We passed through Bielovodsk and Novy Troitsky, the latter being an extensive Cossack station, where all the village men have red stripes on their trousers, and where even the little boys riding the horses in from the steppe have red-striped breeches cut down from father’s. The Cossacks are soldiers first and peasants only second or third. Whilst farming they are understood to be “on leave,” and when war breaks out they are at once at the direct service of the Tsar on the field of battle. Novy Troitsky was a Cossack camp in the days of the conquest of Central Asia, and when pacification was consummated the Cossacks were invited to send for their sweethearts, wives, mothers, families, and settle on the pick of the land chosen out for them by the Government. There are many such settlements; they are called stantsi, or stations, whereas the other settlements are called derevnyi, villages.
On the whole, Seven Rivers Land seemed to be more fruitful than Northern Sirdaria. The settlements were very large ones; there were many enormous villages with schools, churches, big general stores and several thousand inhabitants. Pishpek, however, was not quite so large as Aulie Ata. The populations of the colonial towns on my route may give an idea of these growing agricultural communities:
| Inhabitants | |||
| Chimkent | 64 | versts from railway station | 15,756 |
| Aulie Ata | 242 | ” ” ” | 19,052 |
| Pishpek | 505 | ” ” ” | 16,419 |
| Verney | 743 | ” ” ” | 81,317 |
| Kopal | 1,102 | ” ” ” | 3,966 |
| Sergiopol | 1,352 | ” ” ” | 2,261 |
These figures are taken some years ago, and probably twenty per cent. should be added to the numbers now. These are the biggest.
The towns of this colony are not connected with Western Europe either by rail or waterway, and there is an unexampled provincialism in the country. The people are far away by themselves, and they have consequently developed a distinctive local patriotism. The Central Asian pioneers are great talkers about their own country, and they are proud of everything that marks it out as different from Russia and the rest of the world. They are proud of its vast empty spaces, its mountains, its wild beasts and birds, its tigers, wild boars, aurochs, wild goats, its falcons, flamingos, partridges; proud of the Kirghiz, of the tortoises, of the camels—in fact, of anything and everything that seems to mark the country as original. Its people are all hunters. The engineer, the “topograph,” the “hydro-technic,” the land surveyor, the Cossack, the peasant colonist, all carry the gun. The towel-hooks and hat-pegs in their houses are goat horns and antlers. The words of the colonists’ mouths run out in hunting-stories. All journeys are made on horseback or by post-horses, and the people are always moving to and fro. Even the colonists shift about from one settlement to another—by arrangement with the colonisation authorities.
I met many people on my journey: two khodoki, foot messengers from a village in Kursk government, sent by the villagers to spy out the land and choose a plot for colonisation, but now hastening back in order to be home by St. Peter’s Day and the cutting of the barley. Land was scarce with them; all in the hands of the landowners. The population increases—so many children always are born—but the free land does not increase. The two khodoki had not, however, found what they wanted in Semi-retchie, and were returning to Kursk with a tale of disillusionment. “They told us it was heaven out here, and you reaped harvests just after throwing out the seed. But it appears there is as much work here as there,” said they.
I met a commercial traveller, a “voyageur, the representative of a certain firm,” as he called himself. He was travelling post-horses, and had a large chest of travelling samples, which was roped on to the back of his britchka. He was carrying Moscow cottons in bright assortments of colours and patterns, and when he came to a town where there were ten cotton shops he went into each rapidly and deposited a complete set of his samples, and left them with the shopkeepers for an hour or so while he had his dinner and had a shave and a bath. In that way he met me, resting while the shopowners and their friends discussed his goods. Commercial travellers in tea, sugar, cotton, china, ironware and other dry goods were very frequent on the road, but were mostly Tartars or Armenians.
I also met a boy going home from the University of Kief, going home to Verney, and in a tremendous hurry to get back to his mother and the girl he left behind him a year ago. He was “agin the Government,” and imagined that England was ahead of Russia in every way, and wondered what the English would not have done with Central Asia had it been theirs. “Just think of the wealth in these mountains,” said he. “Just imagine it; we have not one mine in this vast territory twice the size of Germany. We have only one factory—a lemonade factory.”
“Its destiny seems to be agricultural,” said I.