Samarkand is 150 miles by rail from Bokhārā. The line follows the course of the Zarafshān, and passes through a carefully tilled country, a large proportion of which is under cotton.[725] Rather less than two-thirds is grown from acclimatised American seed (gorsypium hirsutum) introduced by the Russians, whose persistent aim it has been to render their mills independent of the United States. The seed is sown in April, on soil which has been well ploughed and harrowed, the proportion allowed being 21 pounds per acre. The fields are irrigated thrice and kept scrupulously free from weeds. Towards the end of September the ripe pods are picked and exposed in heaps for sale. In average years an acre yields 1400 pounds, and gives a net return of £5, 10s., considerably more than other crops. But the cultivator has to face extraordinary fluctuations in market prices. In 1895, though the harvest was exceptional in bulk and quality, the price advanced to 4d. per pound, and the acre yielded £8. This flood of wealth thus poured into the cultivator’s lap was the better appreciated because the lowering of railway rates has rendered the production of bread stuffs unremunerative. In point of fact, the Central Asian farmer is suffering, like his comrade of the West, from the effect of free-trade dogmas. The Russian Empire is a world within itself, blessed with every variety of soil and climate, and gives ample scope for Cobden’s theories. But cotton is essentially an object for petite culture. Plantations have been tried without success, and few who raise this lucrative crop devote to it more than one-eighth of their farm; in other words, a plot of three-fourths of an acre. The intense pressure of population on the soil causes a keen demand for cotton lands, and speculators take advantage of the limited supply to engross large areas, and sublet them in plots to tenants who agree to bring them the whole produce. The profits are supposed to be divided equally, but the landlord of course retains the lion’s share. The raw cotton is sold in open market, and is either exported in the pod or purchased by capitalists owning cotton-cleaning mills.[726] Speaking generally, the prospects of the cultivator in the rich valley of the Zarafshān are not very promising. The soil is a yellow loam of great natural richness, but the incessant demands of a teeming population, continued for hundreds, nay thousands, of years, have brought it within measurable distance of exhaustion. Manuring is an imperative necessity, but cattle are few owing to the absence of grazing grounds and fodder; and the process can be repeated only once in three, or even six years. Thus corn shows an ominous decrease in weight; a pound now contains only 16,800 grains, compared with nearly 20,000 a couple of decades back. The Russians have to face a problem as difficult in its degree as that which will one day cause a cataclysm in British India, the ever-growing tendency of population to outstrip the means of subsistence.
Soon after passing the spick-and-span Russian town of Katta Kurgān, the growing freshness of the air proclaims a higher level; and, in point of fact, Samarkand is more than 2000 feet above the sea. At last the eye, which so eagerly scanned the eastern horizon, lights upon a sea of verdure, from which a fluted dome rises just as St. Paul’s seems to float like a vast balloon over London fogs. There are a few cities which touch a chord in him who sees them for the first time. The glamour of their fallen majesty is heightened rather than destroyed by the railway; for it brings before us, as if by magic, a panorama often seen in spirit, and its prosaic surroundings serve as a foil to the halo of romance which still lingers over the seat of a vanquished empire. Who will ever forget the flood of associations that overpowered him when he first heard “Roma” shouted by a railway porter, or when he exchanged the roar of the train for the peace which broods over the vista of palaces on the Grand Canal? The famous city is, as in other cases, at a distance of several miles from the railway station, the environs of which are crowded with the mean shops and drinking-dens usually found in such places. The road thither, as all the chief thoroughfares, is of great width, and overshadowed by splendid trees. It is this feature of Samarkand landscapes, not less than the innumerable gardens and vineyards in which one treads knee-deep in luscious grapes, that stirred the imagination of Eastern poets. In melodious strains the eternal city is styled the “Mirror of the World,” “the Garden of Souls,” “the Fourth Paradise.” But Samarkand was great and glorious ages before the good Hārūn er-Rashīd reigned in Baghdād, or Sa´adi planted flowers of poesy in his Garden of Roses. At Maracanda, in Transoxiana, Alexander of Macedon paused in his mad career, and there he slew his faithful Clitus. Centuries glided by, and it became Sa-mo-kien, the most western province of the Celestial Empire. Then the tide of Mohammedan conquest rolled over Samarkand; followed by the rule of the Seljūk Turks, destined five centuries later to extend their sway from Mongolia to Constantinople. The old city now became what Moorish Spain was—a chosen abode of all the arts that adorn and sweeten life. The whole fabric of civilisation was drowned in blood by the ruthless Chingiz Khān, and the ruin of Samarkand seemed irretrievable. It was lifted from the dust by a greater genius than Chingiz. Tīmūr made Samarkand the “eye and star” of an empire which extended over a third of the known world; and to his loving care belong the works of art which, in hopeless ruin, still excite the admiration of mankind. Their glories were soon obliterated by the uncouth Uzbegs; and 150 years ago the city site was a waste scored with mounds and caverns from which the ruined churches and colleges of a happier age soared heavenwards in desecrated majesty. It became a province of Bokhārā and the residence of the Amīrs during the summer heats, and commerce slowly revived. The story of the last wave of invasion which swept over Samarkand has already been told in these pages.
Chief among the monuments of this war-worn city is the tomb of Tīmūr, spoken of throughout Central Asia as Gūr Amīr—the Amīr’s sepulchre, just as our fathers styled Wellington “the Duke.” It is approached through a double avenue of poplars, which terminates at a gateway ornamented with faience and flanked by ruined minarets. Behind these stands an octagonal structure with a deeply fluted dome. The entrance on the left of the tomb leads to a vaulted corridor, and then to a chamber 35 feet square, with a cupola 115 feet from the floor. On each side there is an arched recess with Alhambresque mouldings, and the walls are covered with six-sided plates of transparent gypsum. The interior is severely simple, as becomes the last resting-place of so great a man. “Only a stone,” whispered the dying emperor; “and my name upon it!” And so he rests beneath a block of dark-green jade—the largest in the world.[727] On the right of the conqueror’s memorial stone is one of grey marble commemorating his grandson Ulugh Beg, a distinguished astronomer, who compiled tables showing the position of the fixed stars, admitted to be the best which have come down to us from Mohammedan times. In the recess facing Mekka there hangs a large standard with a pendant of horse-hair, emblem of a militant faith; and between it and Tīmūr’s tomb is a grey marble slab dedicated to his friend and tutor, Mir Sayyid Barākā, for whom he built this mausoleum in 1386.[728] The recess in the east contains a slab of granite erected to a descendant of the Prophet, named Hājjī Imām `Umr. The central group of cenotaphs, numbering eight in all, is surrounded by a balustrade in fretwork of transparent gypsum. The actual tombs are in a crypt of exquisite proportions, which is reached by a flight of steps. Here lies all that is mortal of one whose empire extended from the Vistula to the China Seas, who in the brief intervals between his conquering expeditions found time to embellish his capital with structures which, even in their decay, rank among the wonders of the world.
THE SHĪR DĀR MADRASA, SAMARKAND
The centre of Samarkand life is the great open market-square called the Rīgistān. Its southern side is open to the street, and the other three are occupied by as many great colleges, or madrasas. That which stands on the east side was built in the time of Imām Kulī Khān (1648), and is known as the Shīr Dār (or the Lion-bearing), from uncouth representations of the Lion and Sun of Persia on the four corners above its gigantic recessed portal. At either extremity of the façade rise melon-shaped domes and tall minarets leaning outwards. That nearest the street exhibits a frieze of dog’s-tooth mouldings, resembling those which occur in our oldest Norman churches. A cloister-like passage gives access to an immense courtyard surrounded by cubicles and classrooms in two storeys, each pair under an enamelled arch. A flight of brickwork stairs leads to the summit of the lofty gateway, whence one has a view which is second to none in Asia. The eye ranges over a leafy sea, from which vast raised arches and domes emerge, and rests on snow-clad mountains which close the horizon on the north and east. The madrasa of Tilā Kārī, on the north side, is so styled from a plating of gold-foil under translucent enamel which covers the holy place of a mosque on the left of its courtyard.[729] That founded by Tīmūr’s astronomer grandson, Ulugh Beg, is opposite Shīr Dār, and is the smallest but most beautiful of the group. Unhappily, it has suffered even more than the others from earthquakes. Of the five minarets which once adorned its angles, that on the south-east has fallen, and the rest are much out of the perpendicular. This universal tendency of Samarkand minarets is a standing enigma to visitors. That these minarets are out of the perpendicular may be easily proved by ascending one of them and lowering a plumb-line; but it will probably continue to excite controversy till these forlorn towers have crumbled into ruins. Such has already been the fate of the grandest of Samarkand’s monuments, the Bībī Khānūm, which stands on rising ground north-east of the Rīgistān. Like the Tāj Mahāl of Agra, it records a widowed husband’s passionate sorrow; for she who sleeps below was Tīmūr’s most loved wife, the daughter of the emperor of China. The actual tomb is a mass of shapeless ruins, for centuries of gross neglect have done their work, and a climax was given to the work of Time’s destroying hand by an earthquake which shook Samarkand on the 5th November 1897. The approach lies through a gateway which scarcely retains a trace of the original design. This opens on a garden with a mosque on either side, while the front is occupied by a building which still inspires awe by its grandeur and perfect proportions. The front exhibits a recessed portal, sixty feet wide and higher than that of Peterborough Cathedral, and an octagonal minaret at either extremity. Between them rises a stupendous dome, with a double frieze of blue, green, and yellow enamel, on which texts from the Koran gleam brightly in gold lettering. The interior is a square of fifty feet, adorned with arabesques. In the centre once stood a colossal rahla, or lectern of white marble, which once held a Koran, spreading over fifty-four square feet when open. A tradition has it that Bībī Khānūm, who founded this noble mosque, was wont to read it from a window set high in the wall.[730] The rahla is supported by nine pillars just high enough to admit of a man crawling under it—a painful process often undergone as a cure for lumbago and sciatica. It has now been removed to the courtyard, to avert the destruction which would result from a collapse of the entire structure. For the blue sky is seen through a rent extending over a third of the surface of the mighty dome; and a side view reveals an outer and an inner skin, like those of St. Paul’s, with the staircase leading to the summit. The portal is in worse plight; but so solid was the old builders’ handiwork that the arch is still intact though the brickwork is a mere shell. The Russians must be held responsible for the forlorn state of the Bībī Khānūm. When they entered on their glorious inheritance the power of disintegration might have been arrested. But they were content to see the stately mosque degraded to the base uses of a cotton-market and a stable,[731] and the vast revenues bequeathed by the piety of another age diverted from their proper uses by a horde of greedy and callous priests. They may, however, plead in mitigation of the world’s censure, that lack of funds has impeded their efforts to preserve these relics of a mighty past.[732] If Generals Kauffman or Abramoff had been asked to vouchsafe a grant for archæological purposes they would doubtless have replied, as William Pitt did to Benjamin Haydon’s suggestion that a national gallery of paintings should be established: “We want all the money we can scrape together to buy powder and shot with.”
THE BĪBĪ KHĀNŪM, SAMARKAND
In a suburb half a mile north-east of the Bībī Khānūm stands a sepulchre of a different type. It is that of Kāsim ibn `Abbās, a saint who endured martyrdom in an attempt to convert the fire-worshippers of Samarkand. Tradition adds that he picked up his severed head, like St. Denis, and retired with it to a well, whence he is destined to emerge in the hour of Islām’s triumph. The Shāh Zindah, “Living Saint,” has a tomb erected by Tīmūr,[733] which is entered by a brick gateway rich in blue and white faience, opening on a street of tombs with some resemblance to the Appian Way. On either side of a flight of steps, which once were of marble, ascending the side of a ravine, are a series of mausolea erected in honour of members of Tīmūr’s family, his generals, and trusted servants. The gates and façades are encrusted with glorious faience. A photograph might convey a faint impression of the exquisite form of pillars shaped like palm-trees, the artistic design of the scrollwork and tracery. A consummate master of colouring alone could reproduce the harmony in dark blue, turquoise, yellow, and green of this unrivalled panelling. The common belief is that the porcelain which is seen in such perfection at the Shāh Zindah was evolved in ancient Persia. It was undoubtedly brought by the Mongols from China.[734] The decoration of the Constantinople mosques, especially those dating from the golden age of Sulaymān the Magnificent, is similar to the specimens so much admired at Samarkand. The vista closes with the holy man’s tomb, which is approached by a suite of halls adorned with arabesques and beautifully carved wooden pillars. It is a mosque hung with offerings from the faithful. Visitors are allowed by the attendant priests to peer through a carved screen into a sombre vault, in which the faint outline of a funeral stone is seen, covered with costly shawls. Shāh Zindah has suffered less than its unfortunate neighbours owing to its smaller dimensions; but systematic repairs carried out by experts are urgently needed. All that has been done by the present masters of Samarkand is to prevent the wholesale pilfering of coloured tiles.
The ancient citadel of Samarkand is still called by the people Urda. This “encampment” occupies a commanding position, and is secured on three sides by scarped ravines. Its walls are upwards of two miles in circumference,[735] and have been adapted to suit the exigencies of modern warfare. In Russian eyes it is as sacred as the theatre of a defence as glorious as that of our Lucknow Residency in 1857.[736] In those of the antiquarian it is precious as the repository of the Kok Tāsh, a coronation stone of the Bokhāran sovereigns, and of an old Arabic inscription. The former is in the courtyard of a mean building which once served as the Amīr’s residence. It is an oblong block of grey marble, with arabesques at the sides, measuring 10′ 4″ by 4′ 9″ by 2′ in height. According to tradition, it fell on this spot from heaven, and for ages past it was venerated as the ægis of Bokhāran royalty. No Amīr was considered worthy of his subjects’ homage till he had sat on this rude throne. Behind it is an oval metal plaque bearing a funeral inscription dating as far back as A.H. 550, or 1155 of our era.