THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA AT VERNEY—AFTER
THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1887

The local newspaper had made some sort of record of the cinema films that were shown in the five towns of Seven Rivers and analysed them in this way:

Scientific 2 per cent.
Historical 3 ”
Industrial 3 ”
Nature 4 ”
Farce 20 ”
Lurid drama 60 ”
Polite drama 8 ”

Which seemed to give a fair account of its civilising force. I visited three or four cinemas at various remote places, and was astonished at the French and Italian horrors, German and Scandinavian bourgeois funniosities, ghastly white-slave tragedies, and many visualised penny dreadfuls. When you see the crowds of Russians at these performances you realise that the penny dreadful is by no means played out, that many people did not in the old times read the penny dreadful just because they did not know what lay between the covers of those badly printed books, what enthralling rubbish. The business has changed hands commercially, but the thing sold is the same. It is sold in a more acceptable form—that is all.

Astonishing to see the yellow men of Asia staring at the cinema: the turbaned Sart; the new Chinaman, with cropped pigtail; the baby-like Kirghiz. Whatever do they make of American business romances and the Wild West and Red Rube and Max? They seem engrossed, smile irrelevantly, stare, go out, but always come again. The cinema is a queer window on to Europe and the West.

The road from Verney to Iliisk, on the River Ili, seemed more deserted than the road to Verney had been. Many parties of pioneers evidently turn south at Verney, and not so many turn north-east towards Iliisk. It is waste territory, overgrown with coarse grass and thistles. There are occasional mountain rivulets, bridged on the roadway with straw and mud bridges much higher than the level of the road, so that every bridge is a sort of hump. Behind me and behind Verney immense steep mountains lifted themselves up into the clouds. The road that I walked was a slowly descending tableland.

I passed through the little village of Karasbi, and then through the more substantial settlements of Jarasai and Nikolaevski. These are prolonged and attenuated villages. The oldest houses are the biggest and the deepest in trees, they have plenty of out-houses and farm buildings; but the newest are bare and wretched, with poplar shoots in front of them but three feet high. There are some deserted hovels—even a fine house was perhaps a hovel to begin with, a temporary mud hut put up to give shelter whilst the first work was done on the fields. I saw many houses half built, showing their framework of yet green willow and poplar twigs. I saw whole families and villages at work on new settlements, and also families living in tents. On the foundations of the new dwellings or attached to the rude framework were little crosses, only to be taken down when there would be a place in the house for the ikons brought from their old homes in Russia. Some colonists, on being asked when they had arrived, replied, “Last week,” others said, “During these days”; the dust on their wagons was new. Everyone had a sort of Swiss Family Robinson air, as of exploring an island, making natural discoveries, and bringing things from a wreck. Some groups, however, were already busy sowing their new fields, and I understood that that was the first thing to do; that was the work, and the building the new cottages was the play. They had nothing to fear from sleeping in the open every night of summer and early autumn—a lesson to these Russians, who in their home cottages or in railway carriages are afraid of fresh air as if it brought pestilence.

I spent two wonderful nights under the stars on the road to Iliisk, the first in a sort of natural cradle in a copse, the second in a hollow which I made for my body in the bare sand of the desert. I passed out of the new land on to the waste of the Ili valley; the road was visible twenty or thirty miles ahead, and on it in front of me are telegraph poles unlimited, at first with spaces between, but in the distance thick, like black matches stuck close together in the sand. I walked a long way in the evenings, and I remember, as the sun set, an enormous and foolish bustard that was under the impression I was chasing it. It would fly the space of five telegraph poles, I’d walk the space of three; then it would fly three, I’d catch up; and it would fly on ahead along the track as if it dared not desert the poles. Finally, however, just at the last rays of sunset, it flew crossways over the desert and disappeared.

I was rather nervous at this time about the karakurt, the black spider that sheep eat with pleasure, but whose bite is mortal to men; and each night when I made my fresh-air couch I took pains to keep out of the way of flies, beetles, spiders, and snakes. I never was troubled by the karakurt, but I had a lively time with beetles and running flies, to say nothing of snakes, whose sudden darts and writhings gave me momentary horrors many times. The valley of the Ili is a wild place, with tigers and panthers; a splendid district for study and sport, I should say. However, no beasts came and snuffed my face in the night.