"Merv is about two hundred and forty miles from Herat, and if we should ever be obliged to march against that Afghan stronghold, the Oasis will be an excellent point to start from after accumulating the necessary stores and material of war. It promises to be a good centre of trade, and its importance was easy to comprehend when the English Government made such a fuss as it did about our taking it.
"Before we were established there," continued the officer, "an English newspaper correspondent, Edmund O'Donovan, went to Merv by way of Persia, and lived in the Oasis for five months. At first the people treated him coldly, but he gradually won their confidence and convinced them of his friendliness. They made him one of their elders, and appointed him to a place on the Governing Council; he has told the story of his residence among these strange people in an interesting volume entitled 'The Merv Oasis.'
"One of the most remarkable journeys ever made on the Turcoman steppes," said the gentleman in conclusion, "was accomplished by another newspaper correspondent, an American named MacGahan, during the campaign against Khiva in 1873. Without an escort, and accompanied only by a servant and two guides, he started from Fort Peroffsky, on the Jaxartes or Syr Darya River, near the Aral Sea, to overtake General Kaufmann's army, that had gone to the attack of Khiva. Its exact whereabouts were unknown; he had eight or ten days of desert travel before him, and if he had fallen into the hands of the Turcomans or Kirghese who roam over the desert, his fate would have been certain death.
"The Russians at Fort Peroffsky refused to allow him to start, as they considered it impossible for him to make the journey, and he was obliged to slip out of the place in the night. He had several narrow escapes, but managed to get through all right and join General Kaufmann's column just as the fighting before Khiva began. The officers told him the chances of his getting across the desert with his life were not more than one in a hundred. He remained with our army till the end of the Khivan campaign, and every officer who knew him felt that he had lost a personal friend when the news of MacGahan's death came a few years later. The story of his adventures is told in his book—'Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva.'
"In 1875 a similar journey was made by Captain Burnaby, an English officer of the Guards. He has given an admirable account of his experience in a book entitled, 'A Ride to Khiva.'"
"Conversation such as this," writes Fred in his journal, "beguiled the tediousness of the ride over the flat and desolate region through which the railway passes. At the few oases where we stopped, we saw little villages of Turcomans, but they were so much alike that the descriptions you have already read will answer for them all. At Kizil Arvat we found an oasis containing altogether half a dozen square miles of tillable land, on which were several Turcoman villages, and a Russian town of perhaps a thousand inhabitants.
"We call the town Russian from the flag that waves over it, rather than from the nationality of those who live in it. They are Russians, Turcomans, Kirghese, Persians, Armenians, and Jews, and I don't know how many other races and kinds of people. There is a good deal of commerce, mostly in the hands of Armenians and Russians, but much less than when the railway terminated here. The business of Merv and the Penjdeh district is at the end of the railway; in this respect the commerce of Central Asia is much like that of our far-western country, and changes its base with each change of the means of transport.
TURCOMAN FARM-YARD.