I passed over the fresh green hills and panted at the gradient, plunged down through beautiful meadows, slept a night in the Cossack station of Cherkask, lying on some felt and being almost eaten up by mosquitoes in what the soldier host called a garden. In this village I saw a pitiful sight—almost naked Kirghiz women treading wet mud and manure into stuff for fuel blocks. They looked astonishingly bestial and degraded. You could not feel that they had any soul or stood in any way above the animals. Yet as young women they had probably been attractive and pretty in their day, and might even have won the fancy of white men. There was a question whether the wife in Candida who soiled her lovely fingers putting kerosene into the lamps was really degraded by dirt, but here was something nearer reality.
I slept on the sand beside Gregoriefsky, and next day went deep into the desert, into a land of snakes, eagles, snipe, and lizards. On the Lepsa shore I saw forests of the gigantic reeds with which the houses and bridges are roofed. Here were leagues of ten-feet rushes that waved boisterously in the wind as in a cinema picture. I was warned here against the boa-constrictor; but the worst I saw were intent-eyed little snakes gliding away from me, scared at the sound of the footfall. I got my noon-day meal of koumis in a Kirghiz yurt, borrowed a horse with which to get across the difficult fords, one of black, reed-grown mud, the other of swift-flowing water. All day I ploughed through ankle-deep sand, and but for the fact that the sun was obscured by cloud, I should have suffered much from heat. As it was, the dust and sand-laden wind was very trying. Early in the evening I resolved to stop for the day, and found shelter in one of twenty tents all pitched beside one another in a pleasant green pasture-land which lay between two bends of the river—a veritable oasis. Even here, as I sat in the tent, I listened to the constant sifting of the sand on the felt sides and roof.
IN SUMMER PASTURE: EVENING OUTSIDE THE KIRGHIZ TENT
It was a good resting-place. An old man spread for me carpets and rugs, and bade me sleep, and I lay down for an hour, the sand settling on me all the time, and blowing into my eyes and my ears and my lips. In the meantime tea was made for me from some chips of Mongolian brick tea. The old Kirghiz took a black block of this solidified tea dust and cut it with an old razor. The samovar was an original one. It had no tap, and leaked as fast as it would pour. Consequently, a bowl was set underneath to catch the drip. This filled five or six times before boiling-point was reached, the contents of the bowl being each time returned to the body of the samovar.
After tea I went out and sat on a mound among the cattle, and watched the children drive in sheep and goats and cows, and the wives milk them all. It was a scene of gaiety and beauty. There were many good-looking wives, slender and dainty, though they were so short in stature, had white turbans on their heads and jackboots on their feet. As they went to and fro, laughing among themselves and bending over the cattle, their breasts hanging like large full pears at the holes made in their cotton clothes for the convenience of their babies, they looked a very gentle and innocent creation. These women did all the work of milking, and I saw them handle with rapidity ewes, she-goats, cows, mares, draining all except the last into common receptacles. The mares’ milk alone was kept separate, to be made into koumis. I must say my taste rebelled against a mixture of sheep’s milk, goats’ milk and cows’ milk, even when made sour; but the Kirghiz were not worried with such fastidiousness.
When the milking was accomplished fires were lit in oblong holes dug in the earth outside the tents—the Kirghiz stoves. Bits of mutton were cut up and fixed on skewers and placed over the glowing ashes in the holes. So supper was cooked. I was called into a tent, and there made to sit on a high wooden trunk, while eight or ten others sat below me on rugs. “You are a barin,” said the oldest man. “You must have the highest seat.” Seated up there, they brought me about a dozen skewers of grilled mutton on a wooden plate and bade me eat. I should not have been surprised to see a sheep’s head brought in to me.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s far too much for me.”
“You eat first,” said the old man. “Then we will eat.”
So I took a skewer and put them at their ease. There were in the tent the old man, his son, two wives of the latter, several children, an old woman, and a minstrel. Outside and in other tents were many sons-in-law and daughters-in-law and cousins, a whole genealogical tree of a family. Among the Kirghiz all sons remain in the father’s and father’s father’s family; only the girls change families, sold or arranged for in marriage. The men all wore hats, or, rather, bonnets, trimmed with an edging of fox’s fur, and the foxes from whose thighs this fur had been taken had been captured by trained eagles. The Kirghiz are deeply versed in falconry, and have diverse birds for various preys: hawks for cranes, for plovers, and for hares. They hunt the fox, whose skin is very precious, with eagles. They carry the hawks on their wrists when they ride, and for the support of heavy birds they have stalls or rests coming up from their saddles to hold the bird arm, whilst they hold the horse’s reins with the other. The most interesting man in the tent in which I supped was the minstrel, a tall, gaunt heathen in ragged cotton slops; he thrummed on a two-stringed guitar and improvised Kirghiz songs till the dusk grew dark and midsummer night came out with countless stars over the desert and the tents and the cattle and the wanderers.