One of the great drawbacks of the Turki is that they never wash. There are no public baths, as in Persia, nor does the rule of a weekly bath on Friday before going to the mosque hold good here. The only thing I could do was to insist firmly on clean garments and well washed hands and faces. All the servants wore very long sleeves in which they hid their hands to show respect to superiors. They were in the habit of using these sleeves as dusters, but had to roll them up when they did any work.
Jafar Bai, the head chuprassi, willing and trustworthy, was my marketer, but variety in diet was difficult to obtain when we had only the toughest of mutton and the stringiest of fowls on which to depend. We were warned that the beef was usually diseased, and as many cases of illness had occurred from eating the fish caught in the river—some being diseased and others apparently having a poison-gland—we never ventured upon that form of food, and no game was to be had until the autumn.
Fortunately eggs were abundant, and we obtained some butter and milk from our two cows, attended by their calves, which took about half what their mothers yielded. As the small quantity of butter produced was barely sufficient for the table, I tried to supplement it by procuring cream from the bazar, but unluckily the Kashgaris do not practise cleanliness in any form. The cream was always distressingly dirty and had to be passed through muslin and then brought to boiling-point before it could be made into butter, and even then had an unpleasant smell and a dingy appearance. After various trials I resorted to suet for my cooking, and bought dumba, the big bunch of fat that forms the tail of the Central Asian sheep. On our arrival we found that owing to the War no white flour could be purchased in Kashgar, and we were obliged to have recourse to the native article, with its large admixture of grit and dust, before we could procure Russian flour from Osh.
The Swedes told me that when their mission was started in Kashgar some twenty years ago the prices of food were very low, there being practically no money in the country. In those days trading was done “in kind,” but prices had trebled or even quadrupled in the last few years. Even so, I did not consider them exorbitant when I could purchase a small leg of mutton for 1s. 10d., soup-meat at 2½d. a lb., a fair-sized fowl for 8d., and eggs at about four a penny. Sugar, Russian bacon, cheese and suchlike imported things were naturally expensive owing to the difficulties of transport. The weights were a jing (1⅓ lbs.), 16 jings making a charak (21 lbs.), while the Russian poud was 36 lbs.
The prices were usually computed in tangas, a coin worth about 2d., which, to my great surprise, did not exist. This mythical tanga equalled 25 darchin, while 16 tanga and 10 darchin made a seer—a coin worth about 2s. 8d. This sounds easy enough, but was complicated with the Chinese tael, the Indian rupee and the Russian rouble, all these coins being current in Kashgar.
The important question of the laundry was settled satisfactorily by a woman who arrived on Mondays and installed herself under a shelter in the yard where were basins and a fireplace. On Tuesdays the ironer made her appearance, the same woman being unable to see the clothes through both processes; and she was accommodated in a room with a long table, shelves on which to deposit the garments, and a supply of irons. Lady Macartney had warned me that this woman had a fondness for doing her work on a dirty cloth, and I soon found that she lived up to her reputation and would lay aside the clean sheet that I provided unless I looked in upon her at frequent intervals. Though she was a fair ironer she had no knowledge of starching, but we discovered a male artist who undertook to get up my brother’s shirt fronts and collars, though he utterly declined to wash them. I paid both women some tangas extra on condition that they washed and ironed all the servants’ cloths and dusters, my rule being to give out clean ones every Monday and Wednesday in exchange for their dirty ones; a plan that ensured as much cleanliness as I could reasonably expect.
Shortly before we left Kashgar for England our lady ironer departed without warning to another town, but the male artist kindly came to the rescue and took over her job. He used to make the most extraordinary noises, but I thought nothing of them until I came into the ironing-room one day, carrying a dress that was creased. He laid it out on the ironing-board and to my horror began to eject a fine spray of water from his mouth upon it, making at the same time the noise that had puzzled me!
There was not much social dissipation at Kashgar, though there was a colony of fifty Russians, together with a body of sixty-five Cossacks and their officer. Out of these only a dozen made up “Society,” and we met twice a week at the “Club,” providing tea and cakes in turn. Here four of the men and my brother played tennis on a mud court, an adjoining court being laid out for croquet, where the rest of us played a game with wide hoops, a “cage” in the centre and small-headed mallets that took me back to the days of my early youth. Every one “spooned” and pushed the balls into position in a way contrary to every rule of up-to-date croquet and got quite excited over the games. It was curious to see the thoroughly inefficient way in which the servants swept these courts. Their method was to kneel down and brush up the sand with little twig brooms that they held in one hand, while with the other they collected the dust into heaps before piling it on one of the skirts of their long coats and so carrying it off.
Prince Mestchersky, the Consul-General, and his wife and staff were most friendly, and we were invited to a round of dinners and lunches, Achmet’s incompetence giving me many an anxious moment when we returned the hospitalities lavished upon us. Unluckily for me, only four or five of the Russians could speak French or German, and as I have no gift of tongues my attempts to learn Russian were far from successful.
This was rather trying, as the Russian entertainments ran to length. I always remember the first lunch party to which we were invited. It was given in a garden at some distance from the Consulate, and I drove there well swathed in cloak and veils, to avoid arriving with the complexion of a mulatto from the clouds of suffocating dust that rose up from the road. Driving was also a penance, owing to the rough roads along which one was bumped and jolted until one ached all over. Our goal was an enclosure full of fruit trees in blossom and planted with flowers, in which two long tables, placed on mud platforms covered with carpets, were spread with different kinds of wine, fruit, sweetmeats and so on. The Russian colony, including the three ladies in their smartest dresses, was assembled on a third platform hung round with Chinese embroideries. Scarlet awnings were stretched above the tables to keep off the sun, and when all the guests had arrived we sat at the first table for an hour and a half, while many zakouskas and course after course of meat were handed round and interminable toasts were drunk.