I  WALKED forth from Kopal on a broad moorland road, and after several hours’ upland tramping came to the Cossack village of Arazan—a typical willow-shaded settlement with irrigation streamlets rushing along the channels between the roadway and the cottages. Here, at the house of a herculean old soldier, I was offered for dinner a dish of hot milk, ten lightly boiled eggs, and a hunch of black bread—the typical meal of the day for a wanderer in these parts. In the pleasant coolness of five o’clock sunshine I passed out at the other end of the only street of the village and climbed up into the hills beyond. I turned a neck in the mountains, descended by little green gorges into strange valleys, and climbed out of them to high ridges and cold, windswept heights. All about me grew desolate and rugged. It was touching to look back at the little collection of homes that I had left—the compact, little island of trees in the ocean of moorland below me and behind me—and look forward to the pass where all seemed dreadful and forbidding in front.

In such a view I spread my bed and slept. The hill-side was covered with mullein stalks, and as it grew dark these stalks seemed to grow taller and taller and blacker all about me till they looked like a great wood of telegraph poles. The vast dark masses of the mountains dreamed, and in the lightly clouded heaven stars peeped across the world, rain-laden winds blew over me, and I had as lief it rained as not, so dry was everything after weeks of summer heat. But no rain came, though the winds were cool and the night was sweet.

Next morning, with great difficulty, I collected roots and withered grass enough to boil a pot and make my morning tea, and I sat and ate my breakfast in the presence of Mrs. Stonechat and her four fluffy little youngsters, gurgling and chirping and not afraid to sit on the same bank with me, while their mother harangued them on “How to fly.” While sitting there the large raindrops came at last, and they made deep black spots in the dust of the road, the lightning flashed across my knife, the thunder rolled boulders about the mountains, and I sped to a cave to avoid a drenching shower.

I was in a somewhat celebrated district. The Pass and the Gorge of Abakum are among the sights of Seven Rivers Land, and are visited by Russian holiday-makers and picnickers. All the rocks are scrawled with the names of bygone visitors, and by that fact alone you know the place has a name and is accounted beautiful. When the rain ceased, and I ventured out of the cave again, I saw a Russian at work writing his name. He had a stick dipped in the compound with which the axles of his cart-wheels were oiled, and the wheels of the cart were nearly off for him to get it. For the first time I saw how these intensely black scrawls of names and signatures are written on the rocks. We are content to scratch our names with a bit of glass or a nail, or to chalk them, or cut them with a pocket-knife; but the Russians are fond of bold, black signatures two or three feet long, and they make them with this pitch and oil from the wheels of their carts.

It was a pleasant noontide on the narrow road, between crumbling indigo rocks and heaped debris. The stony slopes were rain-washed, the air fresh, and all along the way these dwarf rose bushes which I had seen on the road to Kopal, thorny, but covered with scores of bright yellow blossoms on little red stems. The jagged highway climbed again high up—to the sky, and gave me a vision of a new land, the vast dead plain of Northern Semi-retchie and of Southern Siberia. Northward to the horizon lay deserts, salt marshes, and vast lakes with uninhabited shores, withered moors and wilted lowlands. I saw at a glance how uninteresting my road was to become if I persevered straight ahead towards Semipalatinsk, and I resolved to keep to the mountains in which I found myself, and follow them eastward and north-eastward to the remoter town of Lepsinsk.

A PATRIARCHAL KIRGHIZ FAMILY

From that height, which was evidently the famous pass, I descended into the pretty gorge of Abakum. The road was steep and narrow, the cliffs on each side sheer. A little foaming stream runs down from the cliffs, over rubbish heaps of rocks, and accompanies the highway in an artificially devised channel. A strange gateway has been formed in a thin partition of rock, and through this runs the stream below and the telegraph wire overhead; there is a footway, but carts are obliged to make a detour. At this gateway and on the rocks I saw a further intimation of commercial Siberia. Commercial travellers had scrawled:

and

which was almost as if I had seen in the midst of the wilderness something like “Owbridge’s Lung Tonic: 4,000 miles to London.” Still, these advertisements of galoshes and tea were scrawled, not printed, and were done voluntarily by enthusiastic travellers who probably received no fee for doing such a thing. In England you cut your Rosalind’s name on the tree; in Russia your own name; in America you write what O. Henry called “your especial line of graft,” and all the New World is scrawled with hand-written advertisements of trade. So in the far-off gorge of Abakum I saw a suggestion of the America of the future-great commercial Siberia, to which perchance, some day, Americans will emigrate for work as the Russians emigrate to America to-day.

I felt this pass and gateway to be the entrance to Siberia, though, politically, the frontier is about three hundred miles distant. After six or seven turns the road issued forth upon a level strand of green and grey—the Siberian southern steppe. Lepsinsk, my next point, was the first town with a name ending in “sk,” and there are scarcely more than four towns in Siberia not ending so. None of the emigrant carts that I now met were coming from the south, but all from Siberia, and many of the emigrants were Siberians discontented with their northern holdings. They seemed poor people, and the caravans were rather woebegone. There is a good deal of land offered to the emigrants in the neighbourhood of Lepsinsk, most of it contiguous to the Chinese boundary; but, though it is green and fertile, it is as hard a land to settle as the plains in the south. The Siberians missed the pine forests, the shelter and the fuel of them, and it was a sight to see the straggling procession of women behind the dust-covered wagons—they had to spread themselves about the moor and the roadway, and search for roots and splinters of wood with which to make a fire at the end of their day’s journey. All the women held their aprons or petticoats up, and gathered the fuel into their laps. It took them nearly all day to get enough for the fires to boil the nightly soup.

For me, however, it was a green and joyous road from Abakum eastward to Sarkand, keeping to the mountain slopes and not faring forth upon the scorched plain that lies away northward. I did not repent that the cross-roads tempted me to go eastward, hugging the mountains. Long green grass waved on each side of the road, and in the grass blue larkspur and immense yellow hollyhocks. I was in the land where the Kirghiz has his summer pasture, and often I came upon whole clans that had just pitched their tents. It was a many-coloured picture of camels, bulls and horses, of sheep swarming among children, of kittens playing with one another’s tails, of tents whose framework only was as yet put up, of heaps of felt and carpet on the grass, of old wooden chests and antediluvian pots and jugs of sagging leather lying promiscuously together, while the new home was not made. On this road the Chinese jugglers overtook me and camped very near where I slept one night. I was amused to see the old conjurer who had juggled the steaming samovar out of thin air hunting mournfully for bits of wood and roots to make that same samovar boil in real earnest.

Next day I came to the village of Jaiman Terekti and its remarkable scenery. The River Baskau flows between extraordinary banks, great bare rocks, all squared and architectural in appearance, giving the impression of immense ancient fortresses over the stream. These squared and shelved rocks are characteristic of the country-side and the geological formations, and they give much grandeur to what otherwise were quiet corners. The gateway of Abakum itself owes its impressiveness to this geological rune.

At a village hereabout I fell in with four boys going up into the mountains to study for the summer. They were students from some large engineering college, and, as part of their training, they had been sent out to study irrigation works and bridges in this colony. At every bridge we came to on the road they stopped and gave it their consideration, and made notes as to its structure and its necessities, and at each village they considered the control of the mountain streams, the canalisation of the water, and the uses to which the natural supplies of water could be put. They called themselves hydrotechnics, and would eventually blossom, perhaps, into irrigation engineers. Their trip was costing them no more than one hundred roubles—say, ten pounds each for the three months of summer. Their headquarters was to be a village on a river about a hundred miles north of Lepsinsk; there they would pitch their tents and camp, cooking their meals, arranging expeditions, and making good their study. Altogether about three dozen young students would turn up at their camping-ground, and make up the equivalent of a summer class.

The four young men had in their protection a lady in cotton trousers, a tall young woman of athletic appearance and good looks. She and her two little children were on their way to the husband, a Government engineer, who had charge of the building of the new town of Lepsinsk—the nearest railway point to Old Lepsinsk. She was a very striking figure in her sharivari, and the natives collected round her and stared in an absurd fashion. She told me she had bought the print for 1 rouble 87 copecks, and made them herself just before starting out; skirts were so inconvenient for travelling in and collected the dirt so. But she drew thereby an enormous amount of attention to herself, it must be said. She was rather a crazy Kate. It tickled me to think how her husband would pitch into her when she arrived at her destination. But perhaps I was mistaken, and he was so homesick that he would not even laugh when she appeared. She was a regular scapegrace, with light blue, torn, openwork stockings, and button boots, one of which was fastened with a safety-pin, the other with two shirt-buttons. But she was very naïve and had bunches of smiles on her lips—the sort to which much is forgiven. When she tried to smack her children, they went for her tooth and nail, and the little boy, aged two, continually imitated someone, probably the father, and addressed his mother thus:

“Akh tee somnoi ne zagovarivaisia” (“Don’t stand there talking to me.”)

“Bross!” (“Stop it!”)

“Pliun!” (“Spit!”)

I was called upon to imitate cats and dogs and sheep and pigeons and camels, and make-believe generally to an unlimited extent.

The lady told an amusing story of a banquet to which the Kirghiz had invited her husband and herself. It should be explained that the Russian for the head of an animal is golovo, and for the head of an expedition or band of workmen is glavny, the adjective derived from golovo, a head. At this banquet in the Kirghiz tent the engineer was put in the highest seat, and was told that the dinner was coming. Suddenly a Kirghiz appeared with a roast sheep’s head, and carried it to the Russian, saying:

“Please, eat!”

“What’s this?” asked the engineer. “The head for me; that won’t do at all. I don’t want the sheep’s head; you must cut me something more tasty.”

“No, please,” said the Kirghiz. “You are the head man, and you must eat the head.”

“That will never do,” said the Russian. But they besought him to honour their custom and permit the rest to eat, for until he had started on the head nobody else might begin.

All the engineer’s workmen were Kirghiz, for he was working in Kirghiz country, in a district as yet untouched by Russian colonisation. The wife and her babies turned off at a mountain track, and were taken to her husband’s camping-ground by a Kirghiz. We were loath to let the woman go, for she had given much gaiety to the road.

Lepsinsk is what the Russians call a medvezhy ugolok (a bear’s corner), a place where in winter the wolves roam the main street as if they did not distinguish it from their peculiar haunts. It is by post-road 945 miles from Tashkent on the one hand, and 1,040 miles from Omsk on the other—roughly, 1,000 miles from a railway station. It is high up on the mountains on the Mongolian frontier, and lives a life of its own, almost completely unaware of what is happening in Russia and in Europe—a window on to Mongolia, as a local wit has called it.

In the course of the next five years a railway is to be run from Semipalatinsk to Verney, and as Lepsinsk is the largest town on the way, it should in justice pass through it. But Lepsinsk is high. When the news of the projected railway came, the burgesses made a petition to the authorities asking to be informed where exactly the railway would be, and they would remove Lepsinsk thither. Everyone who had any business would transfer his stock. They were informed, and in a year, or a year and a half, Lepsinsk promised to remove itself fifty miles westward. Building operations were in full swing on the new site, land having been allowed by the Government free; and the engineer whose wife we had met was in charge. If the war does not preclude the continuation of the railway construction, Old Lepsinsk will be abandoned.

I spent four days in the town in the company of the young hydrotechnics. We were given rooms free at the Zemsky guest-house, and I stayed three nights there before resuming my journey toward the Irtish. The students quickly found and made friends with people in the town. We found a family that came from the same country-side as one of the young men, and spent the whole evening in a big farmhouse, drinking tea, trying musical instruments, and singing Russian choruses. Next day we went to the colonists’ information office, made friends with the young man in charge, and went and played pyramid with him in the town assembly rooms; several other folk came in, young and old, and joined in the game of billiards till we were a dozen or more. After billiards we all sat down to a crude lunch of boiled and undisguised beef, without vegetables, but with jugs of creamy milk to drink. The conversation went on cards, billiards, the coming Sunday-night dance. Couldn’t an orchestra be made up to supplant the usual gramophone to which the people danced on Sunday evenings? Had the cinematograph films come, and that had been so long expected? What would happen if one showed a cinema film backward—wouldn’t the story be often more funny?

SHEEP-SHEARING OUTSIDE THE TENT HOME

Sunday morning we spent in the domain of the colonists’ information bureau, and interviewed peasants for the manager whilst he was still in bed. What a litter there was everywhere—tea glasses, cigarette boxes, picture post cards, electric lamps, old letters, forms issued by the Government, maps—the same in the bedroom as in the office. There was a typewriter, and I amused myself trying to write English sentences with the Russian type, there being a fair number of letters in the Russian language resembling our own. The people who came for information had various pleas. One was ill, another had quarrelled with her husband. An old man pushed in front of him a rather downcast young woman, and commenced his appeal to us in these words: “I recommend this woman to your mercy. The land which is hers is being stolen away from her.” She had fallen out with her husband, and had fled to her father’s house. But meanwhile the husband was trying to sell the land or raise money on it—at least, so the father said. But we pointed out to him that that was nonsense; the land was not yet the unqualified property of the husband, and he could not sell it; he could only give it back to the Government, and so on and so on. On Sunday evening we all went to the assembly rooms, and saw Lepsinsk in its Sunday best, talked vociferously in crowds, listened to a gramophone, watched peasant girls and young men dance melancholy waltzes—there was no Russian dancing, but the people were glad to think themselves “European.” I made acquaintance with the ispravnik, or whoever he was who ruled Lepsinsk, and with the local rich men—a remote, obtuse, provincial set, whose only interest was cards. They were very keen on playing me at preference, a complex Russian card game which I have generally thought it worth while not to learn, and I was amused to hear that they would teach me, and what I lost would pay for my lesson. I talked a little about England. They got their daily papers three weeks after issue, as a rule, but they read them as new when they came. Their chief idea of our British activities was that the suffragettes were assassinating, murdering, bombing, expropriating, and they chuckled over the fact that our men were not able to manage the women.

Lepsinsk is an out-of-the-way place, and, as far as the road is concerned, a blind alley among the mountains. I was much exercised to know which way I should go next, and I did not want to retrace my steps to Altin-Emel. The map and my route was another topic of conversation among the worthies of Lepsinsk. Everyone gave me a different account of the roads and the ferries. Eventually I decided to cut across country and take the risk of marshes or rushing water lying in my path—a rash decision, as I might after a day or so be forced to walk back to the town and try some other way; but it turned out to be a perfectly happy decision. On this track I saw more of the Cossacks and of the Kirghiz, two races in striking contrast, and I spent Midsummer Night—always a festival night—under very beautiful and unusual circumstances.

Lepsinsk is a Cossack settlement. All the young men are horsemen, have to serve their term in war, and are liable to military service without any exemption or exception. All Cossack families and Cossack villages are brought up on these terms. The children are taught to get on to horseback and ride as we teach our children to walk. They learn the songs which the regiment sings as it comes up the main street on horseback, bearing the black pikes in their hands. The women, whose children and husbands go to the war, are patient as the mother of Taress Bulba. War is the normal condition of life, and the mere manœuvres are taken so seriously that the opposing parties frequently forget that it is only a friendly test, and do one another serious injury. “The Cossacks get so enraged, and they can’t stop themselves when they are called upon to charge the sham enemy,” said a Lepsinsk boy to me.

On the Monday morning I said good-bye to the students, and, shouldering my knapsack, set off in a north-westerly direction to find Sergiopol, forded the Lepsa river, and climbed out of the green valley where Lepsinsk lies as in a cup. The mountain-sides were rankly verdant, and the purple labiate was thick as in spring-time. It may be remarked that strawberries were not expected to ripen in Lepsinsk for three weeks, whereas six weeks ago in Tashkent they had been a penny a pound.

I passed over the fresh green hills and panted at the gradient, plunged down through beautiful meadows, slept a night in the Cossack station of Cherkask, lying on some felt and being almost eaten up by mosquitoes in what the soldier host called a garden. In this village I saw a pitiful sight—almost naked Kirghiz women treading wet mud and manure into stuff for fuel blocks. They looked astonishingly bestial and degraded. You could not feel that they had any soul or stood in any way above the animals. Yet as young women they had probably been attractive and pretty in their day, and might even have won the fancy of white men. There was a question whether the wife in Candida who soiled her lovely fingers putting kerosene into the lamps was really degraded by dirt, but here was something nearer reality.

I slept on the sand beside Gregoriefsky, and next day went deep into the desert, into a land of snakes, eagles, snipe, and lizards. On the Lepsa shore I saw forests of the gigantic reeds with which the houses and bridges are roofed. Here were leagues of ten-feet rushes that waved boisterously in the wind as in a cinema picture. I was warned here against the boa-constrictor; but the worst I saw were intent-eyed little snakes gliding away from me, scared at the sound of the footfall. I got my noon-day meal of koumis in a Kirghiz yurt, borrowed a horse with which to get across the difficult fords, one of black, reed-grown mud, the other of swift-flowing water. All day I ploughed through ankle-deep sand, and but for the fact that the sun was obscured by cloud, I should have suffered much from heat. As it was, the dust and sand-laden wind was very trying. Early in the evening I resolved to stop for the day, and found shelter in one of twenty tents all pitched beside one another in a pleasant green pasture-land which lay between two bends of the river—a veritable oasis. Even here, as I sat in the tent, I listened to the constant sifting of the sand on the felt sides and roof.

IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT

It was a good resting-place. An old man spread for me carpets and rugs, and bade me sleep, and I lay down for an hour, the sand settling on me all the time, and blowing into my eyes and my ears and my lips. In the meantime tea was made for me from some chips of Mongolian brick tea. The old Kirghiz took a black block of this solidified tea dust and cut it with an old razor. The samovar was an original one. It had no tap, and leaked as fast as it would pour. Consequently, a bowl was set underneath to catch the drip. This filled five or six times before boiling-point was reached, the contents of the bowl being each time returned to the body of the samovar.

After tea I went out and sat on a mound among the cattle, and watched the children drive in sheep and goats and cows, and the wives milk them all. It was a scene of gaiety and beauty. There were many good-looking wives, slender and dainty, though they were so short in stature, had white turbans on their heads and jackboots on their feet. As they went to and fro, laughing among themselves and bending over the cattle, their breasts hanging like large full pears at the holes made in their cotton clothes for the convenience of their babies, they looked a very gentle and innocent creation. These women did all the work of milking, and I saw them handle with rapidity ewes, she-goats, cows, mares, draining all except the last into common receptacles. The mares’ milk alone was kept separate, to be made into koumis. I must say my taste rebelled against a mixture of sheep’s milk, goats’ milk and cows’ milk, even when made sour; but the Kirghiz were not worried with such fastidiousness.

When the milking was accomplished fires were lit in oblong holes dug in the earth outside the tents—the Kirghiz stoves. Bits of mutton were cut up and fixed on skewers and placed over the glowing ashes in the holes. So supper was cooked. I was called into a tent, and there made to sit on a high wooden trunk, while eight or ten others sat below me on rugs. “You are a barin,” said the oldest man. “You must have the highest seat.” Seated up there, they brought me about a dozen skewers of grilled mutton on a wooden plate and bade me eat. I should not have been surprised to see a sheep’s head brought in to me.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s far too much for me.”

“You eat first,” said the old man. “Then we will eat.”

So I took a skewer and put them at their ease. There were in the tent the old man, his son, two wives of the latter, several children, an old woman, and a minstrel. Outside and in other tents were many sons-in-law and daughters-in-law and cousins, a whole genealogical tree of a family. Among the Kirghiz all sons remain in the father’s and father’s father’s family; only the girls change families, sold or arranged for in marriage. The men all wore hats, or, rather, bonnets, trimmed with an edging of fox’s fur, and the foxes from whose thighs this fur had been taken had been captured by trained eagles. The Kirghiz are deeply versed in falconry, and have diverse birds for various preys: hawks for cranes, for plovers, and for hares. They hunt the fox, whose skin is very precious, with eagles. They carry the hawks on their wrists when they ride, and for the support of heavy birds they have stalls or rests coming up from their saddles to hold the bird arm, whilst they hold the horse’s reins with the other. The most interesting man in the tent in which I supped was the minstrel, a tall, gaunt heathen in ragged cotton slops; he thrummed on a two-stringed guitar and improvised Kirghiz songs till the dusk grew dark and midsummer night came out with countless stars over the desert and the tents and the cattle and the wanderers.

Asked whether I would sleep inside the tent or out, I preferred the open air, and my hosts made a couch for me, a pile of rugs over an uneven thickness of mown clover. And there I lay and watched the stars come into their places in the sky as at the lifting of a conductor’s baton. It was St. John’s Eve, a night of mystery and of remembrances. A young moon looked down on me. In the twenty tents around me were singing and music and momentary strange illuminations. Inside the tents the Kirghiz set fire every now and then to piles of weeds, which flared up, causing all the felt walls and roofs of the tents to glow like strange, enormous, shimmering paper lanterns, like fire reflected in silver. They would suddenly glimmer and glow and glimmer again, the light would go, and the grey-white tent would be opaque again.

All night across the sleeping encampment came volumes of music from young throats, the songs of the children minding the cattle. The stillness of the night reigned about this music, and was intensified by the dun-dun of rusty camel-bells, the jangle of the irons on hobbled horses, the occasional sneeze of a sheep with a cold, and the hullabaloo of dogs barking on false alarms. I lay and was nibbled under by goats, trying to get at the clover, and breathed at by ruminating cows.

So the night passed. Orion chased the Pleiades across the sky. The eyes that stared or lay open and were stared at by the stars drooped, and eyelids came down over the little windows. Sprites danced among us, tiptoed where we slept, breathed devilry upon our faces and dusty clothes, and I dreamed sweetly of home and other days.

Next morning I felt the turn of the year and looked forward to the glorious autumn and the new life coming after the long journey and the much tramping.

I was up at the dawning and away before the hot sun rose. The old man of the Kirghiz gave me my breakfast himself, a pot of airann and a cake of lepeshka, and came forward with me, showing me the track onward towards Sergiopol.