SARTS SELLING BREAD: THE LEPESHKA STALL
Presently out of the blue sky came a hurricane shower of hail and rain, flashing through the dazzling sunshine and yet never obscuring it. It was big, stinging hail, but none of the Kirghiz seemed to mind it. I could see all the children of the village disporting themselves with the lambs and the calves on the hill opposite. Not till twilight did they return—and then there was for me one of the prettiest sights. All the children came in riding bareback on calves or sheep, and driving them forward with kicks of their little bare feet. The little dusky girl sat astride of a golden-brown lamb, and her brother on an unwilling brown calf. Following the lamb came the anxious mother ewe, and following the calf a bellowing old black cow. Many children came up, and there was a gay gathering and a delicious noise of mirth and jollity at the end of the day. As a reward to the ewes and the lambs the children brought them millet bread and fed them from their hands. The ewes did all but speak to the children, and the way they took the millet bread from them spoke of an unusual intimacy between children and animals. The sheep were not worried or stupefied by the children’s pranks; they were watchful, wilful, and almost as mischievous as the children themselves. In these wild places of the world where there is no civilisation and no pretension on the part of man to be more than an animal himself—where, moreover, man lives in the midst of great herds where all business and doing seems to be the breeding of young—the children of men and the children of the herds are much more akin. The birth of children synchronises with the birth of lambs and foals, and is associated in the aboriginal mind. One understands how the eyes of the ancient Israelites and Egyptians, those primeval shepherd and nomadic peoples, were fixed upon the process of birth. They lived also in the midst of the animal world.
At nightfall carpets were spread outside the hut for the people to sleep on. They also lived the night with the stars. But the children stayed long with the lambs, and I imagine in some cases slept with them.
I, for my part, decided to push on for Chimkent[A] in the cool of the evening, and I got into the little town about ten o’clock at night. Chimkent is a miniature of Tashkent, but without the great buildings and shops in the Russian half. The same wide town—when you come to it you are not there; it is necessary to go on and on. The same gullies running along every street—only the water in them is less muddy than at Tashkent. The Sartish shops again. The dazzling cinema shows once more. I made for a brilliant illumination, thinking it might be an hotel, but it was the cinema theatre “Light.” Cinema theatres all have names in Russia, none more common than this one of “The Light.”
I found an inn at length, and a room. Next morning I went out for provisions. Chimkent has a little reputation as a watering-place, and chiefly because of the supply of koumis! Russians are very fond of going to outlandish places in order to be “cured,” and koumis is the cure of Chimkent. It is a beautiful little town, however. Chimkent has its mountain background, its white-stemmed, magnificent poplars, its old ruins, its fortifications. The Russians live more freely than usual. No passport was asked of me at the inn where I stayed. There was no Government monopoly of the sale of vodka.[B] There seemed to be fewer police about.
The Sartish bazaar was full of life and colour; carpenters, smiths and metal workers doing their work at open booths; koumis merchants standing behind gallon bottles and little glasses, inviting you to sit down there and then and drink a glass, the white of the milk gleaming suggestively through the gloomy green of the bottle; silk and cotton vendors exposing marvellously gaudy wares to veiled females who tried to look at the stuff without exposing their faces, a difficult manœuvre; strawberry hawkers; hawkers of lepeshka; carpet vendors; saddle vendors. There were high stacks of gaily coloured wooden saddles. A Kirghiz woman, riding astride of a pony, and yet having a dusky baby at her open breast, came and bought just such a saddle.
What remains most brightly in my mind was a long row of silvery-grey wolf skins exhibited at one shop. It was almost as if the animals themselves were looking at you. It reminded me of what winter must be like in this land—not mild, as one might expect, but intensely cold as long as it lasts. The moors are full of dangers from wolves. It was hereabouts, some years ago, that a whole wedding party of thirty or forty people perished on their way from the church to the bride’s house. The distance was only twenty miles, and in that time the wolves tore down all the horses and all the people except one Kirghiz driver, who by sacrificing the last-left couple, the bride and groom, and throwing them to the wolves, escaped to tell the tale and not feel shame. The Kirghiz would not feel shame at such an act—they are somehow outside codes of honour and chivalry and religion. They are not savages, but they are not civilised.
I spent a day altogether at Chimkent. Before resuming my tramp I bought myself a bottle in which to keep water or milk against a thirsty hour on the road. At the shop where I bought it a strange variety of wares was exposed; first Caucasian wine, then local wine—vodka, called here table wine—cognac, liqueurs, then ikons, flowers for your grave, matches and tobacco. Very suggestive, I thought. The landlady was rather taken aback at my remarks, and said that in a small place like Chimkent one could not have a separate shop for ikons or for flowers or for vodka, and her brother was a joiner, and she could take orders for coffins.
At Chimkent I struck colonial country, the main stretch of Russian colonisation extending eastward from Tashkent. I set out over a very worn switchback road, through irrigated fields of barley, through hayfields, where Russians were at work, past Russian farmhouses, into a country entirely different from that which I had been traversing. For the time being the Kirghiz was out of sight and I was in a Russian colonial district, a sort of Southern Siberia, full of interest and promise. At dusk I came to an encampment of fifty or sixty emigrants, with their wagons and horses. Many fires were burning, and iron pails full of soup were simmering over them; samovars were steaming, children were skirling and playing, someone was playing a concertina, and many drunkards were singing. Familiar Russian songs rent the air—the old songs which Russians never seem to abandon, and perhaps never will abandon, even when everybody knows the latest music-hall catch.