After our meal the beggar horseman went off on his nag, and I wandered through the village on foot. Among other establishments in the village was a photographer’s, and outside his little house was a notice:
THOSE WISHING TO HAVE THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS
TAKEN MAY HAVE A SHAVE FREE
I went in to the photographer, and saw many photographs of shaven colonists, all very stiff and serious looking. These were chiefly pioneers and passers-by, the people of the caravans. It is strange how unhappy everyone looks in a provincial portrait. The photographer, however, did a good business.
I settled down for the evening and the night in the sight of lovely mountains. The sky cleared of wisps of cloud and discovered the stars. The new moon, born surely that day, was but a hair of silver in the west, and sank an hour after sunset, followed by a beautiful attendant star. As I lay on the heath and looked upward, the first constellation just formed, and it was the seven stars, delicate and lovely in the half-night, as dainty as a maiden’s ornament. Showers of meteors, half observed, slipped out of the dark into the dark; long single meteors left, as it were, phosphorescent trails of light behind them. The Asiatic mountains drew their cloaks round them, hardened their faces, and slept as they stood away in the background. It became a night of countless stars, each star a jewel set in the darkness. The night wind came waving over the grass, full of health, gentleness and warmth. It was never still all night, but never cold, and never a cloud touched the vast glittering sky.
Next night before falling asleep I witnessed an unusual phenomenon. Away in the north a strange black ribbon seemed to be let down from a cloud, and it fluttered in the air. I thought of America and advertisement devices and of aeroplanes all in a second, and then remembered I was in Central Asia, far away from the inventions of civilisation. The ribbon came nearer, and as it passed overhead took a wedge-shaped formation, and I saw it was composed entirely of birds. They were flying across the heaven at a breathless speed, now in the clouds, now out, and never breaking up their ranks, the big birds seeming to be thick on top of one another in the front. On approaching the line of snow peaks in the south, they defiled into a long, single line, looking like some aerial train, and then easily, rapidly, passed over Talas Tau and Hindu Kush to India, as I surmised, just four hundred miles as they fly. The moon that night was a crescent of pearl, and stayed a little longer in the sky. I watched her night by night till she was full grown, and rose in the east the time the sun was setting, and reigned in the sky the whole night. How pleasant and serene the night weather remained! All night long the breeze rippled and flapped in my sleeping-sack and crooned in the neck of my water-bottle. Far up on the hills lights twinkled in Kirghiz tents, and in the illumination of moonlight I faintly discerned black masses of cattle beside which boys watched all night, playing their wooden pipes and singing their native songs to one another.
As far as High Village (Visokoe) the road remains with the Russians, and their villages abound. After Visokoe there is forty miles of moorland to Grosnoe, and then for a hundred miles there is not a Russian settlement except the town of Aulie Ata. Journeying became very difficult when the road was over deserted, empty moorland. The sun poured down, there was not a glimpse of shade anywhere, seldom any water, and seldom anything to eat. Even the grass was disappearing, and the Kirghiz everywhere were moving, following the spring, with their tents and their cattle and their camels, away from the scorched plains up to the fresher slopes of the mountains. Often I rigged up my plaid as a tent, often sat in the pale grey shadow of an ancient ruin or a tomb. The emigrants who tended the oxen on the road were fain to climb into the canvas-covered wagons and sleep, leaving the slow cattle to trudge with the extra load through the dust. Russian Ascension Day came, and the road was perfectly empty—for no one would travel on a festival. All day long I met but one man, a native on a camel. For a long time we walked within sight of one another, he allowing the camel to graze when it felt inclined, but every now and then giving it a kick, to which it responded by a plaintive groan and a jangling of the bell round its neck.
One might ask where is Tamerlane, where the warriors, the robbers, the camp followers of the hordes? The Easterns you meet are all gentle as children. No one needs to carry a weapon. Where is the old spirit of fighting? The answer might be found, I suppose, in the thousands of Cossacks and Russians who, later in the same year, returned along these roads to fight against the Germans.
The day before reaching Aulie Ata, in the heat of noon, I came in sight of a green patch on the moors, and sought and found a bubbling spring of clear water. “Here is the place,” thought I, “to make my long-deferred cup of tea,” and I cast my knapsack on the moor and looked around for a spot on which to make a fire. I had gathered a few sticks along the road in case of need, so I had the foundation of a little blaze. With what trouble did I keep that fire going till the kettle boiled, rushing about for wisps of withered weed, hunting for roots, for a straw, for anything that would burn, and all the time anxious lest in my absence the pot should capsize. At last, as I stood over the fire, there were symptoms of boiling, and I was just rejoicing. Then suddenly all grew black around me, and I lost control of my body and fell down. Such was the effect of the burning sun on my neck and head. Perhaps this was something in the nature of a sunstroke. Be that as it may, even at the moment of falling I got up again. For what was my vexation to realise, even at the moment that I fell, that my kettle had capsized. The fact brought me to my senses. I hardly touched the ground before I started up again to save the water and the fire. No luck; the water was all spilt, the fire out, and the kettle lying in the ashes. I did not trouble to pick the kettle up. I sat down by the spring, soaked a handkerchief, put it on my head, took out my mug, and drank water—such a lot of water.
What a day! I was to feel the effects of my sunstroke. A great thirst took possession of me, and when I got to Aulie Ata a touch of fever, which I had to fight.
Aulie Ata the ancient, the tomb of the Holy One, is a mysterious and umbrageous city. I became aware of its trees on my outward horizon early one afternoon, when the mighty sun had just passed the zenith and was beginning to beat on my shoulders. I had made my siesta at noon in a tent I contrived with my plaid. I tied one corner to a telegraph pole and tied stones to the other corners, and somehow made a canopy, and I lay in a blaze of diffused light on the hard, dry, sandy steppe. Though the wind blew, it was burning hot, and my right hand was swollen and smarting, for I hold a strap of my knapsack with it as I march. I drank the last drain of water in my water-bottle and made the melancholy reflection that Central Asia is not a land to tramp in. I heard the jun-jun-jun of camels, but did not care to put out my head to look at them. I wished I had a tent, or a stout and voluminous umbrella.