THROUGH DESERTS AND OASES
OF CENTRAL ASIA

Strike me dead, the track has vanished.

Well, what now? We’ve lost the way,

Demons have bewitched our horses,

Led us in the wilds astray.

Pushkin.

A YA-YIEH OR YAMEN RUNNER.

Frontispiece.

THROUGH DESERTS AND
OASES OF CENTRAL ASIA

BY

Miss ELLA SYKES

F.R.G.S.

AUTHOR OF
“THROUGH PERSIA ON A SIDE-SADDLE” AND “A HOME HELP IN CANADA”

AND

Brigadier-General Sir PERCY SYKES

K.C.I.E., C.B., C.M.G.

GOLD MEDALLIST OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
AUTHOR OF
“A HISTORY OF PERSIA” AND “THE GLORY OF THE SHIA WORLD”

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1920

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

Few works dealing with Chinese Turkestan and the Pamirs have been published of late years, although the Heart of Asia, where the empires of Great Britain, Russia and China meet, can never fail to excite our interest. Furthermore, the great trade route which ran from China to the Roman Empire lay across Chinese Turkestan, from which remote land silk was introduced into Europe.

The present book has been written in two parts. The chapters composing Part I., which describe the nine months’ journey in deserts and oases, in mountains and plains, have been written by my sister, while I am responsible for those dealing with the geography, history, customs and other subjects.

We are indebted to Mr. Bohlin of the Swedish Mission in Chinese Turkestan, and to Khan Sahib, Iftikhar Ahmad of the British Consulate-General, Kashgar, for much assistance; and also to Dr. F. W. Thomas, of the India Office, who has read through the historical sketch.

A good deal of new material will be found in the various chapters, and as far as possible the subjects so ably and exhaustively dealt with by Sir Aurel Stein have been avoided.

To my sister belongs the honour of being the first Englishwoman to cross the dangerous passes leading to and from the Pamirs and, with the exception of Mrs. Littledale, to visit Khotan.

We greatly enjoyed the nine months we spent in Chinese Turkestan and on the “Roof of the World,” and if we succeed in arousing the interest of our readers in this old-world backwater of Asia, and at the same time convey something of its distinctive charm, our ambitions will be fulfilled.

P. M. SYKES.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Note.—The illustrations, with one exception, are from reproductions of
photographs taken by the authors.

ERRATUM

Page 134, line 22, for “there was no sign of a division” read
“it was broken up into islands.”

PART I

CHAPTER I

ACROSS THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN WAR TIME

The cities are called Taskent[1] and Caskayre,[1] and the people that warre against Taskent are called Cassaks[1] of the law of Mahomet, and they which warre with the said countrey of Caskayre are called Kirghiz, Gentiles and idolaters.—Anthony Jenkinson.

On March 5, 1915, my brother and I started off on our long journey to Kashgar, the capital of Chinese Turkestan, where he was to act for Sir George Macartney, the well-known Consul-General, who was taking leave.

Owing to the War, we were obliged, as the first stage of our journey, to travel to Petrograd by the circuitous route through Norway, Sweden and Finland. The small Norwegian steamer, the Iris, in which we embarked at Newcastle, made its way up the coast of Scotland to a point opposite Peterhead in order to avoid mines and submarines, after which it crossed to Bergen. We passed two choppy nights in stuffy cabins with the portholes tightly screwed up, and I was too prostrate with sea-sickness to care when the engines of our steamer stopped dead during the first afternoon. My brother rushed up on deck to see if we were held up by a German submarine, which might mean the unpleasant experience of internment for him, but after a couple of hours we went on again, and no explanation of the delay was given us.

Some three months later this same vessel was attacked in reality, two torpedoes being fired at her, and only the zigzag course skilfully pursued by the captain saved her from destruction. Amundsen, the discoverer of the South Pole, was on board, and wrote to the papers describing the incident, and strongly reprobated Germany’s policy towards neutral shipping, which, he declared, had converted him to the side of the Allies.

To return to our journey, we finally steamed in safety up a long fiord, and Bergen stood up picturesquely against its background of snow-covered hills. We thought that the pleasant-mannered Norwegians were decidedly Scotch in appearance, and a sturdy youth, quite of the type of a Highland gillie, soon guided us to the Hospidset Hotel, which had originally belonged to the Hanseatic League in Bergen. In old days the apprentices lived in this house, being locked up safely at night, and though the building has undergone considerable restoration, it is still a characteristic piece of architecture.

Next morning we tramped round Bergen in our snow-boots, finding the steep roads very slippery with frozen snow, even the inhabitants falling headlong now and again. Here and there children were merrily tobogganing, dashing recklessly across the main street through which the trams were running, and hurling themselves down steep inclines on the other side in a way that made me shudder. They were all sensibly clad in woollen garments, their rosy faces peering out from fur caps or fur-trimmed hoods, and it did one good to see them. A graver note was struck as a funeral passed by, with all the mourners on foot; and the pastor, in a stiff ruff with muslin frills at his wrists, seemed to have returned from the sixteenth century, and might have posed for a portrait of Calvin. Sleighs were everywhere, drawn by sturdy little ponies that raced along at a great pace with jingling bells and kept their feet wonderfully.

We left by the night train for the twenty-seven hours’ run to Stockholm, changing at Christiania, and next day were speeding through a land of snow and pine inhabited by a hardy-looking, fur-clad race. Fish seemed a staple article of food, and we were offered salted prawns, herring-salad, raw sardines and anchovies; veal, ham and tongue, with pickles or cold fried bacon, forming the meat course. There were no sweets or fruit, but for compensation we had delicious coffee and cream. In the restaurant car the bread and rolls were fastened up in grease-proof paper, sugar in tiny packets, and biscuits in sealed bags, in order to prevent unnecessary handling.

It was night when we steamed into the “Venice of the North,” a city which must be lovely in the summer, as it rises from its waters; but at the time of our visit the river was covered with floating blocks of grey ice, and all the world was skating or ski-ing.

The people were not unfriendly to us, but from more than one source we learnt that, owing to their hereditary fear of Russia, the Swedes were generally partisans of Germany, in contradistinction to the Norwegians, who, as a nation, were warmly in favour of the Allies.

We had a five o’clock dinner (three to five o’clock being the usual time, reminding one of early Victorian customs), and then settled ourselves into the comfortable sleeping coupés which we were to inhabit for two nights as far as Karungi, the direct route across the Gulf of Bothnia being inadvisable for obvious reasons. There were four racks for light luggage in each compartment, a convenient washing apparatus and a table, and we could open our windows, whereas in Russia we found the windows screwed up until the spring.

But there was one thing in which the Russian trains, with their three bells rung for departure, compared favourably with those of Scandinavia, and that was that the latter gave no real warning when they were about to start. The engine whistled and moved off immediately, with the result that I was always nervous about walking up and down the platform, for the iron steps leading up to the carriages were so slippery with frozen ice that I feared to risk a fall if I scaled them in a hurry.

A Russian girl travelling in the carriage next to ours had given her ticket to the care of a French lady, a complete stranger to her, and, strolling along the platform with a fur collar round her neck but no fur coat, was unluckily left behind. The railway officials sent her ticket back to her and took care of her belongings, and I trust that some good Samaritan aided her, but she must have had a most unpleasant experience. I asked a Swede who talked to me why the trains gave practically no signal when they started, and he said that there was some reason which he had forgotten.

The country lay deeper in snow the farther north we advanced, and on either side, as far as eye could reach, the undulating ground was covered with vast forests of fir and pine. At intervals we passed little towns and villages, the small wooden houses, painted in many colours, giving the impression of toy-dwellings. The brightly clad fur-capped little girls with long fair plaits of hair seemed as if they had come to life from the fairy books of my childhood, and one could almost credit the existence of gnomes and trolls in those limitless uninhabited tracts of pine. Soldiers in blue-grey or navy-blue uniforms, with white sheepskin caps or picturesque three-cornered cloth hats, stood about on the platforms up and down which we tramped in our snow-boots whenever the train halted. As there was no restaurant car we obtained our meals at the station buffets, halts of about half an hour being made at 10 A.M., 3 P.M. and 10 P.M. In the absence of waiters the hungry crowd of passengers helped themselves, selecting from a tray laid out with different kinds of fish, cheese, pickles, etc., or piling their plates with hot pork or veal. I made invariably for the big cauldron of excellent soup with vegetables, and there was always coffee and milk, bread and cakes in abundance, and no pushing or hustling on the part of those travelling.

At last we reached Karungi, the frontier between Sweden and Russia, and scores of sleighs were in waiting at the station to convey the passengers the short distance to the Russian Karungi. The fine-looking Russian Consul, clad in a splendid fur coat and cap to match, was most obliging, and cheered us greatly with the news—alas, quite inaccurate, as we found out later—that the Allied fleets had silenced all the forts in the Dardanelles! My brother went off to pass our heavy luggage through the Swedish Customs, and I had some difficulty in collecting our small possessions on to one sleigh, because half a dozen men and boys, clad in nondescript garments of fur and leather, hurled themselves upon hold-alls and dressing-cases and bore them off in all directions, utterly regardless of my remonstrances. The only thing I could do was to follow the most responsible-looking of my self-constituted porters, and when he deposited his burden on a sleigh I induced him to accompany me in a hunt among the lines of shaggy little ponies, finding the tea-basket in one place, a hat-box or a bundle of sticks and umbrellas mixed up with another passenger’s luggage, and so on. The Consul told me to come and drink coffee in the buffet, exclaiming reassuringly, “You can leave everything safely, for in this part of the world the people do not know how to steal.”

At last we drove off in the keen air across a level waste of snow, traversing a frozen river which forms the actual boundary, and in half an hour, with many a bump and jolt, we reached a gate through which, after we had shown our passports, we were admitted into Finland.

We had now a wait of some six hours, which we spent in walking on the crisp snow or sitting in the little station buffet, where I observed that coffee had given way to tea, the Russian national beverage, drunk in glasses with a slice of lemon and much sugar. From now onwards the pièce de résistance of our chief meals was sturgeon. I liked it fairly well when stewed or fried, but it was usually tough when served cold. Some of these enormous fish are said to weigh two or three tons.

When the train made a tardy appearance it could not accommodate all the passengers, and many were perforce left behind to follow the next day. The first halt was at Tornea, to which point travellers used to drive until the extension of the line to Karungi after the outbreak of the War, and, though we were in the Arctic Circle and it was early in March, the air seemed quite mild as we rushed across Finland, our wood-fed engine belching forth immense whorls of smoke. At Vyborg we entered Russia, and at midnight of the second day reached Petrograd.

In the Astoria Hotel it was remarkable to see every one drinking kvass, a somewhat mawkish beverage made from bread or from cranberries, in lieu of wine or spirits. In Finland alcoholic refreshments were obtainable in the restaurant car, but now we found ourselves in a country which the will of an autocrat had made so strictly teetotal that we were unable even to purchase methylated spirit for our tea-basket!

Some of our Russian acquaintances spoke with enthusiasm of the beneficial effect of the Tsar’s edict, one competent observer pointing out that the Russian women were just beginning to take to drink, which would have meant the ruin of many thousands of homes. On the other side, there were murmurs among the well-to-do, who were deprived of their favourite beverages unless they could obtain a doctor’s certificate of ill-health, which did not, however, seem difficult to arrange. I was asked more than once whether King George was about to follow the lead given by the Tsar, Russians not being very clear as to the limitations of a constitutional monarchy.

Soldiers were to be seen everywhere, sometimes drilling near the great red Winter Palace, sometimes as reservists, with numbers chalked upon their backs, or again as small parties of wounded in charge of kind-faced hospital nurses. I heard pathetic accounts of the extreme poverty of the men who were being nursed back to health in the English Hospital directed by Lady Georgina Buchanan, who had had the kindly thought of fitting them out when they were dismissed to their peasant homes; the totally disabled being trained in basket-making. Both at Petrograd and at Moscow, our next halting-place, those actively engaged in nursing spoke highly of the courage and gratitude of their patients. In the latter city an English girl of only nineteen and a Russian lady of the same age, neither of whom had had any training in nursing, were in charge of a hospital containing forty-five wounded soldiers. They did all the bandaging themselves, assisted at every operation, and supervised the peasant women who performed the more menial share of the work. My devoted compatriot told me that the men called her “Little Sister,” and were marvellously brave when operated upon, saying that her presence gave them courage. Owing to the absence of the great majority of the trained nurses at the front, these capable amateurs were of the utmost service. We heard that the Russian medical faculty disapproved of inoculation for typhoid, giving the somewhat inadequate reason that “there were so many worse diseases,” and consequently the soldiers suffered terribly from this scourge.

My brother and I did the sights of Petrograd, with its many gold-covered domes, cupolas and spires, but I will refrain from describing the gorgeous interior of St. Isaak, the pictures of the Hermitage, or even the deeply interesting house in which Peter the Great lived while building his “window opening to the West.”

Moscow, with its hundreds of gilt-domed or purple or blue or green cupolas, that bizarre orgy of colour and fantastic design called the Church of Ivan the Terrible, and the ancient Kremlin built to resist Tartar inroads, gave me, as indeed it does to most travellers, the impression of a semi-Oriental city.

We were in the very heart of Russia, and no one could fail to be struck by the intense devotion—I refrain from calling it superstition—of the people. In the dim magnificence of the small but lofty Coronation Chapel, which has its walls literally encrusted with jewelled icons, crowds were kissing the hands and feet of the sacred pictures all day long, in defiance of every hygienic principle. Long-haired priests in embroidered copes were chanting services, and as the body of a saint, dead centuries ago, had just been exhumed, it was confidently expected that many miracles of healing would be wrought by the remains. Gilded and jewelled banners to be carried in procession stood in the ornate chapels, which had gorgeous doors through which no woman might pass. On the great day of his coronation the Tsar passed through these portals, anointed and crowned himself, then issued forth, the Father of his people, to perform the same ceremony on the Tsaritsa.

The monarch, in common with the humblest of his subjects, uncovers himself as he passes under one of the entrances to the Kremlin, above which stands a particularly holy icon. Indeed in every room of every Russian house, even in the hotels, hangs some pictured saint with a little lamp in front of him, while the railway stations and waiting-rooms are all provided with sacred guardians.

To these people the War was then a holy one. The chambermaid of our hotel, who spoke German—a language it is forbidden to use in public—told me with tears that her only son had been killed at the front, that his father had died of grief when the news reached them, and that her daughter, working at a hospital, had had no news of her soldier-husband for three months and naturally feared the worst. “But we must not grumble,” she ended bravely; “it is terrible for all of us, but with God’s help our Tsar will conquer his enemies and we shall have peace once more.”

Russians struck us as being somewhat silent in the streets, and we never heard any one whistle. It was explained that they have the same superstition about whistling as have the Persians, and look upon it as “devilish speech.” In connection with this we were told that on one occasion an American bishop and his chaplain were visiting a monastery in Moscow, and to the horror of the monks the chaplain kept on bursting into snatches of whistling. But one of the holy men was equal to the occasion and, walking close behind the unconscious offender, made the sign of the cross repeatedly in order to avert any evil consequences!

The lack of efficiency in Russia was very noticeable. For example, to cash our letters of credit in a bank was a tedious business, the money being slowly counted with the aid of an abacus. The shopkeepers also depend greatly on these aids to arithmetic. It was moreover a land of tips. In every private house the servant who helped you on and off with your fur coat and galoshes expected a pourboire, and on leaving a hotel we were surrounded by a throng of waiters, porters of different grades, and a bevy of small boys, all intent on fees.

During the next section of our journey to Tashkent the trains were by no means as comfortable as before. Our only light was a guttering candle in a lantern placed high above the carriage door, and, what was worse, the double windows were screwed up for the winter, all the air we breathed passing through most inadequate ventilators in the roof. After some thirty hours of semi-suffocation it was a relief when the train stopped at Samara, and its great bridge over the Volga. Before we crossed, soldiers with fixed bayonets filed into the corridors and lined the train, and henceforward sentries stood with fixed bayonets on all the platforms. Instead of going through to Tashkent, our train stopped for eighteen hours, so we drove perforce to the best hotel in the place. There I was ushered into a bedroom which had only a mattress on the bedstead; but a cheery maid soon produced sheets, pillows and towels, these articles from now onward being charged separately in the bill: she also filled up the water-tank which discharged itself into the basin by a kind of squirt, liable to drench the unwary. A hot bath is an expensive luxury in Russia, costing from three to five shillings; but I never appreciated it at its proper value. The bath, filled with water too hot for me to plunge my hand into, was invariably taken in a tiny room without ventilation in which a stove was fiercely burning, and the attendant, armed with a thermometer, was always greatly astonished when I demanded a copious admixture of cold water. Half the room would be occupied by a divan covered with a sheet on which to repose after the bath, and once or twice I had some difficulty in getting rid of the maid, so anxious was she to wrap me in a second sheet, with which Russians drape themselves before they step into the water.

Samara is an important provincial town, but the whole place looked poor and shabby, partly because the coloured plaster coating of the houses was dropping off in unsightly patches. The wide streets radiated from a small public garden in which stood a statue of Alexander II., the Liberator, and, as it was Sunday, all the world was promenading in its best clothes along the slush-covered pavements, the thaw having set in. The peasants looked picturesque in short sheepskin coats, worn with the wool inside, fur caps with lappets to protect the ears, long leather riding-boots, putties tied up with string and thick leather gloves. The shaggy hats of black or white sheepskin made their wearers look like brigands in opera, and beside them the women, in long black coats much kilted at the waist, with their heads tied up in woollen shawls, appeared decidedly tame.

We made our way down to the Volga and walked on the frozen river, which was a mile wide, watching the drinking-water of the town being drawn from various holes in the ice.

At the railway station that evening we found a large crowd on the platform assembled to give a hearty send-off to a trainload of soldiers evidently hailing from the neighbourhood. The men were travelling to the front in horse-boxes, and leant over the wooden barriers wildly cheering and waving their caps, full of health and spirits, and one could hardly bear to think that many would never return, or, sadder still, would come home incapacitated for the rest of their days.

Owing to the War there were no restaurant-cars attached to the trains, and as the time-tables were unaltered we had halts of only ten or twelve minutes three or four times a day, when the passengers made a frenzied rush to get what they could at the inferior station buffets. We usually bought something in the way of meat, cheese and bread, and carried it back with us to our carriage, after we had gulped down plates of the excellent cabbage soups called stchee or borsch. The only long halt we made—one of forty minutes—was at a station with no buffet whatever. The farther east we went the less food could we procure: sometimes packets of inferior Russian biscuits were the only stock-in-trade of the buffet, and if it had not been for our soup-packets we should have been half-starved. As it was, we were often unpleasantly hungry, hot water being the only thing that we could be sure of obtaining.

In spite of this the journey was full of interest. We were travelling across limitless steppes, and the melting of the snow in patches showed that spring was at hand, when the sun would break forth from the grey, lowering skies. Near Orenburg we noticed many tons of hay ready to be despatched to the front, and as we halted at Alexis I suddenly saw the ungainly forms of camels. Nearer and nearer they came, padding across the snow, drawing sleighs laden with hay, and with a leap of the heart I realized that we were once again in the East, that Europe was left behind, and that we had entered that vast mysterious continent of Asia, cradle of the human race and birthplace of its great religions.

The following day we passed the Sea of Aral, with masted ships riding at anchor in its port; and by now all traces of snow had gone, and the sandy steppe was scantily dotted with coarse grasses. Sometimes we traversed stretches of salt-encrusted ground, and in places the rolling sand-dunes were planted and bound together with rushes in order to prevent them from encroaching upon the railway, or long lines of fencing answered the same purpose for the snowdrifts.

We saw few signs of life, and the loneliness of the steppe made me realize something of those vast empty spaces of Asia which from lack of water will for ever be dreary wastes forsaken by mankind. Yet a picturesque crowd was usually assembled at the stations. Hairless-faced men with high cheek-bones were clad in long padded coats reaching to their heels, or wore sheepskins, their rope or straw-soled shoes being tied with leather thongs criss-cross from knee to ankle over thick woollen stockings. Among a variety of headgear the quaintest resembled early Victorian coal-scuttle bonnets tied under the chin. They were made of brightly coloured velvet, with broad fur-lined brims, a fur-lined flap behind and lappets over the ears, and looked most comical when worn by brawny Kirghiz, who strode up and down the platforms trailing long whips in their hands.

The warm weather was now beginning, and the Russian women who sold tea and hot water from big brass samovars had discarded their winter clothes and appeared in flowered cotton dresses with gaily coloured handkerchiefs over their heads. Their children were running about barefoot, and I was amused at watching an encounter between a lightly clad urchin and a smart little boy who was travelling in our overheated train. This latter, who had a long fur-lined coat, a fur cap and galoshes over his boots, held up his foot for the admiration of the platform youngster, who laughed good-humouredly, and stretched out his dusty toes in response.

In spite of the warm sunshine, ours were the only windows open in the whole train, and when, after leaving Samara, my brother had obtained fresh air by freely tipping a most reluctant conductor, an official higher in rank came to enquire whether it was not a mistake and whether after all we did not wish to be screwed up again! I could not imagine why our fellow-passengers did not follow our example, because, before we reached Tashkent, the sun flamed down from a cloudless blue sky; the hoopoe, harbinger of spring, chased its mate; the crested larks sang, and the children offered big bunches of the little mauve iris. Ploughing was visible in places, and a faint green flush was spreading over the vast plain, which near Tashkent gave way to grassy downs on which cattle grazed.

At the imposing-looking station of Turkestan we made enquiries respecting the flags that we noticed hanging out on all the platforms, and to our joy were told that they were in honour of the taking of Przemyzl. An officer of military police with whom my brother talked, said that this victory had come at an opportune moment, as there was considerable unrest among the native population.

We were sorry not to see the tomb erected by Tamerlane in the old city of Turkestan to the memory of a Kirghiz saint, for M. Romanoff, an authority on Mohamedan art, who has visited a large proportion of the mosques and shrines of Central Asia, considers this splendid building to be a masterpiece.

CHAPTER II

BEYOND THE TIAN SHAN TO KASHGAR

Farghana is a country of small extent, but abounding in grain and fruits; and it is surrounded with hills on all sides except on the west.... Andijan is the capital. The district abounds in birds and beasts of game. Its pheasants are so fat that the report goes that four persons may dine on the broth of one of them and not be able to finish it.—Memoirs of Baber.

After three days and nights in the train it was pleasant to make a halt at Tashkent, the capital of Russian Turkestan, though the sudden change of climate was somewhat exhausting. It was towards the end of March, and the whole town, famous for its fruit trees, was embowered in pink and white blossom, and the avenues of magnificent poplars, willows and beautiful Turkestan elms were shaking out their fresh green leaves.

The Russians, under General Kaufmann, took Tashkent about fifty years ago, and have laid out the new town with broad roads planted with fine trees that are watered by irrigation. There are churches, public parks, tram-lines and imposing-looking shops, the considerable Russian population appearing to mix freely with the Sarts, as the inhabitants are termed by the dominant race. In India a white woman of whatever class has a position with the natives, but here the ordinary Russian woman is seemingly on an equality with them, and not infrequently marries them. In the best confectioner’s shop, served by Russian girls, natives came in and bought and ate cakes and sweets on the premises, side by side with smart officers or elegant ladies evidently belonging to the upper circles of Tashkent society.

Even in this remote part of the Russian Empire the War was brought home to the inhabitants by the presence of fifteen thousand prisoners, Germans and Austrians. The latter, who were mostly Slavs, had the privilege of shopping in the town, and we heard that they were on excellent terms with their captors, whereas the Germans were permitted no such relaxation of their captivity.

A long narrow street led from the Russian city straight into the native town with its mud-built houses, its little stalls of food and clothing, its mosques and shrines, and above all its gaily clad populace. But for the people I could have imagined myself to be in a Persian city; but here, instead of men in dingily coloured frock-coats and tall astrakhan hats, and women shrouded in black from head to foot, the inhabitants of both sexes revelled in colour. All wore smart velvet or embroidered caps, round which the greybeards swathed snowy turbans. The men had striped coats of many colours, the brighter the better, the little girls rivalling them with bold contrasts, such as a short, gold-laced magenta velvet jacket worn above a flowered, scarlet cotton skirt, or a coat of emerald green with a vivid blue under-garment. For the most part they were pretty, rosy-cheeked, velvet-eyed maidens, with their hair hanging down their backs in a dozen plaits, and I felt sorry to think that all their charm would shortly have to disappear behind the long cloak, beautifully embroidered though it might be, and the hideous black horsehair veil affected by their mothers.

One fascinating little figure adorned with big earrings and bracelets came dancing down an alley into the street, holding out the ends of a scarlet veil which she had thrown over her head, her cotton dress and trousers being in two shades of rose. She pirouetted up to a tall man in a rainbow-coloured silk coat who was carrying a tin can, and had paused at the steps of the mosque to let the children gather round him. To my surprise he began to dole out ice-cream in little glasses, and boys and girls had delicious “licks” in exchange for small coins. I remembered how envious I had felt in early youth when I saw English street urchins partaking of what seemed to me to be food fit for the gods, although my nurse allowed me no chance of sampling it, and in a moment the East and the West seemed to come very near, the ice-cream man acting as the bridge across the gulf.

After leaving Tashkent we travelled through a rich alluvial country watered by the Sir Daria, the classical Jaxartes, and halted on our way to Andijan at the ancient city of Khokand. As at Tashkent, the Russian and native towns are separate, and we hired a moon-faced, beardless Sart, attired in a long red and blue striped coat and with an embroidered skull-cap perched on his shaven head, to drive us round.

He raced his wiry little ponies at a great pace along a wide tree-planted avenue ending in a church of preternatural ugliness set in a public garden. Near by were Russian houses and shops, while small victorias containing grey-uniformed officers or turbaned Sarts dashed past, and native carts laden with bales of cotton creaked slowly by. Many of these carts had big tilts, the wooden framework inside being gaudily painted, and the horses themselves were decked with handsome brass trappings.

The old town, with its high mud walls, flat-roofed squalid dwellings, a bazar closely resembling those to be found in any Asiatic city, and comparatively modern mosques, had little of interest, though a well-known traveller speaks of its thirty-five theological colleges: its roads, as usual, were bad and narrow, and must be rivers of mud in wet weather.

Many women were unveiled, others wore the ghoul-like horsehair face coverings, and some of their embroidered coats were so charming in design and colouring that I longed to do a “deal” with the wearers. Many of the people were squatting, eating melons which they store during the winter, or drinking tea, a Russian woman being evidently a member of one family group. We had one or two narrow shaves of colliding with other carriages, as our coachman threaded his way far too fast for safety and exchanged abusive epithets with his brother Jehus, among whom were Russians in black, sleeveless, cassock-like garments worn over scarlet cotton blouses. The harness of the little horses was adorned with many tufts of coloured wools, giving a pretty effect as these tassels nearly swept the ground or waved in the air. The life on the roads, the spring sunshine, the fresh green leaves, the white and pink of the blossom, and the orgy of colour furnished by the inhabitants, made the drive an unforgettable experience.

A few hours later we reached Andijan, where the railway ended, and here we had our last clean resting-place until we arrived at Kashgar. I noticed that the native women wore long grey burnouses with black borders ending in two tails that were always trailing in the dust, and all hid their faces in the mask-like horsehair veils. It was the day before Palm Sunday, and as we strolled in the evening up the cobbled street of the town a large congregation was issuing from the church, every one carrying a small branch and a little candle, which each had lit in the sanctuary. In the darkness the scores of tiny lights looked like fire-flies, and I observed how carefully the sacred flame was sheltered from any draught, as it is considered most important to convey it home unextinguished. Our hotel was fairly good, but I was not pleased on retiring to find that my door did not lock, and that my window, opening on to a public balcony, had no fastening. To supplement these casual arrangements I made various “booby-traps” by which I should be awakened if any robber entered my room, but luckily slept undisturbed.

It may give some idea of the vast extent of the plains of Russia which we had crossed by train, when I mention that there was not a single tunnel on the hundreds of miles of rail between Petrograd and Andijan.

It was the end of March when we set out to drive the thirty miles from Andijan to Osh. We packed ourselves, our suit-cases and the lunch-basket into a little victoria, while Achmet, the Russian Tartar cook we had engaged at Tashkent, accompanied our heavy baggage in the diligence. The sky was overcast with heavy clouds, so there was no glare from the sun, and the rain of the previous night had laid the dust on the broad road full of ruts and holes. Ploughing was in full swing, barley some inches high in the fields, fruit blossom everywhere, and the poplars and willows planted along the countless irrigation channels made a delicate veil of pale green. Beyond the cultivation lay bare rolling hills, behind which rose the lofty mountain ranges which we must cross before we could reach our destination.

The whole country seemed thickly populated, and we passed through village after village teeming with life, the source of which is the river, which ran at this time of year in a surprisingly narrow stream in its broad pebbled bed, and was so shallow that men on foot or on donkey-back were perpetually crossing it. Tortoises were emerging from their winter seclusion, the croak of the frog filled the land, hoopoes and the pretty doves which are semi-sacred and never molested flew about, and the ringing cry of quail and partridge sounded from cages in which the birds were kept as pets.

The men, if not busied with agriculture, were usually fast asleep or drinking tea on the mud platforms in front of their dwellings, and the gaily clad women slipped furtively from house to house, or, if riding, sat on a pillion behind the men. In fine contrast to her veiled sisters was a handsome Kirghiz lady following her husband on horseback through the Osh bazar, and making a striking figure in a long green coat, her head and chin wrapped in folds of white that left her massive earrings exposed to view. She rode astride every whit as well as the man did, exchanged remarks freely with him, and was moreover holding her child before her on the saddle. Other women were carrying cradles which must have made riding difficult, and often a child stood behind, clinging to its mother’s shoulders. On entering the native town of Osh, mentioned in Baber’s Memoirs as being unsurpassed for healthiness and beauty of situation, we passed a mosque with such a badly constructed mud dome that it looked like a turnip, and made our way along a broad tree-planted Russian road to the nomera. This was a house with “furnished apartments to let,” and the small rooms, by no means overclean, were supplied with beds, tables and chairs. We set to work to unpack our camp things, and sent Achmet out to buy bread, butter, meat, eggs, etc., for our two hundred and sixty mile ride to Kashgar.

Our host made no pretensions to supply food, but exactly opposite our lodgings was the officers’ mess; with true Russian hospitality its members invited us to take our meals there, and next day at lunch we met a dozen officers, with their jovial, long-haired chaplain in black cassock with a broad silver chain and crucifix round his neck. Luckily for me there were a couple of officers who spoke German, though the others threatened them with heavy fines for daring to converse in the language of the Huns. In spite of the Tsar’s edict, vodka and wine flowed freely (the doctor had evidently given medical certificates liberally to the mess) and numerous toasts were drunk, every one clinking his glass with my brother’s and mine as the health of King George, the Tsar, our journey, and so on were given. All were most kind, though I could have wished Russian entertainments were not so long—that luncheon lasted over three hours—and we left in a chorus of good wishes for our ride to Kashgar.

We were roused early next morning by the arrival of our caravan of small ponies, and with much quarrelling on the part of their drivers the loads were at last adjusted. We had our saddles put on a couple of ill-fed animals and started off beside the rushing river on our first stage of twenty miles. The ponies were very inferior to the fine mules with which we had travelled in Persia, and our particular steeds would certainly have broken down long before we reached Kashgar if we had not dismounted and walked at frequent intervals throughout the whole journey.

At first the road was excellent as we left pretty little Osh nestling under Baber’s “mountain of a beautiful figure,” and made our way up a highly cultivated valley towards the distant snowy peaks. We were escorted by a fine-looking Ming Bashi or “Commander of a Thousand,” who had a broad velvet belt set with bosses and clasps of handsome Bokhara silver-work. He wore the characteristic Kirghiz headgear, a conical white felt with a turned-up black brim, and four black stripes, from the back to the front and from side to side of the brim, meeting at the top and finishing off with a black tassel. We were to see this headgear constantly during the next eight months, as it is worn throughout Chinese Turkestan and the Pamirs. Owing to the presence of these Ming Bashis we met with extreme consideration, village Begs and their servants escorting us at every stage and securing the right of way for us with caravans. This was a privilege that for my part I keenly appreciated, as the track, when it skirted the flanks of the mountains, was hardly ever wide enough for one animal to pass another, and I had no wish to be pushed out of my saddle over the precipice by the great bales of cotton that formed the load of most of the ponies we met. These officials usually secured some garden or field, a place of trees and running water, where we could lunch and rest at mid-day, and often they brought a silken cushion which they offered to my brother. They were surprised when he handed it on to me, for in Mohamedan countries the woman is considered last—if at all.

In the Osh district horses, camels, donkeys, cows, goats and sheep were in abundance, the sheep having the dumba or big bunch of fat as a tail, which nourishes the animal when grass runs short during the winter months. They had long hair like goats and rabbit-like ears, were coloured black, white, brown, grey or buff, and looked far larger in proportion than the undersized cattle and ponies. On the road we saw many of the characteristic carts that had immensely high wheels with prominent hubs. The driver sat on a saddle on the horse’s back, supporting his feet on the shafts, thereby depriving the animal of half its strength for pulling the load and proving that this nation of born riders has not grasped the elementary principles of driving. These carts had no sides, but carried their loads in a curious receptacle of trellis-work, as shown in the illustration.

CART USED IN THE OSH DISTRICT.

Page 26.

We reached our first night’s lodging about four o’clock, and I was glad to dismount, as riding at a foot pace on an animal that is a slow walker is a tedious business. All these halting-places in Russian territory were much alike—a couple of small plastered rooms, often with bedsteads, table and stools, sometimes looking into a courtyard where the ponies were tied for the night, but often with no shelter for the animals and their drivers. Jafar Bai, the chuprassi from the Kashgar Consulate sent to escort us, was of the utmost service to us on the road. I noticed that many of the men we passed saluted him by throwing their whips from right to left across their chests, and their deference made me realize the high esteem in which he was held. He put up our camp beds, tables and chairs, and found water for our folding baths. It was usually cold at night, and besides warm underclothing I had a sleeping sack, rugs and my fur-lined coat. We always got up at 5.30 A.M., and I did a hasty toilette in the dark with the aid of my torchlight, Achmet producing coffee, eggs, bread, butter and jam for our early breakfast, while Jafar Bai packed our bedding.

Once or twice we were accommodated in the house of a village Beg, and found the floors covered with felts and carpets, and a table spread with bread, sweets, raisins, almonds and pistachios. One of our hosts kept his treasures in a wonderful gilt, red and black chest, from which he produced a handsome watch given him by the Russians. This chest emitted a loud musical note when opened or shut, in order, I presume, to warn the owner if thieves attempted to rifle it. At night his servants removed his bedding of Bokhara silken quilts, but with touching confidence left the box in our charge!

Our second day’s march found us approaching the mountains, and we rode to the top of a low pass where hills slashed with scarlet, crimson and yellow rose one behind another, to be dominated by the glorious snow-covered Tian Shan peaks clear cut against a superb blue sky. Walking down the passes was certainly preferable to sitting on a stumbling pony, but I found it rather hard work, as the track was usually very steep and littered with loose stones, on which one could easily twist an ankle or tumble headlong. Every now and again it looked as if we had reached the bottom, when lo, after turning a corner, the track zigzagged down beneath our feet seemingly longer and steeper than ever.

During this march we passed a party of Chinese bound for Kashgar, consisting of an official and a rich merchant with their retinues. The ladies of the party travelled in four mat-covered palanquins, each drawn by two ponies, one leading and one behind, and I pitied them having to descend these steep places in such swaying conveyances. They were attended by a crowd of servants in short black coats, tight trousers and black caps with hanging lappets lined with fur, the leaders being old men clad in brocades and wearing velvet shoes and quaint straw hats. As seems usual with upper-class Chinese, they were very indifferent horsemen, and sat on bundles of silk quilts, not attempting to guide their ponies in any way, but letting the burly Kirghiz lead them by the halters. In striking contrast to them was a fine-looking man in a long green and purple striped coat, from the handsome girdle of which hung a silver-sheathed knife. His boldly cut aquiline features were surmounted by a black fur cap, and as he rode down the pass on a beautiful Badakshani horse the pair made a delightful picture.

Caravans laden with bales of cotton toiled uphill towards us, and sometimes we met a string of camels; but ponies did most of the work here, their small heads peering out from between their bulky loads. They had bells hung round their necks, enabling the approach of a pack-train to be heard at a considerable distance, and specially favoured animals wore collars of blue beads to avert the evil eye.

Besides caravans we met gangs of Kashgaris going to work at Osh or Andijan during the summer, in order to earn the money on which they live throughout the winter. They were sturdy men, their white teeth flashing in faces tanned almost black by the sun, and they wore long padded cotton coats of all colours, the most usual being scarlet, faded to delicious tints. As these coats were turned back to enable them to walk more freely, we had the contrast of a bright turquoise blue, or an emerald green or a purple lining. Some walked barefoot, others in long leather riding-boots or felt leggings, and all had leather caps edged with fur. Each man carried a bundle of his belongings, out of which cooking-pots often peeped, and some one in the gang was certain to have a tar, a kind of mandoline, with which to amuse the party, or perhaps a bagpipe or a small native drum; it was pleasant to come across a group of these wayfarers beguiling their long march by listening to the music that has so strong a fascination for Orientals.

The farther we left Osh behind us the more barren became the country, until we marvelled how the flocks and herds could support life on the scanty vegetation. At one point the hills were a bright scarlet and it was strange to see a red mud-built village with sheep grazing in this brilliantly coloured setting. We crossed rivers and streams many times, but they were not deep, for the mountain snow had not yet melted, and we found the bridges formed of rough poplar stems, with big holes into which boulders were stuck, far more dangerous than the water. It was during this march that my pony nearly ended our joint careers by backing with me to the edge of a precipice. We were passing a donkey laden with brushwood, an ordinary sight, of which my brother’s horse on ahead had not taken the smallest notice, when my animal made a big shy, and if Jafar Bai had not seized the rein I held out to him and hauled at it manfully while I urged my mount with whip and voice, we should both have fallen into the river rushing far below.

The crux of our journey was the crossing of the Terek Dawan or Pass, 12,000 feet high, and the night before we lodged in akhois, at its foot, in place of the usual rest-house.

It was my first experience of the bee-hive like homes of the Kirghiz—“a dome of laths and o’er it felts were spread”—and, as we had ridden through heavy rain and hail the last part of the way, I was extremely thankful to pass behind a felt curtain and find myself in a snug circular room lined with felts and embroideries. A fire was lit on the ground in the centre, the smoke escaping from a large hole in the roof, and by squatting on the floor we could more or less avoid the acrid smoke that made our eyes water.

In the morning we started at seven o’clock, anxious to reach the top of the pass before the sun, now hot during the day, could melt the snow. To our intense relief it was a superb day, a few fleecy clouds sailing across a deep turquoise sky. I was clad in a mixture of arctic and tropical attire, wearing a leather coat under my thick tweed habit, woollen putties and fur-lined gloves, along with a pith hat, blue glasses and gauze veil. We soon came to the snow and zigzagged upwards on a narrow track moving in single file, any animal trying to pass another being liable to fall headlong in the soft deep snow on either side, a fate that befell two of our party early in the day. After a while, as we advanced, the great peaks towered on all sides, sharply silhouetted against their blue background—nothing but white as far as eye could reach; and here and there skeletons sticking out of the snow bore eloquent witness to the terrible annual toll paid by the hundreds of horses and donkeys that have to cross this cruel pass. I could hardly believe that it was possible to ride over these mountains, so steeply did they rise above us; and at the worst part of the ascent some sturdy Kashgaris coming down towards us had much ado to keep their feet, even though they carried long staves, one man falling headlong and rolling a considerable distance. The last pull to the crest is almost perpendicular, and is noted for accidents—here my brother’s pony nearly went over—but finally, caravan and all, we reached the summit of the pass in safety, and dismounted to enjoy the fine view. Before us lay the great Alai Range, peak towering above peak of boldly serrated mountains. Over us hovered a huge vulture, and as I looked down the track in front where the snow was partly melted, hideous heaps of bones were revealed, and I felt that the ill-omened bird knew that it would never lack food so long as Russia did nothing to improve this execrable road.

In books of travel the writer frequently “swings down” such places, but my experience was very different, as we crept down the worst parts on foot. The snow on the farther side was rotten, and our feet broke through it to water running underneath and big boulders. It was the kind of path on which one could easily break a leg, and for a loaded pony was a cruel ordeal, if not almost impossible. Even where the snow had entirely melted near the foot of the pass the way lay through a mass of boulders and slippery mud most trying to any baggage animal.

For ourselves we had nothing to complain of, and a march of seven hours found us at the little rest-house enjoying some lunch; but our caravan fared very differently. The distance was only twelve miles, but so bad was the going that the ponies, though lightly laden, were about thirteen hours on the road, and four poor animals stayed out all night. We had no evening meal till nine o’clock, and our hold-alls when they arrived were encrusted with ice that had made its way inside and soaked our bedding. We had no means of drying it in the serai, and so were obliged to sleep in our clothes. We were too thankful to be safely over the pass to heed such minor discomforts, and were indeed most fortunate; for the road was closed for some days after our journey in order that a fresh track might be trampled down by driving unloaded animals across it.

On the morrow our caravan had a much-needed rest till mid-day, while we unpacked our boxes and dried our wet belongings in the sun. I was concerned about my face, as in spite of all my precautions I found that my cheeks, nose and lips were terribly swollen, and besides being burnt a bright scarlet, all my skin was coming off in patches, making me most unsightly in appearance. On my mentioning this experience not long ago to an eminent geographer and traveller, he assured me that, if I had thickly powdered my unlucky visage before encountering sun and snow, it would have got off scot-free, and I insert the hint for the benefit of future travellers.

Our next stage was Irkeshtam, situated at the junction of the Osh-Kashgar and Alai routes. In the time of Ptolemy it was an important centre on the great trade route which ran from Rome across Asia to China, the “Stone Tower” mentioned by the Greek geographer being either here or in the vicinity. To-day it consists of a small fort garrisoned by Cossacks, with customs and telegraph offices all set down in hopelessly barren surroundings.

We were hospitably welcomed by the customs official’s wife and sister, but were sorry to find that our host was ill. After the nine o’clock supper we retired, my brother sleeping in some outhouse, and I in a little room which my hostess’s sister had kindly vacated for me, where I had a queer experience. As the window was hermetically sealed up for the winter, and the stove was lit, I had perforce to leave the door open in order to escape partial suffocation. A large carpet was suspended from the ceiling above the bedstead, across which it was carried, and hung down to the floor, and upon the bed were a sheet, a velvet bedspread and a couple of lace-covered pillows. Slipping into my rugs I put out the lamp, and as I was composing myself for slumber I became aware of a stirring under the bed, and a breathing. Thinking it must proceed from the dog or cat, with both of which I had made friends, I tapped the carpet and said “Ssh!” reflecting that if I troubled to drive the animal out it would be sure to return again by the open door, and as all was quiet I thought no more about the matter and went to sleep.

Some time in the middle of the night I was suddenly roused by feeling the bed violently jolted and to my horror heard loud and unmistakably human snores proceeding from under it. Considerably startled, I sat up in the pitch darkness and listened to heavy breathing while I summed up the situation. The intruder could not be a burglar, as there was nothing to steal, and of course I was in no danger, as I could rouse the house in a moment, my door being open. I felt it would be wrong to make a disturbance as our host was so ill; I could not communicate with my brother, for I had no idea where he was, and it would have been impossible to leave the house and search for him in the wind and darkness, with savage dogs roaming about. Another alternative would have been to light the lamp and turn out the intruder myself; but I feared that my lack of Russian and Turki would make this difficult, and it would certainly rouse the establishment. All things considered, I decided to lie and watch for daylight, my matches being to my hand. After the unknown had turned over again I heard the regular breathing of deep slumber, and soon, contrary to my intention, I dropped off to sleep myself.

When I woke about seven o’clock it was quite light. Examining my bed with some trepidation, I found a space between it and the wall at each end. Behind my pillows was a heavy red felt, and pulling this up I came upon a makeshift bed with pillow and bedding underneath mine. The occupant had gone, and I discovered the place at the end of the bed where “it” must have crept out noiselessly through the open door!

I said nothing to our hostesses, who came straight from their beds to give us bread and coffee before we started. They rode with us for a couple of miles to speed us on our way, and I was somewhat surprised to see that they merely pulled long coats over their night attire and muffled their heads in shawls before they mounted their horses. It was not until we had bade them farewell that I was able to relate my adventure to my brother and discuss this curious example of primitive Russian customs.

We parted from the ladies at the Kizil Su, the river that waters Kashgar, which we found very difficult to cross owing to the floes of half-melted ice in the middle of the stream and the broad ice shelves that protruded from either bank. We were now in Chinese Turkestan, and our halting-places changed considerably for the worse; indeed, the animals were relatively better housed than the human beings. Usually we rode into a small yard, two sides of which were given up to the ponies, while only dark rooms lit by a hole in the roof were reserved for travellers. The ceilings were unplastered, the interstices of the poplar beams being stuffed with hay, which as the weather grew warmer would be a haunt of scorpions and tarantulas. There was no furniture of any kind in these “hotels” with their crumbling mud walls and uneven floors, and I was always thankful when I slept in them that the “insect season” had not begun. It was not easy for me to sleep in these places, for the servants seemed to talk all night long; moreover, as my room was merely wattle-and-daub I could hear every movement of the animals on the other side of the thin walls, as they munched their fodder, fidgeted, and now and again screamed and tried to kick one another. I was also often roused from my slumbers by some cat that would leap down through the hole in the roof and would prowl about until my angry “Ssh!” frightened it into departing, though it would probably return later and disturb me again.

At the first of these unprepossessing stages we were greeted by a ya-yieh or “yamen runner,” who had been deputed by the Chinese authorities to escort us for the remainder of the journey. He was a striking figure, with a scarlet and yellow plastron on his chest denoting his official position.

Our onward route lay across many low passes, one I remember being crowned by a deserted fort, a memento of Yakub Beg, and clustered round this stronghold were many shrines—piles of stones adorned with wild sheeps’ horns and with poles on which fluttered countless rags, the idea being to remind the buried saint to intercede for the giver of the scrap of cloth or cotton. After this we traversed a district strewn with conglomerate rocks which assumed the most fantastic and weird shapes, and we wound through a long defile where the loess hills were crimped and frilled, looking much like rows of ballet skirts flung one upon another.

The ranges decreased in height as we proceeded, the sandy detritus moving down on barren valleys in which we saw very little sign of life. There were the pretty snow pigeons, the ubiquitous crows, and occasionally magpies standing on the backs of a few goats, pecking the ticks from their hair as the animals fed on almost invisible herbage or gnawed the bark from branches of willows that were cut down for the purpose.

Ever since we had crossed the Terek Dawan the weather had been cold and windy, with frequent dust-storms, the sand driving in great red clouds across the treeless wastes, and enveloping us and our caravan in grit that made the eyes smart.

Farther and farther the hills receded until we emerged on to the great Kashgar plain, where at Miniol, our last halting-place, the irrigated fields were green with crops, the trees in leaf, clumps of irises about to burst into flower, lizards darting among the stones, and frogs chanting loudly from the watercourses. To give some idea of the size of the Tian Shan Range it may be mentioned that nine out of the twelve stages of our journey lay through mountains.

On April 10, the thirty-sixth day after leaving England, we rode across the stony plain towards a long green line on the horizon that indicated the goal of our journey, passing on our way an old watch-tower erected in bygone days on the edge of the Oasis to give due warning of Kirghiz raiders. Some miles out of the city a fine saddle-horse and a rickety hooded victoria met us. My brother mounted the one and I got into the other, to be jolted over stones and in clouds of dust towards Kashgar. As we entered the Oasis with its avenues of willow, poplar and mulberry that surrounded the town for miles, Sir George Macartney and his children appeared to welcome us, and we also had a greeting from the Indians, when we entered a garden and sat down at a table on which a lavish meal had been spread. We halted farther on to exchange greetings with the Swedish missionaries, then drove in the red dust to where the Russian Consul-General and his staff hospitably entertained us, and afterwards to the Chinese reception, where more tea had to be sipped. This was the last stopping-place, and it was with joy that I heard the children who shared my carriage say, as we skirted the castellated city wall, that we were at last nearing the British Consulate.

We drove into a large garden planted with trees, where Lady Macartney came down the steps of a big, pleasing house and, giving us the kindest of greetings, led us into the dining-room. Here it was so delightful to be once more in an English atmosphere and to talk to a countrywoman that I could not resist partaking of afternoon tea, though it was for the fourth time since we had entered the Kashgar Oasis.

CHAPTER III

LIFE AT KASHGAR

For stalking about the streets (of Leh) or seated in silent rows along the bazaar, were men of a different type from those around. Their large white turbans, their beards, their long and ample outer robes, reaching nearly to the ground and open in front showing a shorter undercoat girt at the waist, their heavy riding-boots of black leather, all gave them an imposing air; while their dignified manners so respectful to others, yet so free from Indian cringing or Tibetan buffoonery, made them seem like men among monkeys compared with the people around them.—Visits to High Tartary, Yarkand and Kashgar—Robert Shaw.

On the second day after our arrival the Macartneys and their children left for England, but, busy though my hostess was, she found time to show me everything in the house and offices, giving me all sorts of hints that proved invaluable later on.

I was delighted with Chini Bagh (Chinese Garden), as the Consulate was called, the well-planned, airy house being set on low cliffs above the river. The large garden was full of fruit trees in blossom, its most charming feature being a terrace shaded by lofty poplars, from which we had a fine view of the river winding away to our right and could look down upon fields green with spring crops and watch the gaily clad people moving along the network of roads and paths. In fact we were so far above the world that I was sometimes reminded of the “Lady of Shallot” and her magic mirror, the busy life passing below seeming almost like a vision when viewed from this post of vantage, where we ourselves were quite unobserved.

Another point that pleased me greatly about our new home was the fact that we could walk on the flat roof of the house, and every now and again, when the air was free of the all-pervading dust, we could enjoy a wonderful mountain panorama. The snow-clad monarchs rose up, peak behind peak, in indescribable grandeur, Kungur, as the natives called it, dominating the whole, and I little thought that a few months later I should be privileged to stand at the foot of these superb mountains and have an unforgettable glimpse of the “vision splendid.” The Russians always insisted that the great dome of Muztagh Ata (Father of the Snows) could be seen from Kashgar, but Captain Deasy definitely settled by his survey work that this mighty giant was hidden by Kungur.

DAOUD AND SATTUR.

Page 41.

However, there was far more prose than poetry in my life at Kashgar, particularly at first, when I was occupied in coping with the details of housekeeping. I laboured under the disadvantage of being unable to speak Russian to the cook, or Turki to the other servants, but fortunately old Jafar Bai, who was entrusted with the purchases of supplies in the bazar, spoke Persian, and as I have a working acquaintance with that language he could act as my interpreter. To counterbalance my lack of tongues I had a fair knowledge of cooking and a good deal of energy, a quality useful in dealing with the slackness of the Oriental, particularly in Mohamedan countries, where a woman is obliged to hold her own, as her sex is of so little account. I speedily discovered that Achmet, a Russian engaged at Tashkent for the high sum of five pounds a month, was hardly a cook at all and could only make two or three soups and prepare the same number of meat dishes; his bread, moreover, was uneatable, and not a single pudding or cake found a place in his repertory! This was bad enough; but his unwillingness to learn, his lack of respect and his ceaseless wrangling with Jafar Bai, whose office he wished to usurp, made housekeeping a tiresome business. Before long it dawned upon me that to pay the wages of a chef and to be forced to do most of the work myself was not good policy, and when I discovered that Achmet had a weakness for alcohol I made up my mind to dispense with his services.

The kitchen-boy left by Lady Macartney had all the qualities that my late cook lacked, and I now entered upon a peaceful existence as far as the kitchen was concerned. Daoud Akhun (David, the Reader of the Koran, as his name implied) was a burly intelligent youth, and speedily grasped my Persian interlarded with Turki words. But he had no claim to his title of Akhun, as he could neither read nor write, and consequently I had to prepare every dish two or three times before he could remember the right quantities and be trusted to make it alone. My little Colonial cookery-book gave all the recipes in cupfuls or spoonfuls, a method that might with advantage be followed in England, as it is a great saving of time and trouble.

Sattur, the butler of the establishment, was a gnome-like little man, perfectly honest, but with the mind of a boy of twelve. The others called him Mulla Sattur, his title, like that of my cook, being due to the fact that his father had been a mulla or priest, though he himself was entirely devoid of education.

He and his underling kept the house fairly well when looked after, but Orientals are incurably slack according to Western ideas, and it was a constant struggle to maintain a very moderate standard of cleanliness and order. At first I tried to teach him to sweep the painted floors by means of a damp cloth tied over a broom, instead of whisking the dust from one place to another; but he nearly wept, saying at intervals, “Not good, not good,” so averse was he to innovations. As a waiter he had a tiresome habit of stretching his arm across us when serving food or drink, and he had a constitutional inability to put on the lid of a biscuit-tin or close a door. It was a proud moment when, after many a reprimand, he knocked at my bedroom door instead of bursting in without notice! Apart from these small failings he was very likeable, most conscientious, and somewhat resembling a dog in his desire for praise if he did anything well.

With all his virtues, he, on one occasion, nearly caused a disaster, as the following anecdote will show. Some years before our arrival, a British officer was in temporary charge of the Consulate, and as he was a bachelor the servants soon took advantage of the fact that there was no mistress. One day he found them going off to their respective homes laden with provisions from his store-room, and in righteous wrath he dismissed every one save Sattur, who had not joined in the depredations. The little fellow then united in his person the offices of cook, butler and housemaid, and apparently did so well that his master was emboldened to give a tea-party. The guests arrived, but the pièce de résistance in the shape of rock-cakes was so long in appearing that the amateur cook was summoned. Sattur then explained with some perturbation that he was sure something was wrong with the baking-powder, because, although he had mixed in a double quantity with the flour, the buns utterly refused to rise. The captain demanded to see this curious baking-powder, and he and his guests had a shock when he discovered that it was the arsenic which he kept to cure the skins of the animals and birds that he shot!

One of the great drawbacks of the Turki is that they never wash. There are no public baths, as in Persia, nor does the rule of a weekly bath on Friday before going to the mosque hold good here. The only thing I could do was to insist firmly on clean garments and well washed hands and faces. All the servants wore very long sleeves in which they hid their hands to show respect to superiors. They were in the habit of using these sleeves as dusters, but had to roll them up when they did any work.

Jafar Bai, the head chuprassi, willing and trustworthy, was my marketer, but variety in diet was difficult to obtain when we had only the toughest of mutton and the stringiest of fowls on which to depend. We were warned that the beef was usually diseased, and as many cases of illness had occurred from eating the fish caught in the river—some being diseased and others apparently having a poison-gland—we never ventured upon that form of food, and no game was to be had until the autumn.

Fortunately eggs were abundant, and we obtained some butter and milk from our two cows, attended by their calves, which took about half what their mothers yielded. As the small quantity of butter produced was barely sufficient for the table, I tried to supplement it by procuring cream from the bazar, but unluckily the Kashgaris do not practise cleanliness in any form. The cream was always distressingly dirty and had to be passed through muslin and then brought to boiling-point before it could be made into butter, and even then had an unpleasant smell and a dingy appearance. After various trials I resorted to suet for my cooking, and bought dumba, the big bunch of fat that forms the tail of the Central Asian sheep. On our arrival we found that owing to the War no white flour could be purchased in Kashgar, and we were obliged to have recourse to the native article, with its large admixture of grit and dust, before we could procure Russian flour from Osh.

The Swedes told me that when their mission was started in Kashgar some twenty years ago the prices of food were very low, there being practically no money in the country. In those days trading was done “in kind,” but prices had trebled or even quadrupled in the last few years. Even so, I did not consider them exorbitant when I could purchase a small leg of mutton for 1s. 10d., soup-meat at 2½d. a lb., a fair-sized fowl for 8d., and eggs at about four a penny. Sugar, Russian bacon, cheese and suchlike imported things were naturally expensive owing to the difficulties of transport. The weights were a jing (1⅓ lbs.), 16 jings making a charak (21 lbs.), while the Russian poud was 36 lbs.

The prices were usually computed in tangas, a coin worth about 2d., which, to my great surprise, did not exist. This mythical tanga equalled 25 darchin, while 16 tanga and 10 darchin made a seer—a coin worth about 2s. 8d. This sounds easy enough, but was complicated with the Chinese tael, the Indian rupee and the Russian rouble, all these coins being current in Kashgar.

The important question of the laundry was settled satisfactorily by a woman who arrived on Mondays and installed herself under a shelter in the yard where were basins and a fireplace. On Tuesdays the ironer made her appearance, the same woman being unable to see the clothes through both processes; and she was accommodated in a room with a long table, shelves on which to deposit the garments, and a supply of irons. Lady Macartney had warned me that this woman had a fondness for doing her work on a dirty cloth, and I soon found that she lived up to her reputation and would lay aside the clean sheet that I provided unless I looked in upon her at frequent intervals. Though she was a fair ironer she had no knowledge of starching, but we discovered a male artist who undertook to get up my brother’s shirt fronts and collars, though he utterly declined to wash them. I paid both women some tangas extra on condition that they washed and ironed all the servants’ cloths and dusters, my rule being to give out clean ones every Monday and Wednesday in exchange for their dirty ones; a plan that ensured as much cleanliness as I could reasonably expect.

Shortly before we left Kashgar for England our lady ironer departed without warning to another town, but the male artist kindly came to the rescue and took over her job. He used to make the most extraordinary noises, but I thought nothing of them until I came into the ironing-room one day, carrying a dress that was creased. He laid it out on the ironing-board and to my horror began to eject a fine spray of water from his mouth upon it, making at the same time the noise that had puzzled me!

There was not much social dissipation at Kashgar, though there was a colony of fifty Russians, together with a body of sixty-five Cossacks and their officer. Out of these only a dozen made up “Society,” and we met twice a week at the “Club,” providing tea and cakes in turn. Here four of the men and my brother played tennis on a mud court, an adjoining court being laid out for croquet, where the rest of us played a game with wide hoops, a “cage” in the centre and small-headed mallets that took me back to the days of my early youth. Every one “spooned” and pushed the balls into position in a way contrary to every rule of up-to-date croquet and got quite excited over the games. It was curious to see the thoroughly inefficient way in which the servants swept these courts. Their method was to kneel down and brush up the sand with little twig brooms that they held in one hand, while with the other they collected the dust into heaps before piling it on one of the skirts of their long coats and so carrying it off.

Prince Mestchersky, the Consul-General, and his wife and staff were most friendly, and we were invited to a round of dinners and lunches, Achmet’s incompetence giving me many an anxious moment when we returned the hospitalities lavished upon us. Unluckily for me, only four or five of the Russians could speak French or German, and as I have no gift of tongues my attempts to learn Russian were far from successful.

This was rather trying, as the Russian entertainments ran to length. I always remember the first lunch party to which we were invited. It was given in a garden at some distance from the Consulate, and I drove there well swathed in cloak and veils, to avoid arriving with the complexion of a mulatto from the clouds of suffocating dust that rose up from the road. Driving was also a penance, owing to the rough roads along which one was bumped and jolted until one ached all over. Our goal was an enclosure full of fruit trees in blossom and planted with flowers, in which two long tables, placed on mud platforms covered with carpets, were spread with different kinds of wine, fruit, sweetmeats and so on. The Russian colony, including the three ladies in their smartest dresses, was assembled on a third platform hung round with Chinese embroideries. Scarlet awnings were stretched above the tables to keep off the sun, and when all the guests had arrived we sat at the first table for an hour and a half, while many zakouskas and course after course of meat were handed round and interminable toasts were drunk.

I am a water-drinker, but soon found that I should give offence if I refused to return the toasts in wine; so I did at Rome as Rome does, held my glass up, clinked it with other glasses, and sipped as occasion required. The Tsar’s Prohibition Act had not found its way into Chinese Turkestan, and never have I seen such a bewildering array of bottles. The first toasts led off in vodka, after which different wines and liqueurs were served in unending succession. Among the guests was a savant who had spent some years in the Gobi Desert copying ancient inscriptions, and had halted at Kashgar on his return to civilization. His exploits with the bottle were so remarkable that my table-companion said he must be slaking his two years’ thirst at one go!

When we had sat till three o’clock at one table we were requested to adjourn to the second, where ices, sweetmeats, champagne and coffee, and of course cigarettes, were served. After an hour of this our host proposed that we should take a little promenade de digestion; so off we all went along dusty paths bounded by high mud walls and round freshly irrigated fields. To compass these latter we had to walk carefully on the top of the irrigation banks, the ladies finding this somewhat difficult owing to their heels of abnormal height. At one place we came to a ditch where the gentlemen insisted on helping us across, though it was a very small jump, but my companions had such extremely narrow skirts that they could not have done it unaided. On our return to the garden the Princess wished to wash her hands; so soap and towels were provided and in turn we held out our hands for a servant to pour water over them, our gallant host waving a bottle of eau-de-Cologne, with which he besprinkled the ladies.

My heart failed me when I saw tea in readiness, with cakes, biscuits and sweets galore, and I had to wrestle for some time longer with linguistic difficulties, thankful that three of those assembled could talk French fluently. When a surreptitious peep at my watch told me that it was half-past six, we took our leave amid many exclamations as to the extreme earliness of our departure from the lunch party!

Nice and friendly as the Russians all were, my brother and I led lives of such a different kind that we could not well coalesce. If we dined with them we could never leave before midnight, and they themselves said that they liked to stay on till five o’clock in the morning, the domestics serving up a supper, or rather an early breakfast, from the remnants of the dinner, and possibly they would stroll out to see the sun rise before they repaired to their homes. Owing to their love of late hours they did not rise till mid-day, and as they could not enjoy the cool of the mornings as we did, they used to “take the air” by moonlight.

They did not play bridge, and we could not learn their difficult card-game, nor was it possible to play a kind of loto with them, owing to ignorance of the language.

Those forming “society” lived apparently in one another’s houses all day long, never liking to be alone, and the little colony reminded us of the Florentines rendered immortal by Boccaccio, who, when the plague was raging, left their city and went to a lovely garden outside its walls, caring nothing for the misery and death they had so skilfully avoided. In this case it was not a plague, but the World War, that our neighbours appeared to ignore, except now and again when the Germans approached some place where they had relatives or friends.

I cannot refrain from giving the menu of one of the dinners we gave the Russians, in order to show what Daoud and I could accomplish when working together:

MENU.

Hors-d’œuvres.

Caviare on toast. Salmon mayonnaise. Fried sausages.

Tomato Soup.

Meat Courses.

Chicken aspic. Steaks à la tournados. Indian curry. Vegetables.

Sweets.

Trifle. Jam tarts. Ices.

Savoury—Cheese straws.

Dessert.

A dinner such as this required my presence in the kitchen the greater part of two mornings, and the food had to be arranged with an eye to Daoud’s capacities; for I fought stoutly against the Oriental habit of long waits between the courses. On these occasions I hired an assistant who did all that my cook would permit, and Sattur was supported by Jafar Bai and another chuprassi resplendent in scarlet and gold uniforms and snowy turbans. The clerk of the office, who spoke English and Turki, always read over the menu more than once to Daoud, and I insisted that the latter should repeat it in his turn, in order to be sure that he had memorized it correctly. When we were seated at table my anxieties were by no means over; for, in spite of my coaching beforehand, the waiters were fond of getting into one another’s way, and occasionally there were unseemly wrangles between Sattur, who considered that he was the head, and masterful Jafar Bai, who would sometimes wrench the bottles of wine from him as he was endeavouring to fill up the glasses of our guests. But on the whole our dinners were not inferior to those given by the Russians with their larger and more experienced staffs, and our guests enjoyed coming to us, as some of our dishes, such as curry, were more or less a novelty to them.

I have always liked entertaining, but in this case the language difficulty used to leave me quite exhausted at the close of the evening, and with the depressed feeling that I could not make things go briskly. Both my brother and I took lessons from a young girl, the companion of the Princess, but as she was uneducated and knew no language save her own, I confess I did not get much benefit from her instruction, although I tried to make her teach me by the Berlitz method. She was, however, a help to my brother, who had studied the language at Meshed, where he had had a good deal of social intercourse with the Russian Consulate, and who only needed practice to talk easily.

The other Europeans consisted of a small body of Swedish missionaries, men and women, headed by Dr. Raquette, who, besides his medical work, has published a Turki grammar and dictionary. All the Swedes talked English and gave us much information about Kashgar and its inhabitants, in particular Mr. Bohlin, who accompanied us on many of our rides. They had a hospital and dispensary, doing most useful medical work, and had the only printing-press in Chinese Turkestan, from which they issued books printed in Turki for use in their schools throughout the province.

A medical missionary in the East may be of incalculable benefit to thousands, and Dr. Raquette’s successful operations for cataract, in particular, brought him patients from far Khotan. Unfortunately the Kashgaris were much under the influence of their mullas and of the native doctors, who, not unnaturally, objected to foreign methods, the result being that they often came to the Swedes only when they were at the point of death. Moreover, though they looked robust they seemed to have little strength to resist the inroads of disease, and any serious illness carried them off very speedily.

The mission was started a quarter of a century ago, Dr. and Mrs. Höegberg, whom we met later at Yarkand, being its oldest members. At first it met with persecution, the Chinese stirring up the Kashgaris to besiege the little community in their house, but fortunately Mr. Macartney, as he then was, rode to the rescue with his chuprassis, and some Russian Cossacks aided him in the work of driving off the mob.

The Kashgari roughs then wreaked their vengeance on the new hospital that was being built on the site which it now occupies, and every kind of threat was used to induce the missionaries to leave Kashgar; but they stood firm, and finally the Chinese official who was their enemy was recalled, and forced to rebuild the hospital at his own cost. His successor announced the change of policy by inviting the members of the mission to a great banquet, at which the much-esteemed swallows’-nest soup was served, and so the hatchet was buried for good.

I always thought that the apple-pie order of the mission buildings and the excellent fruit and vegetables grown in the garden were a good object-lesson to the Kashgaris, and indeed they were not insensible of this, as the following anecdote shows. When one of the missionaries had engaged a servant he heard an old retainer remark to the new recruit: “You must be sure not to be dirty, because these people are so clean that if they are forced to say an unclean word they go immediately and wash out their mouths!” My informant also told me that a servant of one of the lady missionaries, being short of cash, took all her plates to the bazar and sold them. When she turned upon him in righteous wrath, he remarked: “Oh, mistress, you are not blaming me properly,” and he actually poured out a string of most abusive epithets, inviting, nay imploring her to use them upon him!

Our days soon fell into a routine broken by the English post with its month-old newspapers, which we devoured eagerly. The Reuter sent across the passes from Gilgit gave us somewhat later information about the War, and the Russians received occasional telegrams; but their knowledge of geography was so limited that my brother had much difficulty in eliciting any clear statement as to what was going on.

Riding was our chief amusement, and we purchased two fine Badakshani horses of the breed described by Marco Polo, and were usually in the saddle by half-past seven. The morning air was delightfully cool, and the rides were wonderfully varied, a fresh one for each day of the month we used to say. There was also the sound of running water in the numberless irrigation channels as we rode under the trees along sandy tracks free from stones and ideal for cantering. An added charm was the fact that the walls enclosing gardens and fields were quite low, and as a rule the crops were not fenced in at all, save by low banks of earth.

At first we used to be accompanied on our walks and rides by Bielka and Brownie, the dogs that the Macartneys had left in our care. Bielka was a powerful white animal rather like a wolf, and unluckily had such an unconquerable dislike to Europeans that he had to be chained up whenever visitors came to the house. On our arrival Lady Macartney “introduced” us to him by providing us with bits of meat to give him as a peace-offering, and we became excellent friends.

It was amusing on our walks to watch him and Brownie, the fat, easygoing spaniel; for the latter, an arrant coward, would pick quarrels with the pariah dogs and then call his comrade to his aid, the enemy fleeing in confusion as soon as Bielka appeared. But when we found that, if a Cossack rode past, the great dog would rush at him like a fury and try to tear him from his horse, and when on the same walk we had to race to the rescue of a young Russian couple, the edict went forth that our would-be guardian must be left at home. It went to my heart to refuse him when he implored me to let him escort us; for he was most charming to his friends and kept the Consulate free of thieves, as he roamed about the place all night.

Though the Consulate was close to the city wall, we could turn almost at once into shady lanes, bordered with irrigation channels, along which willows, poplars and mulberries grew luxuriantly; while on either side stretched fields green with lucerne and springing wheat, barley and maize. But all the growth and prosperity of the Oasis was entirely dependent upon the water, and should this source of life fail great would be the devastation. One day we came upon a district where a big network of irrigation channels had run dry owing to the bursting of a dam, and hundreds of men were labouring against time to repair it and thereby save the trees and crops. The corvée system is in force in Chinese Turkestan, and although tyrannical according to Western ideas, it is certainly for the public benefit in such a case as this. The villagers are forced to repair all roads and water channels in their own districts, but the hardship comes in when their Chinese rulers undertake to reclaim land from the desert and commandeer men from considerable distances. They are supposed in such cases to be paid threepence a day for their food, but it is rumoured that this money usually goes into the pockets of the headmen.

The Kashgar Oasis is watered by the Kizil Su (Red River, so called from its colour) and its branch the Tuman Su, which make the city and its environs an island. In April there was little water in either stream, so we could ford them easily on horseback; but during the summer it was a different matter. We were warned to be on our guard for quicksands in these rivers. Mr. Bohlin was once nearly caught in one, but feeling his horse sinking beneath him he threw himself off in haste and wading waist-deep he pulled the animal ashore. On another occasion he observed several men trying to extricate a horse that had sunk so deeply that it took the whole day to free it. These quicksands are less to be feared in deep water which buoys the animals up. The Kashgaris always hurry their horses over any suspicious place, but as the dangerous areas are constantly changing, it is impossible to be sure of their whereabouts.

Charming as spring is in Chinese Turkestan, it has a serious drawback in the violent sandstorms that are particularly frequent during March and April, in fact it has been computed that there are only a hundred really clear days during the year. For several days after our arrival the air was thick with dust that veiled the sun and accounted for the strictures passed by travellers on the “grey atmosphere” and depressing climate of Kashgar. Either by day or by night a furious wind would arise, bringing clouds of sand from the desert and coating everything in our rooms with a layer of reddish grit that hurt our eyes if we chanced to be caught in the open. I was told, however, that the inhabitants liked this haze that enshrouded their city as being a welcome change from the brilliant sunshine, and also as tempering the heat that was beginning to be considerable during the middle of the day. We noticed great changes in the temperature, sometimes experiencing a drop of as much as twenty degrees from one day to another. This I found out to my cost when I had a tiresome attack of rheumatism caused by riding on a cold morning in the thin linen coat that had been just the thing on the previous day.

These sandstorms raging through the centuries are supposed to have made the loess formation which is so characteristic of Chinese Turkestan, and so amenable to the spade of the cultivator when irrigated. The countless layers of compressed sand are capable of producing splendid crops, and the apparently lifeless desert of Central Asia is able to support large populations if the beneficent agency of water be provided.

WATERING HORSES IN THE TUMAN SU.

Page 56.

The loess is also most useful in another way; for, when mixed with chaff and water, it forms the staple building material of Chinese Turkestan, and edifices of sun-dried loess bricks will endure through the centuries, if repaired at intervals. I have often seen a peasant mending a wall in most primitive fashion by filling the breach with wet mud, which he slapped into position with his hands. Naturally this style of building is suitable only in a dry climate, and a prolonged period of heavy rain, such as sometimes occurs in winter, works havoc with it, the flat roofs of houses staving in and walls frequently collapsing. To the traveller, the loess, though picturesque when broken up into crevasses and castellated forms, has its drawbacks. Unless cultivated it is inexpressibly dreary, in dry weather the traffic stirs it up into clouds of suffocating dust, and in wet it turns into a sea of slippery mud, in which the surest-footed horse may come down. If the rain be of long duration the soil is apt to turn into a veritable morass, which engulfs many a poor little donkey and chokes it to death.

I was fond of riding through the bazar on a Thursday, the day of the weekly fair, when crowds of people poured in from the many hamlets in the Oasis, making a feast of colour. Among the men there was a great mixture of types, the upper-class Kashgaris usually having handsome features and full beards and moustaches; a group of Afghans with hawk-like profiles and proud bearing would catch the eye, reminding me of birds of prey when contrasted with the flat-faced, ruddy-cheeked, hairless Kirghiz; and the lower classes with the high cheek-bones of the Mongol seemed a link between the Iranian and the Chinese.

The men wore long coats, purple, red, green, or striped in many colours, with gay handkerchiefs serving as waistbands. Snowy turbans denoted mullas and merchants, but the others in fur-edged velvet hats or prettily embroidered skull-caps made gay splashes of colour as they rode by on spirited stallions or donkeys. The women were, if possible, more brightly clad than the men; their under shirts and trousers contrasting with their coats and hats. One belle, for example, had an emerald green coat lined with a flowered pink cotton; her under-garment was a vivid orange, and her hat purple, with a spray of blossom coquettishly stuck under the brim. It seems almost incredible, but she fitted in well with her surroundings in the brilliant sunshine and the spring green of foliage and crops.

The only visible differences between the dress of the men and of the women were the long white cotton shawls of the latter which they wore over their heads, and the small face-veils usually made of hand-embroidery, sometimes with a handsome border and fringe. These coverings were fastened to the brim of the hat, and were usually flung back over it, only to be hastily pulled down by some very orthodox dame at sight of my brother; but if I happened to be riding behind him it would usually be pushed aside to enable its wearer to have a good look at the English khatun. Girls of good family veil and are kept secluded; but there were few “gentry” in Kashgar, for when the Chinese retook the province on the death of Yakub Beg nearly all the upper-class Kashgaris fled to Andijan. Both men and women wore abnormally long sleeves, answering the purpose of gloves in cold weather, and long leather riding-boots. The latter were often made of scarlet leather and were more like stockings than boots, and over them was worn a shoe with stout sole and heel. Indeed these long boots were seen everywhere and constituted a special feature of the country, being worn by men, women and children alike.

KASHGAR WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

Page 58.

On one occasion I was invited to the house of a Turki lady who was kind enough to display her wardrobe for my benefit. All her dresses were beautifully folded and kept tied up in large cloths. A woman of fashion wears five garments visible to the eye, the first two being the long gown and the trousers under it. The gown is made of Bokhara or Chinese silk, brocade, Russian chintz and so on, and over it is worn a waistcoat, often of cloth of gold or silver, edged at the neck with the handsome gold thread embroidery made at Kucha. Then comes a short coat with long sleeves, usually of velvet woven in Germany and decorated with a broad band of gold embroidery. One black brocade coat that I saw was embroidered round the neck with big tinsel butterflies set with artificial stones. The fifth garment is a long velvet or brocade coat covering its wearer to the heels; I noticed a handsome one of magenta velvet, the buttons being big bosses of scarlet coral set in gold filigree and small pearls, a product of the Yarkand bazar. Draped on the head is a big white shawl, often of pretty gauzy material, that falls to the heels, and upon this are set the dainty skull-cap and the big velvet fur-edged cap. To this latter is attached the face-veil of fine-drawn thread edged all round with gold embroidery, the very handsome broad band of needlework at the top being concealed by the brim of the hat. This seemed a waste to my practical English mind, but the lady to whom I pointed this out explained that such was the fashion.

Many of the young Kashgari women were most attractive in appearance, and some of the little girls quite lovely, their plaits of long hair falling from under a jaunty little embroidered cap, their big dark eyes, flashing teeth and piquant olive faces reminding me of Italian or Spanish children. One most beautiful boy stands out in my memory. He was clad in a new shirt and trousers of flowered pink, his crimson velvet cap embroidered with gold, and as he smiled and salaamed to us I thought he looked like a fairy prince. The women wear their hair in two or five plaits much thickened and lengthened by the addition of yak’s hair, but the children in several tiny plaits.

The peasants are fairly well off, as the soil is rich, the abundant water-supply free, and the taxation comparatively light. It was always interesting to meet them taking their live stock into market. Flocks of sheep with tiny lambs, black and white, pattered along the dusty road; here a goat followed its master like a dog, trotting behind the diminutive ass which the farmer bestrode; or boys, clad in the whity-brown native cloth, shouted incessantly at donkeys almost invisible under enormous loads of forage, or carried fowls and ducks in bunches head downwards, a sight that always made me long to come to the rescue of the luckless birds.

WATER-CARRIERS AT KASHGAR.

Page 60.

It was pleasant to see the women riding alone on horseback, managing their mounts to perfection. They formed a sharp contrast to their Persian sisters, who either sit behind their husbands or have their steeds led by the bridle; and instead of keeping silence in public, as is the rule for the shrouded women of Iran, these farmers’ wives chaffered and haggled with the men in the bazar outside the city, transacting business with their veils thrown back.

Certainly the mullas do their best to keep the fair sex in their place, and are in the habit of beating those who show their faces in the Great Bazar. But I was told that poetic justice had lately been meted out to one of these upholders of the law of Islam, for by mistake he chastised a Kashgari woman married to a Chinaman, whereupon the irate husband set upon him with a big stick and castigated him soundly.

Market day at Kashgar presented an ever-changing kaleidoscope. Here a turbaned grandfather bestriding a tiny donkey, his grandson clinging on behind him and holding tight to his waistcloth, would cross the imposing-looking bridge, a favourite haunt of the numerous beggars. On the river bank the dyers would be beating long pieces of cloth in the shallows; horses would be drinking standing knee-deep in the water, and at the ford loaded asses could be seen staggering across, and men and women with their garments kilted high wading to the opposite bank. Donkeys carrying covered tubs were ridden by children who scooped up the water in gourds and filled the receptacles that were to supply their households for the day. Small mites hardly able to do more than toddle, were fearless riders, sometimes two or even three children being perched on the same animal. The excellence of the river brand accounts for the fact that cholera is unknown in Kashgar, and the inhabitants do not suffer from the goitre that is so prevalent in other cities of Chinese Turkestan.

The little stalls in the bazar exposed all sorts of commodities for sale. Melons that had been stored all through the winter; horseshoes or murderous-looking knives laid out on benches; here were small piles of almonds, walnuts and pistachios, there macaroni of native make and rice; and at one corner of the road the dyers hung up their blue and scarlet cloths to dry. As far as I could see the vendors made no effort to press their wares, and there seemed to be no fixed hours of work, men apparently sleeping, gossiping or drinking tea at any time of day. In the bakers’ shops the ovens were big holes flush with the floor of the shop, and the baker stuck the flat cakes of dough against their sides and pulled them off when ready, with the aid of a long-handled iron instrument. The bread, the little be-glazed rolls in the form of rings, and the heaps of flour were all plentifully besprinkled by the dust of the traffic; and during the cold weather the children would squat all day close to these ovens and frequently tumble in and get terribly burnt, poor little things. There was always business doing at the forge, where the horses being shod were lashed so tightly to an ingenious wooden framework that they could not move. Unluckily the Turki farrier is more inclined to make the hoof fit the shoe than vice versa, and as a result often cuts away the wall in most unscientific fashion, as we sometimes found to our cost.

SHOEING IN THE KASHGAR BAZAR.

Page 62.

Partridges and the pretty little desert larks kept in small round cages called and twittered, but their notes would be drowned by the performance of a group of professional singers who had drawn a crowd round them. The leader in turban and silk attire, with a huge silver buckle on his belt, sang, or rather shouted, a solo with many a trill and tremulo, making excruciating facial contortions, the monotonous chorus being taken up by the rest of the troupe. Some of these were greybeards, others mere boys, but all had the appearance of undergoing acute torture as they yelled at the top of their voices, and brought to mind my old maestro who was in the habit of suddenly holding a mirror in front of me if I wore a pained expression as I sang.

Yet the Kashgaris have the reputation of being very musical, and even to my western ears there was considerable charm in many of their songs; but try as I might, I could never pick up any of their airs, probably owing to the fact that their notation is quite different from ours. They do not understand part-singing, but play several instruments, such as sitars, drums, pipes and tambourines. In the spring and summer men and boys would sing up to a late hour at night, and with the first glint of dawn I was often roused by cheerful peasants chanting on their way to work in the fields.

The people say that travelling dervishes bring fresh tunes to the towns, and that when the spring repertoire, for example, has been learnt by the inhabitants it will be succeeded by new tunes for the autumn and winter. There are sometimes no words to these refrains, each singer supplying his own, in the fashion of the Italian improvisatori. No woman of good repute may sing in public, and only once did I hear a little girl of some eight or nine years old singing away to herself and evidently much enjoying the exercise. Whistling is not allowed even to children, but I could not find out whether the Kashgaris believed, as do the Persians, that it summons the demons.

As the Kashgari woman is spoken of as khatun, mistress, and sometimes as khan, or master, of the house, I thought that she had a far better position than her Persian sister; yet the law of Islam presses heavily upon her in many ways. Owing to the emigration of men from the Oasis there is a large surplus of women, and marriage is consequently cheap for a suitor. Parents often sell their daughter to the highest bidder in the matrimonial market without allowing her any freedom of choice. True, divorce may be had for a couple of tungas (about fourpence), but as the woman may not re-marry until a hundred days have elapsed, she often has difficulty in keeping herself meantime, although the man is supposed to return the dowry that he received with her at her marriage. If she has children she must take charge of any under seven years of age, but if they are above that age the husband looks after the sons and the wife has the daughters, the husband paying a maintenance allowance.

There is a law that, if the husband divorces his wife, the latter may take all the movables in the house, and as in the case of a merchant much of his wealth consists of carpets and brass utensils, he often finds it cheaper to take a second wife rather than divorce the first, who would make a clean sweep of the household plenishing. I confess that this law rejoiced me, as I always resented the state of inferiority to which Islam subjects my sex, and was glad that it gave them the advantage for once.

A KASHGAR GRANDMOTHER.

Page 64.

Kashgar is a great resort of traders, and the degrading custom of temporary marriages is in full force, a man often marrying a woman for a week or even a couple of days, the mulla who performs the ceremony arranging for the divorce at the same time. The missionaries told me that most of the women in Kashgar had been married several times, and this constant divorce leads to the wives taking whatever they can from their husbands and secreting it against a rainy day. And one cannot blame them; for, if a man wants to get rid of his helpmate, especially if she be old, he often ill-treats her in order to force her to divorce him and thus free him from the necessity of restoring her dowry. If she does this she may find herself in evil case without means of subsistence, and possibly unable to remarry.

How the children fare in all these matrimonial complications must be left to the imagination. Fortunately marriage is a far more stable institution in the villages, where monogamy is the practice and divorce uncommon. Here the women are more on an equality with their husbands, though on one occasion Mr. Bohlin saw a man guiding a plough to which he had harnessed his wife and a donkey!

The Chinese also practise polygamy; but they never divorce a wife if she be the mother of a son, and I understand that they do not approve of the practice at all, regarding it as the ruin of family life and as full of evil consequences to the children.

CHAPTER IV

ROUND ABOUT KASHGAR

Arabic is science, Persian is sugar,

Hindustani is salt, but Turki is Art.

Turki Proverb.

As soon as we had settled down at Kashgar we were anxious to explore the city and its environs, and Mr. Bohlin proved an invaluable guide in our various expeditions.

From its position the capital of Chinese Turkestan was a commercial centre from very early times. The town as we knew it is built on high ground above the Tuman Su and surrounded by a mud wall and a dry moat, but there are ruins of old Kashgar close by, and the Oasis has changed hands many times. The small traders and peasant proprietors, who form the bulk of the population, are by no means a warlike race, and have apparently accepted with equanimity the rule of whatever master fate might send them. Throughout the centuries it never seems to have occurred to the cities of what is now Chinese Turkestan that they might with advantage have combined against a common foe, instead of letting themselves be subjugated piecemeal.

PRIEST AT THE TEMPLE OF PAN CHAO.

Page 67.

Perhaps the earliest mention of Kie-sha, as it was then called, was when the famous Chinese general Pan Chao in the first century of our era conquered the Oasis and marched his armies almost as far as the Caspian. Accordingly we made our first expedition to the picturesque temple erected by the Chinese to this hero, who, we were told, defended the city most valiantly against fierce attacks from the Kirghiz tribes. This monument is quite modern, the Mohamedan conqueror Yakub Beg having destroyed the original temple during the ’sixties, and the legend that places the remains of the great soldier in the high mound on which the temple stands is open to doubt.

The dirty, black-clad priest in charge of the building pointed out to us the gods in their ill-kept shrines, life-size plaster figures clad in gorgeous silken robes with finger-nails of monstrous length. The god of war was a jet-black deity of peculiarly repulsive appearance, and all had stands before them in which worshippers could burn joss-sticks. There was an upper story to the temple, which we reached by means of a rickety wooden staircase not fastened to the wall in any way, and giving me the impression of being a most insecure mode of communication, and here I remember the quaint figure of the god of schoolboys, appropriately armed with a formidable cane. But the view was what held us enchained. From our post of vantage we could see over the entire town, with its shrines and mosques standing out from the thousands of mean, flat-roofed, mud dwellings, and as the sky was clear that morning the serrated peaks rose up grandly, ramparts, as it were, of the Roof of the World, that we were to visit later on.

We looked down upon the castellated city wall, which is some eighteen feet wide between its high parapets, and I was told the legend according to which it was built by half-starved slaves who were urged to their task by overseers armed with whips. If one of the labourers died, as frequently happened, his fellows were not allowed to remove the body, but were forced to build it into the wet mud in order that it might form part of the fabric, and the narrative haunted me when I stood upon the wall itself.

Though modern artillery would bring down this defence of the city, and the outer moat is always dry, as water would undermine the ramparts, the wall with its square bastions has nevertheless an imposing appearance: so also have the four great bronze-covered gates giving entrance to the town, which are shut at sunset to the accompaniment of Chinese crackers.

KASHGAR CITY.

(Showing the city wall and Tuman Su.) Page 68.

WOMEN AT THE SHRINE OF HAZRAT APAK.

Page 69.

The centre of Moslem veneration is Hazrat Apak, the shrine where the Priest-King of Kashgar, who died at the end of the seventeenth century, is buried, together with many of his descendants. Apak not only ruled over Chinese Turkestan, but had disciples in China and India. He was credited with powers of healing, and even of bringing the dead to life, and the Kashgaris regard him as second only to Mohamed and count him equal to Hazrat Isa (Jesus Christ): he is said to have converted many thousands from Buddhism to Islam. The road leading to the shrine is a vast cemetery, about two miles in length and stretching some distance inland on either side, and along this Via Appia, as Sir Aurel Stein has named it, burial is a costly affair and can be afforded only by the well-to-do. The domed mud tombs have an underground chamber in which are four niches, and here the principal members of a family are buried, each body being laid in turn in the receptacle that faces Mecca. As we passed along the road we heard women weeping loudly at some of the graves, in reality performing a kind of ancestor worship in imitation of their Chinese masters and not in accordance with Moslem practice. The idea is that deceased relatives will take more interest in the welfare of the survivors than do the saints, and accordingly the graves of the former are visited on holidays, and in this particular city of the dead also on Fridays and Saturdays. If any special blessing has been vouchsafed to a family, such as recovery from illness or a safe return from a journey, its members go in a body to express their gratitude at the tomb of parent or ancestor.

A number of beggars ran after our horses along this road; some of them dwell in small houses in the cemetery and are paid to keep certain graves in order. It is hinted that when the tombs crumble away these men are in the habit of turning them into dwellings, in order to sell the land again for burial plots after a decent interval has elapsed.

We dismounted at the imposing-looking gateway leading to the shrine, and were received by the mutawali bashi, or chief custodian, who takes a third of the large revenues, and a couple of turbaned, green-robed shaykhs. These escorted us up a poplar avenue past a big tank of water to a large building with a façade covered with blue and white tiles bearing Arabic inscriptions, the dome and the borders of the façade being in green, which contrasted curiously with the main colour scheme.

This was the famous shrine, and we were invited to step inside, where we saw a crowded mass of blue-tiled tombs, that of the Saint-King being draped with red and white cloths. There were numbers of flags and banners before the tombs, and on one side was a palanquin in which a great-grandson of Apak had travelled to and from Peking. While there he had married his daughter to a Chinaman, and at the date of our visit a Celestial had arrived in Kashgar accompanied by a band of relatives, to demand his share of the great wealth of the shrine. His credentials were unexceptionable, and during a century and a half his ancestors had been given pensions by the Chinese Government; but owing to the revolution these subsidies had been stopped. Hence his appearance, which was causing much perturbation among the managers of the shrine funds.

We were shown the pool where the saint was wont to make his ablutions before praying, and close by was a great trophy of the horns of ovis poli and other wild sheep, the offerings of many huntsmen. There were two wooden mosques in the enclosure, the roofs and pillars of the verandahs being carved and brilliantly coloured in the characteristic native fashion. Between them once lay the grave of Yakub Beg, but when the Chinese recovered Turkestan they destroyed the tomb and flung away the ashes of that masterful ruler.

On another occasion we visited the Chinese cemetery, which was very small when compared with the acres round Hazrat Apak that are covered by Moslem tombs. But the rulers of Chinese Turkestan are conspicuous by their absence in Old Kashgar and, moreover, they are always anxious, if possible, to have their remains interred in their native land. The enclosure, surrounded by a high wall, had usually a custodian of most hideous appearance standing at the open gateway, and the place had a tragic story attached to it. It was called Gul Bagh (Flower Garden), and was formerly the cantonment of Chinese troops in Kashgar. But when Yakub Beg wrested Turkestan from China he killed many soldiers of the Celestial Empire, and their remains were left unburied within this enclosure until the Chinese regained the Province in 1877. Then all the scattered bones were collected and placed under three big mud domes, the site of the former barracks being turned into a graveyard for Celestials.

Just inside the entrance was a temple with a wall on which was an inscription to keep off evil spirits, and at the end of each long, low, mud tomb was a tiny door facing south, through which the spirit of the dead man was supposed to emerge. In the mortuary chambers near the gate were placed the corpses of rich men who wished to be buried in China and whose coffins were awaiting fitting escort for the long journey.

I was told that when a Chinaman of importance dies, or, as it is put poetically, “drives the fairy chariot on a long journey,” the body is kept in the house for several days, during which a priest offers up prayers before it, music being played and crackers let off. At the funeral a cock is brought to the cemetery on the coffin and killed at the moment of burial, in order that the spirit of chanticleer may be ready to waken the spirit of the dead man in the next world. Paper houses, attendants, soldiers, horses, carriages, beds, boxes, money—in fact every kind of thing pertaining to the daily life and use of the deceased—are burnt before the coffin, in order that the spirit may have all these in the next world and may thus be enabled to take its proper position there. In the case of a wealthy man this ceremony is repeated on the three anniversaries following his death, and in front of a temple outside Kashgar a small pagoda-like tower was pointed out to me in which masses of paper prayers were burnt for the benefit of the deceased founder.

The Chinese are not considered particularly brave, but, though a man will avoid death by any possible means, yet he will meet it calmly when inevitable, and suicide is looked upon as rather a meritorious act than otherwise. If a man is condemned to death he is strangled; but for serious crimes short of murder the culprits are beaten severely on the legs, and men who have expiated their misdeeds in this way have frequently been brought into the Swedish hospital with their leg-bones broken in two or three places, and in some cases so badly injured that death ensues.

“There is something of a baby and something of an old man in every Chinaman,” quoted Mr. Bohlin on one occasion, and I was naturally interested when we were entertained at a lunch given by the Taoyin, or Governor, of Kashgar. The invitation, written on a strip of scarlet paper, described my brother as Sa Ta-jen (the Big Man), while my title Gu Ta-tai (Sister of the Big Man) appeared below.

I had hoped that we were bidden to a real Chinese dinner where sharks’ fins, swallows’ nests and such like delicacies would figure in the menu, though I was somewhat staggered at being told that a first-class dinner would comprise no fewer than a hundred and twenty courses, second and third class banquets having sixty and thirty courses respectively. No wonder that after such orgies the yamen is wont to remain closed for three days. But in this case, though the dinner lasted with an interlude from one o’clock to four, it was, as far as the food went, an inferior Russian repast. It began with many zakuskas, consisting principally of dubious-looking tinned fish, followed by soup, several meat courses, jelly, ices, tea and champagne. The Russian Consul-General and his staff were present, and all the Europeans were placed on one side of a long table under an awning, while their Chinese hosts sat opposite. These latter amused me by getting up at intervals. Some would take the Governor’s children on their knees—he was the proud father of four sons—and give them tit-bits from the table; others smoked opium in curious pipes and had choking fits, during which they retired into the garden to cough in peace; while others would leave the table to give instructions to the servants in charge of two gramophones that discoursed popular European airs all the time.

The commander-in-chief, a quaint-looking figure with grey locks, a putty-coloured complexion and claw-like nails that made me shudder, strolled up and down in a khaki uniform and made amiable remarks to the guests; other officials rose to ply all and sundry with vodka and wine, and the only one that kept his seat was a small boy clad charmingly in blue and purple silk and wearing a sailor hat woven in blue and mauve straw. He ate manfully of every course, and even demanded a second helping of some of the more indigestible of the delicacies, but looked so strong and rosy that I suspected he was not accustomed to indulge his appetite in this way very often.

There is a great mortality among Chinese babies if their mothers are unable to feed them; for Celestials have the strongest repulsion to cows’ milk. “We do not wish to become calves,” they say, and if a mother dies her offspring is nourished on rice and sugar.

There was a crowd of soldiers at this party, some quite aged men, clad in black cotton uniforms, their heads bound up in handkerchiefs and holding curious weapons, such as steel prongs at the end of long sticks, and all having a highly unmilitary appearance. The army is looked down upon in China, it being a common saying, “We do not make nails from good iron or soldiers from good men,” and in consequence of this strong pacifist feeling no man of decent standing would enter the profession of arms, except in the higher ranks where successful generals have temples built in their honour.

Our host gave the European ladies fans and silk handkerchiefs as souvenirs, showing us how to unfurl a fan to its full extent with a movement of the wrist, and then escorted us to the house to visit his wife, who met us at the entrance. She was a pleasant-faced lady, with well-oiled hair brushed back from her forehead, and was dressed in a black silk coat and tightly-fitting trousers. As she clambered with difficulty over the extremely high door-step, and tottered towards us on the tiniest of feet, I was unkind enough to reflect that my Russian friends with their narrow skirts and heels of abnormal height did not progress much better.

CHINESE SOLDIERS AT THE KASHGAR YAMEN.

Page 74.

We were invited to drink tea in a room adorned with a couple of charming Chinese pictures, together with a mass of European photographs and knick-knacks in bad taste, and afterwards passed into two large bedrooms, where we were received by the daughter-in-law, and inspected huge bedsteads hung round with curtains and furnished with long silk-covered bolsters and neatly-folded piles of silken quilts. My entire ignorance of the language prevented me from enjoying this glimpse of a Chinese home in the way I might otherwise have done, and my thoughts centred on the neat little “hoofs” shod in black satin that served our hostesses for feet. I had heard Mrs. Archibald Little lecture on this fashion, and her account of the tortures inflicted on so many thousands of tiny girls to bring about the repulsive mutilation which the Chinese euphemistically call “golden lilies” had filled me with an abiding indignation. And yet a recent traveller in China says that these crippled feet possess for him a “quite extraordinary exotic charm,” and he exhausts himself in conjecture as to which mistress of an Emperor’s heart introduced a custom that “entailed a new charm on her sex.” I have no theory to offer as to the origin of the custom, but from the position of women in China it seemed to me that some man must have been responsible for a plan that would firmly tether his womankind to their homes, just as the veiling of Mohamedan women was a masculine device.

During our visit to his house the Governor, who could talk Russian, kept the ball rolling with Princess Mestchersky while we sipped our tea. He had met her some years before in China and afterwards she quoted to me one of his remarks, of which she had not entirely approved. He had said, “When we were in China we were young, but now in Kashgar we are old!” I thought the Governor distinctly lacking in tact, but how easily can one jump to wrong conclusions through ignorance. Later on I heard that there is such reverence for age in the Celestial Empire that it is a high compliment to impute many years; an aged man, even if poor and blind, being regarded as a fortunate being. To this veneration for age is united an intense respect for parents, especially for the head of a house. No son would retire to rest before his father, nor would he sleep upon the roof if his parent occupied a room below.

The death of a father is one of the greatest calamities that can befall a man, and Sir Aurel Stein illustrated this by an incident that occurred when he was returning to Kashgar from one of his long desert expeditions. It became known that his Chinese interpreter’s father had passed away, and all along the road there was a friendly conspiracy to keep all letters from Jongsi until his journey was at an end and he could indulge his grief at home.

When we said good-bye to our host we drove off, as we had arrived, to the accompaniment of three loud detonations, and this time the crackers were exploded so close to us that I marvelled that our horse did not smash the carriage and its occupants in its terror.

JAFAR BAI DISPLAYING THE VISITING CARD.

Page 77.

Later on my brother attended real Chinese feasts, where the procedure was quite different from that I have just described. He would drive into the outer courtyard of the yamen, where musicians would be discoursing weird music from a latticed gallery, and the great doors of the inner courtyard would be flung wide to the deafening sound of crackers. The etiquette was to leave the carriage and proceed across a stage with an altar on one side, Jafar Bai walking ahead waving his master’s red visiting-card, and calling out his name and title, while the Amban met his guest half-way and escorted him to the repast. My brother’s name, as rendered in Chinese, was Si-Ki-Su, and we were told that it is considered chic to have a name of two or three syllables, whereas a name running into four is not good and a five-syllable name would expose its bearer to derision, as the slip of paper on which it was written would be so long. The custom of visiting-cards is supposed to have originated in the Celestial Empire centuries before the coming of Christ.

As is the habit in Persia, the Chinese spend about half-an-hour before the meal in discussing fruit, nuts, tea, wine and native spirit, this last being served hot and poured from a kettle. The host takes the lowest seat at table, helps his guests to tea, putting in the sugar with his fingers. Later on he serves them the various dishes and is full of attentions towards them. The dinner proper is placed on the table in bowls, from which every one supplies himself by means of chopsticks, fishing out what he fancies and transferring it to the small saucer placed before him.

Sharks’ fins, turtle fat, a plat prepared from the stomach of a fish, fried fowls’ livers, year old eggs, edible seaweed and preserved duck were some of the numerous dishes. My brother always carefully avoided this last, as the Consulate interpreter had had an illness which resulted in deafness from partaking on one occasion too freely of the delicacy, and perhaps it was this comestible that caused Captain Deasy to write so feelingly of the ill-effects that he experienced from Chinese banquets. Swallows’-nest soup is almost unprocurable nowadays and prohibitive in price; bread is seldom served, and if it appears it is rather like dough.

When the meat courses are concluded the servants bring in a basin of water in which they wash all the chopsticks and spoons, and then the sweets appear, beans in syrup and a kind of plum-pudding being among them. The last course is a bowl of rice, the national dish; when it makes its appearance it is a sign that the feast has reached its close, and after partaking of it the guests depart.

Sir George Macartney told me that the Chinese are very fond of playing games with their fingers at their dinner-parties. One game is for a man to put forward a certain number of his fingers, his opponent doing the same, and he who first guesses the total correctly is the winner, the whole being done at lightning speed. The guests do not call out five, six or seven as the case may be, but there are elegant titles for each number, such as Mandarin of the First Empire, and so on. Another curious game is as follows: The hand, when clenched, is supposed to represent a stone, two fingers protruded stand for scissors and two hanging down for a sack. The point of the game is that a stone cannot be cut by scissors but can be put into a sack, but on the other hand, a sack can be cut by scissors. If, therefore, a player responds with scissors to his adversary who has clenched his hand for stone he loses; but if he replies with sack he wins. It sounds a childish amusement, but the Chinese will play the game for hours at a time with tremendous zest.

I have omitted to mention that there is usually a length of wall placed in front of the gateway leading to any yamen, temple, rest-house, or graveyard, its purpose being to prevent evil spirits from entering. Most fortunately these can only go straight forward and cannot turn corners, so the wall brings them to a full stop and foils them in any malignant design.

The “name day” of the Tsaritsa fell early in May—Russians keep the baptismal day, and not the birthday, as we do—and the Cossacks attached to the Russian Consulate gave in her honour a display of horsemanship known as jigitofka. It was held on their sandy parade-ground close to the river, where the Russian colony assembled in full force. The men went through quite a military tournament programme, springing off and leaping on to galloping steeds, riding at breakneck pace facing the tails of their mounts, and leaping across kneeling camels. The “ships of the desert” strongly objected to this particular feat, and with loud roarings struggled to rise, until the men who held them bound cloths over their eyes. There were the usual V.C. races, and we had a glimpse of the war in watching the exciting rescue of a Cossack attired as a woman from the hands of a troop masquerading as Huns. The most sensational item was when the soldiers galloped their horses through a big barrier of flaming bundles of reeds, firing off blank cartridges, the sight of the flames and the noise of the rifles driving the animals almost mad.

The Princess gave away the prizes, chiefly money, daggers, and huge silver watches, and the simple-looking, fresh-faced youths rode past in a body when all was over, singing beautifully. They had a natural gift for song, taking parts as if by instinct, and on quiet evenings I used to listen for their hymn.

The Kashgaris had assembled in hundreds to see the spectacle, and opposite to where we sat the high loess cliffs were crowded with brilliantly clad spectators, who climbed with the agility of monkeys to apparently inaccessible points of vantage. Horsemanship naturally appeals strongly to a nation of riders; but the Kashgaris, though as it were born in the saddle, never appeared to use their horses otherwise than as a means for getting about, in contrast to the young Persian or Arab, who is for ever racing his steed. Later on we saw much of the “goat game” as practised by the Kirghiz, but the only horses which were galloped in Kashgar were ridden by Cossacks, who occasionally ran riot in the narrow public roads, to the imminent danger of passers-by.

Our Russian friends drove instead of riding, and, as my brother and I much preferred our saddles to being jolted in a carriage, we never organised any joint-picnics. To be perfectly frank, a dinner or a garden-party always left me quite exhausted in my efforts to play the hostess, talking French to this one, helping out the inadequate German of that one, and cudgelling my brains for some Russian sentence of welcome to those guests, alas, in the majority, who knew no language save their own. The Russians enjoyed coming to our garden, especially when the strawberries were in season, and I always took them over the house, winding up with the roof for the sake of the view. The ladies were specially interested in the kitchen arrangements, and the Princess declared that the Consulate was far more convenient in every way than the grandiose building that was in course of erection for her future residence. When my brother and I went over it later I was struck with the difference between British and Russian ideals. We love comfort and privacy in our homes, but our Slavonic friends appeared to need constant social intercourse. They had crowded many buildings on to a small piece of ground, each house raked by the windows of the others, and at the end of a long avenue stood the imposing-looking Consulate. I was surprised at its internal plan; for there were four very large reception rooms, but only three fair-sized bedrooms and a couple of small servants’ rooms. There was apparently no pantry, scullery, larder or storeroom; and, as there was no central passage in the house, all the rooms opened one into another, an intolerable arrangement according to English ideas.

We were also shown over the Cossack barracks close by, big rooms with rows of grey blanketed beds, the long tables and benches for meals being in the same apartments, and the icons in a prominent position. The Cossacks all looked healthy and hardy, replying to their officer’s salutations with a formula of greeting that they chanted with precision, but I fancy that Kashgar must be a place of exile to men who have left their farms on the Don at the bidding of the Tsar, and they must look forward to settling down upon them for good when their term of service is ended.

Shortly after our arrival we had an interesting guest in the person of M. Romanoff, a young Russian archaeologist whom my brother had met both in London and Bokhara. He was studying the Moslem art of Central Asia, and showed us carvings, pottery, carpets and embroideries that he had bought at Kashgar and Yarkand, and was consequently able to help us with our own purchases.

The old Khotan carpets, their colours made from vegetable dyes, were attractive, and the silk carpets are highly prized and very difficult to obtain. One belonging to our guest had a pale yellow colouring, but was terribly damaged. The best woollen Khotan carpet that I inspected had a pattern in a series of panels; indigo, a faded-looking madder and yellow being the chief tints. There were Chinese vases in the design, and also the conventionalized swastika, that symbol of good luck which originally came from India, and which later on I saw copied ad nauseam in glaring aniline dyes. Certainly none of the old carpets that I came across, whether woven of wool or of silk, could compare in design, colouring or texture with the beautiful Persian works of the loom with which I was familiar. The modern Khotan carpet, with its aniline dyes, is rarely pleasing to the eye. A favourite subject is a row of magenta, purple and orange pots, with flowers stiffly protruding from them, the whole design being thrown upon a scarlet background and making one wonder how the artistic Chinese can descend to such depths.

STUDY OF KASHGAR WOMEN.

(One woman is shown with face veiled.) Page 82.

The pottery brought to us for sale and sold in the bazars was rough and not particularly good as to pattern, while the tiles on the façades of mosques and those that covered a few of the tombs were practically all white and blue, comparing unfavourably with the fine work of much of Central Asia. What specimens of jewellery I saw were heavy and clumsy and to me devoid of charm. The native art seemed to find its chief expression in the columned verandahs of mosques and dwelling-houses, the pillars and roofs of these being often profusely carved with charming patterns in the style known as chip-carving; and also in the fretwork of doors and windows, frequently carried out with a wealth of intricate design that reminded us strongly of the art of Kashmir, and may possibly have been influenced by that country.

The old brass and copper utensils are often very beautiful, with open metal work showing Persian influence; in fact my brother and I sometimes thought that they must have been brought from Iran, so much did they resemble those we had picked up at Kashan.

It seemed to me that the embroideries produced by the women were more typical of the race than anything else. Shaw mentions that in the ’sixties the women wore wide trousers, the borders of which were embroidered, and though the trousers are now narrower and worn without adornment, we were able to collect many specimens of the old work. Moreover, the long gowns worn by the women were formerly profusely embroidered, conventional flowers appearing with charming effect on the red, green or yellow silk of which the costume was made. Now, alas, this beautiful handicraft seems almost to have died out, and is reserved for the pretty skull-caps which are worn by both sexes, and over which both alike place the “little pork-pie hat” with fur border mentioned by Shaw.

In spite of the Turki proverb that heads this chapter, it appeared to me that Chinese Turkestan had evolved no art of its own, everything of the kind being influenced by its neighbours, China, India or Persia.

The province is a back-water of the Chinese Empire, and the race of petty farmers who inhabit it cultivate the soil as if by instinct. The so-called cities are comparatively small towns, where the trade is not on a large scale. They are separated one from another by the Takla Makan desert, and have been conquered and re-conquered during their whole history at bewilderingly short intervals, an experience which does not make for progress in art.

We rode all over Kashgar and its environs, and also visited every building of any pretensions in Yarkand and Khotan, but found nothing of real architectural merit; nor could any mosque or shrine compare with the magnificent monuments of India or Persia. As to Chinese architecture, it must be borne in mind that the conquerors would scarcely raise fine temples in a country which they looked upon as a land of temporary exile; moreover, buildings constructed of mud crumble away in the course of centuries, and it has been the custom of some of the many rulers of Turkestan to destroy the places of worship erected by those of another religion. For example, Yakub Beg, when he made himself ruler of Turkestan, set to work to raze all Chinese monuments to the ground, and perhaps the two ruined Buddhist stupas to the north and south of the Consulate owe their dilapidated condition partly to the fury of the early Mohamedan conquerors. At present these Tims, as the Kashgaris call them, are shapeless mounds giving no idea of their original form. Sir Aurel Stein, who has carefully examined them, believes that they date from between 600 and 800 A.D.; but too little was left for him to have any opinion as to what they looked like when erected. It seems curious that, although Kashgar is supposed to be on the site of Kie-sha, visited by Hiuen-Tsiang, yet these two stupas are apparently all that remains of the hundreds of Buddhist monasteries that he mentions.

RUINS OF THE BUDDHIST TIM, KASHGAR.

Page 85.

CHAPTER V

OLLA PODRIDA

It is doubtful if these Central Asian towns ever change. Their dull mud walls, mud houses, mud mosques look as if they would remain the same for ever. In most climates they would be washed away, but in Central Asia there is hardly any rain and so they stay on for ages....

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,” would be a particularly appropriate motto to place over the gateway of a Central Asian town.—The Heart of a Continent, Sir F. Younghusband.