When the long caravans of new colonists came to a settlement they tied their horses and oxen to trees, repaired to inns, sought out people who had come from their part of Russia, and made merry with them. The village was a great sight when one of the long caravans had come in.
A little respite from the hot road, and then on once more. I see a Kirghiz riding with reins in one hand and a hawk in the other. The Kirghiz are great hawkers, using different hawks for different game. I meet a Sartish cart in which are five soldiers coming home from Verney, where they have received their discharge—several hundred miles from a railway station—and they have hired a native cart, and are asleep in the bottom of it. At last I come to a tumbling mountain stream, and it is good to have a swim and make myself tea in the shadow of the great bridge which takes the high road across the water. When a great band of colonists arrives here, there is an astonishing scene of peasant men and women bathing. They take to the water as if their very bodies were thirsty.
We pass through Mankent, one of the few native towns remaining, and that tending to be swallowed up by Russia also; and there, at a Sartish shop, stay for koumis—very bad koumis compared with what the Kirghiz gave me in their tents. Coming out of Mankent I fell in with a band of rich emigrants going from Stavropol, in South Russia, to beyond Kopal. They had twenty-four ox-drawn carts and twelve drawn by horses, and in the carts were their household goods—tables, chairs, beds and bedding—agricultural implements, reaping and binding machines, ploughs, grindstones, saws, axes, even metal baths, barrels, guns, pots and what not in such miscellaneity and promiscuity, mixed with mothers and babies, that it was touching to see. The oxen, in their wooden yokes, were fine beasts, and the emigrants tended them on foot. Every wagon was accompanied by one or two on foot, who flicked off the flies and encouraged the oxen along, sang songs, and shouted to one another. Every wagon had buckets swinging at the side. One wagon had several cages of doves fixed on to it; to another a poor old dog was tied, and came along unwillingly. In short, everything they could bring from Mother Russia to the new land the emigrants had brought.
I accompanied them up on to a wild moorland, on to a great plateau, where we spent the night after passing out of Mankent.
As I tramped thus across Russian Central Asia the great event that should change everything was hidden behind the screens of the future. The gentle and innocent present was more interesting than past or future. It is touching to go over my diary and see how guilelessly and unsuspectingly I and everyone was walking the time road that led so soon—if we only could have known it—to the precipice of war. The every-day was friendly, even though it contained storm or adventure or privation. We were familiar with mornings and evenings as with long known and trusted friends. As we look back at them they have a sinister aspect as of police conducting us by stages to some frontier. It is with these feelings that I look back now to my long tramp to the mysterious city of Aulie Ata, a famous shrine in the days of Tamerlane. Each night I slept under the stars, each day journeyed pleasantly forward under a tropical sun.
One night, near the new Russian village of Antonovka, there was an appalling sunset—through a barrel-shaped thundercloud into a sea of fire; and directly the sun went below the horizon the lightning became visible in the cloud, and I watched it running through the dark veils of vapour in ropes and loops and flying lassos of silver. The thunder rolled lugubriously, and far away I could see the rain pouring in continuous flood, the black fringe of the cloud torn from heaven down to earth. I wondered had I not better pack up and go down to the village. But a little wisp of clear sky, containing one pale star, expanded itself slowly and drove away the great lightning-riven barrel and banished every cloud, and it was clear and the thunder was not, and the night was dry and starry. Dawn next morning was clear and cold, and at the sound of cart-wheels on the highway below me I gladly took the road again—quick march to get warm. In an hour, however, the sun was already too ardent a friend, and I took shelter in a caravanserai, a cubical mud hut with neither chair nor table, and from the samovar steaming on the floor I prepared my morning tea—put some tea from a packet in my knapsack into my pot, and then filled up with boiling water from the samovar. The village street outside was full of life, crowded with wagons and wagoners standing half in the bright new light of day and half in the deep, damp shadow of mud walls and banks. I sat down opposite the village school. The school door was wide open, and I saw all the village children sitting in desks round the mud-built room. There were about thirty children, and they were a pretty sight, the boys in turkey-red cotton trousers, the girls in red frocks, with their black hair in plaits. There was only one row of desks, but it went right round the room. In the middle space were two teachers squatting on a carpet spread on the floor. Each and every child was saying his lessons at the top of his voice, and sing-song—but not the same thing, all different, according to the page the boy or girl was at, some far behind, another far in front. These were all Sart children.
I walked all day after this with a damp towel hanging from under my hat, and as fast as the towel dried I made it wet again from my water-bottle. Everyone on the road was thirsty and hungry, and I said to myself: “The next village is called Cornucula; let’s hope it will turn out to be Cornucopia!” And it was indeed a horn of plenty, and I shared there a roast chicken and a pitcher of milk with a companion of the road, a poor old horseman who had a horse but who had no money, and was begging his way home to Aulie Ata.
“How much did you give for your horse?” said I.
“It cost thirty-five roubles originally, with saddle and bridle and bags. I don’t know what it’s worth now. It’s peaceful, that’s the main thing, and it lives on grass.”