing land used to be leased by the Russian Government at a nominal rental ; now it is put up to auction. A certain number of pouds (a poud is thirtv-six lb.) of oil is supposed to be available for a certain area, and the bidding is by kopecks (say farthings) per poud of that number. Having acquired the land, the concessionaire pro- ceeds to sink his wells. First he erects the pyramidal w^ooden structure, about seventy feet high, called the " derrick," with a large grooved wheel, like that over a colliery shaft, at its apex. He puts in an engine and a winding drum, and then the digging begins. It is of the first importance to have as wide a shaft as possible, because the wider the shaft the greater the dimension of the "baler," or elongated bucket, in which the oil is ultimately brought to the surface, and therefore the greater the yield of oil per diem and the larger the profit. So nowadays the first tubes of wrought-iron of which the well consists may be as wide as twenty-eight or thirty inches. A kind of huge spade, weigh- intJ perhaps half a ton, is suspended from a beam, which balances THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU 221 like the beam of a beam-engine. This spade is fixed to its shaft by a sort of bayonet catch, and when the beam hfts the whole apparatus a man standing over the well gives it a half turn, and the spade falls two feet, striking the ground a heavy blow, the beam allows the shaft to fall upon it, pick it up and raise it again, the man gives another half turn, the spade falls again, and so on for hours with ex- traordinary rapid- ity, the spade fall- ing perhaps thirty times a minute. This is known as the " free fall " sys- tem, from the German Freifall. After a while the earth is extracted by means of a co- lossal shell-auger, and the iron tube is lowered into place. The spades are of all shapes and sizes, and so far all is plain sailing. But by-and-by accidents happen. Spades break, tubes collapse under the enormous pressure necessary to force them into place, steel ropes and chains give way and precipitate the whole apparatus into the well, or the apparatus gets twisted or broken and jams fast perhaps a thousand feet below the surface. Or perhaps even a wrench or a heavy bolt falls into the well — quite enough to prevent o A "fountain" at BAKU 222 ALL THE RUSSIAS the " free fall " from working. Then the fun begins — not that the well-owner regards it as fun at all. But the business of picking up these things seems to me an intoxicating task. Remember that your accident has happened perhaps 1500 feet underground, in a tube perhaps a foot in diameter, perhaps only six inches, for, as the well goes deeper, its diameter de- creases. You do not know what the accident is — you only know that something, perhaps everything, has gone to smash down there. Or you may know that you have a ton of broken, twisted iron jammed tight in the narrow iron tube, with a quarter of a mile of wire rope or chain piled up pell-mell on the top of it. Your business is to get it all out — and the oil-borer does get it all out. In his workshop are laid side by side scores of surgical instruments — tweezers, pincers, forceps, probes, snares, ecraseiirs, expanding things which grasp a tube by the inside, revolving knives which cut a three-inch iron bar or a 12-inch tube, eccentric hooks which put straight anything lying on its side, so that the pincers can seize it, and in fact a replica of every ghastly implement of modern surgery that I know, except a speculum. There is this little difference, however, that each of these instruments weighs a quarter of a ton or more, that a whole day is not too much in which to lower it, let it do its work, or fail to do it, and hoist it up again, and that the oil-surgeon has nothing whatever to guide him except the light of pure imagi- native genius and the waggle in his hand of a wire rope which has half a ton dangling from it a quarter of a mile below. The reader should not now be surprised when I add that in a moment something drops into the well, and that it sometimes takes the most skilful engineer six months to pick it up. I looked with pro- found respect upon the man who accomplishes such things. He happened to be a Caucasian prince, but that had nothing to do with my admiration. Never in my life have I seen anything which demanded such infinite patience. Waiting for the Foreign Office to publish a Blue-book is child's play in comparison. THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU 223 But at length the engineer has his splendid reward. The oil stratum is reached, he rolls affectionately in his hand the slimy sand that the digger brings up — he is sure there is oil ! So to the wire rope a hollow cylinder, twenty to thirty feet long and an inch or two less in diameter than the lowest tubes, with a plunge- valve at the bottom, is attached, and cautiously lowered. It comes back by-and-by, the valve is pushed open as it is gently lowered upon a board, and out pours a quarter of a ton of sand, slime, water — and the precious oil. At last it is only oil, and then the well is pumped night and day till it runs dry. It takes on an average fifteen months to dig a well, and may cost five or six thousand pounds. The tubes alone for a well 2000 feet deep cost ;^'30oo. But perhaps it will give you five hundred tons of oil a day. The average life of a well may be said to be three years, but of course it is often vastly more. There is, it must be added, the horrid chance — rare hereabouts — that after all your boring you may find nothing. Three miles from here a Rus- sian well-owner sank a well 1995 feet and failed to get a trace of oil. But, on the other hand — and this is where the gambler's excitement comes in — you may have the delirious joy of getting a " fountain," and then hats are thrown up and dividends mount skyward. A " fountain " is an artesian well of oil which bursts up- ward with incredible force and gives you as much oil in a minute for nothing asyou could pump in twenty-four hours of labour and expense. Perhaps it blows the huge baler through the derrick roof and into somebody else's boiler-house, knocks the derrick it- self into splinters, hurls up great stones like cannon-balls, buries the machinery in sand and slime and oil, and floods the reservoirs and roads — nitchevo, the more the better, it is coining gold for its lucky owners. The Russian Petroleum Companvhad a "foun- tain " once which gave forty million pouds of oil in two months. The world went very well then. Curiously enough, a fountain made its welcome appearance on the same property the very day I went to say good-bye to Mr. Tweedy, its managing director 224 ALL THE RUSSIAS in London, whom by good luck I found at Baku, and he had of course rushed off to see it. This is a good opportunity for me to say how much I am indebted to Mr. Tweedy for the oppor- tunities of studying and understanding the business of oil- getting. His knowledge of the subject is minute and profound, he has rendered great services to the successful investment of British capital in Baku, and after what I have written it is per- haps hardly necessary to add that his enthusiasm 's contagious. Such is, in hasty outline, the business of oil-getting on its mechanical side. Imagine a couple of thousand of these black derricks crowded together, with a network of little canals, reservoirs dug in the ground, and pipes innumerable just laid about, one above another, exactly as they happened to lie most conveniently — the pipes which carry off the oil to the reservoirs at a little distance, the whole place ceaselessly reeking, smoking, steaming, and humming, and you know what Balakhani looks like, and why it seemed so strange to me when I drove through it at night. Since so much British capital is invested in this district cer- tain statistics concerning the production of oil may be read with interest, especially since they point to some important conclu- sions regarding the future prospects of the industry. The num- ber of firms and companies engaged in 1899 ^'^^ 160, owning 1357 active wells. Of these firms 62 sprang up during the pre- vious two years, and 26 of them were still at the boring stage. All attempts to "strike oil," in spite of extensive and deep boring, outside the five proved areas of the Apsheron Peninsula, namely, Bibi-Eibatandthegreat oil-field formed by Balakhani, Sabuntchi, Romani and Binagadi, have proved wholly unsuccessful. The total output for 1899* (to which the Binagadi area contributed very little) was 2,167,801,130 gallons. This was over 162,000,000 gallons more than in 1898, but though this great increase looks * The figures here given are taken from the report of the official Russian super- visor of the petroleum industry at Baku, as published in the official ViestnikFinanzoJ. THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU 225 very satisfactory :it first sijfht, furtlier examination gives it a less encouraging aspect. In the iirst place, the relative increase com- pared with previous years shows a marked decline ; and second, theseincreascs arc nothing like so great as the increases in energy and expenditure in boring operations. In 1899 the enormous sum of ;£r2, 600,000 was spent on boring alone, and 572,761 feet of wells were bored, against 402,605 feet in 1898— an increase il 1; \ll \\A\ of over 42 per cent. Thus for a 42 per cent, increase of effort, only an 8 per cent, increase of output was obtained. This is not quite so bad as it looks, for a number of wells, especially on the Bibi-Eibat area, were only commenced in the second half of the year, and could not have become productive. But it points to the serious fact that the whole oil-field is becoming less pro- ductive. This conclusion is clearly borne out by other figures. The number of inactive wells, for instance, has increased by nearly 50 per cent., whereas the number of active wells has increased by only 24 per cent. Of the five areas, moreover, only Sabuntchi and Balakhani showed an absolute increase of out- put. Most significant of all, however, are the facts that the 22 6 ALL THE RUSSIAS " fountains " — i.e. wells where the oil is forced to the surface by confined gas, showing that the seam has no other sufficient outlet— have decreased by one-half ; and that the average pro- ductiveness of wells has regularly diminished, while their average depth has as regularly increased. This is strikingly shown by the oflicial figures when arranged thus : Average Production Average Deptbi per Well in Gallons. per Well in Feet. 1895 . . . 2,578,996 . • • 853 1896 . . . 2,171,922 ... 895 1897 . . . 1,926,292 . . . 897 1898 . . . 1,811,672 ... 917 1899 . . . i,597>495 ■ • • 937 These figures are again confirmed by the fact that whereas in 1895 only 2 per cent, of the wells were " deep" ones — i.e. over 1400 feet in depth — and gave only 5.4 per cent, of the total out- put, in 1899 over 10 per cent, of the wells were "deep," and gave over 29 per cent, of the total output. The conclusion is thus unavoidable that the upper levels of oil-strata are becoming exhausted, and that in the future the supply of petroleum from the Baku district will depend more and more upon deep borings, until these in their turn become exhausted, or the extreme depth possible for boring and pump- ing is reached. In other words, the approaching exhaustion of this great oil-field is unquestionably foreshadowed, though no man can foretell when this point will be reached. I happen to know, by the way, that Russian engineers have discovered another oil-field, which they believe to be of the highest value, in an entirely dilTerent district, at a considerable distance from Baku. For certain good reasons no particulars concerning this have yet been made public. It is also practically a cer- tainty that valuable oil-fields will be found in other parts of the Caucasus itself. I should say, however, though of course I speak entirely as a non-expert, that the above statistics and considerations deserve THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU 227 the careful attention of investors in oil-hearin^f properties at Baku. From Baku my way now lies across the Caspian Sea, and to tlie wild, world-famous towns of the heart of Asia, once so far away that a man could make a reputation by riding to one of them, now so intimately connected WMth the commerce of the world that the price of cotton is telegraphed to them every morning from Liverpool. CENTRAL ASIA CHAPTER XVI THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY : ACROSS CENTRAL ASIA BY TRAIN NOT many years ago — since a middle-aged man left college, in fact — a journey to the heart of Central Asia involved several curious preliminaries. P'irst of all, making a will, because the chances of your coming back again were slender. Second, a perfect colloquial knowledge of at least one Eastern language. Third, an Oriental cast of countenance, and much skill in disguising it. Fourth, a most unusual love of adventure and stock of personal courage. For you were going to places as suspicious as Mecca, as hostile to the stranger as Thibet, as fanatical as nowhere else, and amongst other things you were running the risk of a fate unequalled in sheer horror in the whole wide world, namely, being eaten alive by vermin trained for the purpose. The qualifications mentioned above were pos- sessed by Arminius Vambery, which accounts for his successful journey and safe return, and the fate alluded to was suffered by our countrymen Stoddart and Conolly in the 'forties. Nowadays the undertaking is simpler and less perilous. To begin with, you apply to the Russian authorities for special per- mission to travel in the Trans-Caspian military district. Usually they accord it ; if they do not, you don't go. Supposing they do, you betake yourself to Baku, by the route you have read about here, or some other ; you drive down in the evening to the wharf of the Caucasus and Mercury Steamship Company — stopping on the way, if you have the proper traveller's foresight, to buy a thousand cigarettes, a bottle of something for strictly medical THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 229 use, and a dozen tins of sardines ; you take a ticket for Krasno- vodsk, and a perspiiinj^ Persian carries your luggage on board a sturdy little paddle-boat, built thirty years ago on the Tyne. If you are lucky, you travel with the same captain that I did, who knows about as much French as you know Russian, but whose geniality is wholly independent of any philological basis ; you Tin-; i,.\M>iN(;-siA(;i-: at kkasn(i\ have a jovial little supper with him ; you turn into a comfortable cabin ; and some time after you are asleep the ship paddles out into the blue Caspian, her nose turned toward the rising sun. Not much danger so far, and disguise superfluous. Eighteen hours is the allotted time for the sea-crossing, and in fine weather it is enough. Coming back we took forty, for there was a wind and sea that at times made us think it would have been safer, after all, to be in old-fashioned Central Asia, to say nothing of the man we lost overboard. Going East, however, the Caspian was like a pond, and on the crowded decks, with their conspicuous division of quarters for "Men," "Women," and 230 ALL THE RUSSIAS " Persians," happiness reigned, and everybody ate sunflower- seeds and brewed tea. The oily reek of Baku was far behind the Caspian was as still as a lake, and at last the little paddle-boat turned sharply round a sand-spit and brought into view a hun- dred flat white houses, scattered at the foot of converging bare brown hills, like a few crystals of sugar at the bottom of a brown cup, and we were at Krasnovodsk — " Red Water," though why so called I cannot tell, for there is no fresh water there at r\llii.\ A'l KRAsN(j\OI)SK all, except what they produce every day in the big distillery, and the sea is a deep Italian blue. Here, according to some authorities, in bygone ages the mighty Oxus emptied itself into the sea, so that from Peter the Great's time till now there has always been a project of bringing it back to its old bed. The town is new, for the original starting- point of the Trans-Caspian Railway was at Uzun-Ada, farther to the south, in a bay which proved unsuitable for shipping. Mud- brown mountains hem it closely round ; not a green leaf or a drop of fresh water is in sight, the place is as burnt and dry as the inside of a baker's oven. And in November a hot and daz- zling sun is still beating down into it ! The long, handsome white THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 231 stone building, of consistent Oriental architecture, is the railway station, for Russia lays solidly and artistically the foundation- stones of her empire, no matter how remote they may be, and there stands the train, all white, ready for its incredible journey. The next most conspicuous building is the distillery, which sup- plies both the town and the line, and the next is a sort of military depot, half barracks and half prison— a halting-place between Europe and Asia for soldiers and convicts alike. No foreigner, as I have said, lands at Krasnovodsk without special permission ; Russia watches all strangers on her frontiers — and England's — hereabouts. Mine was obtained from St. Petersburg through the British Foreign Office before I started. Thewooden pier was crowded withciviliansand porters — Persian hamals — and, where the steamer was to touch, a group of uni- formed police stood, with a military band behind them. When we were within a few yards the music struck up, and as soon as the gang-plank was in position the chief of police came aboard, and nobody else. The captain awaited him. Were there any foreigners on board ? One — myself. My name ? An official list was produced from a portfolio and consulted. Pozhahiista ! — " If you please" — and I was politely invited ashore. In St. Peters- burg it is the official pleasure to smile when you speak of special permission being necessary for the Trans-Caspian Railway. They take it seriously enough at Krasnovodsk. I may add that after this original formality — with the single exception of the Chief of Police, an army Colonel at Askhabad, who curtly summoned me to his office and kept me waiting for an hour and a half, and then charged me before all his subordinates with being in Central Asia without permission, the fact being that not only had I special per- mission but also the highest official letters of personal introduc- tion to all the principal authorities — I received the greatest possible courtesy and assistance from the Russian officials every- where, a courtesy going so far on one occasion as a mounted torchlight escort of Cossacks. It is, however, but natural that 232 ALL THE RUSSIAS the Russians should be ready to show what they have done in Central Asia. They have every reason to be proud of it. On the Trans-Caspian Railway there are two kinds of train — the train and the post-train. And the difference between them is that the latter has a restaurant-car and the former has not. The post-train has an extra passenger-carriage, and the train has sev- eral freight-cars, but the speed is the same and the discomfort is the same. For what the Russian railway service gives you in extra comfo'-t on the magnificent Siberian Express, it takes out of you in exira fatigue and dirt on the Trans-Caspian. The train that awaited me was the post-train and con- sisted of hve corridor carriages, the last be- ing a restaurant-car all of them painted white. The lender of the engine was an oil- tank, and behind ir, on a fiat truck, was an enormous wooden tub, to hold water, THE TRANS-CASPIAN TRAIN ' ' for in Central Asia there is little fuel, and water is the most precious commodity that exists. But a glance at the train raised a most painful suspicion, which a visit to the ticket-office confirmed — there is not a first-class carriage on the Trans-Caspian Railway ! It was not snobbery which evoked one's consternation at this disco verv. A thousand miles of a slow, hot, dusty journey lay before me, and even in European Russia the prospect of a thousand miles in a second-class carriage would be farfrom pleasant, while in Central Asia, with ample experience in other lands of what a native crowd is, it was appalling. Let me say at once that it more than ful- filled all my expectations. The ordinary second-class, too, has THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 233 narrow, flat wooden seats, with thin, hard cushions spread on them. After a couple of nights ©n one of these you are stiff for a week. There is a carriage which has stuffed seats, but it is half second and half third, and the toilette arrangements are all in the third-class half. Moreover, in the stuffed cashions are passengers without number who pay no fare. 1 still wriggle as I think of those carriages, for on one never-to-be-forgotten stage I became perforce what a recent Act of Parliament calls a " verminous per- son." Now, to go unwashed is bad, but to share your washing with third-class Russian Asiatic passengers is not only worse— it is impossible. P^u-thermore, while the railway authorities have separate third-cla^-s carriages for Europeans and natives, the second class is open to both. Their idea probably was that the higher fare would deter the native passenger, but this is far from beingthe case,so prosperous has the sedentary Sart becomeunder Russian rule. Therefore your carriage is invaded by a host of natives with their innumerable bundles, their water-pots and their tea-pots, then- curiosity and their expectoration. They do not understand the unwritten law which reserves to you the seat you have once occupied ; they dump themselves and their belongings anywhere, and they are very difficult to detach ; they are entirely amiable; they follow your every movement for hr^urs with an unblinking curiosity ; and they smell strong. I hope I have noth- ing but goodwill for my Eastern fellow-man,and I assuredly often find him more interesting than peoplewith white skins, but I have the greatest objection to passing days and nights crowded close with him in an overheated railway carriage. And if I expatiate somewhat upon this minor topic it is because the Trans-Caspian railway journey is such a remarkable experience and affords such rare and vast interests, that everybody who can afford the time and money should take it, and the [Russian authorities should do all in their power to make the actual travelling as tolerable as possible. As things are at present, I should not advise any lady to come who is not prepared for some of the most personally 234 ALL THE RUSSIAS objectionable sides of "roughing it." Prince Hilkoff, however, Minister of Railways, is so prompt to make any improvement or to inaugurate any new enterprise that if this plaint should meet his eye it may well be that no future traveller will have occasion to make it. There is also one other little matter which calls for attention. Formerly the train at Krasnovodsk waited for the steamer from Baku. Now the local railway authority causes it to start precisely at three, even if the steamer is coming into harbour. So it has happened that the train has started with- out a single passenger, while the wretched people arriving by steamer have had to pass twenty-three hours in some railway carriages, there being nothing of the nature of an hotel at Krasnovodsk. Such an absurdity should be corrected, but the fact that there is a railway here at all is so marvellous that every other consideration is insignificant beside it. There is a strange medley on the platform before we start. Crowds of ragged porters, jostling and jabbering in Persian and broken Russian, and carrying huge bundles of native luggage tied in carpets ; a few civilians — merchants and commercial tra- vellers ; Armenian " drummers," sharp and swarthy, for Persian firms; a score of officers in various uniforms; several soldiers sweating in heavy grey overcoats — they badly need a bath — and old, patched breeches of red morocco leather ; three officers in the handsome green and gold of iht pogranichnaya strazlia, the frontier guards, soldiers and customs-officers in one ; specimens of most of the natives of Central Asia ; and myself, the only foreigner. There are no fewer than eleven parallel lines of rail, for either military purposes or freight accommodation, as maybe needed. At three o'clock we start, and between the bare brown hills and the still blue sea the train runs slowly along for hours. It carries, as I said, its oil-fuel, and its water in a huge wooden tank on a truck behind the engine, for the country is a desert, andthestationsaremerely the little white houses of the employees, appearing as specks in the wilderness. The low indented coast- THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY ^2>S line, within a few yards of our ri<^lit, reminds me of the Mediter- ranean coast, between Marseilles and Nice, but here there are in every bay thousands of white-breasted ducks. For twenty-five miles the line runs across an absolutely barren plain ; sunset linds us traversing a salty waste, dotted with scanty bushes, and when I look out of the window in the middle of the night, a bright moon shines on the same desolate scene. But at eight o'clock next GEOK TEPE, THE Ol.li kAMi-AKIs AM) IIIK ,\h:\V RAILWAY morning comes a sudden thrill. Over a little station are written the magic words " Geok Tepe," and I rush out to see if any- thing remains to tell of the terrible battle and more terrible slaughter of 1881. Sure enough, on the opposite side of the line, only fifty yards away, is the whole story, and luckily the train is accidentally delayed long enough to enable me to make a hasty visit to the historic spot. It is a rectangular fortress, a thousand yards square, formed by a high and thick earthen wall and rampart. The sides are rid- dled with bullet-holes — not a square yard is untouched, while scores of gaps in the top show where shells have burst. Several complete breaches gape wide, and one whole corner is gone — that is where the mine exploded, giving both the signal and the occasion for the final attack. Here raged for three whole 236 ALL THE RUSSIAS weeks an almost uninterrupted battle, fought by both sides with a ferocious courage never surpassed in history; here Skobelef, and Kuropatkin under him, won their greatest laurels; here Russia became mistress of Trans-Caspia ; here died a gallant and an interesting race. TheTekke Turkomans first drove back the Russian General Lomakin ; then they completely routed Lazaref at this very spot, and swept in triumph over the whole country. For two years Skobelef made his preparations, and on Jan- uary I, 1881, he delivered his first attack upon this Turkoman stronghold with 8000 troops and more than fifty guns. Inside was the flower of the Turkoman race, with 7000 women and children. Their felt tents were set on fire by petroleum bombs, artillery rained shell and shrapnel on them, gradually the trenches drew nearer ; but they fought with a desperation which kept the Russians at bay for three weeks, and on more than one occasion they routed the invaders in a hand-to-hand struggle and slashed them to death in their own trenches, leaving Russian heads and limbs scattered about. But the inevitable end came, and the slauf^hter of every male left in the fortress, and, after it, that ter- rible Cossack pursuit of flying men and women for ten miles. Opinions differ as to this part of the struggle. What is certain is, that never since that time has a Turkoman hand been raised against Russia, nor ever will be. If you would strike only once, and thus be more merciful in the end, you must strike hard, was Skobelef's motto in dealing with (Orientals, as it has been that of all who have understood the Eastern character. Trans-Caspia has been aspeaceful as paradise since then. But Turkoman brides cost few cattle for many years, as all the bridegrooms lay beneath Geok Tepe, and the knell of the Turkoman, so hospitable to strangers, so terrible in his raids, so devoted to his proud steed, so independent and gay in his moving home, was sounded. He died as he had lived, and the stone crosses in the gaps in his fortress wall tell how many Russians, as fearless as himself, went with him where brave dead soldiers go. THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 237 With a natural desire to perpetuate the memory of their own victories, the Russians have built between therailway station and the nuns a pretty little museum of white stone. In front of it stands a Turkoman cannon, captured by them from the Persians in one of their innumerable raids. This has its glorious story, too, for though it was mounted on the ramparts of Geok Tepe the Turkomans did not know how to use it, and, having captured some Russian artillerymen, they ordered them to fire it on their own comrades, or be slaughtered on the spot. The Russians loy- ally chose death. In the museum are portraits of Skobelef and the other commanders, and a collection of Turkoman guns and swords — poor tools against artillery and petroleum bombs, throw- ing the bravery of these nomad horsemen into still higher relief. I ran up the rough earthen steps leading to the shattered ram- parts and looked through them at the busy station, the white train, and the groups of officers strolling up and down the platform. It was the advance of Russia at a glance. For some time now we have had the mountains to our right, and the country has become more populated, though theherbage is still thin, and long strings of camels wind across the plain. The Turkoman mud houses are hardly visible, but the villages of Khirghiz kihitkas, round felt tents, make picturesque groups. There is neither cuttmg nor embankment, the line being simply laid upon the surface of the plain. When General Annenkof was building it, with almost superhuman energy and a confident en- thusiasm which events have more than justified, everything re- quired — rails, sleepers, men, food, water, protection — had to be moved forward by a train always following the railhead. Even to-day a large proportion of the stopping-places are j ust stations, and nothing else — a house, a storehouse embedded in the ground as a protection against both heat and cold, a well, built round with sloping stones and planted around with trees — the p 238 ALL THE RUSSIAS only trees in the landscape, a few shaggy black cattle, and often, too, a little unfenced cemetery in the open desert, with half a dozen wooden crosses to mark its site. The station-master and his family who live in these houses have no nearer neigh- bours than their fellow-officials at the stations on either side of them, and no connection with the world except by the one passenger train daily in each direction, whose arrival is the chief daily event at every place. At Askhabad, the administra- tive centre of Trans-Caspia, where we arrived an hour and a half after leaving Geok Tepe, a military band played us in, a crowd was waiting on the platform, and an officer of gendarmes, recognising me as a foreigner, became anxious and made many pointed inquiries. East and West mingled here in curious fashion — elegant ladies escorted by smart officers, alongside big Turkomans in mulberry-coloured dressing-gowns and enor- mous hats of shaggy black sheepskin, their bare feet thrust into thick leather shoes. From Askhabad a carriage road of one hundred and seventy miles runs across the Persian frontier to Meshed, a town of the greatest interest to the two rival nations of Asia. It has a flourish- ing trade with Russia, Afghanistan, and thence with India and Bokhara. After Mecca and Kerbela (near Baghdad) it is the holiest goal of Moslem pilgrims, of whom 100,000 are said to visit the tomb of the hnani Reza every year. The Persian schis- matic Mohammedans have their headquarters there in a mosque whose doors are studded with rubies, and whose library contains over a thousand Korans. But far more important than either commerce or creed. Meshed "the Holy" is only one hundred and ninety-five miles from Herat as the crow flies, and a road two hundred and thirty miles long connects the prosperous Per- sian town and the Afghan fortress supposed to be the key to the invasion of India. Therefore Russia and England keep very active rival intelligence departments there and struggle diplo- matically for influence. The proximity of Meshed has perhaps THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 239 something to do with the fact that Askhabad is the mihtary centre of this part of Russian Central Asia, with a garrison of 10,000 men and stores of every kind on a war footing. A few years ago the tea and indigo of India used to supply Central Asia from this centre, but when Russia became paramount here her first care was to destroy British trade by excessive duties and even direct prohibition, and in this task she has been only too successful. After Askhabad the desert once more, till at last cultivated, irrigated land appears, and at each little station is a great heap of bales of cotton, for the harvest has just been gathered, await- ing transport. It has come for the most part on camels, and while their owners chat these are tethered in a quaint manner, tied nose and tail in a vicious circle, so that each is fast between two others. Midway in the burnt plain is a magnificent old fort- ress, its good preservation telling how few years have passed since these same plains held the wild life of immemorial time. A belt of fertile land extends for fifteen miles from these moun- tains to the south, deliciously green in spring, but now only covered with dwarfed scrub — tamarisk, I think. In summer the heat is terrible, rising to 155 at midday, and even now, in mid-November, one is glad to get out of the sun. At nine o'clock at night and 556 miles from our starting- point, another sensation. Most readers will remember how the word " Merv " once rang through England, thanks to O'Donovan and Marvin and Vambery, as the possible cause of war with Russia, whose absorption of Central Asia brought her here in 1884 — just a year before Parliament, at Glad- stone's behest, voted ^£'1 1,000,000 of war-money at a sitting in view of Russia's next step south ; how the fears of some people that Russia meant to seize it, and beyond it, all Central Asia, gave rise to the sarcastic adjective " mervousness " ; how Russia assured us that she did not mean to take it ; how she took it soon afterwards ; and how she built from it a line with no other 240 ALL THE RUSSIAS possible object but, should need arise, to hurry troops toward India. Well, the train slackens speed on the second evening, draws up to a long platform full of brilliant uniforms whose wearers are escorting elegant ladies, u^hile a band strikes up a gay tune, and your window stops exactly opposite the word " Merv" over the central doorway. You cannot quite believe it. But it is a fact, for the whole oasis of Merv, one of the most fertile spots in the world, is as Russian as Riga, and when you say " Merv " in Central Asia you mean a long, low, neat stone railway station, lit by a score of bright lamps in a row, where the train changes engines, while in a busy telegraph-office a dozen operators sit before their clicking instruments ; and if you are a Russian officer or official you mean also a brand-new town where a pestilent malarial fever is sure to catch you sooner or later, and very likely to kill you. But Merv has long ceased to be a Russian boundary, for in the dark you can see a branch line of railway stealing south- ward across the plain. This is the famous Murghab Branch, the strategical line of one hundred and ninety miles along the river to the place the Russians call Kushkinski Post, close to the frontier of Afghanistan, a short distance from Kushk itself and only eighty miles from Herat.* The Russians keep this line absolutely secret, no permission to travel by it having ever been granted to a foreigner. My own permission for Central Asia read, "With the exception of the Murghab Branch." This line is purely strategic and military. Neither trade nor agriculture is served by it ; nor would anybody ever buy a ticket by it, if it were open to all the world, as it may be before long. Moreover, it runs through such a fever-haunted district that Rus- sian carpenters, who can earn two roubles a day on it, throw up the job and go back to earn fifty kopecks at home. The line is * This line has since been prolonged a few miles to Chahel Dokhteran, on the very frontier, and a branch is building through Penjdeh to Maruchak, where the Murghab River crosses the frontier. THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 241 simply a deliberate military measure aj^ainst Great Britain. It serves at present only the purpose of facilitating the invasion of India, or rather of enabling Russia to squeeze England by pre- tending to prepare the lirst steps of an invasion of India, when- ever such a pretence may facilitate her diplomacy in Europe. In simple truth, it places Herat at her mercy. The Merv-Kushk line, I may add, is now completed, and two regular trains a week run over it, at the rate of something less than ten miles an A GLASS OF TEA WHILE TlIK TKALN STOPS hour, reaching the Afghan frontier terminus in eighteen hours. The country on both sides of it is a desert, with tufts of hardy scrub. Wild pig abound, and pheasants, of which this country is the original home. The fever I have spoken of attacks a man suddenly, the spleen swells, he turns as yellow as in jaun- dice, becomes unconscious on the second day, and then recovers or dies. Those working on the railway say that recovery de- pends upon whether there is a train immediately after the attack to take you to the hospital at Merv. If you have just missed the bi-weekly train, you die. But the epidemic will doubtless 242 ALL THE RUSSIAS diminish in frequency and in virulence as there is less necessity to dig up the ground. In the East — even at Hongkong, for instance — stirring of the soil almost always produces illness. Armenians, the pioneers of trade in this part of the world, are trying to open up trade at Kushk Post, but hitherto w^ith little success. From the Russian post the Afghan frontier is visible, and the Russian sentries can be discerned with the naked eye. There is one line of them on the top ridge of the hills, and another upon the slope beyond. Beyond these are the Afghan posts, Kushkinski Post itself consists of about a score of houses, with something like fifty white inhabitants, apart from soldiers. There are no white women in the settlement, and nothing like an hotel. The officers have established a little military club, where they take their meals. During the great heat of summer, ice, or rather snow, is brought regularly by train. At first the only fortification, 1 was told, consisted of a series of detached ram- parts, within which the artillery was quartered. The infantry and Cossack barracks, and the ofKcers' quarters — little grey one- storey houses — are in the town. A temporary line of rails, how'- ever, had been laid down from the main line to convey material for building a second fort, on the right of the terminus, and two hundred labourers had been brought — which meant that the garrison was to be increased. There is also a considerable rail- way workshop, and a depot, where presumably rails, &c.,are kept in readiness for a hast}- prolongation of the line — precisely as is the case at our own terminus on the Indian frontier. I read, by the way, in a recent work, that the relations of the Russians and the Afghans are very friendly. The contrary is the case. Russians described the Afghans to me as " very dangerous," and told me that it had happened more than once that Russian officers out shooting had accidentally crossed the boundary and been pursued by armed Afghans. The Afghan posts let nobody pass, and no trade, and there is no custom-house of any kind. THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 243 Allo<^ether, this particular I'Jussian outpost of Empire must be about as disaj^reeable a place of exile as can be imagined — which is precisely what officers who have been stationed there say about it. Of course, I did not myself see any of the things I have mentioned, but they were matters of common conversation with my acquaintances in the train. Most interestingof all, however, as one standshere on the edge of the platform and looks down the few hundred yards of this mysterious Merv-Kushk line visible in the dark, is to reflect that if the future brings war between England and Russia its roaring tide will flow over these very rails for the invasion of India, and that if it brings peace this will be a station on the through line between Calais and Kandahar. Some day surely, though it may be long, long hence, and only when tens of thousands of Russian and British soldier-ghosts are wandering through the shades of Walhalla, the traveller from London will hear on this very platform the cry, " Change here for Calcutta ! " For some time after Merv the train passes through this world- famed oasis, then for more than fifty miles it traverses the heart- breaking desert of sand. Central Asia, in fact, as one views it from the train, is a desert broken by oases. Where a river descends from the mountains on the south, and is caught and measured and allotted and distributed till it sometimes disappears alto- gether in the sands, there is fertility — luxurious vegetations and enormous crops, such fertility, indeed, as hardly exists else- where. The moment the irrigated area is passed, the burnt desert begins again, where nothing grows but stunted tamarisk and the prickly camel's thorn — indeed, for hour after hour one often sees not even these poor struggles after plant life. Here", on either side, as far as the eye reaches, is a yellow plain of ribbed sand. The earth has surely nothing more dreary to show, and it is dangerous, too, for the wind blows it up and over the track, 244 ALL THE RUSSIAS and at the best, companies of men must sweep it away, while at the worst it chokes the locomotive and brings the train to a standstill. Sometimes the whole service of the railway is sus- pended by such a wind. The only help is found in the saxaul, a stunted, gnarled bush whose twisted roots bind the sand together as osiers bind mud. This being so, I was astonished A MYSTERY IN TRANS-CASPIA— TURKOMANS EXAMININC THE TRAIN to see that the fuel in the stoves of the train was heaps of tangled saxaul roots and branches. By-and-by vegetation begins again — timidly at first, but soon luxuriously, for we are on the edge of the most wonderful river in the world, not excepting the Nile. At the station which now bears the name of the river, Amu Darya, but used to be called Charjui, one hundred and fifty miles beyond Merv, we halt for twenty-five minutes, and then creep forw-ard at a snail's pace. At first by close-packed mud-houses, deep in tropical vegetation, then out upon a wooden bridge over long mud flats, then, barely moving at all, over the Amu Darya — the mighty and immortal I'HE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 245 Oxus itself. The bridife is :i narrow, low way, upon trestles and piles, but it is one of Ihc engineering wonders of the world, for it is a mile and three-quarters long, the river runs fast over its deep mud, and every balk of timber — there are 3300 piles in the river-bed alone — had to be brought from Russia down the Volga and then transported these seven hundred miles by rail. It is as dry as tinder, for rain is almost unknown here. Every quarter of a mile there is a fire station, with a great cistern of water and buckets, over which stands a sentry with fixed bayonet. Fire is the nightmare of the guardians of the bridge, but though I am not of a nervous temperament I must confess I was much more afraid of water — the dashing, swirling, coffee-coloured water below, between us and which was such a narrow, slender support of twelve years old wood, every single timber creaking against its neighbour in a sickening fashion. Without exaggera- tion, I should not have been surprised if the whole thing had collapsed in an instant, and I was glad to see the solid ground imderneath once more. The authorities seem to share this fear, for our speed was the slowest at which the engine could move at all. And, in spite of the great cost and the emptiness of the Russian official pocket just now, they are working with utmost speed upon a new bridge a quarter of a mile to the north. A number of huge iron cylindrical piers are in place, a dozen engines are puffing, huge heaps of dressed stones and limbers lie about, and an army of men is at work, I saw this scene for the first time at sunrise, and I count that among the most impressive moments of my life. These waters rise mysteriously in the "Roof of the World " ; for 1500 miles they roll through the land which has been the scene of the most marvellous human episodes ; they were looked upon by the first of mankind, for the cradle of our race was there, and they have qualified the schemes of many of the greatest ; the legions of Alexander and Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane drank at them ; we hear of them at the beginning of Genesis, and they may well yet 246 ALL THE RUSSIAS be one of the pathways of the last great war of human history. The railway jars sadly upon one's thoughts of such a scene. One feels vulgar to pass through the heart of Asia, the mother of peoples, to the accompaniment of the restaurant-car and the con- ductor's whistle. The Turkoman, silent in his dignity, wrapped in reserve as in his flowing garments, looking upon the invading stranger and his iron modernitieswith inscrutable eyes — it is with him, and like him, that one would wish to journey here, and learn and wonder. Most welcome, therefore, comes the recollection of Matthew Arnold's noble lines upon these immemorial waters: But the majestic river floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into tlie frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste. Under the solitary moon ; — he flow'd Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,='- Brimming, and bright, and large ; then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents ; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.f By breakfast time we are running amid houses and fields and trees, with dignified Bokharans on horseback everywhere in sight. And now the great names of Asia follow fast. Seventy miles beyond the Oxus, and seven hundred and eighty altogether, bring us to Bokhara. A neat, stone-built station like Merv, but larger, a long row of droschkies outside, and a little town of new white houses — that is all the passing traveller sees. The old Bokhara, "■ Khiva. f " Sohrab and Rustum." THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 247 "the noble," the seat of the learning of Asia nearly a thousand years ago, and always tiie home of its most savage bigotry, the city with a connected history of more than twelve hundred years, is eight miles away in the fertile land, while the station itself is in the desert. When they brought the railway the Russians were still afraid of the fanatical Bokharans; now they wish they had run their line past the very gates of the city. On the platform a native barber is rapidly shaving heads with a huge hatchet-shaped razor. A woman completely hidden in a dark blue garment sits with her face to the wall, while her husband arranges cushions and washes grapes, and then they proceed to a breakfast of fruit and flapjacks. The Turkoman head-dress of shaggy sheepskin has wholly disappeared, and in place of it there are big burly Bokharans in enormous white tuibans and khalats of flowered and striped cotton over their tunics, their feet in elegant green- heeled morocco boots, and these tucked into a couple of pairs of slippers, one over the other. They crowd into the train the moment it stops, mostly into the second class (remember there is no first class), and make themselves very much at home. All their belongings come in with them, packed — including, in every case, a long-necked copper water-bottle — in a pair of car- pet saddle-bags slung oveir their shoulder. The native passen- gers leave the train, and, squatting down a few yards beyond the track, perform their ceremonial ablutions and pray toward Mecca. Then they go over to the melon-sellers and return with an enormous water-melon to make a pickaninnygape with envy, and this they proceed to eat in the carriage. These people have never been crushed like the Turkomans ; their independence is still nominally preserved to them, for their own Amir can have their throats cut in the bazaar at his pleasure, and their looks and actions are therefore those of free men. They behave, in fact, as if the train belonged to them, and the unfortunate foreigner is crushed in his corner — if he has been lucky enough to keep a corner — by mere weight of humanity. 248 ALL THE RUSSIAS The flocks of sheep and goats are the most striking feature of the landscape as we proceed, and among the latter are huge billy-goats, as big as a pony and twice as thick, with horns a yard long tossing over them. Then come the first really cultivated fields we have seen, surrounded by low mud walls, some under water and all cleverly irrigated, with winter rice or corn just coming up. After a while the water-supply stops — not a blade can be grown in this country without irrigation, therefore the water-supply is subject to the most rigorous supervision and scrupulous distribution, what Matthew Arnold calls " the shorn and parcell'd Oxus," in a line as remarkable for its exact accu- racy as for its perfect music — the desert regains its sway, and for hours w^e pass over an absolutely flat plain, unbroken at an horizon, without a living thing upon it but tufts of coarse grass a few inches high. Then gradually signs of the neighbourhood of a river reappear, willows and alders and big trees like maples, irrigation channels, planted fields, winter crops just green above the surface. Ruined strongholds, similar to those one sees in the Balkans, where a whole village had to be ready to run for safety against Turkish marauders, tell their own tale of the rich life hereabouts and the state of society in years long past. Some of these little castles are now inhabited by villagers, and some are in almost perfect preservation, walls, gates, towers, crene- lated battlements and all. At half-past seven, nine hours after leaving Bokhara, and 934 miles from the Caspian, the train stops, and opposite my window is the magic name " Samarkand," redo- lent of the East and its roses, the city which Tamerlane made the Asiatic Athens, alike for the renown of its learning and the magnificence of its monuments. A glimpse of a wooden town in a park of verdure, a twenty minutes' halt, a capital meal in the restaurant, and we are off again. Of course, I lingered in these famous cities on my return — now^ I go straight through. Five hours later we are at the junction of Chernayevo, where the line divides, one branch going northward to Tashkent, the THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 249 other continuing eastward to Andijan, in the heart of the cot- ton country. At hist, sixty-six hours and 1153 miles from Krasnovodsk, the train stops for good, in the lieart of Asia, at the large, handsome station of Tashkent, the administrative centre of Turkestan and the residence of the Governor-General of the whole Trans-Caspian region. The following condensed time-lable will show the reader this journey— the most remarkable train-journey in the world — at a iilance : \iiLi-:s. STATKiN. IIOl i; ui- .\uKivAi Krasnovodsk . (departure) 3.00 P.M. 208 Kizil-Arvat 2.36 A.M. 343 Askhabad 9-45 A.M. 556 Merv .... g.io P.M. 574 Hairani-Ali 10.25 P-^'- 706 Amu- Darya (Charjui) 5.07 A.M. 780 Bokhara .... 10.04 A.M. 886 Katti- Kurgan . 4.40 P.M. 934 Samarkand 7.30 P.M. 1005 Jisak . . . . 11.40 P.M. 1059 Chernayevo 2.55 A.M. 1 1 53 Tashkent. 8.40 A.M. 1059 Chernayevo (departure) 4.00 A.M. iioS Khodjcnt. 6.45 A.M. 1177 Kokand .... 10.55 A.M. 1226 Marge! an 2.ig P.M. 1261 Andijan .... 5.15 P.M. The principal stations are thus sixteen, but the total num- ber of stations is ninety-six — seventy-seven to the junction of Chernayevo, five to Tashkent on the northern branch, and four- teen to Andijan on the eastern branch. The total length of the railway, including both branches, is 2053 versts — 1355 miles — and the average speed, from Krasnovodsk, the starting-point on the Caspian, to Tashkent, the northern terminus, including all stoppages, is seventeen and one-half miles an hour. But ex- 250 ALL THE RUSSIAS eluding the eight scheduled stops, amounting to two hours and .twenty-five minutes, and allowing three minutes at each of the other stations, the actual average speed while running works out at over twenty miles an hour — a highly creditable performance and much superior to that of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Merely as a railway the Trans-Caspian is in no way extraor- dinary. Except for the absence of labour, timber, and water, which necessitated a rolling camp following upon the heels of BKEAD-SELLERS AT A STATION the working party, and the passage of the sand desert, it pre- sented no difficulties, and the only engineering exploit is the bridge over the Oxus. But, as I said at the beginning, the as- tounding fact is that it is here at all. It was begun on June 30, 1885 ; Merv was reached in July 1886 ; the Amu-Darya in June 1887 ; the bridge, 4600 yards long, was opened for traffic in January 1888; Samarkand reached in May 1888 ; and Tash- kent soon afterward. Thus twenty years ago it was not thought of as it exists to-day ; the notion of it was even strenuously repu- diated by Russian statesmen when England grew nervous about THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 253 their intentions. Twenty-five years ago Samarkand and Tash- kent were only to be reached by adventurous travellers carry- ing their lives in their hands ; Bokhara was as dangerous and as inaccessible as the capital of Thibet is to-day; Andijan was un- heard of ; England would not have tolerated for a moment the idea of the absorption of all Central Asia by Russia. Now Russia has it all — for ever, beyond the possibility of internal revolt or external attack; you **book" to Kokand as easily as to Kent or Kentucky ; you are as safe there as in Calcutta or Colorado ; the raihvay has brought Russian troops once more close to the frontier of China, and actually to the frontier of Afghanistan ; most wonderful of all, this line, planned and carried out as a purely military work, is already paying its way handsomely, and has been transferred from military to civil administrators. And it has brought peace and commerce and civilisation, as Russia understands the word, to a vast region where so few years ago utter barbarism reigned. The military advantages it confers are too great and too conspicuous to call for mention. It is a daring enterprise, magnificently executed. Physical difficulties and diplomatic obstacles have been alike overcome or disregarded. Moreover, it is but the beginning of what is to be in this part of the world. No thoughtful foreigner can make the journey without conceiving a profound admira- tion of Russia's courage and a profound respect for her powers. Russians have every right to be proud of their Trans-Caspian conquest and its symbol, the railway ; for the rest of the world it is half a dozen object-lessons in one. CHAPTER XVII RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA THE railway which Russia has pushed forward through the region of tropic heat has worked a revohition not less than that which she has thrust across the region of Arctic cold. Indeed the Trans-Caspian Railway has accomplished more than the Trans-Siberian, for whereas the remotest districts of Siberia have been accessible for generations to anybody who had time and endurance enough to undertake a journey of many weeks in tarantass or sleigh, Central Asia a few years ago was hermetically sealed except to the courageousfew who, knowingthe languages, were prepared to penetrate it in disguise, at the risk of torture and death, beyond the reach of any possible succour or rescue in case of mishap. Moreover, in Siberia, there was always river transport in summer, slow, but cheap and safe ; in Central Asia the camel was the only carrier. Therefore the Trans-Caspian Railway was destined by nature to have a revolutionary effect, and this has been even more than was foreseen. Not to burden these pages with figures, I may say that in 1885, two years before the railway reached Samarkand, the total imports and exports of the province of Turkestan amounted to 40,475 tons, while in 1896, after the railway had been in operation eight years, they had risen to 159,229 tons, and the increase is pro- ceeding rapidly and steadily. In 1897, ^^^ district of Andijan alone exported 19,000 tons of cotton, and along the eastern portion of the line I saw acres and acres of bales awaiting ship- ment, while everywhere I heard complaints of the insufficiency of rolling stock to meet the demands of growers. Yet the line itself is laid as in Russia, except for the first hundred miles, RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 255 where the rails are tlie old light ones originally laid to Uzun- Ada ; the roadway is solidly ballasted ; and the speed, as I have shown, is good. The income from freight and passengers is not yet enough, of course, to pay interest on the whole capital expenditure, but it more than pays all working ex- penses, and for the rest Russia has the enormous strategical advantages it gives her, and the certainty that the pecuniary re- turns will be greater every year. The gross receipts for 1899 were £^C)0 — say $3000 — per mile, and the total movement of freight 376,000 tons. Russia is not satisfied, however, with the brilliant results she has achieved — British trade, once so flourishing, driven from Cen- tral Asia ; a great domestic trade created ; Trans-Caspia, Bokhara, Turkestan closely connected with European Russia ; a railway station placed upon the Afghan frontier; and the rich province of Khorassan as good as annexed. As usual, it is a supposed strategic necessity that is urging her on. At present, in the eyes of her strategists, the Trans-Caspian is an isolated railway. It depends upon the military district of the Caucasus alone. If a Russian army is'ever required in Central Asia — a possibility which every Russian strategist feels compelled to contemplate — it will be a great one, it will demand vast quantities of supplies behind it, and both men and uiatcrid will be w^anted quickly. Taking Mos- cow or Warsaw as the military centre of Russia, this movement would have to take place, as things are now, by the rail route of Rostof, Vladikavkaz, Petrofsk, Baku, thence across the Cas- pian, and another seven or eight hundred miles to where the troops were wanted — a long and costly journey, and without sufficient steamer accommodation on the Caspian Sea. By rail to Samara or Saratof, and thence down the Volga and across the Caspian to Baku, would be even longer in point of time. Why does Russia think her troops must be more quickly moved than either of these two routes would allow ? She know^s that she has no invasion from India to fear, and that, whether her forces were 256 ALL THE RUSSIAS gathered quickly or slowly, they would find the same mili- tary concentration awaiting them on the Indian frontier or in Afghanistan. The explanation is simple, and has recently been put forward in an almost semi-official manner in Russia.* It is an absolutely determined part of her policy to have an outlet on the Persian Gulf — to carry her south-western frontier to the warm water.f With her present railway system, however, she does not feel strong enough to meet the opposition that this step — practically the annexation of Persia — might provoke. The definite project * See "The Shortest Railway Route from Central Europe to Central Asia" (St. Petersburg, 1899) and R. E. C. Long, "Russian Railway Policy in Asia," Fortnightly Revieiv, December 1899. t It may be remarked that Russian writers have been for some time urging upon the Russian Government the necessity of pushing a railway to the Indian Ocean with - out delay. For instance, Professor Hermann Brunnhofer, of St. Petersburg, in a volume of essays called " Russia's Hand over Asia," published three years ago, advocated the seizure of the little Persian seaport of Bender Jesseh, near Ormuz, as an offset to the expected British occupation of Bender Abbas. He wrote : ' ' Bender Jesseh is, so to speak, the Russian Vladivostok on the Indian Ocean. If Western Siberia and Central Asia are not to be excluded from the great trade of the world in future, they must endeavour to come into direct communication with the Indian Ocean. Gigantic as the advantages are which the Siberian Railway will confer on the Russian Empire, it will in the future not be able to meet the still more gigantic demands which will be made upon it by international traffic, the produce of Russo- Siberianand Chinese soil, the industries, and the civil and military administrations. A second Pacific railway through Siberia, analogous to the three Pacific railways running through North America, is absolutely impossible. If Russia, therefore, wishes to, and will, safeguard the future, the centre of her Empire — viz. Western Siberia and Central Asia — she must, in the first instance, keep open the access to the Indian Ocean. The railway to Bender Jesseh will probably start from Askhabad, south-east, via Kotchan, to Meshed and Herat ; then curve westward to Birjand, cross the terrible Lut Desert, and reach Kerman. From here it will run to Bender Jesseh, after overcoming considerable difficulties. The harbour of this commercial town is good, and only open to south-east winds. The anchorage is five metres deep at oneand one-half kilometres distance from the shore, and eight metres deep at three kilometres distance. Bender Jesseh is connected by a regular weekly steamship service with Kurachi and Bombay on the east, and with Bushire and Busraonthe west." This railway, he added, would have its greatest value in rendering Russia "entirely independent of the Dardanelles and the Suez Canal." And in this connection it is a curious fact that Suez Canal shares fell when the concession for the Baghdad railway was announced. RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 257 of such a railway would (unless a preliminary agreement had been reached), precipitate hostile action by England ; it would in all probability cause a Mohammedan rising ; like the Trans-Cas- pian, the railway would be isolated from Europe, and moreover it would be open to military attack from Egypt and India. Most important consideration of all, Germany stands possessed dc jure of the right of which Russia is hurrying to become possessed (Ic fiicfo, namely, to build a railway connecting the present Euro- pean system with the Persian Gulf. Russia's fear is intense, therefore, that Germany, or England and Germany in co-opera- tion, will create direct transit between Europe and India, and will do this before she herself is in a position either to prevent it or to offer an alternative. For the Russian view is that the trade of the world is insufficient to support two railway connections between Europe and India, and that therefore whenever one such connection is made, any other becomes impossible. And this connection Russia has always been determined to have for her- self. The answer to the above question, therefore, is this : Russia is extremely anxious to extend her railway system in Central Asia, (i) to bring her military centres into direct connection with the Afghan and Persian frontiers, in view of possible hostilities with England ; (2) to secure for herself the future railway trade- route between Europe and India, by offering a shorter and cheaper line before the alternative route rm Baghdad is con- structed ; (3) by thus rendering the construction of this latter railway an unprofitable undertaking, to remove the one fatal obstacle to an ultimate port for herself upon the Persian Gulf ; (4) to develop further her own Central Asian territories. From a Russian point of view the reasons are certainly convincing. The German project is so important, in itself, as affecting the future of Russia in Central Asia, and as possibly compromising gravely the relations between the two Empires, that all students of foreign affairs are watching its development with great atten- tion, and I may pause a moment here to give a brief account of it. 258 ALL THE RUSSIAS From the time of the Armenian massacres, when Germany so conspicuously declined to join in any coercive measures, the relations of the Kaiser and the Sultan have grown steadily more intimate, as exhibited during the war with Greece, and in the former's triumphal visits to Constantinople and Jerusalem. The climax — assuredly foreseen and planned^ — came in the signature, in December 1899, of the concession to a German company of the right to build a railway across Asia Minor to Baghdad, with an obvious ultimate terminus in the great harbour of Koweit, at the head of the Persian Gulf. The Russian Ambassador had moved heaven and earth to prevent this concession being given to Germany, and a British syndicate had even offered to con- struct the line without any State guarantee at all. But so powerful was the combination of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, and Dr. von Siemens, the director of the Deutsche Bank, that they not only obtained the concession but also in it an undertaking from the Turkish Government to pay to the Company a kilometrical guarantee or subsidy of j^iooo per mile per annum — that is, a yearly payment in all of _^'240,ooo — .S^I, 200,000 ! This is the most striking diplo- matic success of modern times, and the rebuff to Russia is, of course, proportionate to the triumph of Germany. I say nothing of the rebuff to England ; the conduct of our foreign affairs of late has accustomed us to rebuffs. But it is worthy of remark that the final struggle for this great concession was taking place in Constantinople at the precise time when the Kaiser was in England and when the first startHng disaster of the Boer War had just occurred. The proposed railway is an extension of the line rapidly built and well worked by Germany, from Haidar-Pasha, on the Bos- phorus (where a German company has just been formed, with the Sultan's approval, to develop a harbour), via Ismid, Eskishehr, and Afiun kara-hissar, to Konia. The new line will proceed §oi;thward to Kerman^ at the foot of the Taurus Mountains^ then RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 259 skirt this range north-eastward to EregH, cross it by the famous pass to Adana (whence there is already a short EngHsh Hne to the Mediterranean), and proceed to Tell-ha-besh (with a branch to Aleppo), bridging the Euphrates at Europus, and via Mosul (near Nineveh), Tekrit, and Beled (with a branch to Khannikin, on the Persian frontier, whence a line might profitably be run via Kermanshahan, Aamadan, and Kum, to Tehran) to Baghdad. Thence the line will continue via Kerbela, Nedjef, and Busra, to Kozima, at the head of the magnificent harbour of Koweit, where there is to be a German naval coaling-station — four days' steam from Bombay ! To bring this railway into connection wuth European lines the Bosphorus is to be spanned by a bridge gratefully named after the present Sultan, and a recent well-in- formed anonymous writer calculates that Kozima will be reached in three and a half days from Constantinople, and ten days from Berlin. The length of the new railway will be 1750 miles, and according to the concession it is to be finished by 1907. But although the concession was signed two years ago, the first shovelful of earth has yet to be lifted^and for the very good reason that Turkey is utterly unable to pay the guarantee she has promised unless she is permitted by the Powers to increase her import duties from eight to eleven per cent., which, backed of course by Germany, she is now desirous of doing. But England has the preponderant share of Turkish trade, and therefore for her to consent to burden her trade in order that Germany may build a railway to rob her of an important trade- route is, as has been said, like asking her to contribute to the cost of the razor for cutting her own throat. The harbour of Koweit has just enjoyed a period of con- siderable diplomatic and naval prominence, unquestionably in connection with the development of the German scheme. In January 1900 it was visited by a German mission, accompanied by the German Consul-General in Constantinople, and several engineers, including the chief engineer of the Baghdad Rail- 26o ALL THE RUSSIAS way. This mission requested the Sheikh of Kovveit, Mubarek el Sabbah, /// tJie name of the Sitltan of Turkey, to cede to Ger- many the village of Kadne, on the northern shore of the Ko- weit inlet. The Sheikh declined to do so. Next, a Turkish force of 3000 men was collected at Busra, where Izzet Bey, said to be one of the Sultan's chief advisers upon Arabian affairs, had been spending several months, and in August last the Turkish corvette Sehah arrived at Koweit with some of this force on board, to occupy the place — a previous attempt to ■ smash Mubarek through his enemy Ibn el Rashid, Emir of Nejd, having failed. But when the Scliab reached Koweit she found a British gunboat already there, the commander of which prohibited her from landing troops, and a British naval force was promptly concentrated in the Gulf. In view of the relations of Turkey and Germany one need not be unduly suspicious to suppose that if the Sultan had succeeded in occupying Koweit, its cession to Germany would have been the next step. Those who have a taste for such things will greatly enjoy the following comment of the Kolnischc Zeitung upon the incident : " In the political sphere the Koweit question threatens to assume a certain importance. It is naturally not in the interest of Turkey, nor in that of those who will build and work the railway, that the terminus, the excellent harbour of Koweit, on the shores of which Kozima lies, should be alienated from the immediate sovereignty of Turkey. The ' Salnameh,' the Tur- kish statistical annual, regularly registers Koweit as ' Kaasa ' and its Sheikh as a Kaimakam. This clearly shows that Koweit is accounted Turkish territory, although the exercise of sovereign rights had been ceded to the Sheikh for the time being. The question of the form in which the State should exercise its sovereignty may best be left to itself. The fact that Koweit belongs to Turkey cannot be impugned, and English atlases have till now exhibited no dubiety on this point. SCALE Op- K^T*. MONGOLIA %, oTashkurafan Tfj^r ^* ^ <\SIA. RAILWAY EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA. r RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 261 It must be regarded as highly improbable that England means to alter this situation by violent means, and it is equally im- probable that the Sultan of his own accord will divest himself of rights which are of great importance for Turkey and for the working of the contemplated great railway. In an epoch which has given birth to Pan-Islamism, a movement with many promising aspects, the renunciation of the sovereignty of the Sultan over Mahomedan territory in Asia would be a step which would be entirely inconsistent." A blind man could read between the lines of this inspired utterance. The spectacle of Christian Germany invoking Pan- Islamism on behalf of her own political and commercial ambi- tions is both .instructive and entertaining.* What is this railway to accomplish ? " The German calcula- tion is, of course," says the anonymous writer I have already quoted, " not only that new trade will be developed, but that the course of present trade will be altered. It is expected that British vessels will cease to be the chief medium between Central Europe and the East. Passenger traffic with India is to be almost ab- sorbed by the Baghdad Railway,reached from Londonand Paris i'ia Munich and Vienna." But far more than this, Asia Minor is to serve for the overflow population of the Fatherland ; its grain is to render Germany independent of the United States and Russia ; Mesopotamia, irrigated anew, is to overflow with agricultural wealth ; tobacco, silk, oil, petroleum, are to be produced lavishly ; and a German fleet, at a naval base four days from Bombay, with a railway to Germany behind it, is to alter the balance of power in Asia. All discussion of these developments is stifled in Germany at present, but a glance at * A second incident of a similar kind has since (December 1901) happened at Koweit. A Turkish official from Busra visited Koweit and hoisted the Turkish flag there, whereupon the commander of a British gunboat hauled it down and hoisted Mubarek's own flag. The Porte has repudiated its official's action and assured England that it has no desire to disturb the status quo. The French and Russian press is angry, but the Russian Government has privately disavowed any aggres- sive intention in that part of the world, 262 ALL THE RUSSIAS the map, combined with an elementary knowledge of ancient economic history, is sufficient to show them plainly. This, then, is the very serious rivalry which Russia has now to face in her cherished policy. It is not surprising that she is genuinely alarmed. Two years ago (November 1899) the Riisski Tnid, a well-informed weekly, since suppressed, prophetically re- marked : " We have repeatedly urged that before great interests have been developed in Persia the whole of this country must somehow or other be drawn into the sphere of Russian influence. What we can now attain without any sacrifices on our side, later on, when the auspicious moment will have passed, would require immense efforts in a struggle with Germany, which has for a long time past been aiming at the Persian Gulf." A month later, when the Turkish concession to Germany was known, the Novoye Vremya expatiated with alarm upon the " terrible blow " which Germany would be able to deal to Russian trade, and upon the prospect of Russia having to fight in Persia " not only against the British, but against a whole coalition of Western Commer- cial adventurers," while the Sviet saw Russia face to face not with the Triple but with a Quadruple and even a Quintuple Alliance, formed by the adhesion of Great Britain and Turkey to Germany, Austria, and Italy. Now the Novoye Vrcniya announces frankly that " before the German Baghdad Railway has become an accomplished fact, Russia's railway projects in Persia will have been advanced to an important stage," and in its alarm even holds out a surprising olive-branch to England : " We cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that the Near Orient is of immense importance to us. It is absolutely indis- pensable to the final accomplishment of an historical task im- posed by Providence upon Russia. As England is perfectly well aware of this, she has swayed hither and thither, pro and cow, in her dealings with Germany with regard to the latter's Baghdad Railway scheme. . , , Had England conferred one- RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 263 half the favours upon this country which she has heaped upon her wily and ungrateful German neighbour, there would to-day exist a cordial and durable Anglo-Russian entente, if not, indeed, a complete and lasting Alliance.* I have already described briefly what Russia is doing in the matter of railway expansion towards the Persian frontier, and what her further intentions are believed to be.f In 1898 Count Vladimir Kapnist, cousin of the then Russian Ambassador in Vienna, applied on behalf of an international syn- dicate for a concession to construct a railway from Tripoli to Koweit, uniting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf, with the double object of developing the marvellously rich country traversed by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and of reducing the journey from Brindisi to Bombay from thirteen days to eight.l In spite of very influential support, however, the scheme fell through. The claim that such a railway would have added enor- mously to the wealth of the world appears to be well founded, * Under the circumstances this overture maybe read with a smile in England, but for my own part I believe the assertion in the last paragraph (omitting the adjectives applied to Germany) to be unquestionably true. t See Chapter XIV., and also Chapter XXIV. J The following was the exact route laid down by the engineers to the syndicate. From Tripoli the line would followthe sea-coast as far as the Nahr-el-Kebir, and then up the course of that river over the lowest and easiest pass which could be found through the chain of mountains running parallel to the Syrian coast. The line would reach a summit level of about 2000 feet above the sea between Tripoli and Horns, on a plateau of hard black basalt. Thence it would proceed to Homs, which is about 1500 feet above the sea, and on through Palmyra, past numerous villages, to Rahaba, on the Euphrates, following, in the main, the present caravan route. The railway would go down the valley of the Euphrates as far as El Kaim, then over the plains to Hit, where it would cross the river and proceed to Iskanderieh, the junction for Bagh- dad and for Khannikin (on the Persian frontier), and to Kerbela and Nedjef, the famousshrines and burial-places of the Persian Mahomedans, on the south ; thence, in as nearly a straight line as possible, across the great alluvial plain between the two rivers to Kurna, where it would again cross the Euphrates and be continued to Busra, and thence across country to Koweit, on the Persian Gulf. — Tli e Times, Decem- ber 17, i8g8. Another application for a similar railway concession, this timefrom Alexandretta to Aleppo and thence to Hit and onward, issa.\d{Daily Mail , April 27, 1899) to have been unsuccessfully made by Mr. Ernest Rechnitzer, a Hungarian ^^nker resident ip London, backed by English, German, and Belgian capital, 264 ALL THE RUSSIAS but as it would not have strengthened Germany or Russia to the exclusion of other nations it was doubtless wrecked by the opposition, or failed to succeed for lack of the official support, of one or both of these Powers. Russia has never turned aside from her "historical task," however. Her agents have worked with complete success in the Persian capital ; a good road has been built by a group of Moscow merchants, heavily backed by Imperial subsidies, from Resht, on the Caspian, to Tehran ; the Shah's "Cossacks" are commanded by Russian officers and have recently been increased in number to 2000 ; and parties of her surveyors have examined the railway routes to the Gulf. That her present aim is the incorporation of Persia in the Russian Empire admits of no doubt whatever; indeed it was recently openly avowed by the Chief Officer, a personage of princely rank, of the Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovitch, of the battleship Rostishrc', at a banquet in Odessa, who declared it to be just as certain that Persia would become Russian as that Manchuria had already done so.* All accounts, official and private, agree that Russia has been extremely active in Persia of late, and she has twice despatched to the Gulf ports a steamship named the Koniilov, carrying Rus- sian goods with which to open trade relations, and an investi- gating commission of twenty merchants, and is also stated to have sent a lighter draught vessel, the Azov, to enable her admiralty hydrographers to take soundings of important points. Her newspapers declare that her forward policy in Persia is due to the British preparations for a railway from Quetta to Siestan, and ultimately to Busra — "another base from w^hich she may attack us in Central Asia" 1— but, as a matter of plain fact, no direct evidence of Russian aims in this direction need be adduced. Her determination to construct such a railway as is here described follows naturally and logically from her political, geographical, and commercial conditions, and would * See The Standard, July 22, 1901. RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 265 similarly follow in the case of any other nation so situated. It would be of such enormous value to her, from every point of view, that her statesmen would be poor in patriotism indeed if they did not make every conceivable effort to secure it.* Other nations, however, may be equally interested to prevent it, but this aspect of the situation is apart from the matter in hand, and I shall return to it later, in connection with the political relations of Russia with her neighbours, great and small, t This somewhat lengthy digression has been intended to show what reasons Russia has, or thinks she has, for linking her Euro- pean railway system without delay to her Trans-Caspian Railway. I return now to Central Asia, with the reflection, to begin with, that the position of this link must chiefly depend upon its im- mediate object. For one of two practical considerations would be decisive : the route would be selected either for its strategical value and to form ultimately the connection with India, or else primarily for the development of new territory. If the former, then the shortest and most direct route would undoubtedly have been from Saratof, on the Volga, to the little town of Alexandrof- gai, one hundred and forty miles to the south-east (the two are already connected by a narrow-gauge railway), bending round the north of the Caspian and the south of the Aral Sea, and running straight by Khiva to the station of Amu-Darya (Charjui) on the main line of the Trans-Caspian Railway. Thisrailway would have the disadvantage of passingthrough comparatively poor territory, but it would be almost a straight line from Moscow to Amu- Darya, and, via Mew and Kushk Post, would place the head- quarters of the Russian army within literally a few days of its * ' ' That Russia seriously contemplates such an adventure I do not for a moment believe." Sir Lepel Griffin, quoted by Mr. P. H. Oakley Williams, in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 19, 1900. t See Chapter XXIV. 2 66 ALL THE RUSSIAS military objective, whether this were Afghanistan, Persia, or Chinese Turkestan. The distance from Alexandrof-gai to Amu- Darya station would be 1128 miles, and the cost of laying this line, which would meet with no engineering difficulty of any im- portance, is estimated at';^9,5oo,ooo— $46,300,000— including an iron bridge over the Volga at Saratof, and the widening of the line from Saratof to Alexandrof-gai. When it was completed, the distance from Moscow to Merv, which latter we may take as a central point of concentration, would be 1980 miles, and at an average speed of twenty miles an hour, Merv would be just four days distant from Moscow, and in less than another day the Afghan frontier would be reached at Kushk Post. If strate- gical and rapid-transit interests were adjudged paramount, this seems obviously the line which should have been con- structed. Russian statesmen have been led by considerations of direct and strategical transit rather than by commercial and agricultural potentialities, but they have not chosen this route. For reasons difficult to understand they have decided upon a railway from Orenburg to Tashkent. The Riisski Invalid, which has just published an account of it, admits that it will traverse a large tract of sparsely populated and barren land. After leaving Oren- burg it will pass through Ilentsk and Aktiubinsk and strike the Syr Darya at Kazalinsk. It will then follow the course of the river to Tashkent, passing on the way the fort of Karmakchi, the town of Petrofsk, and the village of Julek. It will be a single line and have a length of about 1150 miles. The build- ing of the railway is already in full swing ; on the northern part, from Orenburg to Kazalinsk, the earthworks and the building of bridges are almost finished, and the laying of the rails will be commenced next spring ; in the southern part the work is not so far advanced, but preparations are being made and ma- terials collected. It is expected that the railway will be opened on January i (14th), 1905, and it will then be possible to run RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 267 trains from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Tashkent and the whole Trans-Caspian line. The estimated cost of the railway is 115 million roubles — _^' 12, 150,000, $58,175,000. When com- pleted, the journey will be : Moscow to Samara, 738 miles ; Samara to Orenburg, 260 miles (railway traffic has long existed to this point) ; Orenburg to Tashkent, 1150 miles; and Tash- kent to Merv, by the existing line, 597 miles. Total : 2745 miles, as against the 1980 miles 7' id Alexandrof-gai. When 1 was in Tashkent I was told by the Director of the Topographical Bureau that this decision had been reached, and that the line would shortly be commenced, but after studying the alternative routes I thought that he must be mistaken, and I am still unable to find a reason for the choice that has been made. In each case over a thousand miles of new rails must be laid, no engineering difficulties occur, and the country traversed is almost worthless for agricultural or commercial development. The one important difference is that by the Orenburg-Tashkent route the military centre of Russia in Europe is some seven hundred miles farther from the military focus of Russia in Central Asia. The chief export of Central Asia to Russia is, and will be in a still greater degree, cotton. At present this goes to the mills of Moscow by the Trans-Caspian Railway, the Caspian Sea, and the Volga in summer, and the Russian railway system instead of the Volga in winter, the former rate being 1.08 rouble and the latter 1.30 rouble per poud. From the centre of the cotton dis- tricts of Fergana to Moscow is reckoned at 3212 versts, and the freight of cotton at one-thirtieth of a kopeck per poud per verst, which works out at 1.07 rouble per poud* — practically the same cost as by the existing railway and the Volga in summer. Thus only in winter will the line to Orenburg be of service * The English or American reader who desires to translate these figures into the currency and quantities of his own country can do so by the equivalents given in the Appendix. 268 ALL THE RUSSIAS to the greatest export of the country, and then only, allowing fully for all the disadvantages of the present route, by reducing the total cost of cotton in Moscow by 3 per cent.* — a trifle, while on the imports of manufactured goods from Russia, costing much more and paying a higher freight than cotton, the percentage of advantage will be considerably less. A branch will doubtless be run from the flourishing little town of Orsk, 152 miles to the south-east of Orenburg, in the centre of a cattle-breeding district, to Chelyabinsk, on the Siberian side of the Urals, the commence- ment, properly speaking, of the Trans-Siberian Railway. This will bring grain and iron to Trans-Caspia, and thus to some extent afford a commercial justification of the choice of route, but even here I cannot see that the advantage over the present line of transportation will be anything like great enough to lead us to believe that the interests of commerce dictated the choice of the new line. If commercial and agricultural development were really the paramount consideration, then beyond any question a line con- necting Turkestan with Western Siberia would confer the greatest benefit. This would run from Tashkent, 7Ui1 the town and Russian fort of Aulie-ata, one hundred and fifty-five miles to the north-east; Vernoye, the capital of the province of Semiryechensk, with a population of nearly 25,000 ; Kopal, one hundred and seventy miles farther on ; Sergiopol ; Semipala- tinsk, capital of the province of that name, on the Irtysh River, with a population of nearly 20,000 ; and thence to Omsk, the town probably destined to become the most important on the Trans-Siberian Railway. This railway would run, as shown, past large and growing towns, through districts with an industrious and prosperous population of nomads, through a fertile corn- growing country, where the best wheat to-day sells for eight * For this calculation I am indebted to an essay by Mr. D. Zhoravko-Pokorski, a Russian merchant resident in Central Asia, and to the author himself for interesting information and some statistics gi\en elsewhere. RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 269 kopecks the poud (twopence, or four cents, for thirty-six pounds) through a rich cattle-raising steppe, and past known deposits of both coal and gold. Moreover, it would enormously increase the production of cotton in Turkestan, by bringing cheap wheat into that country from Siberia and thus allowing all the land now necessarily given to corn-growing to be devoted to the far more profitable cultivation of cotton. The reader who has followed this somewhat technical rail- way discussion w'ill have gathered that Russia has two inter- twined aims and motives, that she is driving two politico-econo- mic horses abreast, so to speak. She greatly desires to connect her European railway system with the railways of British India, across Central Asia and Afghanistan. And she desires this for two reasons : first, that she may enjoy the great advantages of the future ownership of the great international railway route to the East ; and second, that by depriving any prospective railway to the Persian Gulf of much of its misjii d'etre she may pre- vent it being built, and thus block the creation of what w'ould undoubtedly be an almost insuperable obstacle to her protec- torate over Persia, and her own railway to the Persian Gulf. This policy may be thought to resemble Paul Morphy's announcement of mate in twenty-three moves, but Russian diplomacy is accustomed to look far ahead and to calculate with wide combinations, and when I say above that such is Russia's desire, I mean that I know^ that the men who chiefly direct her policy have these particular aims in view and very much at heart. Most readers will by now have formulated an objection some- what in this shape : it is all very well for Russia to talk about join- ing her Central Asian railways to the Indian railways, and thus securing a great rapid-transit route from Europe to the richest East, but what about Afghanistan and the Indian Government — R 270 ALL THE RUSSIAS will they, under any circumstances, permit such a junction to be made, and thus prepare an easy road for Russian troops to enter India ? * The question is, of course, of the first importance, and in the present state of feeling on both sides, it can only be an- swered with some discretion. In the iirst place, such a junction is absolutely certain to come some day, but the time may be far off. Second, if Russia were successful in a war against England, it would assuredly be one of her conditions of peace. Third, a railway would give little advantage to Russia that it would not give to England, for if it would enable Russia to hurry troops toward India, it would equally enable England to hurry Indian troops toward Central Asia, and the final advantage would thus be, as it always is in war, to the quickest to act. Fourth, it would do much to remove international misunderstanding, for it would bring intelligent and commercial Russians into India, and a similar class of English and Anglo-Indians into Russia. Finally, will not the moment soon come, when two civilised nations will refuse to allow an uncivilised regime, friendly at heart to neither and only friendly in action to one of them so long as self-interest dictates such a course,! to stand in the way of one of those great advances of intercommunication, which are the chief signs and promoters of civilisation ? In view of these considerations, it can hardly be thought unreasonable for Russia to plan her Central Asian communications with a view to their ultimate extension to Central India. If the two nations agreed to join hands across Afghanistan with their respective railway systems as at present existing, the route would be from Merv to Kushkinski Post, thence to New Chaman,thepresentterminusof the Indian frontierrailway, sixty miles north-west of Quetta ; thence to Sukkur and Ruk junction ; and from there either to the Punjab or to Karachi, one of the four * Forthedetailsofthe Russian branch railway to the Afghan frontier, see the pre- ceding Chapter,and for the political question of Russia and India,see Chapter XXIV. t This was written before the death of the late Amir of Afghanistan. RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA 271 ^reat seaports of India. If Kushkinski Post and New Chaman were connected by railway to-day, a distance of only four hundred and thirtv-ei^ht miles, without any new line whatever being constructed by either Russia or India, the distance from London to Karachi by rail (including the short sea passages of the Channel and the Caspian) is calculated by Mr. Paul Lessar as 4716 miles, and the time of the journey as one hundred and seventy-four and one-half hours. The route would be London, Calais, Berlin, Alexandrovo, Warsaw, Rostof, Petrofsk, Baku, Krasnovodsk, Merv, Kushk, Chaman, Karachi. If Kushkinski Post and New Chaman were connected by rail after the Orenburg-Tashkent link is finished, there would be, of course an all-rail route from Calais to Karachi, but it would take considerably more time. I have written at what may seem undue length about the future of Russian railway construction in Central Asia because it is really the most important and significant question in that part of the world. It is vitally connected with peace and war alike — with commercial development and international rivalry. The reader who takes the trouble to grasp the routes I have mentioned and the arguments for and against each of them, will understand also where the line of next tension lies, and when the first step in advance is made — and it may not long be delayed — he will be in a position to interpret its intention, to perceive its diplomatic significance, and possibly to forecast its military consequences. CHAPTER XVIIl RUSSIAN ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA: TRANS-CASPIA AND TASHKENT AS I sat writing my notes in a little whitewashed room in the very heart of Asia, having come by train through Merv, with its branch straight to the Afghan frontier ; past the ruined fortress of Geok Tepe, which fought Skobelef for three bloody weeks ; past Bokhara, the last home of Central Asian Mus- sulman fanaticism ; by Samarkand, where Genghiz Khan ruled and Tamerlane is buried ; to Tashkent, which routed a Russian army thirty-five years ago — as I sat and thought, on the one hand, of this wild, remote, unaltered East, and on the other, that I was as safe as if in my own garden and that I had just come from a brilliant evening party at the Governor-General's, it seemed to me that I must be dreaming. I almost despair of making it all seem real to anybody else, for the position was one "at which," in Dr. Johnson's words, "experience revolts, cre- dulity hesitates, and even fancy stares." However, the attempt must be made, and I begin with the district in which you set foot on landing upon the eastern shore of the Caspian, officially known as the Trans-Caspian Territory. The administrative district of Trans-Caspia extends from the Caspian to the frontier of Bokhara, and is under the authority of a " Chef du Territoire Transcaspien," with headquarters at Askhabad. At the time of my visit this was Lt.-Colonel Bogo- liubof, one of the most enlightened administrators it has been my good fortune to meet. He is not only a soldier and a states- man, but a student : the practical problems of his great province, ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRA!. ASIA 273 its commerce, its ethnology, its arts, have all been made bv him the subjects of profound investigation, and he talks of them with rare knowledge and enthusiasm. When I had the pleasure of visiting him he was busily engaged upon a great ethnological map of Trans-Caspia, the first that had ever been attempted, and I believe he will some day publish an epoch-making study of Turkoman art, particularly as exhibited in the products of Turkoman needlewomen. Trans-Caspia has an area of about 215,000 square miles and only about 360,000 inhabitants. Its scanty population cannot increase, because each Turkoman head of a family requires, to live with anything like comfort, ten camels, four to five horses, fifty sheep, and two cows, and to feed these, ten square versts are needed. Camels cannot be replaced by horses, for only camels and asses can eat the prickly "camel's thorn " which is the sole fodder available during much of the year. The attempt to improve the condition of Trans-Caspia is therefore a struggle between civilisation and this nomad life, and it is unlikely that civilisation will win. Civilisation has had, at any rate, one bad effect — it has killed the carpet. The carpet woven by Turkoman women in their moving tents, without any pattern to copy, the design being handed down in instinct and memory, was, both for design and workmanship, the finest thing of the kind in the world. Old specimens are now almost unprocurable and fetch huge prices, but the examples which may still be had are eagerly bought up. In fact, carpets furnish one of the chief topics of conversation among Russian officers and functionaries quartered in Trans- Caspia. Everybody collects them, and the discussions about price and quality, and the comparisons of " finds " are endless. Carpets are peculiarlyconvenient to these nomadsof civilisation, astheywere to the uncivilised nomads who originally made them, for as both soldiers and civilians may not be long in one place they seldom possess much furniture, since it could not be trans- 274 ALL THE RUSSIAS ported except at an expense which would ruin them, whereas a few empty beer-boxes with carpets and cushions thrown over them, and a few carpets hung on the walls, give you a fine Eastern salon at once. Moreover, carpets can be easily taken home, and then if you wish you can probably sell them for IN Tin: NI.W TASIIKI,XI much more than you gave for them. There is unfortunately one drawback — all modern carpets fade. The old carpet, however, is now perhaps the one relic left of a great bygone civilisation, for assuredly the Turkomans in their dirt and squalor could not have invented the beautiful designs that their women made till recently. The patterns and the surroundings are in too great a contrast. The different great tribes of Turkomans — the Sariks, Saliks, and nearer the Caspian the Yumuds — are indistinguishable in their dress, their utensils, their habits, &c. ; their carpets alone can serve to distinguish them. These are their passports — their visiting cards. Perhaps these very patterns were given them by Nebuchadnezzar ! But aniline dyes and loom competition are killing these fast, and ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 275 soon nothing except their old carpets will be left to tell of a mysterious civilisation of the far past. This whole region, as far as China, is the field of rectangular ornaments, and the details of these patterns recur in the most extraordinary fashion. A detail can be traced, for instance, through China, Afghanistan, Persia, and Galicia. I n Trans-Caspia are two well-marked races, about whom we know almost everything — in the north the Kirghiz, in the south the Russians. In the farthest south there are two or three tribes of Arabs and Jews, come nobody knows how or when. But the Turkomans are the great mystery, and it will only be from their carpets that the problem of their origin and movements will be solved at last. The magic carpet of Eastern fable, which transports its possessor in an instant to the other end of the earth, has its counterpart in the carpet which will carry the student round the Asian world in the track of its racial design. Not only cannot the population of Trans-Caspia increase,but, so far as can be foreseen, its productivity is likely to decline. Cotton is its chief, indeed practically its only important export. It formerly possessed the finest race of horses in the world, and the Turkoman, who lived by raiding, esteemed his steed far above all his other belongings, including his wife. But Russian rule has imposed peace upon him, and therefore the need ot his horse, and his incentive to breed and cherish him, have gone. So, in spite of I mperial Commissions and the importation of Arab stallions, the fleet and tireless Turkoman horse, with his flashing eye and scarlet nostril, is extinct for ever. And the production of cotton cannot increase without an increase of water for irriga- tion, and instead of more there is growing steadily less. For the Kopet Dagh Mountains, which rise above Askhabad, and are the great source of vi^ater supply, are gradually w^earing away. Ages ago there was eternal snow upon them ; now they are nowhere more than 9000 feet high. The explanation is that they are of clayey substance. In summer the great heat calcines this clay to 276 ALL THE RUSSIAS powder, then the rains come and wash it away. Hence the fecundating power of the rivers, but hence also their ultimate disappearance. A geographical authority has said of this whole region that "both glaciers and rivers continue to lose volume ; the lakes are shrinking and the extremes of temperature become more marked, while the sands of the desert are steadily encroach- A COSSACK PATROL IN TASHKENT ing on the cultivated zones." A well was recently sunk three miles from the mountains to a depth of seven hundred metres without striking water. The truth is that this water question, vital to the prosperity and indeed to the existence of Trans- Caspia, is in the last analysis a political issue — a peculiarly interesting example of the forces underlying diplomacy and national ambitions. For the water-basin of this part of Trans- Caspia is in Persia, and the Amir of Afghanistan controls, in the River Murghab, the water supply of the great Merv oasis and other districts. Therefore if these possessions of Russia are ever to regain their ancient wealth, when Merv, for instance, was really " Queen of the World," Russia must rule in Persia ADMINISIRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 277 and Afghanistan. Northern Persia — the province of Khorassan — is probably at her mercy, to seize whenever an opportunity or an excuse presents itself, but Afghanistan is quite another matter, for the British fleet blocks the way thither. Thus the cotton crop of Central Asia, and purchases for Russia on the markets of Richmond and New Orleans — for it is Russia's desire to grow all her own cotton and buy none abroad — depend at last upon the number of ironclads that fly the cross of St. George in the Channel and the Mediterranean. It is, I repeat, a peculiarly interesting example of the correlation of sea-power and political history, but it should not surprise the readers of Captain IVIahan. The cities of Central Asia to-day are of two widely differing kinds — theold and the new, the world-famous towns of antiquity, whose proud and fanatical inhabitants have only been constrained for a few years to tolerate white men among them, and the brand-new settlements which Russia has built up for her admini- strators, her soldiers, and her merchants. Each kind is the more interesting according to whether you look at it with the eye of the traveller and the ethnologist, or from the point of view of the student of contemporary expansion and politics. Krasno- vodsk I have sufficiently described ; Kizil Arvat is merely the site of the railway workshops, where a large number of Russian artisans are employed, whose pale wives and children give pain- ful evidence of the unhealthiness of the place and climate ; Merv is wholly a new city, the old " Queen of the World " being noth- ing but a few splendid ruins some distance away, an important military centre where the prevalence of a particularly virulent fever has often suggested the desirability of abandoning the town altogether, and where, a few miles to the east, the Tsar has an ''appanage" which irrigation and skilful management are making into a most fertile and profitable estate ; Askhabad, the 278 ALL THE RUSSIAS military headquarters of Turkestan, on account of the proximity of the Persian frontier and the road to Meshed, is ahiiost entirely a new town, where the central railway administration has a range of handsome stone-built offices. None of these calls for any special mention. In ordinary times the entire garrison of Central Asia is prob- THF. BOYS COLLEGE, TASHKENT ably about 30,000 men, with .headquarters at Askhabad, and the chief garrisons at Merv, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Andijan. At the present moment this figure is doubtless largely exceeded. The civil administration, which, as everywhere in Russia, is elabo- rate and highly manned, brings a population of its own, under a Governor-General of Turkestan at Tashkent, a Governor of the Trans-Caspian Territory at Askhabad, and Governors at Samar- kand and at Margelan, the administrative centre of Fergana. All the public offices are fine commodious buildings, the ofBcials and their families live in much comfort, indeed, often in luxury, and the foreign shops in the chief towns are large and well stocked. There are admirable schools for Russian children, and many native schools for teaching Russian and elementary subjects. ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 279 Two prisons I inspected, and that of Tashkent was, so far as I could see, excellent. The other, a mere <^uard-room in the citadel of Andijan, was not creditable, for the twenty or thirty prisoners were crowded toi^ether in one apartment without dis- tinction of class or crime, the sanitary conditions were offensive, and there was no proper supervision. But Andijan is the latest and remotest Russian town, and doubtless a proper prison will be built before long. It was at the village of Mintiuba, close to Andijan, by the way, that an abortive little revolt broke out in 1898, suppressed with the usual thoroughness of the Russians in such matters, the village being wiped out, a colony of Russian emigrants planted on its site, eight leaders hanged together, and a large number deported to Siberia — via Moscow 1 One curious little fact about Trans-Caspia, by the way, deserves mention. The Persians, of whom there is of course a large working and trading population, insist upon being paid with the Persian kraii, a small silver coin now w^orth 40 kopecks. The Russian authorities have recently prohibited its impor- tation, but with the only effect, so far, of causing its price to appreciate. The capital of Russian Central Asia — though no such nominal position exists — is undoubtedly Tashkent, "the city of stone," at the northern terminus of the railway in Turkestan, and presently to be connected with Europe 7'id Orenburg. Here the two kinds of city and the two races are best seen side by side. Tash- kent was for many generations, and perhaps still remains, the most important strategical focus of Central Asia. An interesting and significant incident is connected with its capture. The gallant Chernaieff, advancing victorious from the north, attacked it in 1 864, but was beaten back with heavy loss. Alexander II., averse to further slaughter in a cause whose importance he had not realised, and perhaps fearing complications with England, for bade him to make a second attempt. The outcome is a striking 28o ALL THE RUSSIAS example of how Russian officials on remote frontiers drag Rus- sian policy at their heels. Chernaieff appears to have known what was in the Tsar's despatches, so he attacked first, took the city by storm, and then opened his papers. The reply he sent, as given by Ney (quoted by Ross and Skrine), was this : " Your Majesty's order forbidding me to take Tashkent has reached me only in the city itself, which I have taken and place at your Majesty's feet." His career was ruined by this act, but Tashkent was promptly used as a base from which to subjugate Samar- kand and Bokhara. It is after Chernaieff that the junction of Chernayevo is named. Tashkent is pro- bably to-day the largest town in Asia- tic Russia, for in 1885 it was nearly as pop- ulous at Tiflis, hav- ing 120,000 inhabit- ants, and covering an area of twelve square miles. The first thing that strikes you as you drive from the station is the width of the streets, and the second the mud. The former are often fifty yards wide, and the latter is a foot deep. Through this wades and splashes an extraordinary procession of men and beasts — Tajiks, the chief race, of Persian descent, in turbans and multi- coloured khalats, or loose-sleeved robes gathered at the waist with a sash, their material depending upon the wealth of the owner; Kirghiz in skins with the fur inside and tight-fitting caps ; women in sad-toned garments and draped from crown to sole in thick, absolutely opaque horsehair veils; Russian soldiers, always in the same thick grey felt overcoats — in fact, all the Eastern humanity seen by Matthew Arnold in the past : A FAMILIAR SIGHT IN TASHKENT ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 281 The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks Of the Jaxartcs, men with scanty beards And close-set skull-caps ; and those wilder hordes Who roam o'er Kipchak and the northern waste ; Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzaks, tribes who stray Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes, Who came on shaggy ponies from Pamere. They ride on horses, on donkeys — often two adults on one little beast — on shaggy camels or in the arba shown in my photograph, with enormously high wheels to enable it to ford rivers without wetting its load, the driver seated on the horse in the shafts. The Russian town, which has 5000 or 6000 inhabitants, consists of well-built, low houses of brick and stucco, with roofs of sheet iron painted green, and the streets, as everywhere else in these Russian settlements, are planted on each side with shade trees, chiefly silver poplars. In the Russian shops most of the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life may be bought, though they do not compare with the shops of far Siberian towns. There is no such thing as an hotel, its place being taken, loiigo iiitcivallo, by what are called Noinera—" numbers," that is, furnished rooms, to which, if you have nowhere else to eat, you can have a greasy meal brought. These are dirty, cold, and uncomfortable. But there is a magnificent military club, with a theatre and ball- room, where you can find all the papers, including a local bi-weekly, the Vicdomosti, play cards or billiards, and fare very well indeed, being waited upon by soldier orderlies. The Governor-General— when I was there, the late General Dukhovskoi — who rules over the whole of Turkestan, lives in a charming old-fashioned, wide-spreading residency, filled with precious Eastern objects. On nights of official reception the staircase is lined with picturesque native troops who supply a fitting local colour, and several bands of oriental performers with weird instruments provide local sound. I can no longer 282 ALL THE RUSSIAS thank General Dukhovskoi for all his kindness, but the hospi- tality so brilliantly dispensed by Madame Dukhovskoi will not be forgotten by anybody who ever enjoyed it. The large staff of ofticials at Tashkent works in spacious quarters in buildings which, as they were erected thirty years ago, show the fore- sight that provided accommodation for all the development to follow. The garrison at the time of my visit consisted of four battalions of sharpshooters (siirlki), two of the line, one of it^M' THE "AREA", IN TASHKENT engineers, a regiment of Cossacks, and some artillery. There is an observatory, equipped with instruments brought on camel-back across the desert. But the sight remaining most vividly in my memory is the Rcahchiile of Tashkent. This was not only wonderful because it was in the heart of Asia, but also because it would be an admirable school even in London or New York. The enthusiastic headmaster. Prince Dolgoruki, conducted me over it, and a better equipped or more capably managed educational institution could hardly be found. A complete course of instruction is given, and the class-rooms, museums, laboratories, gymnasiums, &c., were on the latest ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 283 German model. There are two hundred and ninety-six scholars, all sons of Russian ofiicials and residents exxept two, the son of the late Amir of Kokand and the son of a rich native merchant. Among the professors was Mr. Howard, a Russian subject, admirably teaching the English classes, and I was in- vited to satisfy myself of the ability of his scholars. The school costs 40,000 roubles a year, of which the boys contribute forty roubles each and the State the rest. They take only their dejeuner at school, and for this they pay seven roubles each per half-year. I saw this meal, and how it is provided for the money I cannot tell. Afterward I visited the Technical School, and here, remembering the admirable Austrian native schools of Bosnia, I was disappointed to find but very few native boys. It appears, however, that they invariably fall behind, and most of them leave after the second year. But any native boy who wishes to learn can attend one of the gratuitous schools in the native quarter where Russian is taught and elementary instruc- tion given by some of the most devoted educationalists I have seen, who live in discomfort and on a pittance, devoted to their work and worshipped by their scholars. Altogether, in fact, Russia is doing more to educate her people, both Russian and native, in Central Asia than she is doing in Europe. The native quarter of Tashkent contains nothing of interest, unless it be the old citadel which Chernaieff stormed and after- ward put in repair for his own defence. It is simply a wide en- ceinte surrounded by high earthen walls, commanding the city by a number of guns. Within its area are the magazines and barracks, but as a military work it is long out of date. No foreigner has ever visited it, so I remarked to the Governor- General that I should like to do so. He was surprised, but upon reflection, seeing no reason why he should refuse, con- sented, and issued a written order that I should be admitted. The officer in command was the most surprised individual in Central Asia when I arrived with my order. He conducted me 2 84 ALL THE RUSSIAS into the guard-room within the walls, and then inquired cour- teously what it was that I wished to see ; for, said he, "There is nothing whatever remarkable in the citadel." " I beg your pardon," I replied, " but I believe there is a most extraordinary thing here at this moment." " What may that be ? " he asked in much surprise. " An Englishman," I said ; and he laughed and admitted FATHER AND SON IN TASHKENT that it was indeed so. This citadel, however, reminds me of an incident which explains how Chernaieff came to conquer these peoples as he did. After the storming, and even before the dead natives had all been buried, and almost before the firing had ceased, finding himself war-stained and uncomfortable from not having changed his clothes for days, he w^ent, alone and unattended, on the very afternoon of his victory, in spite of the protests of his staff, to the vapour-baths in the native city. Such extraordinary coolness and indifference made a greater impression than all his Cossacks and cannon. This is, indeed, how natives are taught who is their master, as our own earlier Indian annals abundantly show^ ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA 285 Statistics of Central Asian trade are not easy to procure, for Russia is very jealous of foreign curiosity there. The annual report, for example, of the Trans-Caspian Railway is printed in two parts, one the military and confidential portion ; the other the commercial. The director of the railway at Askhabad bluntly refused to give me the latter, though the highest local authority ordered him to do so, without a direct order from the Minister of War, and this of course I did not apply for, as it would have invested my natural and innocent curiosity with a suspicious importance. But certainly Russian trade here has grown by leaps and bounds, except with Afghanistan, where it has ceased altogether, for political reasons, and by the action of the Amir. Askhabad station was opened in December 1885, and by October 1886 no less than 360,000 pouds of merchandise had passed through en rouic for Persia. Taking the average of the three years previous to the opening of the railway, 1883-5, ^"^ the average of four years, 1893-6, the imports of the country nearly trebled, while the exports nearly quadrupled. During the year 1899 {'^^^ latest statistical year), the Trans-Caspian Railway carried 24,999 passengers and 376,000 tons of freight, and its gross receipts were ;{'725,376, or ^590 per mile. And this, be it remembered, upon a railway originally built as a strategical line and until a short time ago under the direct control of the Minister of War. The exception to the develop- ment of trade is Afghanistan — a fact evidently unknown to writers who have pointed morals by the relations of Russians and Afghans in Central Asia. In 1895 Afghan exports to Russian territory were of the value of 209,000 roubles ; and in 1896 of 83,000 roubles; while Russia exported to Afghanistan in 1895, 21,000 roubles, and in 1896 the trade ceased completely. The trade of Persia, it should be added, is with Russia proper ; Trans-Caspia is merely the point of transit and produces nothing which Persia buys. 286 ALL THE RUSSIAS It will be evident, I think, before I have done with Central Asia, and I may as well set down the reflection now, that Russia has carried out a great task here, and on the whole, most worthily. Not only must the greatness of her conquest evoke our admira- tion, but the qualities of civilisation she has afterwards imposed, the peace, the commerce, the comparative happiness and well- being of the people, should also win our sincere respect. CHAPTER XIX NEW BOKHARA AND ITS PROSPECTS RUSSIA has been very careful not to annex the Khanate of Bokhara. She had enough on her hands in Central Asia without undertaking direct responsibility for the government of three million fanatical Mussulmans, who have never learned the lesson that Skobelef administered to the Turkomans. So she made it into a Protected State, thereby securing all the advan- tages of control and commerce, without assuming the obligation of good government. She has nothing to fear from Bokhara ; the Amir is a nonentity, mentally and physically exhausted, though not yet forty ; her own territory is on both sides of it; her main railway runs within ten miles of the capital and could bring a small army in a day ; by her control of the Zarafshan she has Bokhara at her mercy, for she could cut off the water-supply and ruin every crop at once ; and no trade except Russian is permitted. So the Bokharans are left in their original dirt and cruelty and corruption, nominally under the rule of their own sovereign. He, however, does not greatly appreciate his posi- tion, for he spends all his time at a hunting lodge near Termene, the fifth station up the line beyond the capital, 44 miles away, his passion being for falconry — a sport the local importance of which may be judged from the fact that the principal Minister of State is called KJinz Begi, ''Chief of the Falconers." He receives reports, however, every day, brought by relays of horsemen who cover the distance in three hours — the railway taking four ! In his capital his prestige is gone, and he dislikes the vicinity of his Russian masters, but on the rare occasions — sometimes not once 288 ALL THE RUSSIAS in a year — when he visits Bokhara he sharply reminds his people of his existence by taking a dozen condemned wretches from the prison and having their throats cut in the open bazaar. I said that Russia had left Bokhara in its original cruelty, but this is not quite accurate. She has abolished the open sale of slaves and the native method of execution by trussing hapless criminals like fowls and flinging them from the top of the great tower. But otherwise she has left Bokhara as it was, and, above all, she has left untouched the prison of execrable memory. Here it was that the two English officers, Stoddart and Connolly, sent on a diplomatic mission from the Indian Government about sixty years ago, were flung into the pit where sheep-ticks, most loath- some of insects, gnawed the flesh from the bones of living men. When the Russians reached Bokhara with their railway they were rather afraid of the natives, and as a measure of precaution they created New Bokhara, eight miles from Old Bokhara, and placed the station there. Now they realise that their caution was excessive, and wish they had originally gone straight to the town, and thus avoided the necessity of building a branch railway to connect it with the main line. New Bokhara consists of a few European houses, the Residency and offices, and a clean and comfortable little hostelry, called the Hotel d'Europe, kept by a worthy German and his wife. The Amir maintains a suite of rooms in a native house in the old city for the use of the Resident, who thereby avoids disturbing the populace by too much show of foreign dominion. M. Ignatieff was so kind as to allow me to use these rooms, as there is, of course, no place in the native city where a foreigner can even take a meal. The Resident has a personal escort of about a score of Cossacks, and there is a detachment of railway sappers, w'ho do technical work and furnish guards for the bank, post- office, &c. The Amir, on the other hand — and the contrast is instructive — is allowed to keep a so-called army of 30,000 men in the whole country, 10,000 of whom are in the city of Bokhara. In spite NEW BOKHARA AND ITS PROSPECTS 289 of their scarlet trousers they can hardly he called soldiers, and tiieir best weapons are a few thousand old rifles given them loy Russia, with old-fashioned triangular bayonets. Concerning these rifles, and bearing their origin in mind, my meaning will doubtless be obvious when I say that I should be quite willing to let a Bisley marksman shoot at meat a hundred yards with one of them. And while speaking of the Bokharan army I must repeat a pleasant story I read somewhere. The Amir's forces were once exhibiting themselves at a field-day before a Russian general. Suddenly, to his intense surprise, all the men in the front line threw themselves upon their backs and waved their legs in the air. But he was more astonished still when, in reply to his inquiry as to the military purport of this remarkable man- cieuvre, he was assured that it was exactly copied from the Russian drill ! The explanation turned out to be that once, when Russian troops were attacking, they had been obliged to ford a stream waist-deep, and on gaining the bank they had all lain down and lifted up their legs to let the water run out of their long boots. The Bokharans, attributing the victory which immediately followed to this impressive stratagem, had promptly incor- porated it in their own tactics ! Political writers about Central Asia often speculate upon the possibility of a Mussulman rising against Russia there, and as Bokhara is undoubtedly the most fanatical country, this seems the place to say a few words on the subject. If there should ever be a real Pan-Islamic movement — if the Mussulman world should ever be inspired with a common religious fervour against the Cross, then, of course, the Crescent would be raised in Central Asia also, and the Russians would have all they could do for a short time. And such an outburst is not quite as improbable as most people think. It will hardly come from the appeals and intrigues of the ruler of the Ottoman Turks in Constantinople, who enjoys among millions of his co-religionists no loftier title than " Sultan of Roum," although the fact is remarkable that 290 ALL THE RUSSlAS certciin communities who hitherto acknowledged no allegiance to him, as in Tripoli, for instance, now accept the obligation of mili- tary service for the defence of Islam, but many little signs — such as the collection of ;^2ooo by the Anjituian-i-Islaiu in Bombay for the projected Damascus-Mecca railway — show that it is not altogether out of the question. After the revolt in Fergana in 1898 the Russian authorities were very anxious for a time about the state of Bokhara, and the telegraph line to Tashkent was monopolised with military conversations. Curiously enough, at that very moment a Russian railway watchman was killed by a native. The latter was tried by a Court consisting of the Acting Resident and two native Begs, and was condemned to death. And then the Russians played one of those little master-strokes of policy which, insignificant in themselves, contribute so largely to their success with Oriental races. Instead of making a mystery and conferring great importance upon the incident by executing the murderer in the Russian tov.'n, with all the elaborate ceremonial of a European death-penalty, they simply handed him over to the Bokharan authorities, who cut his throat in the bazaar in the good old way. This completely reassured the native authorities, who had believed that the Russian would treat the murder as a political offence, and make it an excuse for annexing the country. The war between Turkey and Greece, again, produced a con- siderable impression in Bokhara, and the news was eagerly dis- cussed in the bazaars. The Resident discovered some Turks from Egypt, fomenting religious feeling, and the Political Agent at Tashkent told me that he had found and arrested several fanatical mollahs from Constantinople. On one PYiday evening I was enabled by a Russian friend, who is an acute and sympathetic student of native life, to enjoy the rare advantage of being present at the regular prayers of a widespread dervish sect in one of the chief towns, and nobody could witness the profound attention of the crowd at first, gradually growing into fanatical fervour. NEW BOKHARA AND ITS PROSPECTS 291 and finally reaching a height of religious madness when anything would have been possible, the whole crowd swaying rapidly and abruptly back and forth to the deafening rhythmic staccato shout of Ya lioii ! Ya hak ! — and not realise that the tinder and the spark are never very far apart in Central Asia. For these men, barking like mad wolves under the temporary sway of religious hypnotism, were not performing for Christian money, like the dervish mummers of Cairo, but were just pious Mussulmans come to prayers and in many cases plainly drawn into the vortex in spite of themselves. But a Russian fort was not two miles away, and at a warning gun four thousand men would have sprung to arms. Pan-Islamism, even if it should break forth, would accomplish nothing in Russian Asia — unless Russia herself should be lighting for her life elsewhere. A local revolt in Bokhara, however, is another matter, and upon this I have a decided opinion, namely, that it is more than probable. But it will be a revolt in favour of Russia, not against her. Government in Bokhara under Russian protection is, as I have said, almost as bad as under unmitigated native oppression, and in the matter of tax-gathering — always more considered by a native than life and liberty — it is quite as bad. Now the Bok- haran looks across the border into Samarkand, and sees that his fellows under Russian rule, men with neither more land nor more fertile land than himself, are contented and comparatively rich, and know precisely what their obligations are and how much money the tax-collector will require of them ; while they them- selves know neither, and must live at the mercy and the whim of every cruel and rapacious official. Therefore the prospect is that sooner or later, when they have outgrown their dislike of the infi- del, the Bokharans will demand to be taken under Russian gov- ernment. One informant assured me that this would have been done before now except for the fact that when the Amir visited the Tsar at his coronation the latter promised him that no change should be made in the status of Bokhara while he reigned, and that 292 ALL THE RUSSIAS consequently if the Amir dies before the Tsar another Amir will be allowed to rule. But even in this case a stricter supervision would probably be exercised, especially as regards taxing the people. Indeed, there are other signs that a change in this direction is coming, for a handsome new palace is being built halfway between New and Old Bokhara, the intention — it was M. Lessar's idea — being that the Amir shall have some fitting place in which to receive the Russian authorities, who will doubt- less take advantage of more frequent interviews to exert a more extended influence. But meanwhile, Russia has clearly had every advantage in leaving things as they are, and up to the present her tendency has been rather to shift burdens on to the Amir's shoulders than to relieve him of any — as in the cession to Bokhara of Roshan and Shignan from the British sphere. This is not at all to the taste of the military caste in Tashkent and Merv, who would like nothing so much as an order to march on Bokhara, in view of the ease of the campaign, and the shower of crosses, medals, and promotions that would follow. The Trans-Caspian Railway has, of course, wrought a revolu- tion since it reached the valley of theZarafshan. In pre-railway days Bokhara's connection with Russia was by the old caravan route vici Kazalinsk and Orenburg, when the cost of transport was three roubles a poud and the journey depended on so many accidental circumstances — a scarcity of camels, for instance — that its duration could never be foreseen, and goods sometimes remained at Kazalinsk for months, spoiling, while all the risks were the sender's, since nobody would grant insurances against them. Up to 1887 Russia sent to Bokhara iron, crockery, sugar, cheap safes, oils and colours, to the extent of about 8000 tons a year, and Bokhara exported to Russia and to Turkestan some 16,000 tons of cotton, wool, sheep-skins, goat-skins, and karakul — the lamb-skin we know as *' astrachan." At this time, how- ever, Bokhara enjoyed a trade of over 3000 tons a year with India, via Afghanistan, importing indigo, green tea, and English NEW BOKHARA AND ITS PROSPECTS 293 manufactures, but the new railway enabled Moscow manufac- turers to flood the market with cheap manufactured articles, drivint^ out the better but dearer English goods, a process which the Russian Government completed when necessary by prohibi- tive tariffs. Bokhara was the depot for tea and indi(^o for the whole country, and it now gets, via Meshed, Askhabad, Dushak, and Kaakhka, the remnant of what used to reach it from Kabul. For sugar Russia has established depots at Bokhara and remits the excise and pays a bounty upon all that is sold there. Bok- haran imports have risen from 8000 tons in 1887 to over 42,000 tons in 1896, but exports have not risen in proportion, havmg never exceeded 21,000 tons. This discrepancy is attributed by the local authority I have previously quoted to four causes : the limited sphere which is really tapped by the railway, and the indifference of merchants to districts distant from the railway, without waggon-roads or regular communication by the Amu- Darya ; the rapid growth of new needs among natives served by the railway ; the difficulty in the cultivation of American cotton owing to the uncertainty of water supply; and the truly Oriental carelessness of the Bokharan Government regarding its products — for example, twenty-five years ago the silkworm industry flourished and is now in decay. When these condi- tions, however, are removed, Bokhara will once more be in a position to export in proportion to its imports, for, thanks to the railway, which carries wheat at the very low rate of i/iooth of a kopeck per poud per verst, grain can be bought as cheaply as it can be grown, and the land thus left free for more valuable crops. Moreover, as in 1893-4, the railway will render famine from bad harvests impossible. The principal new objects which the railway has taught the natives to use are kerosene, building materials, passementerie, and stearine candles. The consumption of these articles increases regularly, but with the exception of candles, which go as far as Afghanistan, they do not yet reach nearly the whole of the Khanate. 294 ALL THE RUSSIAS Before the railway came, capital could hardly turn over once a year, because of the difficulty of communications with Europe, and therefore Russian commerce was confined to a few wealthy Bokharan merchants. But now that goods can be delivered in Moscow in from 35 to 40 days, direct relations are possible even to small capitalists, and the natives take every advantage of this, with the result that competition is very keen and the people en- joy the lowest possible prices. The establishment of elementary processes of manufacture, on the other hand, such as cleaning, packing, tanning, has quadrupled wages, and cultivated land has risen enormously in value. My Bokharan authority claims, and rightly, I think, that the two facts (i) that a total annual trade of ;^3,ooo,ooo is done by a population of 3,000,000 souls, one half of whom take no part whatever either in producing or purchasing ; and (2) that the imports are 3,000,000 roubles more in value than the exports, show that the trade of Bokhara must necessarily increase largely, as soon as the conditions which prevent the greater part of the mountainous regions of the Khanate from taking any share in the commerce wath European Russia are changed. It is confidently held, too, that the mountainous dis- tricts of Bokhara are the natural half-way house of trade between Moscow and Afghanistan. At present there are no direct rela- tions, although Bokharan merchants bring every year a certain amount of produce, chiefly karakul, from Afghanistan and send it to the fair of Nijni Novgorod, paying for it in iron, cotton, sugar and candles, but the natural trade route to Kabul, well known to the Afghans, runs through Bokhara, and therefore in the future Russian manufactures should be exchanged for Afghan raw materials via Bokhara. Then Bokhara will stand to Afghanistan in a relation similar to that of Trans-Caspia to Per- sia, but more favourably, for whereas Trans-Caspia trades with only one province, Khorassan, Bokhara will exchange with the whole rich and densely populated northern part of Afghanistan, beginning with Kabul, which has an area equal to the whole of NEW BOKHARA AND ITS PROSPECTS 295 Bokhara, and which, when the roads are somewhat improved, will be able to seek an outlet for its products in Bokhara, rather than send them over the difficult mountains to the south, to find a market in the direction of Kandahar. So, at least, they believe in Bokhara ; but, apart from other considerations, it is obvious that the development of a trade route over the Murghab branch line to Kushk and Herat, if England and Russia should agree upon it, would upset most of their calculations. There is one other industry that should be mentioned, for although it has only just been started, its success— and the few who have invested in it have a iirm faith in its future — would have an enormous influence upon the development of Bok- hara. I refer to gold-mining. It would seem inherently prob- able that in such a mountainous country as a large part of Bokhara minerals would be found, and gold in paying quantities may well be along them. Two Russian commercial residents have begun the work of seriously developing one district known to be gold-bearing. Their mine is 530 miles from Bokhara city, and at present can only be reached on horseback. They hold a concession of seven properties, each two versts square, and one of these they are working. They have reached the gold-bearing stratum at a depth of fifteen metres, and they were getting one zoloinik of gold from every hundred poudsof dirt washed — say 2 dwt. to the ton. They pay the Amir a royalty of five per cent, of the gold produced, and an annual rent of about two shillings an acre. Against the small returns of gold may be set the fact that labour is plentiful and wages are from sixpence to eight- pence a day, and that there is abundance of water. The owners of this concession are very anxious to get foreign capital to help them to prove and develop their six remaining properties. My lady readers may like to know something of the origin of the fur which becomes them so well, known to them as "astra- chan" (Astrakhan used to be its port of entry into Russia) or "Persian lamb," and to those who produce it as karakul. It is 296 ALL THE RUSSIAS the skin of the very young lamb — not of the unborn lamb, as is commonly believed — and the best comes from Afghanistan. Its high cost is due to the heavy export duty the Amir of Afghanistan places upon it, which his subjects regularly try to evade by smug- gling. In Bokhara the Afghan skins are mixed in parcels of ten with inferior local skins, and thence they go to Novgorod, to Moscow and especially to the great annual fur fair of the world at Leipzig. Only the best are kept for sale in Central Asia, and for these the Russian dealers give about 32 roubles — £2, ys., $16.50 — for ten skins, though the best single skin will fetch as much as fifteen shillings — $3.60. I bought excellent grey skins in Tiflis at the rate of 28 roubles for ten. Another curious Bok- haran export, of which also those who use it do not guess the source, is sheep's guts, prepared for violin strings imder the supervision of Russian workmen. I remarked above that the natives had imported for them- selves smce the railway came, and that prices of European goods rule very low in Bokhara. This is partly due to a very peculiar system of trading which prevails there. There is now only one firm of Russian importers in the city, and the native merchants, the Sarts, have been accustomed to conduct their business as follows. They go to Moscow themselves, give their orders, get long credit, return to Bokhara, sell their goods for less than they paid for them, and invest the cash thus raised in cotton or silk or skins. In a good year their profits cover their loss and leave a handsome balance. In a bad year they fail and pay fifteen or twenty kopecks on the rouble. The Moscow merchants know that when a man has paid for four or five years in succession he is sure to go under, but their profits have been so good that if they were paid for four years they could w^ell afford to lose the fifth. Now, however, the Trans-Siberian Railway has given them so much more to do that they care less about Central Asian trade and are refusinj^ the old loner credit. CHAPTER XX OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS '' T T has eleven gates, and a circumference of fifteen English X miles; threehundredandsixtymosqLies,t\venty-twocara- vanserays, many baths and bazaars, and the old palace called Ark, built by Arslan Khan one thousand years ago, and has about one hundred splendid colleges." So wrote of old Bokhara that singular divine, the Rev. Dr. Wolff, sixty years ago, one of the very few Europeans to visit it before the conquering Russian army, a witness to whom 1 shall presently recur. Like all the East, alas, Bokhara is no longer what it was, but it is a mightily impressive city all the same. And the more so because it is among the rare places where the Oriental does not cringe to the white face. One notices a distinct difference in the attitude of the natives towards foreigners here, from that of the Turkomans of Trans-Caspia and the Sarts of Samarkand. The Turkomans were crushed by Skobelef at Geok Tepe once for all ; they will never lift a hand again. The Sarts are urban and mercantile people, and are wholly resigned to the present n'gimc. The Bokharans, on the other hand, are still nominally a free race. They see few strangers, and they dislike them intensely. As you go about the crowded narrow streets of Bokhara you meet with studied in- difference or black looks, except from the Jews, and it is easy to see that indiscreet action would provoke instant reprisals against yourself. This is one reason why the Russian authori- ties do not encourage visitors to Bokhara, and indeed some passports issued for Central Asia include it with the Murghab branch of the railway as a forbidden place. 298 ALL THE RUSSIAS When I was there the new branch Hne from the Russian settlement to the native city was not built, so I drove eight miles along a flat, dull, dusty road, passing to the left the new palace the Russians are building for the Amir — a handsome heterogene- ous sort of structure, half Oriental, half European — and to the left an old palace completely hidden behind high mud walls. CITY AND CITADEL, BOKHARA Midway we stopped at a roadside hovel with a big water-trough in front, and while the horses drank, the owner brought out a great gourd water-pipe, with a red charcoal on top, and passed it to my driver, who drew one deep inhalation and passed it to another driver, who handed it to a third, and so on till it had been used by the half-dozen teamsters watering their beasts there. No man even wiped the mouthpiece as it passed from mouth to mouth. I mention this incident because it goes some way tow^ard justifying the statement of a Russian physician quoted to me, that eighty percent, of the inhabitants of Bokhara suffer from the worst of contagious diseases. The approach to the centre of the city is through a great gateway in the wall, and then by long, narrow streets, between high walls. In the true fashion of the East, where domesticity OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 299 is of all thini^s most secret, the houses all look inwards, pre- senting blank backs, broken only by a huge door, to the passers-by. After a mile or more of these you reach the great covered bazaar, with charming corners where mulberry-trees drop their fat berries into shaded ponds, and gossiping men sit sipping coffee or green tea and smoking the inevitable kalian. Already the convenient Russian samovar is in general use, and indeed is made here. Each trade has its own street. Workmen in leather, in iron, brass, tin, are hard at it, stitching, grinding, riveting, hammering, with all the strange labour-saving dodges of the machineless East. Much of the bazaar is vmder a heavy vaulted roof, and here the more valuable articles are exposed — books, stuffs, the embroidered skull-caps worn by all, the gay silk khalats, the universal outer garment like a dressing-gown, rolls of rainbow-like watered silk from native looms, carpets, cottons and crockery from Moscow, exquisite kngaiis, ewers of chased and hammered brass — irresistible to the foreign visitor, the most characteristic and interesting objects here. The money- changers are as usual conspicuous — Hindus, with the orange flame-shaped caste marks on their foreheads, great heaps of little brass coins and big lumps of silver before them, and a stock of the beautiful Bokharan gold coins in leather bags tucked into their breasts. The Jews are in evidence everywhere, recognisable by their drab khalats, square hats trimmed with fur, and the cord round their waists. Anti-Semitism has always reigned in Bokhara, and every Jew is compelled to wear a cord round his waist. The original intention was that this should be a genuine piece of rope, but the Jew of to-day obeys the letter and escapes the spirit of the proscription by wearing a thin silk cord, or, if he is poor, just a little bit of string. Twelve or fourteen years ago this bazaar was filled with English goods, but the Russians deliberately set about killing that trade, and the long credits of the Moscow merchants helped. Now nothing is English but the fine muslin used for 300 ALL THE RUSSIAS the voluminous turbans (in Persia for shrouding the dead), which Moscow cannot make. The native velvet of brilliant colours running one into the other, greatly admired by the Bokharan, though thin and poor in quality, is from 14 to lyi inches wide, and costs from three to four shillings the arshm (28 inches). The watered rainbow silk of the same width costs THI', I'liRTAI Will; - I'M, ATE, BOKHARA about 2s. the arsliiii. After long haggling I bouglit a beautiful brass kurgan, fifteen inches high, for six roubles. Sunday is bazaar-day in Bokhara, and the crowd is extraor- dinary. The road from stall to stall is packed with men and beasts and carts, each man shouting to all the others to get out of his way, and belabouring the nearest beast. P'or those on foot it is one congested jostle. The mounted are of many kinds : big men on little asses — often with veiled women sitting behind them ; boys astride asses' cruppers with sacks before OLD BOKHARA y\ND ITS HORRORS 301 them; proud cavaliers, iiiagniiicent in niiilti-coloiired silk and velvet, on splendid horses of Arab-like breed from Turkestan ; camels with silent feet and horrid face high above all and pushing ruthlessly through ;every now and then one of the Amir's otttcers, followed by his suite, preceded by grooms on foot smartly clearing a way with sticks ; then suddenly the baklui, thrust close by the crowd, staring curiously at you with wise old eyes in a child's face — the scene entrances till you weary of it, which is soon. The charm of the East is in its mysteries, its thoughts unuttered, its opinions veiled, its eloquent silence, the strange things it knows and does not tell : this noise and pushing are of the West you know. Besides, there is too much horror here — the hot smallpox marks, the unmistakable pallor of the leper, the dirty bandage where the Bokharan worm has been pulled from the flesh, the feature rotted away from unnamable evil, the mutila- tion from gangrenous wound or judicial torture. You shoulder your way to a side-street, in a few minutes the bazaar is only a distant surf-like murmur, and you venture a deep breath again. The hiitcha of whom I have spoken is one of the peculiarities of Samarkand. He is the singing and dancing boy, correspond- ing to the geislui of Japan. It is needless to inquire very closely into his career, which depends upon his looks and gifts, and not infrequently brings him wealth by the time his beard comes and he " retires," but it is an interesting and instructive fact about Bokharan life that a number of high officials to-day were for- merly batcJias, and I was told that d.uring my visit there were hardly any left in the city, as the Amir had sent for them all ! While I had lunch a carpet was spread in the courtyard and a band of batdias was brought to dance and sing. The natives took the greatest possible interest in the performance, crowding in, and appearing on every house-top around, but it seemed to me a dull show. The singing, which, perhaps fortiuiately, I did not understand, showed a certain amount of training, but the so- called dancing seemed aimless, and some of the band were of the T 302 ALL THE RUSSIAS most repulsive ugliness. Doubtless for a performance before an infidel, in broad daylight, these epicene artists did not give the rein to their passion, as otherwise it would be impossible to ex- plain the mad admiration and devotion they excite among their native patrons. But they would not come for less than twenty roubles, all the same, and they were very dear at the money. As Mr. Skrine truly remarks, the European never feels more acutely the gulf between East and West than when he wit- nesses the enthusiasm excited by the mimic passions of such a scene. My illustration is a pho- tograph I took at the time of an extremely popular hatcha. I have always been greatly inter- ested in native dances, and often found them repay careful study, but Bokhara contributed little to my notes on this subject — not to be compared for a moment to the charming dancing of Japan, or that most wonderful and eloquent dance I witnessed and photographed in Seoul, the capital of Korea.* Every respectable woman in Bokhara goes, of course, veiled, and her veil is of horsehair, thick and long enough totally to obliterate her personality. Nothing but the little pointed toe of a scarlet or green boot, or a mud-plastered shapeless extremity, betrays the presence behind the veil of a woman whose looks still justify coquetry, or of a poor old labouring hag. The unveiled ladies have a street to themselves, where they sit on " BATCHA " OF BOKHARA * See " The Real Japan," Chapter IX., and " The Peoples and Politics of the Far East," p. 354 sqq. OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 303 their balconies in velvet robes and wei<4hed down with cheap metal ornaments. As they olTer the only opportunity of see- ing what the women of this country look like, I took advan- tage once of having a Cossack with me to get him to gather a little group of them together to be photographed — with THE UNVEILED LADIES OF .BOKHARA the result you see. They thought it great fun, and were made very happy with a rouble or two and some handfuls of cigarettes. Bokhara is the focus of Mohammedanism in Central Asia, since its teaching here is free of all Christian interference. There- fore the inailrassas, or theological colleges, are still the homes of devotion and fanaticism, and enjoy all their original prestige. Therefore, also, a Christian cannot enter them. But their original architectural beauty has vanished, for the tw^o chief ones, which 304 ALL THE RUSSIAS face each other in the middle of the town, were once covered with exquisite bhie tiles and are now meanly repaired with great patches of mortar. At one mosque in Bokhara two thousand worshippers can pray at once. Another has a fayade entirely formed of delicately carved wood, now of that beautiful greyness which untouched wood takes on with age. In front of it there is a quiet spot where willows and birches droop over a trickling fountain, and here an old man in a bright yellow khalai, seated upon a low square stool, was reading aloud ancient Asian history to scattered groups of deeply attentive listeners. From time to time one of them would rise, walk by the reader and drop a coin for him and silently disappear, while others would as silently join the circle. I stood a long time watching this scene, held by its charm, the monotonous voice of the reader, and the remoteness of it all from one's own w^orld. The genuine untouched East, exactly the same to-day as it was a thousand years ago, is rare now. 1 had not been in the city an hour, on my first visit, before there was a commotion in the crowd and a huge old gentleman in a brilliant striped A'//^//^?/, mounted on a hne horse and followed by several attendants, came pushing his way through the crowd, careless of whom he trod upon or knocked aside. It was evident from the demeanour of the people that he inspired respect if not fear, so when he reined up sharply by me and began to address me volubly, I was prepared for some sort of a scene. It turned out that he was the chief of police, and that he had been despatched by the Khiiz Bt^gi^ the ruler of the city in the Amir's absence, to find the foreigner reported to be in the bazaar, and request him to present himself at once at the palace. I have had so many of these dreary receptions, and my time was being so much more interestingly occupied, that I made every excuse I could think of. I was not fittingly dressed to wait upon his mightiness, my time was very short, I begged the policeman to present my respects and excuses, and so on. But it was of no use, and the worthy OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 305 man became so insistent that I saw it would be discreet to comply without further delay. The nondescript " palace " to which we made our way may be better jud^^ed from my illustration than described. It is the old "Ark," built in 1742, and the clock between its towers was the ransom an Italian prisoner gave for his life. The slope leading to it was lined with soldiery, wearing black astrachan hats, black tunics, scarlet trousers and high boots, and groups of officials eyed us curiously and without any obvious ap- proval. The actual entrance behind the towers is up a narrow sloping passage, evidently made to admit a horse, with queer dark cell-like rooms off it at intervals — the sleeping quarters of the soldiers, and perliaps places of detention also. At last we were ushered into an ante-chamber, beyond which was a kind of banqueting-room,and in the former we were immediately joined by that redoubtable personage, the Chief of the P'alconers him- self. He was a short, enormously fat man, with a patriarchal white beard, a colossal white turban, and a splendid kliahit of flowered white silk. A native interpreter, speaking Russian, ac- companied him, so our conversation was done at two removes, through my own interpreter. He greeted me with a string of profuse and variegated compliments, and begged me to partake of refreshments. As soon as we entered the adjoining chamber I saw that I should be lucky if I escaped in a couple of hours, for a most elaborate and picturesque ilasfarklian, or spvecLcl of sweet- meats of every kind, was on the table, too obviously the prelude to a corresponding feast. And so it proved, the troop of servants swept away course after course, the well-known sluisJilik, the sluufct, boiled mutton with rice, the kdvanlik, ragout of mutton and onions, the kebab, grilled knobs of mutton, and the profusion of fruit and sugary cakes; while finding that I did not drink the sweet champagne very fast out of one glass they tried the hos- pitable but ineffective expedient of filling several glasses with it and placing them temptingly within reach of my hand. 3o6 ALL THE RUSSIAS The conversation was of a similar sugary character. I asked after his Highness Sayid Abdul Aliad, and if he was soon coming to Bokhara. I was informed that he was very busy but that he would soon come to conduct affairs of state. The Klinz Bcgi hoped "my Queen" was in good health, and that the war in which she was engaged was progressing well. I was thankful to say the Queen was well, and I hoped the war would soon have a victorious issue. War, remarked my host, was a terrible thing. I agreed, and asked how trade in Bokhara was. Thanks to the wisdom and kindness of the Russians in bringing the railway, it was excellent (O hypocrite !). I begged that my respectful greetings might be conveyed to the Amir, with an expression of my profound regret that I had not been able to present my com- pliments in person. A special courier should instantly be des- patched to his Highness, I was assured, to carry my message. This, I afterwards heard, was actually done, not of course for anything of the sort, but doubtless to tell him that a foreigner had arrived, that he had been summoned to the palace and enter- tained with food and fair words, and ascertained to be a harmless Englishman, who had duly paid homage to the great Amir. At every compliment, or whenever our eyes met, the KIiuz Begi rose, passed his hand slowly down his beard (the conventional salaam, refusal to perform which cost poor Stoddart his life), and bowed profoundly, I of course doing the same. The scene would have been a great success on the stage, I think — at least I had to adjure my Russian companion not to laugh. As a matter of fact, it was rather a shocking farce, for he regarded me as an accursed Christian dog, thrusting my nose into places where I had no business, and was doubtless reflecting that but for those other accursed Russians he would promptly have dropped me among the sheep ticks, preparatory to letting my blood run down the gutters of the bazaar ; while I certainly regarded him as an old monster, given up to the beastliest vices, and crafty and cruel and rapacious beyond words. We parted OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 307 with an outburst of compliments and affectionate assurances which deceived neither of us. This is one aspect of Eastern travel. If there were much of it, and nothing else, few people would go to the East except for trade or sword in hand. As we were conducted down the passage I noticed hanging THK STREET GRIMACER OF BOKHARA near the entrance a great club and an enormous whip. The former is said to have come from Mecca, and the latter to be the whip of the immortal Rustum himself. Outside, a crowd had gathered, and an official made a way for me with his stick. In the middle a tall native was holding forth at a great rate about a young fellow in a blue tunic, who illustrated the different phases of the patter with an appalling grimace, greeted by the spectators with shouts of delighted laughter. Never have I seen such a countenance on a human being. The fellow's mouth seemed made of india-rubber, and inserting a finger of each hand into the corners he pulled and stretched it and apparently wound it round his ears and opened it till you could have inserted a good-sized melon. It was a quaint scene, as my photograph shows, proving 3o8 ALL THE RUSSIAS that the natural man finds pleasure in unnatural things, alike in Central Asia and on Epsom Downs. High above everything else in Bokhara towers the Minar Kalan, the great tower of punishment. It is built of flat red bricks, and its graceful proportions have not suf- fered at all from the effects of time. At the top, as will be seen, it widens into a kind of campanile, set with oblong windows,and at its foot there is a de- pression which looks as if it had been scraped out of the ground. From one of these windows condemned criminals, trussed like fowls, were pushed out, and this de- pression is where genera- tions of them fell. One of the last Europeans to wit- ness the horrid sight be- fore the Russians stopped it for ever was M. Moser, the well-known French traveller in Central Asia, who spent some time in Bokhara, but almost as a prisoner in his house, for he could not go about the city without an escort. Speak- ing of dull days .thus spent he writes : " Comme distraction, je voyais, les jours de bazar, des paquets, jetes du haut du Manarkalan, tournoyer dans I'air." THE TOWER OF EXECUTIONS, BOKHARA OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 309 The prison of Bokhara possesses an irresistible fascination for anybody who knows the history of Central Asia, and I fear I looked forward to visiting this more than any other place there. It was the scene of three of the most horrible and lonely martyrdoms that Englishmen have ever been called upon to suffer in the cause of Empire. The story is forgotten now, but cannot be separated from the place. In 1840 Colonel Stoddart, of the Indian army, was sent by the British Government on a mission to Bokhara, to make cer- tain political arrangements with the Amir Nasrullah. He was discourteously received, and appears to have acted with indis- cretion. When he was requested to make the usual salaam before the Amir, he drew his sword — a gross affront, and when a message was brought to him from the Amir he is said to have replied with the Oriental insult, " Eat dung ! " At any rate he was on the worst terms with the Amir, and was eventually thrown into prison. Later, Captain Arthur Conolly, also of the Indian army, a man of singular beauty of character and con- spicuous piety, was despatched by the Indian Government to Khokand and Khiva, with orders to proceed afterwards to Bokhara, to place himself under the orders of Stoddart and assist the latter in any way necessary. He duly reached Bokhara, and shared Stoddart's treatment. Then darkness fell upon the fate of the two envoys. The last authentic news of them, up to September 1843, was contained in two letters from Conolly to his brother John, himself a hostage in Kabul, and told of their situation in the summer of 1842 : " For four months they had no change of raiment ; their dungeon was in a most filthy and unwholesome state, and teemed with vermin to a degree that rendered life a burden. Stoddart was reduced to a skeleton, and his bodv was covered with putrid sores. They had, with great difficulty, prevailed upon one of their keepers to represent their wretched condition to the King, and were then awaiting his reply, having committed themselves 3IO ALL THE RUSSIAS to God, in the full assurance that, unless soon released, death must shortly terminate their sufferings." The British and Indian Governments — to their shame be it said, unless there were circumstances one does not know — took no steps to discover what had become of their envoys, and, indeed, placed obstacles in the way of several officers who volunteered to risk the journey to Bokhara, by forbid- dincf them to wear their uniforms and refusing them official credentials. At this point a quaint hero stepped forward, in the person of Joseph Wolff, D.D., LL.D. This worthy man had already lived through experiences strange enough, one would have thought, to satisfy the most adventurous. Born a Jew, he had become a Roman Catholic,turned Protestant, publicly protested against the Pope in Rome, and been escorted out of the city by twenty-five gendarmes. He joined the Church of England, studied at Cambridge, and then, with two objects, the conver- sion of his fellow-Jews and the discovery of the Ten Lost Tribes of the Dispersion, he had preached a defiant and polemical gospel all over the East, challenging the learned everywhere to dispute with him in many tongues. Amongst other remote and dangerous lands his missionary zeal had carried him, in 1830, even to Bokhara, where he " underwent much rigid questioning from the Goosh Bekee " — a fact eloquent enough in itself of the stuff he was made of. Then he settled down as curate of High Hoyland, in Yorkshire ; but unable to pass rich on X60 a year, he had taken his wife and son to live in Bruges. With a courage not to be over-praised he decided to make the perilous attempt to rescue the two officers, the younger of whom he knew personally and greatly esteemed, or at least to place their fate beyond doubt, and in July 1843 he inserted a letter in the Morning Herald, addressed to all the officers of the British army, calling for companions or funds to help him in the enterprise. " I merely want," he wrote, " the expenses of my journey, and OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 311 not one sin<^le f:irthin}4 as a compensation, even in case of complete success." Tlie money was found, chiefly by a Captain Grover, one of the officers to whom, as narrated above, the Government had refused official countenance; instructions were given to all British representatives on his route to afford him help ; he left London on October 14, 1843 ; reached Bokhara ■rill". APPKiiACll 10 rilK TKISON, BOKHARA after many adventures and in spite of the gravest warnings of his certain fate ; was detained there a prisoner for a longtime; refused to embrace Islam, and finally abandoned all hope of escaping the executioner ; was only allowed to go at last in consequence of letters demanding his release being sent to the Amir by the Shah of Persia ; was in such a condition when he reached English friends again in Persia that he wrote : " For five days poor Colonel Williams was engaged in putting the 312 ALL THE RUSSIAS vermin off my body " ; and arrived back in London on April 12, 1845.* His journey established the fact that the two men he sought to rescue had been murdered three months before he started, and also that a third British officer, Lieutenant Wyburd, had been killed by the Amir. " For the quietude of soul of the friends of those murdered officers, Colonel Stoddart and Cap- tain Conolly," wrote Dr. Wolff, "I have to observe that they were both of them cruelly slaughtered at Bokhara, after suf- fering agonies from confinement in prison of the most fearful character — masses of their flesh having been gnawed off their bones by ver- min — in 1843." The fate of the unhappy envoys had indeed been almost the cruellest conceivable. They had been kept long in prison, sub- ject to every privation, their hopes being constantly raised by sham negotiations with the Amir, and several times they had been led to execution and taken back to prison. On one of these occasions they had been offered their lives if they would embrace Islam. The younger man boldly professed * By a curious slip his own narrative gives the date of his start wrongly as October 1844, instead of 1843. GATE AND THK GAULEK, KUKHAKA OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 313 his faith in the eye of death, but in a moment of weak- ness, for which he needs no forgiveness, the elder aposta- tised. That they were confined in a dungeon-pit infested with sheep-ticks — the reader who has ever seen a sheep-tick may supply the adjectives — seems certain, though it may be a fable that these insects were fed with meat in readiness for the human prey supplied to them from time to time. At last they were taken out and their heads cut off in public, but not before Stoddart had denounced Islam and declared that he died, as he had lived, in the faith of his fathers. Of Conolly's end Dr. Wolff finely wrote : "His firm conduct at his dying hour re- minds us forcibly of the bearing of those brave soldiers who died in the persecutions of Decius and Diocletian. I hope to see my Conolly among them at the hour of Christ's coming in glory." As the British Government had done nothing to save its emissaries, so it did nothing to punish their murderer. But the Reverend Joseph Wolff was not without justification when he said : " I have given such proofs to my Jewish friends of my sincerity of belief, as I may say without boasting no other Jewish convert has yet done. Independent of this, my nation saw that the Jew was prepared to risk his life to save the Gentile." Lcclia shaloui* All this was vividly in my memory when I set out for the old prison of Bokhara. The palace, or, as it should rather be termed, the citadel or fort, stands upon a low hill, said to be artificial, and is surrounded by a high mud-wall. Skirting * Dr.Wolff subsequently became vicar of Isle Brewers, in Somerset, and remained there till his death. The Rev. Mr. Cole, the present vicar, courteously informs me that he is buried in the churchyard under a marble cross with this most modest inscription: " Joseph Wolff, Vicar of Isle Brewers. Born Nov. gth, 1795. Died May and, 1862. The Lord Jesus Christ was his only hope of Salvation." It is equally remarkable and regrettable that his monument bears no allusion to his life of missionary zeal, or to the act of Christian heroism which was its climax. 314 ALL THE RUSSIAS this, one comes at its eastern side to the foot of a mound, upon which there is a walled enclosure reached by a winding road and entered through a massive gateway of brick, now dilapidated. This is the Zindan, or state prison, and it faces the wall of the citadel. The gaoler came out to meet me and I shivered at the thought of those at his mercy. He was an THE DOOR OF THE GREAT PRISON, BOKHARA old man, very fat, with a long white beard, dressed all in white, and his cruel, leering face was an epitome of the vices. Expec- tation of a present made him obsequious, but from his wicked grin it was easy to guess that he would have been better pleased to receive me under quite different circumstances. For twenty- seven years, he said, he had been in charge of the prison. The square doorway admits to a kind of vaulted guard-room, in which soldiers and a few ugly natives were sitting and lounging. On the walls were plastered pieces of paper on which texts from the Koran were roughly engrossed, and below them hung a fine collection of chains and handcuffs. Beyond the guard-room was a small yard, and two sides of it were formed by the fronts of the two separate prisons — one of brick, and comparatively OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 315 new, the other of mud, low and old, below the level of the yard, its thick doors of worm-eaten wood fastened at the top by an antediluvian padlock. The door of the new prison was opened and I entered alone. It was a good-sized chamber, lighted by little barred windows near the roof, its floor covered with men. A row of them sat round the wall, for the simple reason that they were chained there, while others had spread their miserable quilts so as to fill every inch of space, and sat and lay in all sorts of attitudes to get relief for their limbs without touching their neighbours. The moment they realised that a foreigner had come, they broke out into all sorts of petitions, a dozen talking at once. Doubtless they took me for a Russian of^cial, who could have interfered on their behalf. One poor wretch ran across and fell on his knees, seizing me by the leg and reiter- ating in all the Russian he knew that he was a Samarkand man, and therefore a Russian subject — " Ya Scnuarkand chclovick ! Ya Samarkand cheloviek 1 " It was a shocking sight, and I con- fess I approached the door of the old prison with misgiving. A soldier undid the padlock and stood aside for me to enter. I took one step and then stopped. The room was almost dark, two deep steps led down into it, it was crowded with men like beasts in a pen, a stifling reek issued, and heavy chains rattled as those wearing them turned to see who was entering. For a moment I hesitated, then a thin broken voice said half reproachfully, in Russian : "Please come in— please ! " and I stepped down into the inferno. The spectacle was such as one does not easily forget. The room was smaller than the other, and without any opening to the outer air except the door, and it was even more crowded. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I saw that most of the inmates were chained, and others were evidently only free for the day, for behind them were the rings in the wall to which they were chained at night. Chains on the hands, chains on the feet, even chains round the necks, and some of them with 3i6 ALL THE RUSSIAS a big iron collar and chained by it to the wall. Poor, pale, haggard wretches — utterly ignorant of what might happen to them, never knowing when the door opened that it was not the executioner come to take them to the bazaar. Among them were men evidently well-to-do, for they were dressed in clothes that had once been good, and their mats had once been the clean beds of prosperousfmen. They were almost beyond hope ; THE HUKKOK OF HuRKOKS, IJOKHARA few spoke to me except to beg for bread and water ; several took no notice of me whatever, but the moment the door had opened and let in a little light they had pulled copies of the Koran out of their dress and were reading if fast as long as the light lasted. One man seemed to take a sardonic satisfaction in my evident horror, for he made a way for me across the floor and invited me by gestures to enter a second chamber, through a low doorway in the wall. I remembered that the vermin-pit was said to have been within a second chamber in the old prison, so I overcame my repugnance and entered. The inner room was like the outer, but its human inmates were in even a worse state, and it is needless to dwell more on filth OLD BOKHARA AND ITS HORRORS 317 and horror. The earthen floor sank in the middle — the pit that was here has been filled up. This, then, was probably the scene of the long agony of Stoddart and the gentle Conolly. Within these very walls the two Englishmen, thinking on the spotlessness and the honour of home, on their comrades and friends, on the women who loved them and were breaking their hearts for them — or were finding consolation, if time had tried troth too high — on the Government that had sent them and had apparently washed its hands of them, starved with hunger, sickened with dirt, gnawed alive by burrowing vermin, had prayed first for life and then at last for death. But even this poignant memory could not displace the present horror. There is this truth in the Roman playwright's immortal remark, that the degradation of one human being, whether inflicted or self -procured, degrades humanity. I was haunted for weeks by the face of a man I once saw in prison who had just been flogged, and to me, who hate to see a lark in a cage or a monkey tied to an organ, the sight of all these men, with hopes and fears and affections like my own in kind, positively chained in rows, robbed of every vestige of human rights, was awful. All I could do was to buy bread for them all, and stand by till I saw they really had it, and distribute some handfuls of small coin, in the hope that it would afford a grain of alleviation of their lot. How long had most of them been there ? I asked the old gaoler. Some just come in — some for years. Had they all been tried ? Some had — some had not. What were they chiefly condemned to ? Some to stay in prison — some to death. Would some of them be freed ? The old man smiled. I knew what he meant — it depended upon whether they, or their relatives, could find money to bribe others and him. When would the condemned ones be executed ? God alone knew. If the round earth has a spot upon which hope can find no foothold, that spot would seem to be the prison of Old u 3i8 ALL THE RUSSIAS Bokhara. Yet as I looked back I saw that a gipsy woman had followed me in, and that — the soldier at the gaol-door being too interested to shut it — a group of eager prisoners had gathered round the step, and she was telling their fortunes for the coppers I had given them. CHAPTER XXI SAMARKAND AND BEYOND AFTER Athens, Rome, and Constantinople, I should rank Samarkand as the most interesting city in the world. A volume might be filled with descriptions of all its sights, hut fortunately my photographs, which I venture to think are of unusual interest, tell the greater part of what one would wish to say. It lies 2000 feet above the sea, and is a desert of narrow streets and silent, mud-coloured houses, surrounded by an earthly paradise of fertile fields, rich vineyards, and blossoming gardens, recalling at once a certain clever imita- tion of Omar Khayyam — What thoiish the Book 3-011 cannot understand? Druik while the Cup stands ready to your hand ; Drink, and declare the summer roses blow As red in London as in Samarkand. In its midst is the inevitable bazaar, crowded from morning till night by dense crowds of haggling purchasers and gossipers, through which a ceaseless stream of men and women on horses, donkeys, and camels push their way with the greatest difficulty. As in Bokhara, one section is devoted to cloth, another to silk, another to leather, another to arms, another to metal-work, and the most interesting of all to manuscripts. Here I was brought all ports of strange volumes to buy, and although this market had been ransacked of late for rare treatises I could not help feeling that only my ignorance of their contents prevented me securing some manuscript of value. But probably my ignorance 320 ALL THE RUSSIAS also preserved me from less pleasant discoveries, for much of the reading matter that delights the East would produce a very different impression upon a Western mind. It is the marvellous ruins of Samarkand, however, that give the city its extraordinary interest. Alexander the Great paused here ; long afterward China made it into a great capital ; then Mohammedanism, destined to conquer from China to Turkey, converted it into the best loved and most admired spot of the world. Genghiz Khan destroyed it with fire and sword in 1 2 19, and more than a century later Timur, the lame Tartar — Timur Lciig, whence our "Tamerlane" — anticipated the beauty and the fame of Athens here, and adorned it with the "grandest monimients of Islam," whose ruins to-day, six centuries later, are worth the long journey to the heart of Asia to see. They surround the Rigistan, or market-place, and consist of several iiuulrassas, or colleges, Timur's tomb, his wife's mausoleum, and one wonderful mosque. The niadrassa, called Shir Dar, or "the Lion-Bearing," from the Lion and the Sun of Persia enamelled upon it, stands on the eastern side of the great square, and that known as Tila Kari, or the Golden, from the gold plating with which it was once covered, on the north. To their splendour, as shown in my illustrations, must be added the effect of colour, for their fafades are built of coloured tiles, among which the unequalled blue of Persia predominates. These fagades are flanked with minarets of extreme grace but curiously out of the perpendicular, while within, the courtyard is surrounded with two storeys of class-rooms and students' apartments. Foreigners are not welcomed here, but I managed to make friends with the professors of one of these colleges, and after a theological discussion of the prohibition in the Koran of making pictures of the faithful, to take this photograph of a group of them. A young student of the niadrassa, with the Oriental's eye for SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 323 bakshish, volunteered to take me up to the roof, and the view of the city, combined with the recollection of its marvellous past, held me long entranced. Below was the crowded, noisy, many- A SAKT OF SAMARKAND coloured market-place, enclosed by the great buildings, still magnificent in their partial ruin — the noblest public square in the world, in Lord Curzon's opinion. Beyond them the glorious domes of the mausoleums of Timur, the man who built them all, and his wife, stood high above everything else. Time and 3^4 ALL THE RUSSIAS earthquakes have wrought destruction, the portals are broken, some of the minarets are without tops, square yards of tiles have fallen off, rubbish-heaps have been formed of the ch'biis, but still the magnificence of these great structures persists, and I know THK MADRASSA SHIR DAR, SAMARKAND no more impressive and picturesque sight than this great market, crowded with stalls and shouting buyers and sellers, while high above and all around the human ant-heap stand these vast archi- tectural splendours of an age long past, the note of heavenly blue dominating all. The city, flat and sombre, was ringed around SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 327 with gardens and vineyards. Around these was the bare, sandy desert, rolHng up into the Mai range. Behind me was the peace- INTKKIOK OF SHIR PAR, SAMARKAND ful courtyard, surrounded by its tiers of cells for the students, with trees, and fountains, and slowly stepping, white-turbaned 328 ALL THE RUSSIAS iiiolhilis. Once this was the metropolis of the world of Islam, the home of art and poetry, the site of everything most splendid that Mohammedanism produced, the place of every Mussulman's desire, the symbol of beauty and perfection. Hafiz of Shiraz be- lieved himself to be touching the high- water mark of hyperbole when he wrote — If that Turkish girl of Shiraz would give me her heart, I would give for one mole of her cheek Samarkand and Bokhara. But the Uzbegs were the Goths and Vandals of this Asian Rome — the Turks of this later Athens. F'inally even Bokhara took it and held it till the Russians came conquering from Tashkent. Happily Timur built his monuments so solidly that neither men nor time have destroyed them, and to-day they are assuredly still among the most glorious works of human hands. Timur himself reposes beneath an exquisite fluted dome, flanked originally by two minarets, of which one has fallen and the other is cracked and leans dangerously. In front is an entrance portal with a Gothic arch, in blue enamel, leading to a garden shaded by alders and mulberries and weeping acacias. An aged mollaJi lives in a stone cell within the mausoleum, surrounded by paper texts copied from the decorations and tombs, which he sells to the faithful. Beneath the lofty dome, on the ground level, within a kind of palisade of pierced alabaster or gypsum, are half a dozen coftin-shaped slabs, marking the places where the bodies lie in the crypt below. One of these is an enormous block of dark-green jade, almost black, said to be the largest in the world, bearing the name of the Amir Timur himself, and the date of his death in Mohammedan chronology — A.D. 1405. Another block is commemorative of his grandson, Ulugh Beg, the famous astronomer. In a recess, below a pierced stone window, hangs a flag, surmounted by a horse-tail — the SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 329 symbol of fightin<^ MoliainniecUmism. When you have gazed upon these the old iiiollnh h<4hts a guttering candle and leads you down a narrow liight of marble steps to the crypt, where the 'amOfiiMti^iAifis^iJ^jS POKTAI, OK THK TOMR OF TAMERI.ANK, SAMARKAND mighty conqueror lies beneath a single stone — one of the world's greatest dead, whose armies ranged victorious over more than even Russia rules to-day. Not less impressive than his own tomb, and probably more beautiful before it fell into hopeless decay, is the mausoleum of 330 ALL THE RUSSIAS Bibi Khaniim, his wife, the daughter of the Emperor of China. One traveller speaks of it as "Ic plus bcdii luonumcnt qui ait jdiiiais etc clevc n la mcinoirc d'ltiic fciiuuc adorcc,'^ and if one THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE, SAMARKAND did not remember the Taj Mahal at Agra one might accept the enthusiastic verdict. Its colossal and sweeping portal is now but a ruined arch, and its magnificent and towering dome, once gorgeous in red and green and gold, is rent across and must SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 33'^ soon fall. But time and ne<4lect have failed to make any impression upon one thing — the enormous marble lectern in the courtyard, which used, it is said, to hold a Koran of corresponding proportions read by Bibi Khanum herself from an upper window. Most impressive of all, however, to my way of thinking, is the THIC TOMB OF TAMKKLANE— THE Ul'l'KR CHAMBER mosque of the Shah Zindah, or " Living Saint," a martyred saint of Islam, who is to arise again in the hour of the triumph of his failh. You enter it through a blue and white-tiled gateway, and pass by a marble stair between a double row of tombs of Timur's relatives and generals. To the left, when I visited it, the very sacred mosque was crowded with kneeling worshippers, all bow- ing together like a wave as the leading niollali chanted the credo of Islam. If I caught thedeeprollingalliterativesyllables aright, they were the sacred words which Mohammed saw in letters of 332 ALL THE RUSSIAS fire on the tiara of Gabriel, since that day the profession of the most fanatical—" God, and nothing but God, and Mohammed the Prophet of God." Then through a long narrow corridor to the entrance of the inner mosque, on the threshold of which a mollah was devoutly praying, with its huge inscription, " God is Great," and a green text from Mecca, a carved wooden pulpit, KiMl; (II TAMEKLANK— THE CRYPT WHERE HE LIES and an enormous Koran, five feet square. Then across padded carpets to the inner sanctuary, where, behind a pierced stone screen, old green flags hang, and a faint candle shows the deep stone-built hole where the Saint awaits the joyful news of the final triumph of Islam. Beside the screen is a heavy little wooden door, leading to the vault below, and fastened with a most quaint padlock. " That has never been unlocked since the Saint entered the earth, twelve hundred and fifty-nine years ago," said the mollah who was conducting me — with a fine disregard, it must be confessed, of historical accuracy, for that would place the date about six hundred years before the birth of Timur himself, who built the mosque. This spot, however, does not need the aid of pious fiction, and through these narrow SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 333 ways and gates and prayer-chambers one walked in silence, for everywhere worshippers were prostrating themselves in deep devotion, and in the innermost room one peered down into the deep and black tomb where the Saint lies until that day, feeling that one was in truth in a place sanctified by the solemn homage of ages of devout men. One word must be added here in criticism of the Russian authorities. They are apparently oblivious of the sacred re- sponsibility imposed upon them by the possession of these unique monuments of a glorious past. Some rough repairs of common plaster have been made in the walls and dome of the tomb of Timur — and, indeed, it would be a crime to allow so memorable a spot to fall into decay — but, on the whole, the Russians have done almost nothing to keep these splendid structures intact. They do strictly forbid the selling of the blue tiles, but thirty years after they came here an earthquake wrought destruction, and the piles of brick, and mortar, and smashed tiles lie just as they fell. One of the most beautiful domes of Samarkand, that of the Mosque of Bibi Khanum herself, the great Amir's consort, has a huge open rift across it, and may collapse at any moment. The cost of preservation would not be great, and it is surprising that some archaeological society in Russia does not undertake the task which the Government thus strangely neglects.* As Samarkand and all the surrounding country is Russian territory, and as the commerce of the place is important and rapidly growing, the Russian town — which, as in the case of * Since I wrote theabove the following lamentable confirmation of this neglect has been telegraphed from St. Petersburg to the Daily Chronicle : — " The tomb of the great Asiatic conqueror Tamerlane was plundered last month in Samarkand. The robbers not only broke the valuable memorial tablet that was on the tomb under the cupola of the great mosque, where the conqueror is buried, but they also took away many other valuables belonging to the mosque, which seems to be practically un- guarded, notwithstanding it contains some of themost valuable inscriptions in Asia." 334 ALL THE RUSSIAS Bokhara, is at some distance from the native one — is aheady of considerable extent and importance. The Governor's residence is large and spacious— indeed, somewhat extravagantly so — set in the middle of a square- walled garden of several acres. The official departments are numerous and well housed, and there is an admirable school, on an astonishingly large scale, for the MAUSOLEUM OF BIBI KHANUM children of the civilservantsand Russian residents. Theshopsare not like those in Siberia, but all ordinary supplies may be pur- chased. The town reminded me of some American cities in the West, being laid out like a chessboard, with wide streets planted with trees. It is evident that the Russians foresaw from the beginning the possibilities of the place, and that they allowed roomforthedevelopmentthatissuretocome. The mountainous districts around are believed to contain valuable minerals in enormous quantities, and it is said that a great coal-bed has been SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 335 discovered. The natives are industrious, and weave Moscow yarn into stuffs which have a large local sale ; many thousands of acres are planted with vines, producing wine and raisins; and the industry of distilling eau-de-vie de viii has sprung up and is growing fast. It is curious, as I have already remarked, that in such TOMB OF BIBI KHANUM thriving foreign settlements there is nothing like an hotel. The nearest approach is what are called Nojiiem, houses let out in furnished rooms, in which you can get a cup of coffee in the morning and nothing else that you can eat. On the other hand, the military casino, or club, is a fine building, with dining-rooms, billiard-room, library, and a truly magnificent ball-room, and pri- vate theatre. Unless the traveller hasthet'^/n'Vtothis, he is very badly off in Samarkand. At Tashkent I was formally introduced^ by a courteous acquaintance, but here I knew nobody, as the Governor did not trouble to acknowledge the letter of intro- duction I left at his residence from his immediate superior, the Governor-General of Turkestan. This, by the way, and the 33^ ALL THE RUSSIAS action of theChief of Police of Askhabad,of which I havealready spoken, were the only two occasions during my whole journey in the Tsar's dominions when I was not treated with the utmost courtesy and consideration, and when every effort was not made to enable me to see everything and learn everything that I desired. I gladly take this opportunity to return my cordial MAUSOLEUM AND MOSQUE OF SHAH ZINDAH thanks, and to say that nowhere in the world could a visiting foreigner have pursued his way under happier conditions. But this reference to the club at Samarkand reminds me of a story. As I have said, I knew nobody, and the club was the only place in the foreign settlement where a decent meal could be had. So, with my interpreter, a young Russian gentleman who ac- companied me everywhere, I made bold to call at the club, ask for the name of any officer who happened to be present, and when a lieutenant who was playing billiards came out, to ex- SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 337 plain to him who I was and what was my p'ii^ht, and to beg that I might be permitted to use the chib during my short stay. Like every Russian, lie was the soul of courtesy when courte- INTEKK^K ()|- SIIAII ZINUAH, SAMARKAND ously approached, and he at once sought another officer on the premises to be my supporter, and our two names were entered as guests on the spot. This is one example of many such acts of friendly politeness. Now for the story — which shows another 338 AIX THE RUSSIAS side of foreign life in Russia. It was during the Boer War, when things were not going well for us in South Africa, and anti- British feeling ran veryhigh in Russiaand the newspapers served up a daily hash of denunciations and lies manufactured in Brus- sels. Things reached such a pass at last that British Consuls, in full uniform, on official occasions, were deliberately insulted in THE HOUR (i|- I'KA'tIK, SAMARKAND public by Russian officials of high rank. With the timidity that has characterised it during the past five years, the British Foreign Office, instead of officially takingup these insults and thus bring- ing them to an instant stop, ordered all our Consuls to absent themselves on public occasions. This order was the result of an exceedingly gross insult offered to our Consul in Moscow by a Russian General at an official party given by the Governor-Gen- eral there — an insult which compelled him to rise, seek his wife at another table, proceed to the table w'here the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess were sitting at supper, make his bows, and withdraw, the most marked action that a foreigner could possibly take in the presence of Russian royalt3\ This, however, SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 339 is not the story, which contains one of the most finished diplo- matic repHes I have ever heard of. A British Consul-General, with a mihtary title from having served in a famous Highland regiment, was dining in full uniform at an official party on a State occasion about this time. He was seated at a table with a distinguished company, including a prince and princess. While THE AVENUE OF ANDIJAN they were talking, a well-known Russian General, covered with decorations, walked across from another table, his glass in his hand, and holding it before the face of the British Consul-Gen- eral, exclaimed, "/^ ^^^'-^ ^' I'-i saute des braves Boers !" It was a moment that would have tested the most experienced diplomacy. But the Scotsman was equal to it. The insult was deliberate and gross; moreover, it was official, and the Consul would have been wholly within his rights if he had treated it as such, left the room, reported it to his Ambassador, and demanded an apology. This, 340 ALL THE RUSSIAS however, in the ciicumstances, and considering the relations of the two countries, would have been a blunder, and the Foreign Office, while it would have been compelled to take up his case, THE NATIVE POLICEMAN OF ANDIJAN would have regarded him as a tactless mischief-maker. Still, some reply had to be made on the spot, and a dignified one. The Consul-General rose instantly, with perfect self-control ignored the intended affront, and touching his glass to the General's, responded, " Aiix braves dc toutes Ics nations, inon SAMARKAND AND BEYOND 341 Gc'iuTol!" It would be difficult to beat that reply, and the Russians themselves were loud in their praises of such con- summate tact. The man who made it was severely wounded by a Boer shell not long afterward. Beyond Samarkand, along the eastern branch of the Trans- Caspian to its terminus at Andijan, lies the cotton country of Turkestan. The towns themselves— Khodjent, Kokand, Marge- Ian (the administrative capital of P'ergana), and Andijan— are on a smaller scale like those I have described, Kokand with a past, Margelan with a present of greater importance. Nothing in them calls for additional remark, except cotton. Where there is no water, or no system of irrigation, desolation reigi.s. I remember well how the train stopped, late one afternoon, at a station in the middle of the desert. Not a house or a leaf was in sight. A few dogs were prowling about, an old man on a camel was just starting across the trackless sand, and a long- bearded Sart was delighting the Russian station-master's little son by setting him upon his ass. A hundred yards from the station were seven graves in the sand, each with a rough wooden cross above it, and by the sight of the station-master himself, thin, pale, bent, with crooked knees, I judged there would soon be eight. Given water, and the scene changes to fat fields, cosy dwellings, blooming gardens, prosperous natives, and mountains of bales of cotton awaiting transport. The cotton-land is the property of those natives who were in occupation of it when the Russians came, and every effort is v^risely made to keep it in their hands. Before they can sell, they must procure the written permission of three Kazis, or native judges, and then the Russian Chief of the District can either give or withhold his consent to the transaction, and in any casehe only gives permission when none of the native neigh- bours wish to purchase. The land-tax is based upon a quin- 342 ALL THE RUSSIAS quennial classification according to crop, and its maximum is 6 roubles per dcssiatiiia (2.7 acres*) for cotton-land, and 7^ roubles for rice-land. That which pays yh roubles is sold at about 500 roubles the licssiafiiia— shout _^"2o an acre. Land bought twelve years ago om every point of view, therefore, his story is worth telling, but I must preface it by the remark that in no w^ay whatever, directly or indirectly, is any word here due to his inspiration, or has even any suggestion upon the subject ever been made by him to me. I have had the honour of conversing with M. dc Witte onagoodmanyoccasions, butall that follows here is my personal view, and the sole responsibility for it is my own. When this sketch of his career appeared in its original form I sent him a copy of it. At our next meeting he thanked me formally, but neither then, nor at any subsequent time, did he make one word of comment upon it. Serge Julievich Witte was born in i84(), in the Caucasus, where his father, of German descent, was Director of State Do- mains. His mother, iice Fadayef, was the daughter of the Gov- ernor of Saratof under the Emperor Nicholas, and of a Princess Dolgoruki, one of the oldest and best-known Russian noble families. His first studies were pursued at the G\'iniiasiinii of Tiflis, which must have been a very strange place forty years ago, wnth its extraordinary mixtures of Georgians, Armenians, Cir- cassians, Persians, and the like, all much more strongly marked w^ith their national characteristics than they are in the same city to-day. To such an environment in early youth M. de Witte's wide outlook in after-life may probably be traced. From Tiflis he passed to the University of Odessa, where it is said he pre- sented Georgian as the " foreign language " necessary to his graduation in 1870, thus compelling the faculty to import a pro- fessor of Georgian to examine him. Like many another, he found in journalism the ladder to public life, M. Katkof, the well-known editor of the Moscow Vicdoiiwsti, being first his pattern and afterward his chief, whom he supported enthusiastically in more 352 ALL THE RUSSIAS than one of his hard-fought campaigns for a new ideal of Russian patriotism. He was also a collaborator of the once famous Aksakof. M. de Witte's first post was a modest one in the service of the Odessa Railway, which at that time belonged to the State. He rose steadily from one grade to another, and hispersonal qualities were so highly esteemed that the municipality of Odessa elected him to the post of honorary magistrate, a kind of judicial arbi- trator to whose decision both parties in a dispute can agree to refer the issue between them. At this time, too, the Odessa Railway, together with other adjoining lines, was conceded by the State to private enterprise, and the whole, amounting to 2000 miles of road, formed into the important South-West Railway Company, of which M. de Witte, who had attracted favourable official notice by a work upon the principles of a universal railway tariff, ultimately adopted throughout Russia, became general manager after ten years of service. During the Russo- Turkish War he also greatly distinguished himself by adminis- trative skill and energy in forwarding troops and supplies to the front. In 1887 M. Bunge, Minister of Finance, resigned this office, and was succeeded by M. Vishnegradski, a man of great natural gifts and greater acquired knowledge. He had been for several years president of the South-West Railway and other important companies, and being, therefore, intimately acquainted with M.de Witte's career and capabilities, one of his first acts was to offer the latter a post in the Ministry of Finance. M. de Witte declined this, not unnaturally preferring his own independent position, but a dramatic incident which occurred soon afterward led him inevitably to St. Petersburg. As manager of the South- West Railway it was his duty to supervise the arrangements of the Imperial train. In spite of his energetic warnings these were so made as to result in the terrible catastrophe at Borki, when theTsar,the Tsaritsa, and their children narrowly escaped death. M. DE WITTE AND HIS POLICY 353 M. de Witte's action in this connection recommended him so strongly to the Tsar that soon afterward M. Vishnegradski's repeated invitation was backed! by an Imperial command, and HIS EXCELLENCY M. DE WITTE, MINISTER OF PTNANCE he accepted the post of Director of Railways, specially created for him. In March 1892 he was appointed by the Emperor Minister of Ways of Communication ; during M. Vishnegradski's long illness he undertook the duties of the Finance Department ; and when the latter was compelled in August to retire from public Y 354 ALL THE RUSSIAS life, M. de Witte was appointed, provisionally at first, and after- ward formally, Minister of Finance. This was in January 1893, and consequently by his own unaided ability he had reached the highest administrative post in the Russian Empire at the age of forty-four. In tlie very same year he fought the great tariff war with Germany, and showed the world once for all that he could handle colossal issues of national finance with the utmost hardihood, and that, having once entered upon a struggle, he would stop at nothing to bring it to a successful conclusion. Since that time his high-tariff neighbours have taken care to give him no ground for reprisals. The key to M. de Witte's economic views may be found in the fact that at an early period of his career he published a work entitled " The Political Economy of P'riedrich List." The latter (1789-1846, "the politico-economic Messiah of two worlds ") was an apostle of what may be called " educational protection," and this has been throughout his life, as it still remains, the fundamental principle of M. de Witte's economic statesmanship. Such a principle assuredly needs no explanation or comment for American readers at any rate, to whom it must be familiar alike in theory and in practice. M. de Witte's statesmanship has been directed, up to the present time, to four ends, of which this educational protection is the first and chief. A brief experiment he made, but dropped as soon as wider knowledge showed it to be unsound, may be just mentioned for the sake of contrast. He began with a belief in ** rag-baby " currency — the issue of assignats, irredeemable paper money, for the payment of the cost of public works. Of this nothing more need be said than that the greatest achievement of his public life has been won in precisely the reverse direction. The second subject to which he turned his attention was the fluctuation in exchange of the gold price of the rouble. These fluctuations seem almost incredible to-day, in view of the stability now so firmly established. In M. DE WITTE AND HIS POLICY 2SS Kcbruary 1888 the loublc was quoted in London at 19 pence; in September 1890 it sprang suddenly to 31 pence; by Decem- ber 1891 it had fallen to 21 pence. Between 1877 and 1896 the highest and lowest rates in London and New York, respec- tively, were 2.s-. ()d. and 15. yd., and 67 cents and 385 cents. The most unscrupulous gambling took place upon the Berlin bourse. In 1891 the hundred-rouble note had actually been quoted at rates varying from 245.10 marks to 191.50 marks. Financial reform, or indeed any important financial operation, was almost impossible to a country whose currency was thus the sport of the money-gamblers, so M.de Witte resolved to strike, and — perhaps remembering what the tariff war with Germany had cost him — at Berlin. So he struck, with his accustomed boldness, straight from the shoulder. It was decided that from January i, 1894, to December 31, 1895, the gold price of the hundred-rouble note should not fall below 216 marks, and Berlin was informed that as many paper roubles as she cared to sell would be bought at that rate. Berlin sold gaily for eight months, and M. de Witte bought ; then, when the final time for delivery came, her speculators had to go upon their knees to the Russian Minister of Finance and beg him of his mercy not utterly to ruin them all. He consented to let them off easily, and there has been no gambling in the rouble since. The Russian statistical historian remembers that not long ago an empty space used to be pointed out in the Berlin Stock Exchange, and questioners were told, " That is where specu- lators in the rouble stood." Campi iibi Troja fiiit. The rouble being thus placed upon a stable basis of exchange, the next step was obviously to the gold standard, and this su- preme reform constitutes the third of M. de Witte's aims, The policy which had stopped the gambling at Berlin was contmued till November 1897, by which time experience had shown con- clusively that the resources of the Russian treasury were suffi- cient to enable it to announce definitively that payments would 2s6 ALL THE RUSSIAS henceforth be made in gold specie, and by an Imperial ukaz of November 14, 1897, every rouble note was made to bear upon its face an undertaking to that effect. The most remarkable fact about this resumption of specie payments is the enor- mous contraction of paper money by which it was accompanied. On January i, 1892, the amount of paper roubles issued was 1,121,000,000; to-day it is 630,000,000. That is, over ;^5 2,000,000 of paper money was withdrawn from circulation, the public being literally compelled to take gold. And what makes this enormous contraction the more remarkable, if not indeed unique, is that as in Russia the State alone issues paper money, these notes were not withdrawn in one form to be reissued in another. M. de Witte's fourth great undertaking — the first in point of time — is under way to-day, but it will not be concluded for several years. This is the Government monopoly of the sale of alcohol. Hitherto his official achievements had been in the line of economic science, connected only indirectly with social prob- lems. His latest legislation, however, strikes deep to the very roots of popular welfare. Drunkenness is a great curse in Russia, as everywhere. The consumption of alcohol per head is not so great there as in the United Kingdom, but it does more harm, for there is in Russia an entire class, the peasants — the very class upon whom in the last analysis the prosperity and security of the country rest — which is impoverished and degraded by drink to an extent not found in any class of any other country. The very virtues of the Russian peasant — his good humour, his sociability, his kindness of heart — make him an easy victim, and to these must be added the terrible loneliness of his life, the long black evenings of winter, the total absence of any other form of enter- tainment, his ignorance and illiteracy, and finally the poisonous filth which has been all that he could buy in the shape of alcohol. To the late Emperor Alexander III. belongs the credit of seeing M. DE WITTE AND HIS POLICY 357 that this evil, destroying his people wholesale, must absolut ly he stopped so far as legislation can stop it, but hitherto no Russian statesman has been found courageous enough to carry the gigantic task to its logical conclusion. Already in i 404 Morchansk, 129, 130 Mortgaged estates in Russia, 455 Moscow — Amu-Darya, direct route to, vi<1 Alexandrof-gai, 265-267 Bokharan trade with, 296, 299 Cannon and bell of, 25, 26 Chinese city in, 28, 45 Churches of, 24 Commercial activity, 28, 296 Fergana, distance from, 267 Kremlin, the, 24, 25, 27, 32 Merv, distance irom.vid Alexandrof- gai, 266 ; vid Orenburg-Tashkent route, 267 Population of, 24 Siberian Railway terminus in, 23, 102 Moser, M., quoted, 308 Mtskhet, 200, 201 Mujik, see Peasants Muravief, Count, 438 Muravief, General, 99, 100 Murghab Railway — Diplomatic value of, 241 Future possibilities for, 243 Route of, 240 and note Russian statement as to, 419, note Secrecy regarding, 240 Trade route by, possible develop- ment of, 295 Murghab River, 240, note, 276 Murray, Colonel, Consul-General at Warsaw, quoted, 377, note * Mussulmans in Bokhara, 289, 303 Navy — German, development of, 433 Russian, expenditure on, 366 Nerchinsk, treaty of, 98 Neva River — Dungeons on, 10 Floods of 14, 15 Shallowness of, 14 New Russia Company, Ltd., 378-384 Nicholas II., Tsar — de Witte, M., confidence in, 362, 385 Nicholas II., Tsar — Peace desired by, 390, 417, 44S Siberian Railway, interest in, 113 124, note Nicholas, Prince, of Montenegro, 399, 404 Nikholsk, 125 Nikolaiefsk, founding of, 100 Nomera (furnished apartments) — at Tashkent, 281 ; at Samarkand, 335 Novogeorgievsk fortress, 402, note " Novorossisk, 378 " Numbers," 281, 335 Odessa — de Witte, M., connection with, 351, 352 Trains snowed up rear, 43 Oil, see Petroleum Oil-worked steamers, 1C8, 169 Omsk, 142, 145, 146 Onions and mutton, 193 Open-Door policy in Persia, 440, 442 Orenburg-Tashkent railway project 266, 267 Orsk, 268 Osh— Approach to, 343, 345 Aspect of, 346 Foreigners disliked in, 347 Governor of, 347 Oxus (Amu-Darya) River- Arnold's lines on, 246 Bridge over, 244, 245 Pan-Germanism, 407-409 Pan-Islamism, 289-291 Pan-Slavism, 396, 409 Paper manufacture in Finland, 77 Paper money, withdrawal of large proportion of, 356 Passports — Forging of, 148, 158 Peasants, for, 361, 362 Peace Conference, 38 Peasants — Characteristics of, see Russians Condition of, 42, 128, 369 Passports for, 361, 362 Relief works for, 369 INDEX 471 Peasants — Rent paid to the State by, 349, 36.4 ; arrears of, written off, 369 I'enjdeh, railway to Maruchak through, 240, note Persia — American interest in, 441 Commercial freedom in, essential, 440, 442 Customs, Russian control of, 422, 423 Division of north and south for po- litical control, Russian \ie\v of, 421, 441, note German railway scheme in, 257-259, 400, 402, 427 ; terminus for, 445 Great Britain — Commercial disabilities of, 424 ; trade with, in igoi, 425, note Gunboats of, action by, 427 Interests of, 424, 443, 444 Imperial bank of, 422, 425 Loans to, 422, 423, note Military possibilities in, 428 Russia — Aim of, for outlet on Persian Gulf, 256, 257, 264, 400, 401, 420; suggested offer of commercial outlet for, 428, 431 Influence of, 264, 422, 423 Trade with, 285, 422 Silver coins of, in Trans-Caspia, 279 Status quo in, maintenance of, 426, 427, 443, 444, 445 Tariff of, for Russian goods, 422 Trade with, 294, 425, note Trans-Caspian water basin in, 276 Persian lamb (wool), 292, 295, 296 Peter the Great — Cottage of, 10 Effigy of, 13 Influence of, 22 Siberian affairs in time of, 99 Petroleum industry — Baku, at, 179, 374, 375 Caucasus district, prospect in, 178, 179 Fountains, 223, 225 Output of oil compared with that of United States, 375 Petroleum industry — Statistics of, 224-22G, 359, 370 Working of wells, 220-223 Petropavlofsk, 100 Pictorial representation, 19, 39 Pig-iron, statistics of production of, 359 Police, Russian, 18 ; scarcity of, in Siberia, 120, 149 Political prisoners, 161 Population of Russian Empire, 451, note Port Arthur — Acquisition of, 100, 396 Railway to, from Kharbin, 124, note, 125 Route to, from United States via Siberia, 125 Poud, equivalent of, 268, 269, 342 Poverty in Russia, 42, 128, 369 Prisoners, political, 161 Prisons — Andijan, at, 279 Bokhara, at, 309, 313-318 Irkutsk, at, i 57-161 Tashkent, at, 279 Protection, educational, M. de Witte an advocate of, 354, 359-361, 377 " Protection " by person of rank, 36 Pskov, 7 Pulp industry in Finland, 76-78 QUETTA-SlESTAN RAILWAY rROJECT, 264, 424 Races, variety of, in Russian Empire, 449 Rails, tests imposed on manufacturers of, by Government, 382 Railways — Advances to, loans to meet, 365, 366 and note Alexandretta-Hit scheme, 263, note X Alexandrof-gai route to Merv sug- gested, 2C5-267 Baghdad scheme of Germany, 256, note-\, 257—259, 400, 402, 427; pro- posed route of, 258, 259 Caucasian lines, 217, 218 and note, 401 472 INDEX Railways — Central Asia, direct route for Rus- sian line in, 265, 266 ; proposed route, 266, 267 ; best commercial route, 268 ; Russian and Indian connection, 270, 271 Construction of new lines, 451 de Witte, M., appointed Director of, 353 Fares on, 116, 117 Freight traffic, increase in, 367 Galician frontier, toward, 402, note * Gauge of, 5 Indian and Russian connection sug- gested, 270, 271 Investment in, 410 Isolated route of, in Russia, 43 Murghab branch, see Murghab Rail- way Odessa, M. de Witte's former con- nection with, 352 Orenburg-Tashkent project, 266, 267 Passenger traffic, increase in, 367 Persia, Russian monopoly in, 35 Quetta-Siestan project, 264, 424 Siberian, see under Siberia State- Extent of, 350, 364, 366 Revenue from, 364, 367 and note * Tashkent-Omsk route, 268 Trans-Alaskan project, 154, note Trans-Caspian, see that title Travelling by (see also under Siberia), 5,8 Tripoli-Koweit scheme, 263 and note * Rank in Russia, 36 Rawlinson, Sir Henry, quoted, 416 Rechnitzer, Mr. Ernest, railway scheme of, 263, note X Recruits, illiteracy of, in Russian army, 451 Reeds, 136, 137 Reformers, 62 Relief works, 369 Religious fanaticism in Russia, 40, 41 Renton, Mr., 119 Resht, road from, to Tehran, 264, 422 Restaurants, 21 Revenue, see under Finance Road-making as relief works, 369 Romanoff — Establishment of, as rulers, 99 Tombs of, 24, 45 Rosebery, Lord, quoted, 456, note Roshan, cession of, to Bokhara, 292 Rouble — equivalent value of, 118, note ; M. de Witte's reforms regarding, 354-356 Roumania — Austria, convention with, 399, 404 Russia, relations with, 403 Runeberg, statue of, 6g Russia, difficulties and dangers of, 454 Russian Empire, strength of, 450 vastness of, 449 Russian staff officers, efficiency of, 452 Russians, characteristics of — Drunkenness, 21, 43, 44, 50, 356, 357 Geniality, 21, 41, 356 Idealism, 47, 62 Superstition and religious fanaticism, 40, 44, 130 Time, inexact sense of, 109 Untruthfulness, 44 Saima Canal, 67 St. Petersburg — • Bars and saloons non-existent in, 21 Character of, 8, 9 Churches of, 9, 10 Costliness of living in, 19 Exhibition of British Arts and In- dustries in, 376, note Floods in, 15 Hotels in, 19 Island Parks of, 13, 14 Police of, 18 Shops in, 19 Unhealthiness of, 15 Sakhalin, 162 Salisbury, the Marquess of — China, despatch regarding German action in, 434 ; Anglo-German Convention regarding China con- cluded by, 435 Pro-Turkish policy, opinion of, 414 Russian assurance as to Persia, despatch regarding, 425 Samara, 130, 164, 165 INDEX 473 Samarkand — Aspect of, 248 Batchas of, 301 Bazaar of, 3 1 y Discourtesy of (jovernor of, 335 Foreigners disliked in, 320 Garrison at, 278 Industries of, 335 Manuscripts of, 320 Military club at, 335-338 Mosque of the Shah Zindah at, 331- 333 I Noviera at, 335 Prosperity of, 291 Rigistan of, 320-323 I Russian quarter of, 333 335 Saratof, 167-169 ; suggested railway vid Alexandrof-gai to Amu- Darya from, 265-267 Sarts, 297 ; wages of, 343 Scenery, see Landscape Schliissenburg, 10 Sea outlets, Russian desire for, iot, 256, 421 Seistan, project of railway to, from Quetta, 264, 424 Servia — Austrian relations with, 399, 403 Russia, relations with, 399; Russian attitude toward, 403, 404 Shamyl, 175 Shan-tung, German claim to, 396 Sheep, 182-186 Shignan, cession of, to Bokhara, 292 Shilka River, navigation on, 123, 124 Shops, pictorial advertisements of, 19, 39 Siberia (foy rivers, towns, &'C., see their titles)— Agricultural production of, 154; de- velopment of agriculture, 370 Alcohol, sale of, not a State monopoly in, 358 Area of, 139 Climate of, iiS Copper mines in, 156 Crime in, 120, 148, 162 Deforestation in, 141 Emigrants to, 135, 139, 156 Exiles to, 139; number of, in 1898, 161 Siberia — Export of butter from, in 1900, 370 First expedition to, 97 Gold mining in, 150-152, 155, 375 Journey to, and through, 127-141 Muravief's work in. 99, 100 Nature of country, 2 Peasants of, 455 Police in, scarcity of, 120, 149 Siberia, Railway of — Beginning of, 100, no Bridges of, 113 Caravan road through Kiakhta a possible route for, 125 Construction of, 113 Cost of, 126 ; funds for, 364, 366 Engines on, 103 Fares on, iiC, 117 Freight charges on, 153, 154 Length of, 125 Light rails on, 117 Manchurian section of, 123-125 Opinions regarding, 153 Rate of speed on, 103, 106, 116, 141 Stations on, 118; buffets, iiS, 138, 142, 143 Traffic on, 117 and note, 118 Trains on — daily, 102 ; weekly train de luxe, 102-110, 127, 130 Trp ns - Caspian Railway compared with — in comfort, 232; in speed, 250 ; in importance, 254 Watchers on, 118, 119 "Waterways of, 140 Silk of Bokhara, 300 Singing boys of Bokhara and Samar- kand, 301, 302 Sipiagin, M., Inspector-General of Irkutsk prison, 160, 161 Siromyatnikof, M., cited, 414 Skobelef, General, 236 Skoptsi sect, 40, 130 Smuggling, 66 Social change in modern Russia, 452 Social fabric, characteristics of, 38, 39 Soldiers — Characteristics of, 44 Length cf service of, 89 and note Mobilisation of, for diplomatic pur- poses, 241, 418 474 INDEX Soldiers — Pay of, 44 Staal, M. de, cited, 425 Stamp, mourning, issued in Finland, 79, 85 Statistics of increase of population in Russia, 451, note Of railway construction in Russia, 451 Steel- Imports of, 375 Production of, statistics of, 359 ; production in 1892 and 1900, 370, 7iofe Stevens, Mr. Patrick, British Consul at Batum, quoted, 180 Stoddart, Colonel — Indiscretions of, 306, 309 Murder of, 288, 312, 313, 317 Stretensk, railway route from Miso- vaya to, 123 Students, Russian — Disturbances of, 453 Theoretical views of, 62 Uniforms worn by, 20 Sugar, depots for, at Bokhara, 293 Superstition, 40, 44, 130 Sveaborg, 71 Sweden — Language of, spoken in Finland. 67 Russia, attitude toward, 388, uole Taiga, 140, 145 Tajiks, 2S0 Tamara, Queen, 174, 190 Tamerlane, tomb of, 320, 328, 329, 333 and note ; mausoleum of his wife, 329-331. 333 Tashkent — Bokhara, attitude toward, 292 Citadel of, 283, 284 Furnished rooms in, 281 Garrison at, 278, 2S2 Governor-General of Turkestan resi- dent at, 278 Military club in, 281 Native quarter of, 283, 284 Observatory at, 282 Orenburg-Tashkent railway project, 266, 267 Tashkent — Population of, 280, 281 Prison at, 279 Realschvle at, 282, 283 Route (journey and distances) to. from Krasnovodsk, 249 Russian quarter of, 281 Seizure of, 279, 280 Shops of, 281 Tatars, 207 Tatistcheff, M., quoted, 385, note Taxes, 382 Tea plantations at Batum, 180 Tehran, road to, from Resht, 264, 422 Tiflis— Bath of, 213 Bazaar of, 205 Buildings of, 204 Characteristics of, 202 Costumes of, 207-209 de Witte, M., educated at, 351 Hotel de Londres, 177, 204 Importance of, 203 Languages of, 178, 202, 205 Old quarter of, 206 Timber (ses aha Wood) — Barges of, on the Volga, 168 Price of, increasing, 376 Siberian port for, 141 Timur, see Tamerlane Tobolsk, 98 Tolstoy, Leo, Count — Appearance of, 51, 52 Emigration of Dukhobortsi assisted by, 41 Excommunication of, 56-61 Home of, 49, 50 Influence of, 61 Opinions of, 52-58, 61 Title of, 48 Visit to, 49-62 Tolstoy, Countess, protest of, to Holy Synod, 58 ; reply to, 60 Tomsk, 145 Treaties — Aigun, 100 Anglo-German Convention regarding China, 435 ; regarding Persian Gulf, 446, note Berlin, 440, note INDEX 475 Treaties — Nerchinsk, 98 Trade- Afghanistan, with, decline in, 285; future possibiHties of, 294 Bokhara, with, 287, 292-296 British, in Central Asia, decline of 239, 255, 293, 299, 440, 441 ; British merchants' price lists, 377, note * Persia, with, 285, 294, 425, Jiote Price of iron goods fixed by Gov- ernment, 383 Statistics of, Russian secrecy re- garding, 285 Tests imposed by Government, 3S2, 383 Trans-Caspia — Cotton export of, 275 ; export from Andijan, 254 ; from Bokhara, 292 Extent of, 272 Grain imports to, 293 Population of, 273, 275 Scenery of, 234, 235, 243 Water basin of, 276 Trans-Caspian Railway — Boat connection with, 234 Construction of, time employed in, 250 Fever in district of, 240, 277 Financial success of, 253, 255, 285 First-class non-existent on, 232 Map of, 252 Murghab branch of, see Murghab Railway Rate of speed on, 249, 250 Revenue of, iSo Sand drifts on, 243, 244 Siberian Railway compared with- in comfort, 232 ; in speed, 230 ; in importance, 254 Starting-point of, 230 Trade facilities effected by, 292, 294, 296 Trains and post trains on, 232, 233 Trees in Russia, 6 Tripoli — Military service obligation accepted by, 290 Railway between Koweit and, pro- jected 263 and note X Truth-telling in diplomacy, 438, 439 Tsar, peasant worship of, 451 Tsaritsin, 169 Tsars — Coronation of, 27, 32-36 Influence of, increasing, 37, 38, 451 Sentiment for, 35, 36, 37, note Titles of, 35 Tombs of, 10 Tula, 47 Turbat, Russian force at, 34 Turkestan — Cotton product of, 30, 31, 269, 341- 343 Imports and exports of, 254 Land-tax in, 342 Military headquarters of, 278 Turkey — Decay of, 398 French claim against, 393, note German relations with, 258-261, 389, 399-401 Mollahs from, in Trans-Caspia, 290 Russian understanding with, as to railways in Asiatic Turkey, 427 Sultan of, Moslem attitude toward, 289 Turkomans — Art of, 273 Carpets of, 273-275 Costume of, 246, 247 Horses of, 275 Russian conquest of, 236, 237, 297 Tweedy, Mr., oil wells of, 219-224 Underclothing, 21, 22 Uniforms, 20 United States, see America University students- Theoretical views of, 62 Uniforms worn by, 20 Ural Mountains — Iron works in, 156 Products of, 133, 374, 376 Scenery of, 130 Urjumka, 132 Usofka, 378 383 Uzum-Ada, 230 Vambkry Arminius, 228 476 INDEX Velvet of Bokhara, 300 Vermin — Murder by, 228, 288, 312, 313, 317 Prevalence of, 44, 233 Versts, equivalent of, 118, note Viborg, 67 Vierzhbolovo (Wirballen), 4 Villages in Russia, poverty of, 42, 43, 128 Vilna, 7 Vishnegradski, M., 353, 354, 357 Vladikavkaz, 170, 171, 181 Vladimir Alexandrovitch, Grand Duke, 88 Vladivostok — Distance to, from Moscow, 123 Founding of, 100 Volga River — Bridge over, 130 Journey down, 164-170 Navigation of, 170, note Scenery of, 167 Traffic on, 168 von Beck, Baron, 405 von Waldersee, Count, leadership of allied forces secured for, 397, 398, 434 Wages of New Russia Company's employees, 38 i Walton, Mr., Vice-Consul, quoted, 371 Wardrop, Mr. , Vice-Consul, quoted, 371 Wei-hai-wei, 396 Western modes, modern attitude of Russia toward, 8, 9 Wheat {see also Grain) — Low price of, in Eastern Russia, 129 Siberian production of, 154 William II., Emperor of Germany — England, visit to, 397 France, attitude toward, 391, 392 Navy, declarations regarding, J33 Pan-Germanism of, 407 Russia, attitude toward, 395-397 Turkish policy of, 389, 400, 402 Williams, Colonel, 311 Windt, Mr. Harry de, railway scheme of 154, note Wine, Caucasian, 180, 193, 209, 210 Wirballen (Vierzhbolovo), 4 Witte, M. de. Serge Julievitch, Minister of Finance — Address of, to the Tsar, regarding Manchurian railway, 124, note Budget of 1902, Report on, 386, note Career of, 350-354, 454 Coal industry development advocated by, 375 Finland, military proposals for, dis- approved by, 88 Imperial confidence in, 362, 385 Loans, statement regarding, 366, note Policy of, 354-356, 370 Wolff, Rev. Dr. Joseph, career of, 310-313 and notes; quoted, 297, 313 Women — Bokhara, in, 302, 303 Finland, in, position of, 80 Georgia, in, 209 Wood {see also Timber) — Cost of, 30 Fuel of, on railways, 5, 7 Wood-pulp — Demand for, 376 Finland, industry in, 76-78 Workmen, 381 Yakutsk, 98 Yasinovataya, 378 Yate, Colonel C. E., cited, 419, note Yelagin, 13 Yenisseisk, 98 Yermak, exploits of, 96, 97 "Yermak" (steamer), 122 Younghusband, Major F. E. quoted, 430 Zaitzef, Colonel, 347 Zemstvo taxes, 382 Zhoravko-Pokorski, Mr. D.. cited, 268, note Zinoviefl, M., attitude of, toward French claim on Turkey, 393, note Zlataoust, 131, 133 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &r Co, London &= Edinburgh MR. HEINEMANN desires to call attention to the following remarkable Opinions of the London and Provincial Press upon the first edition of this important and timely- Volume : The Times : — "The object Mr. Norman had in view was not to write a comprehensive account of Russian institutions and Russian life, but merely to present a picture of the aspects of contemporary Russia most likely to interest foreign readers, with special reference to the recent industrial and commercial development of the country and the possibility of closer commercial and political relations with Great Britain. Within these limits, and considering the difticulties with which he had to contend, we may say he has executed his task extremely well. Unlike the ordinary globetrotter he is a careful, accurate, and thoughtful observer, and in complicated questions he constantly shows a laudable desire to be just and scrupulously impartial. ... In the first part of the volume, devoted largely to what the French call ' impressions de voyage,' the author shows himself a delightful travelling companion." The Daily Telegraph : — " Mr. Henry Norman's new book ought to be read and pondered by all who take an intelligent interest in the world politics of the present day. It appears at a most timely moment, and fills a gap which has long been felt by those who desire enlightenment upon the aims and the policy of Russia. What is Russia doing? What is her mission ? What is her present condition, what her cardinal policy ? These are questions of the hour, and Mr. Norman answers them from personal knowledge and long study, in a most temperate and sympathetic volume, which must have great weight in moulding public opinion in this country. He gives us a record of his travels written through- out with great charm of style and bright descriptive touches, which light up his pages and carry the reader along with him, delighted to be in such entertaining company. . . . Simply as a record of travel this book is entitled to the warmest praise. ... In a most illuminating chapter I\Ir. Norman deals with the international politics of Russia. ... A most notable contribu- tion to the literature of travel and politics." The Morning Post: — " It should be read by all who take interest in world affairs. The descriptive portions, especially those dealing with the Caucasus and Central Asian towns, are vivid, often humorous, always interesting. The illustrations are beautiful." The Standard:— " Finely illustrated and extremely we written." The Daily Mail :— " Mr. Henry Norman's new book is extraordinarily picturesque and incisive, and will greatly add to his growing reputation, in and out of the House of Commons, as a very able and alert publicist." The Daily News : — "Mr. Henry Norman's book of travel may be commended to all who seek vividly to realise the life of the strangely diverse races who make up the great Russian Empire. He has travelled far and lingered long in gleaning his knowledge. Readers will remember with ease and pleasure more from a single page of the descriptive parts of the book than they can carry away from a whole chapter of the wearisome detail which often fills the traveller's quarto." The Westminster Gazette : — "We have seldom met a book which acted so wholesomely upon pre- conceived ideas and prejudices as Mr. Henry Norman's ' All the Russias.' . The great merit of Mr. Norman's book is that it seizes these paradoxes, presents them with insight and understanding, and so leaves us with a coherent idea of Russia and the Russian character. ... A narrative of unfailing animation and complete coherence. . . . Admirably wrought diaries of travel, \ ivid in colour, delicate in observation, and impressionist in effect, as such things should be. ... A book to read and to possess." The Pall Mall Gazette :— " No writer is better qualified than Mr. Henry Norman to describe the wondrous Empire of the Tsar. He has covered 20,coo miles of railway and river travel in European and Asiatic Russia ; he has penetrated to Lake Baikal and to the confines of Kashgar, and everywhere the officials of government vied with each other in facilitating the object of his wanderings. The result is a picture of 'All the Russias,' which is masterly in its comprehensive lines and the delicacy with which the lights and shadows are filled in. . . . No work approaching Mr. Norman's in completeness has appeared since Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace's, which saw the light more than a quarter of a century back." The Globe :— " Few of the roving Englishmen of to-day wield a defter pen than Mr. Henry Norman, M.P. , and none, we may add, can use the camera with better effect. His latest book ... is perhaps the most interesting in the long roll of works which stand to his credit in the library catalogue." The Contemporary Review : — "It should appeal to a wide circle of readers, for it is certainly one of the most entertaining, and, at the same time, informing books of travel published within recent years." The Spectator: — "Mr. Henry Xorman, who has already done much to give the English reader a better appreciation of Asiatic problems, has now increased the debt which we owe him by producing a very suggestive book on Russia. . . . We need not tell our readers that Mr. Norman wields a practised and fluent pen, and has the art of displaying his observations in the light of thought. This is manifested in the present volume as fully as in his previous works, and no one who wishes to understand the life and true inwardness of Russia — that strange country which unites Europe and Asia psychologically as well as geographi- cally—can dispense with a careful study of Mr. Norman's book, which is so entertaining that even the idlest reader, who seeks amusement at the circulating library, need not fear to attack it. . . . We hold that a really strong and broad-minded statesman, who could shake himself clear of prejudice and rise above the mists of the lower diplomacy, could bring about ' that good and lasting understanding between the two nations,' which Mr. Norman regards as 'not only desirable above all things, but also well within the range of possibility.' Perhaps the highest praise which we can give to this book is to say that it should be of real assistance in educating people in general up to the level of such an enterprise." The Guardian : — " A noteworthy volume. . . . We know of no recent book in English, except Mr. Bookwalter's 'Siberia and Central Asia' (and that is an American study), which gives so true and living a picture of Russia as it is to-day in its economic and political aspects. ... It is unnecessary to say that the results of his inquiries are presented by Mr. Norman with the clearness and force which belong to a good publicist. It may be added that the present volume . is excellently illustrated. As a key to unlock the secrets of Russia the author has chosen sympathy rather than malignity and the interest of fear. In his care of investigation, breadth of view, and depth of insight, he has worked as a statesman putting pen to paper should always work." The Athenaeum : — " A pleasant and even a valuable series of pictures. . . . No false impression wall be produced on the reader's mind, and as he will undoubtedly be enter- tained he has no reason to complain." The Academy : — "A book not only brimful of knowledge and information, but written with unflagging brightness and pictorial quality. To what most writers would lea\e a dry desert of statistics he gives a skilful interest by his manner of presenta- tion. ... A notably distinguished book among the many books on Russia, and by much the brightest of them to the general reader, with no appetite for the plum-duff of knowledge, but a readiness for what is attractive and novel. ... Of the charm of the book no quotation will convey an idea. It depends on the accumulation and succession of vivid and novel details, in page after page, as in the long and interesting description of Samarkand, for example. Nor can we here do justice to its importance ; for the statistics Mr. Norman sets forth and the views he propounds would require an article. ... It is none the less well, and a valuable antidote to the ordinary pessimist view, that we should be shown Russia as she appears to those who believe in her with knowledge, and that she should be shown to us with such conspicuous literary ability." The Outlook :— " In this rapid survey of the topics suggested by Mr. Norman we have indicated the highly engrossing nature of his book, and we add a recommen- dation to all who are interested in the European pressure on the East to read and digest its statements and conclusions." The Graphic:— " Books of travel have many objects, sometimes our amusement, sometimes our instruction, but they rarely combine both qualities in such a remarkable degree as does Mr. Henry Norman's most interesting 'All the Russias.' Interesting as it may be to the layman and the politician, it should be doubly so to the man of commerce." The Scotsman : — "Full of suggestive and often ne-.v light upon questions it is of the utmost importance that the British public should understand : while the author does not hope in vain that, by 'presenting in their natural relationship, picturesque surface, and solid substratum of fact,' he has succeeded in making his pages at once entertaining and informing." The Yorkshire Post :— "The whole work is so interesting, and in its subject so important, that it will repay the attention of everyone who watches with intelligence the progress of the w'orld and the play of political forces." The Freeman's Journal, Dublin : — " For any one who desires to know about ' All the Russias ' this is the very book. It is marvellous how much useful, accurate, and interesting information, geographical, topographical, social, military, and historical, Mr. Norman has managed to cram into a single volume. Nor is the result a mere dry narrative or a bald catalogue. The author has a vivid and lucid style, and by the magic of his style he has produced from his vast accumula- tion of materials not merely a book to be read, but a most readable book. . . . It is a volume for careful and studious reading. Profit and pleasure are to be derived in equal measure from its perusal." The Dundee Advertiser :^ " The work of a man with a singular genius for travel and the possessor of a most agreeably animated style." The "Western Daily Mercury : — " Mr. Henry Norman is probably the Englishman best qualified fo give us a book on this subject. . . . This fascinating book is extremely successful." LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C. 1»A? 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