A muezzin from the dark tower cries
Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.
Again muezzins from the dark mosques of the city. Suddenly the cocks gave an extraordinary chorus, and I knew it must be near dawn, and a cart came lumbering by. Pale rents appeared through the willow trees that hid the sky. My candle grew little and yellow and flickering, but it lasted, and I wrote on and on, page after page, till it was bright morning. Then I lay down and slept an hour, and I had saved myself, perhaps, from fever. In any case, I had lived through a waking nightmare.
By day Aulie Ata was, perhaps, less mysterious, but there still remained a sense of remoteness. It was difficult to imagine European people living there all the year round and calling it “home.” It is an oasis, it is true, but it might be truer to call it a sub-tropical swamp. It is fed by a mountain river, the Talass, which flows off and loses itself in the desert. But there is plenty of water and a great deal of verdure is possible, a very large settlement.
Aulie Ata has its cathedral standing in the midst of a pleasant shadowy garden. It has its bazaar, and its trotting-ground for a horse fair and cattle market. Here were numbers of Sartish shops where bread and hot meat-pies were sold. Scores of Kirghiz on horseback or on bulls blundered about amidst cattle and mud. Young men were trying horses and showing their paces; others were making deals in sheep and goats. The sheep for sale were tied in long or short knots, threaded by the heads as Russians thread onions.
As a general rule a sheep was reckoned as being equivalent in value to a three-rouble note, and many of the Kirghiz had brought up their sheep merely as money, and when they bought six shillings’ worth of stuff at some shop they detached a sheep from their coil and passed him on to the shopman. So I saw for the first time in my life the literal significance of pecunia as the Romans understood it.[C]
Aulie Ata is subject to earthquakes, and my landlady explained how one morning she was washing the floor of her establishment, bending down over her floorcloth with her legs apart, and suddenly she felt her legs going farther apart—by which lively figure she meant to explain how earthquakes are felt.
The chief sights of the city were the caravans of emigrants toiling onwards towards the farther East. Here were no farms for them, no encouragement given to settle. For there is now no particular political need for the colonisation of Sirdaria; the Russians are far more powerful than the native population, and could never be overthrown by an uprising or mutiny. The Government encourages emigration to the points where it is politically most advantageous—that is, on the very frontier lines. The most vigorous irrigation and settlement work goes on on the frontiers of China, Afghanistan and Persia. The colonists have a long road in front of them even after they have reached Aulie Ata. I myself went on with them.
The weather changed whilst I was at Aulie Ata; torrential rain came down, rain brought down by the mountains, and only deluging their own slopes and the country in the immediate vicinity. The desert twenty miles away remained, no doubt, as parched as ever. The River Talass, in flood outside the town, presented an unwonted spectacle; the wide, black, diversified, shingly river, the lowering clouds overhead, the restless wind from the mountains spitting and promising rain, the emptiness and dreariness of the world all around, except at the place where the bridge should have been—but from which it had been lately washed away—and there, an ever-increasing collection of straw or canvas tilted wagons and carts, and of oxen, camels and horses, all the caravans of the emigrants, waiting, as it were, for a ferryman to take them to another world.
I got over at last on a Kirghiz horse, and was pretty nearly soaked in the passage. On the other side was a more desolate country. It was wilder, more broken, perhaps a little greener, but there were very few farms. Even the Kirghiz seemed of a poorer and dirtier type. I bought milk at the Kirghiz tents and bread and eggs at the post stations. At one post-house I had a chicken cooked for me. The heat was not so trying on this road, for clouds had come over and rain had laid the dust. I had a sense of travelling in the opposite direction of the way of the seasons. It had been like June in Tashkent, but here it was early May. Still, the temperature in the shade must have reached 90° Fahr.