FROM Bokhara I proceeded to Samarkand, the grave of Timour. Turkestan has four great cities remaining in splendour from the most remote times—Bokhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Alexander the Great conquered most of this territory and established himself at Samarkand for winter quarters, but there are few traces of Alexander to-day. In his day the land was inhabited by tribes who had come out of the Pamir—Persians, Indians, Tadzhiks. There were also primeval nomads, with their tents and their herds, a people something like the Jews when they were simply the Children of Israel, when they were a family. There were possibly hordes of Jews, as there were hordes of Tartars and Mongols. At the time of the shepherd dynasty of Egypt the peoples of the East were living in patriarchal families, resembling in a way the families of the Kirghiz in Central Asia to-day.

For the ethnologist Central Asia is necessarily one of the most interesting districts of the world, and its inhabitants are like living specimens in a great ethnological museum. The races there tell us more about the past of the world in which we are interested than any pages in the history book. Here we may feel what the Children of Israel were, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Turks, the Russians. We see the destiny of Rome, the destiny of the Church of Christ, of Christianity, of barbarism.

Not that there are many pure or clear types of historical races in Central Asia to-day. The land has been a running ground for fierce tribes coming out of China and Manchuria, coming from the mysterious and vague regions of the Pamir and Thibet. The Kirghiz to-day exhibit every shade of difference between the Mongol and the Turk.

After the Greeks of Alexander came the first ferocious Huns. To the Greeks what is now Russia and Siberia, Seven Rivers Land and Russian Central Asia was vaguely Scythia. They fumbled northward and eastward as in a great darkness, and they were rather afraid to go on. Yet we know that even before the records of Greek history there was an Eastern trade on the Volga and from the Caspian to the Baltic. The merchants of Persia and India traded with the Russia of those days. The Persians ruled from the Oxus to the Danube, and in the wilderness stretching from the Oxus to the Great Wall of China dwelt the primeval nomads.

South of the Altai Mountains was the fount of the mysterious Huns who, some centuries before the birth of Christ, ravaged China to the Pacific and extended their dominion northward, down the Irtish River to the tundra of the Arctic Circle. These were not a Mongol people, but Turkish, though eventually they were beaten by the Tartars, and the Mongolian and Turkish tended to blend. The reason for their turning westward was an eventual failure against China. The Chinese built their fifteen-hundred-mile wall against the Huns, but the wall did not avail them; they were beaten, and were forced to pay an enormous tribute of silk, gold, and women. Then the Chinese reorganised their armies, turned upon their enemies, and crushed them. Their monarch became a vassal of the Emperor. Fifty-eight hordes entered the service of China—a horde was about four thousand men. The remainder of the Huns, coming to the conclusion that China was too strong for them, resolved to fight somewhere else, and set off westward towards the Oxus and the Volga. They expended themselves on the eastern shores of the Volga, where they remain to this day as the Kalmeeks. Visitors to the Southern Ural and the district of Astrakhan will have pointed out to them the Kalmeeks, a low-browed, broad-nosed type of men, sun-browned, wizened, and squat, the ugliest in Russia; these are the original Huns, ferocious in their day, very peaceful and stupid now, and below even the level of the Kirghiz in intelligence.

The chief Turkish tribes to-day are the Yakuts, on the Lena, the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, of whom there are a considerable number in Bokhara and Khiva, the Turkomans, and Osmanli, the Turks themselves, and they have all something of the Hun about them. Their history is Hunnish history. A deformed and brutal people were the hordes of the Huns; there were many cripples among them and people of distorted features, many dwarfs. They were the cruellest people that have ever been, and probably that is why they have such a name for ugliness. Cruelty and ugliness of feature go together. Even the most refined torturers of the Spanish Inquisition must have been ugly. There is something terrifying in the aspect of cruelty. It is an aspect of mania, and when it comes out in the race must be called racial mania or aberration.

Successive hordes of pagans rolled forward, and the story of each forward movement of this kind is the same. Each wave, however, seemed to roll farther than the one before and gather in power and volume to the point where it multitudinously broke. The Asiatic heathen were soon over the Volga and across Russia; it was they who set the North German tribes moving and gave an impetus to the plundering and ransacking of the Western world. They astonished even the Goths by their ferocity and ugliness, and in A.D. 376 the Goths had to appeal to the Romans for protection. The Emperor Valens delayed to answer, and a million Goths crossed the Danube and began the conquest of Roman territory. The Huns joined with the Alani, a wild Finnish tribe supposed by some to be the present Ossetini of the Northern Caucasus, and together they obtained glimpses of the splendour of the South and came into touch with the people who would ultimately give them their religion—the Saracens.

Away in the background of Central Asia, however, Mongol tribes were falling on those Huns who had remained behind and ever setting new hordes going westward, and the impact from China was felt all the way to Germany, and hordes of barbarians began to appear before the gates of Rome itself. Soon the Goths burned the capital of the world (A.D. 410). A quarter of a century later the Huns found a new leader in Attila (A.D. 438-453), and became once more the scourge and terror of all existent civilisation. The Huns of Attila were not just the old Huns who came out of Mongolia and fought with the Chinese, but a mixture of all the Turkish tribes of the East. They worshipped the sword, stuck in the ground, and prayed before it as others prayed before the Cross. Attila claimed to have discovered the actual sword of the God Mars, and through the possession claimed dominion over the whole world. He conquered Russia and Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia, the islands of the Baltic. He crushed the Chinese and Tartars who were afflicting the rearguard of his nation in the depths of Asia, negotiating on equal terms with the Emperor of China. He traversed Persia and Armenia and what is now Turkey in Asia, broke through to Syria, and, in alliance with the Vandals, took possession of “Africa.” His followers crossed the Mediterranean, devastating the cities of Greece, Italy, and Gaul. Rome abandoned her Eastern Empire to the Huns in A.D. 446; and, after Attila’s death, the Vandals, a people of Slavonic origin, sacked Rome once more. Western civilisation seemed to be extinguished, and a barbarian became King of Italy.

A MOHAMMEDAN FESTIVAL AT SAMARKAND—THE HOUR OF PRAYER

What was happening in Central Asia is but vaguely known. The people who lived on the horse at the time of Herodotus still lived on the horse as they do at this day, on mare’s milk, koumis, and horseflesh, camping amidst great herds of horses, the same breed as the Siberian ponies which the Cossacks ride now. There were feuds of the hordes, raids, massacres; the Chinese are said to have attempted to introduce Buddhism, though without much success. There was much intermarriage of Turks and Mongols. On the other hand, the conquering Huns returned with wives of the races of the West, and with a smattering of Western ideas, bringing even with them the name of Christianity, and some Christian ideas. Christians began to appear in the ranks of the pagans.

In the seventh century Mahomet was born, and the characteristic religion of the East took its start, and was soon conquering adherents by the sword; armies of Arabs and Semitic tribes, initiating the propaganda of Islam, conquered Persia, Syria, and portions of Northern Africa and of Spain. In the eighth century they crossed the Oxus, drove hordes of Huns back into the depths of Asia, captured the rich cities of Bokhara and Samarkand, and made Mohammedans of all the people all the way to the Indus. So Uzbeks and Turkomans and Kirghiz and Afghans and the others obtained a religion which suited their temperament, and there was comparative peace and trade throughout all Turkestan and Persia for many a long year. The next great disturbance was caused by the ferment of the Tartars and the mongrel Mongolian Huns, which came to a head under the leadership of Chingiz Khan (A.D. 1206-1227), who was the next conqueror of the world springing out of Asia. He made for himself an enormous empire, extending from the Sea of Japan to the River Nieman in Germany, and from the tundras of the Arctic Circle to the wastes of India and Mesopotamia. There were in his army idolaters and Judaic, Mohammedan, and Christian converts. He was the Emperor of the “Moguls”—the word Mogul is the same as Mongol. Among his feats he laid siege to Pekin, and starved the Chinese to such a point that they were forced to kill and eat every tenth man within the city. He conquered Bokhara and Samarkand again, crushed the Russians and the Poles, took Liublin and Cracow, and, at the battle of Lignitz, defeated the Germans, filling nine sacks with the right ears of the slain. Because of Chingiz Khan all Western Europe trembled.

The manners of the hordes of Chingiz Khan and his successors were very like the manners of the old Huns, and they also brought their flocks with them, and lived on roast sheep and roast horse and koumis as the majority of the dwellers of Central Asia seem to have ever lived.

The splendour of the successors of Chingiz Khan decayed, and Russia and the East gasped and waited till Asia produced another monster—a new conqueror of the world. In the fourteenth century he arose, the worst of all, Tamerlane the Great, called Timour the Lame, who conquered everything that had ever been conquered before by Tartar or Hun. Under him Mohammedanism reached a great splendour and came nearest to world-domination.

CENTRAL ASIAN JEWESSES

Both Bokhara and Samarkand fell to Tamerlane. He conquered great stretches of Persia, Syria, Turkey, the Caucasus, India, Russia and Siberia, besieged Moscow and Delhi in two successive years, dethroned twenty-seven kings, harnessed kings to his chariot instead of horses.

I spent the May of this year in what is particularly the land of Tamerlane, a sort of Russian India on the northern side of Hindu Kush, a country with a majestic past but with little present. Tamerlane the Tartar was once Emperor of Asia, and a potentate of greater fame than Alexander. At the head of the Tartar hordes he conquered all the nations of the East and ravaged every land, committing everywhere deeds of splendour and of barbaric cruelty. The cruelty that is in the Cossack and the Russian, and the taste for barbaric splendour, comes directly from his Tartars. But the greatness of the Tartars has passed away—they are all tradesmen and waiters to-day—and the greatness of the Russians has come about—they are all soldiers. “Is it not touching?” said a Russian to me one day at dinner in a Petersburg restaurant, pointing at the perfect Tartar waiters. “These people under whose yoke we were are really stronger and more terrible than we are, but they are now our servants, waiters, valets. If we had become Mohammedans, the Tartars would still be greater than we. It is the Christian idea that has triumphed in us.”

There stand among the deserts of Turkestan and beside the irrigated cotton fields of a new civilisation, the remains and ruins of a mediæval glory, the mosques and tombs and palaces of the days of Timour and of his loved wife, Bibi Khanum. The Russians are not touched by archæology, and have no interest in pagans, even splendid pagans. English people have considerable difficulty in obtaining permission to enter the country. So Tamerlane is little thought of. But in England, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, he had a tremendous fame—you feel that fame in Marlowe’s great drama:

Shakespeare burlesqued this through the mouth of Pistol:

England’s opinion was the same as Pistol’s, and the grandeur of Tamerlane was forgotten. Yet in two successive years he conquered India and Eastern Russia. He wore what was traditionally held to be the armour of King David. And, to-day, who so poor as to do him reverence? Only the beautiful name of Timour and the ruins of his tombs and mosques remain, giving a strange atmosphere of mystery and melancholy to the youngest of Russian colonies.

It is possible now to linger in the romantic idea of all the splendour that has passed away, and to feel a strange beauty in Samarkand. I remember reading some years ago a beautiful prose poem in modern “impressionist” style, written by Zoe Pavlovska, who is, I suppose, a Russian—perhaps a Cossack. It was the story of pilgrimage to the tomb of Tamerlane’s most loved princess:

The Great War of to-day makes the past more melancholy, and, as the centuries roll out with ever newer sorrows and calamities and strifes, the faces in history seem paler, sadder. The twilight of oblivion deepens. The history of man becomes more melancholy.