THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN ON THE OXUS.*
(FIRST NOTICE.]
ON the 19th of April, 1878, two American gentlemen, Mr.. Schuyler, chargé d'affaires of the United States at St. Petersburg, and Mr. MacGahan, correspondent of the New York Herald, the former on a general tour of observation in Central Asia, the latter on his way to Khiva, found themselves fifty miles east of the northern shores of the Aral Sea, near the Yaxartes. They had accomplished four weeks of travel, day and night, across the level frozen steppes of Russia, and the broad, snowy plains of Asia, with the thermometer ranging from 80° to 50° below zero ; and the journey had been an incessant struggle against Russian perversity, Kirghiz stolidity, the weakness of half-starved horses, and the obstinacy of refractory and ever-howling camels,—from their departure from Saratof, on the Volga, to their arrival at. Kuala, Fort No. 1, or, as the author calls it, " the entering wedge of the Russians into Central Asia." The story of this. journey, from the moment when, having crossed the Ural on the ice, the travellers left Europe behind them, and began to traverse the vast level plains of Central Asia, is full of fascinating interest ; of days passed, " some in wild, fierce storms of snow and sleet, howling as if all the demons of the steppe were up in arms, some in bright, intolerable, blistering sunshine ;" of nights, when the travellers wake from a half-frozen sleep, to see nothing but the wide, snowy steppe, ghostly in the moonlight. The post stationsare merely holes in the ground, covered with reeds and earth ; other human habitation there is none. Count of time is lost in the awful monotony of the plains, "level as a floor, where for weeks one sees nothing but snow and sky ; where one is the moving centre of a horizon-bounded plain, that seems to move with one, and hang upon one, and weigh one down like a monstrous millstone. There are the breadth and loneliness of the ocean, without its movement ; the cold and icy silence of the Arctic regions, without the glory of the Arctic nights or the grandeur of the Arctic mountains,—the silent desolation of an unpeopled * Campaigning on The arra, and the Pall of Sidra. By J. A. IfseCishan, Corre- spondent of the New York Herald. London : Sampson Low, Son, and Co.
world." As they approached to the Syr-Darya (Yaxartes) the weather grew warmer, and we find this charming sketch :—
"The plain changes its snowy mantle for one of delicious green ; the air grows soft and balmy with the breath of spring, and begins to be laden with the odour of wild-flowers. We meet everywhere the Kirghiz, with their tents and camels, out already from their winter quarters, on their annual migration northwards, and the plain is dotted with their flocks and herds. Then we come into the desert of the Kara-Kum, through which we plod slowly ; and at last, one bright, sunny afternoon, we ascend a sandy dune, and hail with delight the dark blue waters of the Aral Sea, lying in the midst of the waste of yellow sands, and glimmering in the sunlight like a turquoise set in gold. Darkly calm and silent it lies, in the midst of the sandy desolation that surrounds it. Here its banks are rolling hillocks covered with brushwood, but far away can be seen, rising abrupt and precipitous, the western shore, in a serrated, mountainous range, and standing out in the evening sunshine bare and bleak, like mountains of rugged brass. It is a picture of strange and weird loneliness, according well with the sinister desolation of the surrounding waste."
When Mr. MacGahan reached Kazala, he found that the Russian campaign against Khiva was farther advanced than he had ex- pected, and that the resolution he had formed, to join the expedition, and do his duty to his employer at any cost in danger and toil, was likely to be tested. The Kazala column, under the command of Colonel Goloff, which he had hoped, when he left St. Petersburg, to meet at Kazala, had marched a month before to join General Kaufmann, who was leading the Tashkent detachment in person, and of whom nothing was know since he left Tashkent. It was supposed that the united columns might even have already reached the Oxus. This was disheartening for the Special Correspondent ; 300 miles of desert, the greater part of the distance being enemy's country, lay between 'him and the column he had expected to meet ; but he resolved to attempt the crossing of that desert (the Kyzil-Kum) alone, .on the trail of the Kazala detachment. With swift horses and a good guide, he thought he could reach the Oxus in eight days, before Kaufmann would have passed it ; and once there, he would " trust to his star," if the army had crossed, for getting over somehow, and evading the Khivan cavalry that would probably be hanging on its rear. While he was endeavouring to procure the swift horses and the good guide, Captain Verestchagin, the commandant of the fort, informed him that he could not be permitted to start upon so dangerous a journey without the sanction of the Governor-General—Kaufmann himself—and as he was then somewhere in the Kyzil Kum, and it must take weeks to communicate with him, this prohibition signified utter defeat of the plans of the intrepid Special Corre- spondent. What was to be done? Captain Verestchagin was much too sharp to be outwitted, and there was nothing for it but to go on to the second fort, Perovsky, and make the attempt from thence. At Perovsky, Mr. MacGahan found Colonel Rodionoff, a more compliant person, in authority. He endured much delay, and infinite cheating at the hands of his rascally Tartar servant Mamatoff, but at last, on the 30th of April, he started with Mamatoff, a guide, and a Kirghiz boy, whose duties were of the nondescript or odd-job kind ; crossed the Yaxartes in a ferry-boat, waved an adieu from the other side to Mr. Schuyler, and " plunged into the desert," expedited by a well- founded fear that Colonel Rodionoff might change his mind, and send for him.
The previous journey has but a faint flavour of romance and .adventure, in comparison with that which pervades the narrative of the twenty-nine days to which the subsequent journey pro- longed itself, under conditions which included some of the severest forms of bodily suffering, and appalling loneliness " among the robbers." Mr. MacGahan claims to be the only " white man " who ,has ever traversed this desert by that same route, under similar conditions. When he halted in a little glade, where there was an aul or Kirghiz wandering village, consisting of four or five kibitkas (tents), he made his first trial of the line of action he had pro- posed to himself. He was heavily armed, he had sufficient pro- perty to make a rich prize for the richest among these people, who have the reputation of being robbers and murderers. "When starting into the desert," says Mr. MacGahan, " I knew I must adopt one of two systems in dealing with such a people. Either fight them, or throw myself on their hospitality; I chose the latter .system." This is the first of many interesting pictures of the desert life,—the first-fruits of the choice he had made, when he and Mamatoff rode up to the largest tent in the aul :— " The Kirghiz motioned me to dismount ; I complied, and he then shook hands with me, stroking his beard, and pronouncing a salaam. I was next led into the kibitka with the gravest politeness, and invited to seat myself on sundry bright-coloured rugs and carpets, which were spread across one-half of the tent for my reception. On entering the 'tent, I unslung my Winchester, and handed it, along with my belt and revolver, to my host. Then throwing myself on the ground, I enjoyed the soft rags and bright fire which burnt in the middle, and sent up a column of blue smoke through a hole in the top. My host hung my arms up in the tent, and then went out to see what my people were doing with the horses, leaving me to the care of two high-cheeked, small-eyed women, who, going about their household duties, cast on me, from time to time, a curious but discreet glance. The scene was a pretty one. Through the open side of the tent I could see the horses cropping the rich grass, the children playing about the green, the smoke curling over the kibitkas in a cosy way, and the river rushing by with a subdued murmur. The children of these nomads, BO far from beinr, shy of strangers, were not in the least afraid of me, and one half-naked, black-eyed little fellow came tumbling into my arms, when I held them out to him, with a childish trust that was delightful."
The following days' march took the traveller into the desert proper, where the auls were few and far between, and the river was lost to view. Thenceforth the more he saw of the Kirghiz, the more he liked the kind, honest, hospitable, and happy people, of whom he says, " I should be sorry indeed ever to see them inoculated with our civilisation and its attendant vices." He
gives a very interesting account of the migrations of the tribes (pp. 50-2), by which it seems that they are conducted on so exact a system, though none appears to exist, that it may be unerringly predicted to a day where, in a circuit of several hundred miles, any aul will be at any season of the year. It was not long before the journey began to involve great suffering, from pitiless heat by day and terrible cold by night, from the stupor of excessive fatigue, and from the endurance and apprehension of thirst. In four days they travelled 200 miles, and on the fourth they lost their way, and came to an utterly desolate place, where there was no water. After many hours of terrible suffering, during which
Mr. MacGahan says, "my throat seemed to be on fire, and the fever mounted to my head ; my eyes grew inflamed and unsteady," they struck the road over which the Grand Duke Nicholas had passed, and found a shallow pool of slimy water, thick with mud, the taste of which remained for days. They drank of it, and threw themselves exhausted on the sand. The next day they crossed the dry bed of a large canal, ascended a hill, discovered the crumbling foundations of an outer wall, and mounting higher,
found themselves among the ruins of an ancient city. Two hours' march beyond they came to an earthwork on the edge of an arid plain, before which stood a crowd of Russian soldiers and officers, watching their approach. This was Irkibal, and as Mr. MacGahan came up on one side, there approached on the other the caravan of the Khivan Ambassador, who travelled with an escort of twenty-five Cossacks, a number of followers, and thirty camels ; who distinguished himself by arriving too late everywhere, and who, having followed Kaufmann from Kazala into the desert, conducted his march with such leisurely dignity that he came up with the Russian General some days after Khiva had fallen, when, as the writer remarks, " the importance of his mission had somewhat diminished." Mr. Mac- Gahan, unimpeded by the Russian officers at Irkibal, came up with and passed the caravan of the embassy at the entrance of "the Thirsty Desert," which offers the greatest danger to the traveller, and surrounds him with the greatest horrors. The face of the country is very fair. " Gentle elevations roll off in every direction, covered with rich, dark verdure, and the sun, shining down from an unclouded sky, turns the spots of yellow sand into patches of golden light." But all this is deceptive :—
"Those gentle hills are only sand, and the verdure which clothes them hides horrors. Blossoms shoot up, ripen, die, and rot in the course of a few days. The verdure consists of but a rank, soft weed, that breaks out into an eruptive kind of flower, which, dropping off at the slightest touch, emits a most offensive odour. Beneath the broad leaves lurk scorpions, tarantulas, immense lizards—often five or six feet long—turtles and serpents, and the putrifying bodies of dead camels. Once lost in this desert ocean, without guide or water, you may wander for days until you and your horse sink exhausted, to die of thirst, with the noxious weed for bed, winding-sheet, and grave."
Sixty miles of this hideous expanse, which must surely be far more terrible in its horrible orders of animal life than the great American desert, where no life is, have to be traversed before a well is reached,—the well of Kyzil-kak, one of those of which the author says :—" Nobody ever saw them dry, no- body knows by whom they were dug, and they are now in exactly the same state as when the hosts of Tamerlane slaked their thirst at them." Here a startling piece of intelligence awaited Mr. MacGahan, as he exchanged salutations with the leader of a caravan, who informed him that the Russian army was at ten days' distance, and in a different direction from that ,which he had supposed. It might be weeks before he could nowDlope to over- take General Kaufmann. Must he give it up ? No, he will go on ; and he does go on, with a new guide, turning away from the cara- van-route through the Bukan Tau Mountains, to Khala-ata, following an unexplored route, which no other " white man " has ever trod. The story becomes dreadful here ; men and animals are starving ; his faithful, sturdy, little black horse, whose load bas been removed and divided among the others, in the vain hope that he may yet hold on, stumbles, and falls with a groan in the sand. "Taking off his saddle and bridle, we left him alone, to die in the gloom of the desert." Why did they not shoot him ? Terror began to beset them. Mr. MacGahan did not believe he :should find Kaufmann at Khala-ata, though the Caravan-Bashi had assured him that the General was there. Long ere this he must have reached the Oxus. The follower of the phantom asks himself .—" The savage Turkomans will be hanging on his flanks, harassing his march ; how shall I, with my tired horses, break though their lines, and reach the army? The death of our horse seemed but the harbinger of our own doom,— the beginning of the end." They go on, however, through the scrubby brushwood, up the steep ascents, where their horses pant and struggle with the horrible sand, over the earth, hard as atone pavement, until the night comes, when they throw them- selves on the sands for a few moments' repose,—only a few moments, for delay means the rising of the red, angry sun, and thirst and hunger, even unto death. Up and on again through the desert, over a low range of hills of red, rotten sandstone, which lie barren and bare under the burning sun, with no leaf, or blade of grass, or sign of life, but from whose summit they gaze over a level plain on the noble curve of a mountain chain, the Urta Tan, just beyond which, the guide tells them, is Khala-ata. But there is the rugged and dangerous slope to descend, and then a weary, desolate plain—not of sand this time, with its bites of wormwood, and its patches of brown desert grass—but of hope- less dust, in which nothing grows, and when they camp, in terror of the Turkomans, the horses, after a march of fifty miles, have neither food nor water. That was a dreadful night, but at sunrise they found a well of good water, and half an hour later they looked from the summit of the Urta Tau upon a bleak, arid plain,—like the one they had just crossed,—with a dome-like mound in the middle, surrounded with small tents, shining white in the morning sun, and upon white masses of soldiers and the glitter of bayonets. It was Rhala-ata, but General Kaufmann had marched away from the fortress five days ago, and Colonel Weimarn, the officer in command, not only denied the intrepid traveller shelter and provision for himself and his attendants, and food for his horses, but roughly refused to permit him to continue his journey.
Previous page
