He spoke in most favourable terms of the Russian rule in Turkestan, and said their government was just and popular. The Russian officials he described as kind and liberal, yet stern when necessary, and declared the people preferred them to their own rulers. There are about twenty thousand of the people of the country employed in the Russian service, civil and military, and there is a strong Russian force at Samarcand—twelve thousand men, he thought. When he left, an expedition had started eastward to subdue Khokand and Yárkand; and it was generally given out that in three years time the Amir of Bukhára would resign his country to the Russians. There were, he reckoned, thirty thousand Persian captives, all Shia Muhammadans, in the country, which is extremely populous and fertile. Hundreds had been purchased from their owners and set at liberty by the Russians. The whole country, including Khiva, would very soon come under the Russian rule, and then all the captives held as slaves would be at once liberated. They number between fifty and sixty thousand. In ten years’ time, he said, the Russians would march to India.
Our quarantine quarters in the garden are insupportably dull and insupportably hot. The thermometer at noon—it is suspended from the branch of a mulberry-tree over a little stream of water—ranged from 100° Fah. to 108° Fah. during the eight days of our stay here. In the sun’s rays, the mercury rises to 150° Fah., and at night has fallen so low as 64° Fah.
On the 2d July, a flight of locusts settled on the garden. The townspeople turned out with drums, and shouts, and stones; but their host was not materially diminished. Their jaws worked steadily with a sawing noise all night and all the next day, and then they flew away, leaving the garden a forest of bare sticks, and the ground thick with the leaves they had nibbled off. Apricot, peach, plum, pomegranate, apple and mulberry trees are cleared to the bark; and their boughs were weighed down with the load of the destroying host. The damage done must be very great. Not a particle of shade is left for us, and the heat is something dreadful.
6th July.—We were to have set out on our way this evening, but at the last moment were informed that our health papers would not be ready till the morning, so our departure is fixed for to-morrow evening. The doctor of the Turkish regiment here came to see us. He tells me that typhus fever is very prevalent in the town, and that one hundred and eighty people have died of it during the last three months. The Turkish troops here are a remarkably fine set of men. There is nothing like them in Persia. They wear the Zouave-pattern jacket, and baggy trousers, with the red cap. The uniform is white cotton, thick and strong, and spotless clean; their arms, the Enfield-pattern rifle and a sword-bayonet.
8th July.—Khánakín to Shahrabad or Sherabad, forty-five miles. Our health papers were brought to us yesterday afternoon, and we were once more free. The march was fixed for sunset, and our mules and baggage and servants were all ready to start at the appointed time, but there was some delay in the arrival of our escort. Shukrullah Beg, who had become as helpless and discontented as any one of our party in the quarantine, now recovered his liberty, but not his former activity and savoir faire. He was out of his element amongst the Turks, and willingly resigned his office to the khavass Ilyás. The latter went off to the Turkish commandant, who had soon after our arrival been furnished with my passport from the Turkish minister at the Persian court, and after a long absence, returned with a party of nine Georgian horsemen, fine handsome fellows, dressed and equipped in their national costume and armour.
It was eight o’clock before we set out on our long night-march. The evening air was close, still, and oppressive. We wound our way through the bazárs of Hájí Cara, passing its many cafés with their crowds of solemn-looking, silent Turks, puffing their long pipes and sipping their black coffee—the first characteristic of the new country we had entered; and crossing the river Alwand a little below a broken bridge, struck across some rough stony ground, crossed by several irrigation cuts, towards the high road, which we reached at three miles. The river Alwand is a branch of the Dyalla, and, where we crossed, was about forty yards wide and two feet deep, flowing in a clear stream over a pebbly bottom.
After reaching the main road, our route led south by west, over an undulating country, apparently uninhabited. At 3.45 A.M. we reached Kizil Rabát, the land gradually falling all the way. Here we changed our escort, and found a large party of the Khaleva rebels, who had recently been captured by the Turkish troops, and were now being conducted to Baghdad, there to answer for their misdeeds. The escort which here joined us had under their charge as prisoner one Hátim Khán, chief of the Khaleva tribe of Hamávand Arabs. He was captured some days ago, shortly after our passage, near the Casri Shirin frontier, and was now being conveyed, as they told us, for execution to Baghdad. He was a powerfully-built, handsome young man, of about twenty-five years of age; and was accompanied by a servant, who walked by the side of his mule, and from time to time eased his master’s position as much as his fetters would allow. The captive chief was mounted on a mule, his hands were manacled together in front, and his feet fettered together above the ankles under the saddle-girths. The position must have been most tiresome, and the captive was sometimes so overtaken by sleep, that he nearly fell off his seat, and was several times waked up by a sudden fall on the mule’s neck.
From Kizil Rabát the road leads S.S.W over an undulating alluvial plain, up to a range of sandstone hills that separate it from Shahrabad. We crossed this range by a fairly good road, here and there passing over rocks by deep and narrow paths worn into their surface, and at seven o’clock reached the plain on the other side. Another hour and a half across a plain covered with scrubby vegetation brought us to Shahrabad, where we alighted at the sarae. I was so exhausted by the effects of the heat and confinement at Khánakín, and so thoroughly fatigued by the tedium of twelve and a half hours’ march in the saddle, that, without waiting for refreshment, I stretched myself on the floor, pillowed my head on my elbow, and immediately sunk into unconsciousness.
About noon our baggage arrived, and, to our satisfaction, the mules were not nearly as jaded as we expected; so I gave the order to march at sunset for Bácúba. During the afternoon, the governor called to say that he could not give us an escort, as all his horsemen were out in the district, owing to the disturbed state of the country. He promised, however, that the Kizil Rabát escort with their prisoner should accompany us in the evening.
This is a dirty little village, in the midst of a wide, thinly-peopled, and mostly desert plain. It is only 750 feet above the sea-level, and 290 feet lower than Khánakín, and at this season is a very hot place. We had the floor of our rooms sprinkled with water in the hopes of the evaporation reducing the temperature, but it did not fall below 98° Fah. during the whole day. The walls of the sarae and adjoining houses are lined with great piled-up heaps of storks’ nests. Towards sunset the parent birds returned from the marshes with the evening meal for their young. Each bird, as it alighted on its nest, threw back its head, and made a loud clattering with its beak, and then disgorged a quantity of roots and worms, which the young ones gobbled up. It was a very singular sight. They all kept up a sort of dance upon the flat surface of the nest, their lanky legs being kept in the perpendicular by the flapping of half-stretched wings.