The train entered the Russian Protectorate of Bokhara, and the population changed. From Askhabad the natives had special cattle-trucks afforded them, and they sat on planks stretched over trestles; they were Sarts, Bokharese, Jews, Afghans. Into my carriage came two Mohammedan scholars going to Bokhara city. They washed their hands, spread carpets on one side of the carriage, knelt on the other, said their prayers, prostrated themselves. Then they took out a copy of the Koran, and one read to the other in a sonorous and poetical voice all the way to the city—they were Sarts, a very ancient tribe of Aryan extraction, some of the finest-looking people of Central Asia, tall, dignified, wrinkled, wearing gorgeous cloaks and snowy turbans. The two in my carriage had, apparently, several wives in another compartment, as they each carried a sheaf of tickets. The women hereabout were very strictly in their charchafs. There was no peeping out or peering round the corner, such as one sees in Turkey, but an absolute black, blotting out of face and form. When you looked at five or six sitting patiently side by side, each and all in voluminous green cloaks, and where the faces should appear a black mask the colour and appearance of an oven-shelf, you felt a horror as if the gaze had rested on corpses or on the plague-stricken.
From the Oxus valley the people swarmed in a populous land, and it was a sight to see so many Easterns drinking green tea from yellow basins. Already we were nearer China than Russia, and the sight took me back in memory to Chinatown, New York, and the chop suey restaurants. I fell into conversation with a Tartar merchant in carpets, and I tried to obtain an idea of what Bokhara was like in the year of grace 1914.
“Is there an electric tramway in Bokhara, or a horse tramway?”
“No, nothing of the sort. The streets are so narrow, two carts can’t pass one another without collision.”
“Are there any hotels?”
“There are caravanserai.”
“No European buildings?”
“Only outside the town. There is a Russian police-station, and a hotel built for officials. The Emir won’t allow any hotels to be built within the walls.”
At length we reached New Bokhara, the Russian town, with its white houses, avenues of trees, its broad streets, and shops, and we changed to a by-line for Ancient Bokhara. The train drew through pleasant meadows and cornfields, bright and fertile as the South of England, and after twelve sunny versts we came into view of the cement-coloured mud walls of the most wonderful city of Mohammedan Asia, a place that might have been produced for you by enchantment—that reminds you of Aladdin’s palace as it must have appeared in the desert to which the magician transported it. Within toothed walls—a grey Kremlin eight miles round—live 150,000 Mohammedans, entirely after their own hearts, without any appreciable interference from without, in narrow streets, in covered alleys, with endless shops, behind screening walls. The roads are narrow and cobbled, and wind in all directions, with manifold alleys and lanes, with squares where stand handsome mosques, with portals and stairways leading down to the cool and tree-shaded, but stagnant, little reservoirs that hold the city’s water. Along the roadway various equipages come prancing—muddy proletkas, unhandy-looking, egg-shaped carts, with clumsy wooden wheels eight feet high, and projecting axles, gilt and crimson-covered carts made of cane and straw, the shape of a huge egg that has had both ends sliced off. The Bek, or Bokharese magistrate, comes bounding along in his carriage, with outriders, and all others give him salute as he passes. It is noticeable that the drivers of vehicles prefer to squat on the horses rather than sit in drivers’ seats. Strings of laden camels blunder on the cobbles, innumerable Mohammedans come, mounted on asses—it is clear that man is master when you see an immense Bokharese squatting on a meek ass and holding a huge cudgel over its head. Charchaffed women are even seen on asses, and some of them carry a child in front of them. There are continually deadlocks in the narrow lanes, and all the time the drivers shout “Hagh, hagh!” (“Get out of the way, get out of the way!”)
