A TENT OF LONELY NOMADS ON A SUMMER PASTURE
IN CENTRAL ASIA
When we got to his tent I bade him fetch me some mare’s milk, and so I got my evening meal. I had never tasted koumis before this day, and had generally regarded it as more in the nature of medicine than food. I knew that Russians suffering from catarrh of the stomach and internal troubles were ordered by doctors to go to Kirghiz country and live exclusively on koumis. Now it seemed I had to live on it, more or less, for several weeks. Some say it is as invigorating as champagne; I do not know. It is certainly a pleasant drink and good food.
That night I slept out till ten, and then thunder and the rain forced me to pack up and search for shelter. Eventually a little old man whom I met in the dark conducted me to a Kirghiz caravanserai. Sarai is Russian for a shed or barn, and the caravanserai is the shed where the caravan puts in, otherwise an inn. I was accommodated on an old carpet on a dried mud floor. There were a score of men in the room. Some were snoring, some were smoking hookahs, one was playing a three-stringed guitar, and the rest were squatting round a little kerosene lamp on the floor, dealing out grimy cards, calling out numbers, gathering in copecks.
The roof of the inn was all canes and earth, and I surmised that grass was growing above it. The walls were tattered and old, and occasionally a fat scorpion wandered along them. There was a black and white duck in one corner sitting on a basket of eggs. I lay away from the walls. “Not good to sleep indoors,” I reflected; “fresher and quieter on the heath; but I don’t want to get soaked.”
After my night in the Kirghiz caravanserai I was regaled in the morning with millet bread and tea. My host charged me 2d. for bed and breakfast, and I resumed my journey. It was over a moorland country, high and windswept. All day I was climbing uphill to view points, or plunging downhill into the rough pits that lay between them. The sun was a ghost in the haze of the sky; there was a tempering of the light, and even now and then a cloud shadow cast over the fields, and it was delicious to look at the myriads of crimson poppies set in meadows of rank grass.
I was in better country; there were more streams, more people, more cattle. There were snowy mountains on the horizon. Some freshness from the snow came from them. I sat on a sun-bathed crown of the downs and watched the lambs playing; white, brown, yellow, black lambs, very pretty to look at, very lively. And immense camel herds came stalking up to me as if released from some pen, groaning, whining, grunting, lying in the dust and rolling over, getting up again convulsively, tolling the lugubriously sounding bells that hang under their necks. There were many baby camels no bigger than donkeys; as they came along they indulged in ungainly scampering, which made it look as if their hind-legs were fighting their fore-legs.
Pleasant for me to sit and watch them idly! How different the feelings of a dozen prisoners whom I saw being marched along my road by two armed guards, a pitiful little troop of men, some of them stripped to the waist, because they thought it cooler so, all very dusty and limp, and all carrying in their hands blue, empty kettles which they hoped to fill at springs or streams by the way. Alas! there was no water fit to drink anywhere along that road! Poor prisoners. What to them were poppy fields, or camel herds, or beautiful views! There was probably just one thought in each and every one’s head: “When shall I get a drink?” or “When shall we come to a piece of shade?”
The prisoners went on in the dust; I remained behind in the free air. In the afternoon I saw a samovar steaming outside a mud hut, and so went up and was allowed to have tea with a Kirghiz family. Not nomads these Kirghiz, but settled inhabitants with passports or papers. The Russian Government is very anxious to get these wandering folk out of tents into immovable dwellings. There squatted down to tea the owner of the hut, in a rust-coloured cloak; his wife, in a bright yellow “cover-all”—hold-all, you might almost say; a boy, in white cotton slops; and a little dusky girl, naked to the waist, but wearing cotton trousers, having a silver chain round her neck, and her black hair in twelve long and slender plaits, each loaded at the end with a little silver weight that kept them from getting mixed up and looking untidy. The mother, in yellow, had a sort of wire puzzle in her ears for ear-rings, on her head a high, white turban. She was by no means a beauty. She looked as if originally she had been made without a mouth, and a neighbour had opened a place for it with a blunt knife. The Kirghiz women are not by any means feminine or attractive in appearance. As we squatted, each with a basin in our hands, in came a neighbour from the fields. She wore a white turban and a white gown. Her face was deep oak-stain. She had a sash of scarlet at her middle, wore jackboots, and had on her wrists three bracelets of the serviette-holder type. She was a woman cowherd, just in from the fields. In her hands she carried a little spinning stick with circular leaden weight at the bottom of it, and on to this she dexterously pulled camel hair out of one hand whilst with the other she twirled it into thread. She was evidently persona grata in the hut. She had the face of a pirate—a great, big, tanned, jolly, horse-like sort of face.
After tea the boy and girl ran off to the flocks, the women went on spinning, and the father brought out a bull with a ring through his nose and a chain and rope hanging from it. He put a bit of hide on the beast’s back, and then, to my astonishment, mounted and rode away over the hills. I sat in a shady corner and watched the afternoon turn to evening.