I slept the night on a hillock overlooking the road, and it was better than at the inn, even though there was a thunder-shower. The larks sang the day out again. I listened to the cuckoo calling and to the conversation of the blue crows that kept visiting me, finding out something, flying away, and then returning with brethren; watched the stars and the clouds, and slept.
I had now struck the main road from Tashkent to the Chinese frontier, and the prospect of my journey changed from one of solitary wandering over sandy wastes to one full of life and interest in the company of Russian colonists and Oriental traffickers. From the moment I wakened up on the hill-side on my first morning after leaving Chimkent, I was not out of the hearing of songs and laughter and chattering, nor out of the sight of wagons, carts, camel trains and people.
The road was really four roads, each separated by streaks of trampled grass-grown mud, now dried or drying after many thunder-showers. On the southern side you are accompanied by snowy mountains for hundreds of miles. You would think that you could walk to them in half an hour and get a handful of snow, so clear is the atmosphere that shows them, but they are at least twenty miles distant. They are, first, the Alai Tau, and then the Alexandrovsky Mountains, and then what is known as the Trans-Ilian Alai Tau, and many of their peaks are over ten thousand feet high, but are not named and little known. On the north side of the road stretches the desert in spring, now green to the horizon, but already turning yellow here and there under the blaze of the sun. On either hand one sees far-away clusters of grey tents of the Kirghiz, and near them their herds of cattle-black patches that are horses, red patches that are cows, grey, white and brown masses like many maggots, and they are sheep. There are also many camels far away on the hills, looking like little twists of thick rope with knots in the middle.
Nearly all the traffic at this season is going eastward, and each morning, when the horses are put in and the wagoners make up the caravan once more, it is with eyes and faces toward the dawn.
The emigrant caravan starts an hour before sunrise; the camp breaks up and the oxen and horses are put to, and the long day of creaking and blundering and toiling onward commences. I was regularly wakened up by the road which had wakened before me, the moving caravans and the traders’ carts.
The stars are setting and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing. Oh! make haste!
I generally slept at a distance of about a hundred yards from the actual highway, in order to avoid being run over at night. Even so, I was frequently in some danger of being trodden on before dawn, and at least sure to be wakened early by the traffic on the road. Upon occasion there were whole hordes and patriarchal families on the roads, with their camels and sheep and horses, their white-turbaned women riding on bulls, and pretty girl-brides on caparisoned palfreys.
We journeyed from village to village, and each was an artificial oasis made by the Russian colonists and irrigation engineers. Every ten, fifteen or twenty miles there was a substantial Russian village; the farther I went the more distance there was between these settlements, but still the actual chain was kept up unbroken to the far east of the colony, and the maps which we have of these deserts are unrepresentative in that they show blank spaces with a scattering of Tartar names of places. The map should now be well marked with Russian names. Each village is a shady shelter, alive with the running water of the irrigation canals, wherein are trailing families of ducks. There are long lines of splendid poplar trees, solid houses, schools, shops, a church, post office, municipal buildings, and so on. A notice-board tells the number of souls and the date of the foundation of the village.