Each night on the road I learned to expect the moon later and later. It always seems unpunctual, always late, but not worried, and having that irreproachable beauty that excuses all faults. She came up late over the Ili desert in a wonderful orange light, and then, emerging into perfect brilliance, paled the myriad stars, set them back in the sky,
Divesting herself of her golden shift and so
Emerging white and exquisite.
I lay looking eastward on the sand, and on my right, in the vague night shadow, lay the tremendous pyramids of the Ala Tau mountains, the great cliff triangles south of Verney, first vision of the mighty Thian Shan. The clouds had lifted off them during the night, and in the morning I saw them in their true perspective, vague, smoke-like, shadow-based and grey-white, sun-bathed, many-pointed rocky and precipitous summits stretching a hundred miles and more from east to west.
It was ten miles in to breakfast at Iliisk. The water in the little lakes being salt, and my water-bottles empty, I could not make tea. The lakes and ponds remind you that you are between Issik-Kul and Balkhash. It is, however, desert country till you come to the thickets of the river, and there the cuckoo is calling, there are bees in the air, and it is glorious, fresh, abundant summer. The bases of the mountains are all deep blue as the sky, but utterly soft and delicious to the gaze, and the colour faints into the whiteness of the hundred-mile-long line of snow.
Iliisk is marked large on the map for convenience sake. One must mark it large to indicate a town on the River Ili, but though there is a prospect of its becoming an important trade centre, it is as yet insignificant, no more than a village, a church, a post-station, a market-place, and the dwelling-houses of two thousand people. I noticed new colonists here, using their horses to tramp great slops of mud to the proper consistency of mud dough for making the walls of new cottages. So Iliisk is increasing in size, its population is growing. Most of the houses here were mud huts of the swinging kind, built to withstand earthquakes, and their roofs were very light and beautiful, being of jungle reeds of a golden colour, each stem twelve feet long and ending in a broom of soft plumage. The River Ili, from which these reeds are cut, is a grateful sheet of silver, the breadth of the Thames at Westminster, has pink cliffs, is spanned by a wooden bridge, and has little tree-grown islets. Among the reeds on the banks lurk the tiger and panther and many snakes. Little steamers go to and fro out of China and into China, doing trade in wool, but held up every now and then by the Chinese for extra bribes. In the village wagons and camels are being loaded with raw wool—indicating the future significance of the little town as a trade centre. The population is predominantly Russian, though there are Tartars, Kirghiz, and Chinese Mohammedans. Near the market-place is a Tartar mosque with a green crescent on the top of it.
My road lay eastward toward Kopal, but before taking it I had my breakfast at Iliisk—sour milk and stale bread—at a cottage, with Christ’s blessing, and how good!
The morning was very hot when I set out again, and I took off my jacket and put it in my knapsack, carrying the enlarged and weighty bundle on thinly covered shoulders. The land was sandy and desolate, being too high above the level of the River Ili to allow of simple irrigation. If it is to be opened up for colonisation, the river must be tapped much higher up, in Chinese territory, but this the Chinese will not as yet allow. I met no colonists on my road out from Iliisk, not even any Kirghiz. Summer had scorched away whatever grass the desert had yielded, and the nomads had retired for the season and gone to fresher pastures higher in the hills. How frugally it is necessary to lunch in these parts may be guessed. It is no place to tramp for anyone who must have dainties and must have change. On the whole I do not recommend Central Asia for long walking tours. For one thing, there is very little opportunity of getting anything washed, including oneself; no early morning dip, no freshness. It is not as in the Caucasus:
The wild joy of living, the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool, silver shock