“Who will converse with me now that the yellow camels are gone? There is no friend for the stranger, save the stranger.”

Then I shall creep out of the town by a turquoise-tiled gate. There they will ask me, “Where do you go?” I shall answer, showing them my box of jade, “I go to the tomb of Bibi Khanum, to lay this at her feet.” I will then show them the flower in my box.

When I have reached the place I shall stand below the broken arches, and will see that they are bluer than the blue night sky beyond them; the moon will make strange shadows. It will seem as if giant warriors are guarding her. Coming to the place where her body lies I shall say, “O beloved of Timour”—he who sleeps under a deep green sea of jade—“I have brought for you a flower.” Then, though in a cloudless sky, the moon will slowly hide herself, the purple shadows will lengthen till all is black save where she lies; there each jewel on her tomb will glow into its own colour, as if lighted from within, and by this faint light I shall see the pale hands and faces of four Tartar warriors who will lift the stone which covers her. As they put it on the ground they will once more become one with the darkness.

“Brothers, I am afraid; stay near me.” Thus shall I cry to them. There will be no answer, only a silence made more desolate by the continuous throbbing round of a distant drum. Slowly from the mingled light of the jewels a form will rise in garments of the colour of ripe pomegranates worked with flowers in gold; some apple-green ribbons will fall from her shoulder, and under her breasts will be a sash of vivid crimson. She will wear on her head a crown of jewels and flowers and dull gold leaves; jade and amethyst drops will fall from this crown on either side of her face, which will be painted tulip-pink and her lips scarlet; her eyes will be rimmed with black jewels ground into powder.

Then, gazing at her, I shall lay at her feet the flower from my garden, and, smiling, she will give me an amber poppy. She will say, looking into my eyes, “You ask for sleep—I would give my eternity of slumber for one moment of that sorrow I called life.”

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.

VI
TO TASHKENT

THE country east of Samarkand is much greener than the country west of it. It was interesting to note that the farther east I went from the shores of the Caspian the less did the desert predominate. There was abundant life on the plains; many horses grazing, many camels carrying grey marble for the building of new palaces, many sheep. At the railway stations were Sarts, Kirghiz, Afghans, occasional Hindus, Jews—not Russian Jews, but polygamous Eastern Jews, a rich, secluded, conservative tribe, who will not own their Russian brethren or sit down with them at meat—at least, so a Jew in the train informed me.

Samarkand is outside the protectorate of Bokhara, and takes its stand now as a city of the Russian Empire. It is also a great Mohammedan centre, as much by tradition and history as by present fact; but it is now completely under Russian influence, and the future which it has is one which will show itself more and more purely Russian. Already there are 25,000 Russians there. The city is divided by one long boulevard into two parts, native and Russian, and it may be surmised that the present state of Samarkand foreshadows the future state of Bokhara, and that those three or four houses which form the Russian part of Bokhara will at length find themselves the centre of a great Russian city, standing face to face with the Eastern and ancient town. What a history has Samarkand, both in legend and in history! It was founded by a fabulous person in 4000 B.C., but only emerged into history as a place conquered by Alexander of Macedon. It was successively conquered by the various monarchs of the Huns and the Tartars and by proselytising Arabs and by the Uzbeks, and at last by the Russians in 1868. Its whole history is one of being conquered. Its people to-day are the most gentle in the world, wear no weapons, commit no violence, never even seem to get angry—I refer, of course, to the native Sarts.