VISITORS AT A KIRGHIZ WEDDING
At a place called Karachok we saw somewhat of the festivity of a Kirghiz wedding. There was a great crowd of men—the guests from the country round about—and they all stood around the tent of the bridegroom, while the womenfolk, apparently all collected together, sat within and improvised songs. The felt was removed from the side of the tent and the cane framework was exposed, so the girls and women within, all in white and with white turbans on their heads, looked as if they were in a cage. Kirghiz women are not veiled. They were all sitting on the floor—that is, on carpets on the ground of the tent. They sang as the Northern Russians sing in the provinces of Vologda and Perm and Archangel, in wild bursts and inharmonious keening. The men joined occasionally in the songs, and occasionally burst into laughter, for the words were full of funny things invented by the girls. That seemed to be the sum of the entertainment. A sheep had been roasted whole. A race had been run for the prize of a dead goat—the national baiga race. About midnight the singing ended, and the guests prepared to take their wives away and go home; the camels and bulls and horses were led forth, also the wives. And then broke out a quarrel. One of the guests had stolen a silver button off the coat of another man’s wife, had cut it off with the scissors as a keepsake, and she had countenanced the theft. The wife, being the personal property of the husband, had, of course, no power to give the button on her own account. There was likely to be an outrageous fight with cudgels, but Liamin appeared in the midst of the dispute and calmed it all away in the name of law and order. The guests mounted and rode away, out into the darkness, by various tracks, on horses, camels, bulls, their wives with them. It was astonishing to see the effect of the appearance of an officer among the angry crowd. They forgot their differences at one look and the recognition of a uniform. Even the dogs ceased barking when they saw the sword of my friend and they smelt his khaki trousers.
Our horses had been taken out of the shafts and given three hours’ rest and plenty of oats to eat. We walked out over the wild and empty moor together and chatted, came back and had tea, and then got into the tarantass once more. It was the depth of night before we moved on, and although we had clambered in before the horses were brought back, our object being to go to sleep before we started, we went on comparing impressions. I told him my life, he told me his, told me about his wife and children and his home at Przhevalsk, of his horses and his experiments in breeding, of the horse races at Verney, of the joy of the Kirghiz in racing, the one Russian pursuit and interest in which they fully share, the common ground of the two peoples in the colony. Liamin spent a great deal of the year in China and on the frontier, and had evidently much experience of the Chinese. He considered there would be a quarrel with China sooner or later through the progress of Russia in Central Asia. But the Chinese would be beaten. He did not fear their millions. They were not equipped as the Japanese were.
“What do you think of the Yellow Peril; is it getting nearer?” I asked.
“There is no danger of it whatever,” said he. “Europe is far too warlike to be in any danger from the Chinese.”
“Do you think Europe is more or less warlike than it was; do you think it is getting less warlike?” I asked. This was, of course, before the Great War.
“Yes, it’s getting less warlike, I suppose,” said Liamin. “But it will be a long while before we are too effeminate to withstand the Mongols. But woe for us if there should ever come such a time! They are a devilish people. At first glance they seem artless and childlike, but you can never be sure what they are up to; they are secret and mysterious. It is an axiom with me that all Asiatics lie; but the Chinese particularly. You remember when San Francisco was destroyed by earthquake the Americans discovered a hitherto unknown and underground city run by the Chinese, and in it many white people who had long since disappeared nobody knew whither, people who had been advertised for and sought for by relatives and police and what not. Wherever the Chinese form colonies they turn to devilry of one kind or another. I remember the ghastly things the Chinese did in the Boxer insurrection, the originality of the tortures they invented. Fancy this as a torture! A Russian whom I knew fell into their hands, and their way of killing him was to fasten a corpse of a man to him, and day and night he lived with this corpse till the worms ate into him and he died of madness! The Russian villagers don’t mind doing business with the Chinamen, but always remember they are pagans, and many think they have direct dealings with devils. I was at Blagoveshtchensk when the Chinese opened fire on us, and our Siberian colonists drove all the Chinese out of the city, thirty thousand of them, and they were drowned in the river like rats.”
By this time the horses had been put in, Karachok left, and we were jogging gently through the night. The Kirghiz who drove slept; the horses also almost slept as they walked. Liamin at last, tired or made drowsy by the movement, nodded as he talked, and fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. The road climbed over high mountains, the moon bathed the track and the wild and empty landscape with light. How far on either hand stretched the uninhabited world! It was like posting across a new and habitable planet where men might have been expected to be living, but where all had died, or none but ourselves had ever come. The world itself poked up, its great back was shyly lifted as if it were some gigantic, timid animal that had never been disturbed. It was a wonderful night; quiet, gentle, and unusual. Liamin, at my side, slept silently and intensely. The Kirghiz looked as if cut out of wood. I lay back and looked out, my fingers locked behind my head. So the small hours passed. Night seemed to move over us and be left behind, and I saw ahead the creeping dawn, the morrow, the real morrow, golden and lucent on the eastern horizon. The sun rose and flooded into our sleepy and sleeping eyes as we clattered over the brow of a hill. We came to the Tartar hamlet of Kuan-Kuza, and it was morning.
XI
ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER
AT Kuan-Kuza I parted company with Liamin. I went off for a walk on the hills; he went on with Vaska and Margarita. I had now reached mountainous country and a region of fresh air. There were green valleys and wild flowers, streams beside which I could make a pleasant repast, and I had a most enjoyable walk to Kopal. There were patches of snow on the heights, and I clambered up and fingered it just for the joy of realising the contrast to the heat of the deserts I had come through. The road went high over a green tableland to Altin-Emel, where I came to cross-roads for China. An enormous caravan of camels blocked all the ways here; two or three hundred ranks of camels, roped three in a rank, roped crossways and lengthways, bearing huge panniers of wool, but no passengers. Chinamen and little Chinese boys were in charge of them, and ran among the camels’ legs cursing and calling as the strings of bewildered or purposely contrary animals threatened to get into knots and inextricable tangles. Sarts were doing a good business here, selling hot lunch from wooden cauldrons with three compartments, in which were meat-pies, soups, potatoes, respectively, all cooking at the same time over charcoal. Altin-Emel is an interesting point on the road. Here may be seen upon occasion British sportsmen with Hindu servants, and two or three britchkas full of trophies and large antlers done up in linen and cotton-wool and fixed with rope. Before the war four or five British officers passed through Altin-Emel every year on their way to Chinese Tartary or India, or from those places, coming home. Some were out here at the time the war broke out, and were a long time in finding out exactly what had happened in Europe.