I slept three nights in the open and tramped three days before I finally passed out of the province of Sirdaria and entered the Semiretchenskaya Oblast, Seven Rivers Land, the remotest of the Tsar’s dominions, remoter than the Far East, because there is no communication either by rail or river. On my right the great chain of mountains with snowy summits still stretched on, and on my left the everlasting moorland. More birds appeared on my way, partridges, bustards, snipe, eagles, cranes. Straying off the road and up to the first rising ground of the mountains were a species of little deer, called here kosuli. Marmots popped in and out of sand burrows, occasionally falling a prey to day-flying owls. The jerboa, with long tail and dainty, bird-like legs, was a pretty visitor, and among insects the green praying-mantis was noticeable, the cicada a nuisance, and various spiders and beetles the bane of night-tide. I was constantly warned against the hairy-legged falanga and a black spider (the karakurt), both of which were said to have a mortal bite, though sheep could eat them without harm. Along the road laborious and stupid-looking beetles rolled their globular homes of gathered dirt.
Slow travelling out here is very featureless, and I grew tired of tramping all day, the emptiness of the life, and the dullness of mere sun and road as companions. What was my disappointment the second noon to lose a lift that would have taken me thirty versts on at the cost of a rouble. I had just got up from a siesta under my plaid tent when a countryman came along with a cart full of clover—food for his horse—and I bargained with him and got a seat literally “in clover.” We proceeded thus for a mile when we came to a mud-built caravanserai, and stopped to have tea. Up to this inn came presently another cart from the other direction. It contained all his wife’s family, the people he had been setting out to see. They had had a similar impulse to come and visit him. In that way I lost my lift, and could hardly share their joy at the happy meeting.
At Merke, however, the second colonial settlement in Seven Rivers Land, I hired a troika to Pishpek, three horses yoked to an arba (a native cart), the driver a Kirghiz. This is the usual mode of travelling for Russians on business in Central Asia. The troika stands instead of the train. But what an impression!
The Kirghiz driver, in rags and tatters, sitting on one hip on his bare wooden driving-seat, lounging to and fro, one shoulder up, one down, flicking the three galloping horses with his whip, whistling, shouting.
The horses bounding along, neck by neck, over bump, over crevice, over chasm; up hill, down dale, never slackening (there is no brake to the wooden arba); coming with a great splash on to a stream, the arba just floating on it as the horses plunge through it; out again, up the bank; what matter stones—even milestones? What a contrast to the way I crawled along when walking!
We go along roads that are like dried-up river beds, over roads little better than mountain tracks. Ever and anon I am nearly shot out of the cup of dry clover and hay on which I am sitting. I am flung against the sides, I grasp at the stained Joseph coat of the Kirghiz, I clasp him round the shoulders.
But the Kirghiz smiles and whistles and shouts again. The horses whisper hurried secrets to one another in their rhythmical threefold devouring of space. We go not by versts or by miles, but by leagues. There are no steamboats, trains, motor-cars, aeroplanes in Seven Rivers Land, but the troika combines these all in one.
As we go along the level high road the whole country behind us is blotted out from view by clouds of our dust. We never hesitate as we dash through market-places and thronged colonial villages. What matter who is in the way; the troika goes on straight ahead, always seeming likely to collide as we dash towards other carts or charge into passing horsemen, the averted horses’ faces breathing into my face as we pass.
The way is always in the view of the snowy mountains and comparatively seldom in view of houses. It is the land of the tent-dwellers, and the moors are dotted with grey pyramids and columns, the temporary dwelling-places of the nomads. Now and then a whole patriarchal family of the wanderers crosses the road on its journey from the parched plains up to the greener pasture lands of the hills. They have their tents and all their goods on camels’ backs; they drive with them hundreds of head of sheep and goats and cows and mares. They ride themselves on camels, horses, bulls; their white-turbaned wives, often four to each man, ride astride of bulls, their faces uncovered, babies at their bare breasts. Brides—girls of thirteen or fourteen—ride in extraordinary state in their midst, seated on palfreys with scarlet horsecloths, themselves clad in bright cottons, their hair in many glistening black plaits, each loaded with a silver bullet to keep it from entangling with sister plaits. They also sit astride, and ride with wonderful grace, as if conscious of being the treasure of the whole caravan. They are good to look upon.
We pass endless lines of wagons drawn by toiling oxen or little, jaded ponies, and tended by burly Russian peasants and their plump, laughing, perspiring womenkind—emigrants going to settle in the youngest of Russian colonies a thousand miles or more from a railway station. We have to turn off the road and tumble over the rough moorland in order to circumvent hundreds of such emigrant wagons. We overtake and pass the equivalent of whole goods trains—long strings of lorries and pack-carts and camels, piled with consignments of goods to be delivered all along the way from Southern Siberia on the one hand and from Orenburg and Tashkent on the other to the limits of the Himalaya Mountains. We pass, or, as it happens, get entangled in a mile of camels, each having on its back a mountain of horsehair or wool, some twenty couples of dirty camels in a company, each company led by a Chinese Mohammedan on an ass, a Dunkan.