IT is not necessary to say much about Verney, the capital of Seven Rivers Land. It is so subject to earthquakes that it is difficult to see in it a permanent capital. No houses of two storeys can with safety be built, so it is more suited to remain a military centre and fortress than to be a great city. In order to look imposing, shops and stores have fixed up sham upper storeys; that is, they have window-fronts up above, but no rooms behind the fronts. Singer and the cinema are here, though an enormous number of Singer shops have been compulsorily closed all over the Russian Empire during the war. Verney has its bazaar, its inns and doubtful houses, its baths, dance halls, clubs, restaurants. Although it is so far from a railway station and such an enormous distance from the wicked West, it has its frivolity and sin and small crime. It has no electric cars. It has no Bond Street or West End. One may say, however, that it has its Covent Garden. Verney is a great market for fruit and vegetables. Its native name means the city of apples, and for apples it is famous. All travellers from China are given Verney apples when they pass through. Carts heaped high with giant red radishes are driven through the town, and the strawberry hawkers make many cries. Many horses are adorned with fancy garments, and I noticed donkeys with trousers on. Women ride about astride, and are evidently used to horseback, tripping along leaning forward over the horse as it springs to a gallop, sedately coming up the high street at a walk, erect like little fat soldiers. Then, Kirghiz women astride of bulls are to be seen, and I saw one carrying twin babies and yet on bull-back, dexterously holding the cord from the ring in the animal’s nose, and guiding it whither it should go. Verney has its newspaper. It has some hope of culture, and in the High School two dozen students matriculate each year and go off to the Universities of Kief, Moscow, and so on. Verney folk are grumblers at home, but when they get to Russia they develop great local patriotism and sigh for a bit of Verney bread, even of the stale bread of Verney. At the Universities the students of Seven Rivers Land keep together, and know themselves as a body having certain views and opinions of their own. Then, after their course, they come back to their home land and bring tidings of Russia. I talked with some students, and found them not unlike our own colonial students in their outlook and their attitude to the Empire. They help, but, of course, a far away place like this needs a lot of helping in the matter of culture. They bring back books and musical instruments. When I went out at night, strolling through the moon-illuminated city, I listened to the tinkling of pianos, and it was interesting to reflect that each instrument, besides coming thousands of miles by train, had also come five hundred miles in a wagon along these Central Asian roads.

There is a suggestion of America in the life out here. When you ask the way you are directed by blocks, not by turnings, and you may be sure the town is a planned one, with the streets running at right angles to one another. Only Nature, with her earthquakes, has tumbled it, given you chasms to jump over, and made it dangerous to walk in the outskirts of the town at night. There is much advertisement of wares and of persons, and a keenness to prosper and get rich. “Getting rich flatters your self-esteem,” I read, and again, “Buy Indian tea and get rich.” It is quite clear to me that buying Indian tea really makes poorer, for it is altogether inferior to Russian tea; but, then, these people have not our experience, they do not know the history of tea-drinking in England; how once we also had good tea, but that, in the national passion for cheapness and “getting rich,” we have come to drink popularly that vile thick stuff we now call tea. Verney has its rich bourgeois—rich for Verney—men with ten or twenty thousand pounds capital. Among such is, or was (for perhaps he has been interned or expelled), a German sausage-maker, who started his career in the market-place with five pounds of sausages on a plate, and is now a respected merchant with shops and branch shops and a fame for sausages throughout Central Asia.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA AT VERNEY—AFTER
THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1887

The local newspaper had made some sort of record of the cinema films that were shown in the five towns of Seven Rivers and analysed them in this way:

Which seemed to give a fair account of its civilising force. I visited three or four cinemas at various remote places, and was astonished at the French and Italian horrors, German and Scandinavian bourgeois funniosities, ghastly white-slave tragedies, and many visualised penny dreadfuls. When you see the crowds of Russians at these performances you realise that the penny dreadful is by no means played out, that many people did not in the old times read the penny dreadful just because they did not know what lay between the covers of those badly printed books, what enthralling rubbish. The business has changed hands commercially, but the thing sold is the same. It is sold in a more acceptable form—that is all.

Astonishing to see the yellow men of Asia staring at the cinema: the turbaned Sart; the new Chinaman, with cropped pigtail; the baby-like Kirghiz. Whatever do they make of American business romances and the Wild West and Red Rube and Max? They seem engrossed, smile irrelevantly, stare, go out, but always come again. The cinema is a queer window on to Europe and the West.

The road from Verney to Iliisk, on the River Ili, seemed more deserted than the road to Verney had been. Many parties of pioneers evidently turn south at Verney, and not so many turn north-east towards Iliisk. It is waste territory, overgrown with coarse grass and thistles. There are occasional mountain rivulets, bridged on the roadway with straw and mud bridges much higher than the level of the road, so that every bridge is a sort of hump. Behind me and behind Verney immense steep mountains lifted themselves up into the clouds. The road that I walked was a slowly descending tableland.

I passed through the little village of Karasbi, and then through the more substantial settlements of Jarasai and Nikolaevski. These are prolonged and attenuated villages. The oldest houses are the biggest and the deepest in trees, they have plenty of out-houses and farm buildings; but the newest are bare and wretched, with poplar shoots in front of them but three feet high. There are some deserted hovels—even a fine house was perhaps a hovel to begin with, a temporary mud hut put up to give shelter whilst the first work was done on the fields. I saw many houses half built, showing their framework of yet green willow and poplar twigs. I saw whole families and villages at work on new settlements, and also families living in tents. On the foundations of the new dwellings or attached to the rude framework were little crosses, only to be taken down when there would be a place in the house for the ikons brought from their old homes in Russia. Some colonists, on being asked when they had arrived, replied, “Last week,” others said, “During these days”; the dust on their wagons was new. Everyone had a sort of Swiss Family Robinson air, as of exploring an island, making natural discoveries, and bringing things from a wreck. Some groups, however, were already busy sowing their new fields, and I understood that that was the first thing to do; that was the work, and the building the new cottages was the play. They had nothing to fear from sleeping in the open every night of summer and early autumn—a lesson to these Russians, who in their home cottages or in railway carriages are afraid of fresh air as if it brought pestilence.

I spent two wonderful nights under the stars on the road to Iliisk, the first in a sort of natural cradle in a copse, the second in a hollow which I made for my body in the bare sand of the desert. I passed out of the new land on to the waste of the Ili valley; the road was visible twenty or thirty miles ahead, and on it in front of me are telegraph poles unlimited, at first with spaces between, but in the distance thick, like black matches stuck close together in the sand. I walked a long way in the evenings, and I remember, as the sun set, an enormous and foolish bustard that was under the impression I was chasing it. It would fly the space of five telegraph poles, I’d walk the space of three; then it would fly three, I’d catch up; and it would fly on ahead along the track as if it dared not desert the poles. Finally, however, just at the last rays of sunset, it flew crossways over the desert and disappeared.

I was rather nervous at this time about the karakurt, the black spider that sheep eat with pleasure, but whose bite is mortal to men; and each night when I made my fresh-air couch I took pains to keep out of the way of flies, beetles, spiders, and snakes. I never was troubled by the karakurt, but I had a lively time with beetles and running flies, to say nothing of snakes, whose sudden darts and writhings gave me momentary horrors many times. The valley of the Ili is a wild place, with tigers and panthers; a splendid district for study and sport, I should say. However, no beasts came and snuffed my face in the night.

Each night on the road I learned to expect the moon later and later. It always seems unpunctual, always late, but not worried, and having that irreproachable beauty that excuses all faults. She came up late over the Ili desert in a wonderful orange light, and then, emerging into perfect brilliance, paled the myriad stars, set them back in the sky,

I lay looking eastward on the sand, and on my right, in the vague night shadow, lay the tremendous pyramids of the Ala Tau mountains, the great cliff triangles south of Verney, first vision of the mighty Thian Shan. The clouds had lifted off them during the night, and in the morning I saw them in their true perspective, vague, smoke-like, shadow-based and grey-white, sun-bathed, many-pointed rocky and precipitous summits stretching a hundred miles and more from east to west.

It was ten miles in to breakfast at Iliisk. The water in the little lakes being salt, and my water-bottles empty, I could not make tea. The lakes and ponds remind you that you are between Issik-Kul and Balkhash. It is, however, desert country till you come to the thickets of the river, and there the cuckoo is calling, there are bees in the air, and it is glorious, fresh, abundant summer. The bases of the mountains are all deep blue as the sky, but utterly soft and delicious to the gaze, and the colour faints into the whiteness of the hundred-mile-long line of snow.

Iliisk is marked large on the map for convenience sake. One must mark it large to indicate a town on the River Ili, but though there is a prospect of its becoming an important trade centre, it is as yet insignificant, no more than a village, a church, a post-station, a market-place, and the dwelling-houses of two thousand people. I noticed new colonists here, using their horses to tramp great slops of mud to the proper consistency of mud dough for making the walls of new cottages. So Iliisk is increasing in size, its population is growing. Most of the houses here were mud huts of the swinging kind, built to withstand earthquakes, and their roofs were very light and beautiful, being of jungle reeds of a golden colour, each stem twelve feet long and ending in a broom of soft plumage. The River Ili, from which these reeds are cut, is a grateful sheet of silver, the breadth of the Thames at Westminster, has pink cliffs, is spanned by a wooden bridge, and has little tree-grown islets. Among the reeds on the banks lurk the tiger and panther and many snakes. Little steamers go to and fro out of China and into China, doing trade in wool, but held up every now and then by the Chinese for extra bribes. In the village wagons and camels are being loaded with raw wool—indicating the future significance of the little town as a trade centre. The population is predominantly Russian, though there are Tartars, Kirghiz, and Chinese Mohammedans. Near the market-place is a Tartar mosque with a green crescent on the top of it.

My road lay eastward toward Kopal, but before taking it I had my breakfast at Iliisk—sour milk and stale bread—at a cottage, with Christ’s blessing, and how good!

The morning was very hot when I set out again, and I took off my jacket and put it in my knapsack, carrying the enlarged and weighty bundle on thinly covered shoulders. The land was sandy and desolate, being too high above the level of the River Ili to allow of simple irrigation. If it is to be opened up for colonisation, the river must be tapped much higher up, in Chinese territory, but this the Chinese will not as yet allow. I met no colonists on my road out from Iliisk, not even any Kirghiz. Summer had scorched away whatever grass the desert had yielded, and the nomads had retired for the season and gone to fresher pastures higher in the hills. How frugally it is necessary to lunch in these parts may be guessed. It is no place to tramp for anyone who must have dainties and must have change. On the whole I do not recommend Central Asia for long walking tours. For one thing, there is very little opportunity of getting anything washed, including oneself; no early morning dip, no freshness. It is not as in the Caucasus:

At night I was fain to discard my sleeping-sack, those two sheets sewn together on three sides; but the beetles and spiders and mosquitoes made that impossible. On the other hand, the whiteness of the sack, when the moon shone full on me, always made it possible that some long-sighted Kirghiz might bring his tribe along to find out what I was.

After a night in the desert above Iliisk I came to a place which was not a place and was called Chingildinsky, perhaps because of the sound of the bells on horses galloping through, for scarce anyone ever stops there, but I suppose really after Chingiz Khan. However, at the Zemsky post-station, to which I had repaired to have tea, I made an interesting acquaintance, a M. Liamin, a Government engineer, architect, and inspector of bridges. He was travelling on a long round through Seven Rivers and Western China via Chugachak—a military-looking gentleman in the uniform of a colonel, but much more sociable than a Russian officer is permitted to be. He was riding in his own tarantass, with his own petted horses, Vaska and Margarita. He asked me if I would care to accompany him, and we travelled a whole day together, all day and all night. Whenever we came in sight of any game the Kirghiz coachman took his master’s gun and had a shot at it. In this way we brought down two pheasants and a woodcock, to the delight of the Kirghiz and the not unmingled pleasure of his master, who could not bear to think of animals in pain. Liamin was inspecting Government buildings, chiefly bridges, and of these chiefly bridges long since washed away. He had to report annually to the governor of Semi-retchie.

“There are two hundred bridges needing repair or rebuilding. I make my report, and the governor sets aside two hundred roubles. A rouble apiece,” he explained, smiling. “But what is a rouble!”

We passed through remarkably empty country, but it was on this second day out of Iliisk that I met for the first time the colonists coming southwards from Siberia. More than half my journey was done; I was nearer Omsk than Tashkent.

In Liamin’s tarantass were all manner of boxes and padlocked safes, map rolls, instruments, pillows, quilts, weapons. There was a soft depth where one sat and lolled on one’s back whilst one’s knees in front were preposterously high. It was a jolly way to travel, and we were both sick of solitude and glad to hear the sound of our own voices. Liamin was charming. We talked on all manner of themes. His favourite authors were Jack London, Kipling, and Dickens. Wells depressed his soul, because he was so pessimistic. It seemed to him very terrible that it was necessary to kill so many people before Man would make up his mind to live aright. The World Republic was not worth the price paid. He had read “The World Set Free” in a Russian translation, and he could not bring himself to believe that there would ever be such slaughter as a world-war meant. Mankind was not so stupid.

Though he was a high-placed official, Liamin was all against the colonisation of Central Asia, which he called a fashionable idea, and full of sympathy for the wandering Kirghiz, who were being excluded from all the good pasture lands and harried across the frontier into China. At one village where we stopped we met a land surveyor and an old, grizzled, retired colonel who both held the opposite view, and they belaboured Liamin as we sat round the samovar.

“The Kirghiz are animals, nothing more. The Russians are men. The Kirghiz are going to China. God be with them! Let them go! Are they not pagans? We should be well rid of them! Just think of their cruelty; they put a ring through a bull’s nose and tie him by that to a horse, and by his tail to a camel! If they want to stay with us, let them remain in one spot, become civilised, and obtain proper passports; then their land will be secured to them. But if they must wander about like wild animals, here to-day and the other side of the mountain to-morrow, then they must pay for their liberty and wildness.”

A grievous question, this, in Russian Central Asia. Liamin could not make his way in his argument against the colonel. The future of the Kirghiz tribes is problematical, but I should say that they were certain to go over the frontier into China in ever greater numbers as Central Asia becomes civilised by the Russians. What they will do when Mongolia and China become civilised I do not know. But that is looking a long way ahead.

VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING

At a place called Karachok we saw somewhat of the festivity of a Kirghiz wedding. There was a great crowd of men—the guests from the country round about—and they all stood around the tent of the bridegroom, while the womenfolk, apparently all collected together, sat within and improvised songs. The felt was removed from the side of the tent and the cane framework was exposed, so the girls and women within, all in white and with white turbans on their heads, looked as if they were in a cage. Kirghiz women are not veiled. They were all sitting on the floor—that is, on carpets on the ground of the tent. They sang as the Northern Russians sing in the provinces of Vologda and Perm and Archangel, in wild bursts and inharmonious keening. The men joined occasionally in the songs, and occasionally burst into laughter, for the words were full of funny things invented by the girls. That seemed to be the sum of the entertainment. A sheep had been roasted whole. A race had been run for the prize of a dead goat—the national baiga race. About midnight the singing ended, and the guests prepared to take their wives away and go home; the camels and bulls and horses were led forth, also the wives. And then broke out a quarrel. One of the guests had stolen a silver button off the coat of another man’s wife, had cut it off with the scissors as a keepsake, and she had countenanced the theft. The wife, being the personal property of the husband, had, of course, no power to give the button on her own account. There was likely to be an outrageous fight with cudgels, but Liamin appeared in the midst of the dispute and calmed it all away in the name of law and order. The guests mounted and rode away, out into the darkness, by various tracks, on horses, camels, bulls, their wives with them. It was astonishing to see the effect of the appearance of an officer among the angry crowd. They forgot their differences at one look and the recognition of a uniform. Even the dogs ceased barking when they saw the sword of my friend and they smelt his khaki trousers.

Our horses had been taken out of the shafts and given three hours’ rest and plenty of oats to eat. We walked out over the wild and empty moor together and chatted, came back and had tea, and then got into the tarantass once more. It was the depth of night before we moved on, and although we had clambered in before the horses were brought back, our object being to go to sleep before we started, we went on comparing impressions. I told him my life, he told me his, told me about his wife and children and his home at Przhevalsk, of his horses and his experiments in breeding, of the horse races at Verney, of the joy of the Kirghiz in racing, the one Russian pursuit and interest in which they fully share, the common ground of the two peoples in the colony. Liamin spent a great deal of the year in China and on the frontier, and had evidently much experience of the Chinese. He considered there would be a quarrel with China sooner or later through the progress of Russia in Central Asia. But the Chinese would be beaten. He did not fear their millions. They were not equipped as the Japanese were.

“What do you think of the Yellow Peril; is it getting nearer?” I asked.

“There is no danger of it whatever,” said he. “Europe is far too warlike to be in any danger from the Chinese.”

“Do you think Europe is more or less warlike than it was; do you think it is getting less warlike?” I asked. This was, of course, before the Great War.

“Yes, it’s getting less warlike, I suppose,” said Liamin. “But it will be a long while before we are too effeminate to withstand the Mongols. But woe for us if there should ever come such a time! They are a devilish people. At first glance they seem artless and childlike, but you can never be sure what they are up to; they are secret and mysterious. It is an axiom with me that all Asiatics lie; but the Chinese particularly. You remember when San Francisco was destroyed by earthquake the Americans discovered a hitherto unknown and underground city run by the Chinese, and in it many white people who had long since disappeared nobody knew whither, people who had been advertised for and sought for by relatives and police and what not. Wherever the Chinese form colonies they turn to devilry of one kind or another. I remember the ghastly things the Chinese did in the Boxer insurrection, the originality of the tortures they invented. Fancy this as a torture! A Russian whom I knew fell into their hands, and their way of killing him was to fasten a corpse of a man to him, and day and night he lived with this corpse till the worms ate into him and he died of madness! The Russian villagers don’t mind doing business with the Chinamen, but always remember they are pagans, and many think they have direct dealings with devils. I was at Blagoveshtchensk when the Chinese opened fire on us, and our Siberian colonists drove all the Chinese out of the city, thirty thousand of them, and they were drowned in the river like rats.”

By this time the horses had been put in, Karachok left, and we were jogging gently through the night. The Kirghiz who drove slept; the horses also almost slept as they walked. Liamin at last, tired or made drowsy by the movement, nodded as he talked, and fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. The road climbed over high mountains, the moon bathed the track and the wild and empty landscape with light. How far on either hand stretched the uninhabited world! It was like posting across a new and habitable planet where men might have been expected to be living, but where all had died, or none but ourselves had ever come. The world itself poked up, its great back was shyly lifted as if it were some gigantic, timid animal that had never been disturbed. It was a wonderful night; quiet, gentle, and unusual. Liamin, at my side, slept silently and intensely. The Kirghiz looked as if cut out of wood. I lay back and looked out, my fingers locked behind my head. So the small hours passed. Night seemed to move over us and be left behind, and I saw ahead the creeping dawn, the morrow, the real morrow, golden and lucent on the eastern horizon. The sun rose and flooded into our sleepy and sleeping eyes as we clattered over the brow of a hill. We came to the Tartar hamlet of Kuan-Kuza, and it was morning.