And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
THE CENTRAL ASIAN DESERT
By evening the train is running along the frontier of the north of Persia, and every house has a garden of roses. A Persian silk merchant, all in black, with a talisman of green jade hanging from a gold chain round his neck, comes into my carriage, and prepares to occupy the upper shelf. He is travelling all night to Merv, and has brought a great bouquet of sweet-smelling, double roses into the carriage. A knobbly-nosed, grey-faced, animal-eared, antediluvian old sort, this Persian would not stay in my carriage because there was a woman in it, but asked me to keep his place while he went and locked himself in the empty women’s compartment next door. He left his black, horn-handled, slender, leather-wrapped walking-stick behind—its ferrule was of brass, and seven inches long.
We reached Geok-Tepe, a great fortress of the Tekintsi, reduced by Skobelef in 1881. At the railway station there is a room in which are preserved specimens of all the weapons used in the fight. There are also waxwork representations of a Russian soldier with his gun, and a native soldier cutting the air with his semicircle of a sword. Many passengers turned out to have a look at these things. It was sunset time, and the west was glowing red behind the train, the evening air was full of health and fragrance, the stars were like magnesium lights in the lambent heaven, the young moon had the most wonderful place in the sky, poised and throned not right overhead, but some degrees from the zenith, as it were on the right shoulder of the night.
It was an evening that touched the heart. At every station to Askhabad the passengers descended from the train, and walked up and down the platforms and talked. The morning of May Day had been blank and dismal; the evening was full of gaiety and life. We reached Askhabad, the first great city of Turkestan, about eleven o’clock at night, and its platform presented an extraordinary scene. The whole forty-five minutes of our stay it was crowded with all the peoples of Central Asia—Persians, Russians, Afghans, Tekintsi, Bokharese, Khivites, Turkomans—and everyone had in his hand, or on his dress, or in his turban roses. The whole long pavement was fragrant with rose odours. Gay Russian girls, all in white and in summer hats, were chattering to young officers, with whom they paraded up and down, and they had roses in their hands. Persian hawkers, with capacious baskets of pink and white roses, moved hither and thither; immense and magnificent Turkomans lounged against pillars or walked about, their bare feet stuck into the mere toe-places they call slippers—they, too, held roses in their fingers. In the third-class waiting-room was a line of picturesque giants waiting for their tickets, and kept in order meanwhile by a cross little Russian gendarme. Behind the long barrier, facing the waiting train, stood the familiar band of women with chickens and eggs, with steaming samovars and bottles of hot milk. They had now candle lanterns and kerosene lamps, and the light glimmered on them and on the steam escaping from the boiling water they were selling. I walked out into the umbrageous streets, where triple lines of densely foliaged trees cast shadow between you and the beautiful night sky; in depths of dark greenery lay the houses of the city, with grass growing on their far-projecting roofs, with verandas on which the people sleep, even in May. But they were not asleep in Askhabad. I stopped under a poplar and listened to the sad music of the Persian pipes. In these warm, throbbing, yet melancholy strains the night of North Persia was vocal—the night of my May Day.
I returned to the station and bought a large bunch of pink and white roses, and, as the second bell had rung, got back to my carriage, laid my plaid and my pillow, and as the train went out I slipped away from the wonderful city—to a happy dream.
III
WONDERFUL BOKHARA
THE promise of Persia was not fulfilled on the morrow after my train left Askhabad. We turned north-east, and passed over the lifeless, waterless waste of Kara-Kum, 100 miles of tumbled desert and loose sand. At eleven in the morning the temperature was 80 in the shade—each carriage in the train was provided with a thermometer—and the air was charged with fine dust, which found its way into the train despite all the closed windows and closed doors. Through the window the gaze ranged over the utmost disorder—yellow shores, all ribbed as if left by the sea, sand-smoking hillocks, hollows specked with faint grasses where the marmot occasionally popped out of sight. At one point on the passage across we came to mud huts, with Tekintsi standing by them, and to a reach of the desert where a herd of ragged-looking dromedaries were finding food where no other animal would put its nose. Then we passed away into uninterrupted flowerless sandhills, all yellow and ribbed by the wind. So, all the way to the red Oxus River. It is called the Amu-Darya now, but it is the ancient Oxus, a fair, broad stream at Chardzhui, but, from its colour, more like a river of red size than of water. All the canals and dykes of the irrigation system of the district flow with the red water of the river, and wherever the water is conducted the desert blossoms like virgin soil. The river is the sun’s wife, and the green fields are their children.
Chardzhui, the port on the Oxus, is the point for embarkation for Khiva. There is a small fleet of Government steamers plying between the two cities, though it is comparatively difficult for travellers on private business to obtain a passage on one of them. When first this fleet was started there was some idea that Russia would use them in her imperial warfare as she pushed south, but probably the vessels have little military significance nowadays. For the rest, Chardzhui is famous for its melons, which grow to the size of pumpkins and are very sweet. Frequently in Petrograd shops or in fashionable restaurants one may see enormous melons hanging from straps of bast—these are the fruits of Chardzhui. At this season of the year Chardzhui has a great deal of mud and does not invite travellers, especially as its inns are bad.