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only be found in Persia, China, or India, and on the question of which it is to be hinges the whole Central Asian controversy. The problem is rendered more complicated by the fact that neither in Persia nor in China could England permit Russia to encroach any further. By encroachments in the first country our empire in India would be menaced more nearly than before; and by any change in the second, other interests, scarcely less important, would be seriously jeoparded. But it is evident that all recent Russian explorations tend to show that the Russian Government has sanctioned them only for the furtherance of its own selfish ends. Science owes nothing to them, for not only have they not been undertaken in its interests, but their principal results have also been concealed. Russian explorations are but the precursors of an advancing army; and those travellers whom we have mentioned are only the scouts of General Kaufmann's battalions. When Russia begins to perform her duty to the nationalities upon whom she has forced her rule, then we shall be more willing to do justice to the enterprise and courage of the by no means undistinguished band of Russian travellers. But until then we can only refuse to consider that they have conferred any service on mankind in general.

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CHAPTER II.

THE AMOU DARYA.*

EVERY large river has a history of some kind or another; but few rivers have one so interesting as that of the Amou Darya, the Oxus of the ancients. There is none certainly in Central Asia that can vie with it either in point of historical associations or of present practical utility. In olden days it was the Oxus alone which made Khwaresm one of the most fertile countries in Western Asia, and which rendered the dynasty of the Chaghtai Khans respectable as well as formidable among its neighbours; and at the present time it is to the Oxus that some of the more prudent and foreseeing of Russians look for that prosperity which is as yet unknown to Khiva and Kara Kum. The Russian authorities have extended a benevolent patronage to the schemes of these persons, both because if they ever became realised they must materially facilitate military operations, and at the least, if those

*See Sir H. Rawlinson's monograph on the Oxus; and Major Wood's "Shores of Lake Aral."

military operations were considered undesirable or useless, they would bring an increased amount of prosperity to a region already Russian or about to become Russian. In fact, the schemes which have for many years been suggested with regard to the Oxus, of which we shall treat specifically by and by, must either enable Russian troops to be carried more easily to the Indian frontier, or must prove that the undertaking of invading India from Turkestan is an impossibility. In the latter case the diversion of the Oxus from its present course to one disemboguing into the Caspian, will at all events have fertilised a region that is now desert, and will have opened up an easy trade route between Russia and Bokhara, the central mart of Western Asia. Even as a pis aller the schemes* which we have referred to would have accomplished this much; so it is not to be wondered at that Prince Gortchakoff himself, and other responsible persons, should have patronised them in some special manner.

But although the history of the Oxus is so full of historical interest and of practical importance, it would be rash, however, to narrate it here after the very instructive account Major Wood has placed before the English reader in his "Shores of Lake Aral." A recent event, nothing less than a diversion, however slight, in the course of this river, gives a fresh aspect to the subject, and admits of some description in amplification of that for which we are indebted to the

* Consult operations of "The Company for encouraging Industry and Commerce," founded at St. Petersburg in 1870.

author just mentioned. The reader must understand that the credit for the historical portion of the narrative is mainly due to Major Wood, whose account is little more than condensed here. Since the year 1874 such information as has been published is given in further explanation of the bursting through of the dam at Bend, which had been constructed to block the entrance to the Loudon canal.

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We need not direct our attention on the present occasion to the information which Greek and Arabian geographers have afforded as to the old course of the Oxus, and of those other rivers which, known as the Amol and Arzass, flowed from the Oxus itself, or from the Aral, into the Caspian Sea. And our interest is also exclusively confined to those of its branches. which appear to have been main channels in the olden time. Of these the Doudon and the Kunya-daryalik are the most important. Both of these branch off from the Oxus a short distance north of the town of Khiva, and they are each traceable to a common destination, the salt lake of Sarykamish. Beyond Sarykamish this channel becomes the Uzboi, which is marked across the Kara Kum desert to the Caspian Sea at the bay of Balkhan. Of each of these channels Major Wood says that their "dimensions are sufficiently large to allow of their having anciently been main courses of the river."

With regard to the Doudon, which is the Turcoman for "steep -a name which Vambery and others apply to the Oghus, or Uzboi-it branches off from the Oxus at a point almost facing the Russian port of Petro

Alexandrovsk, and immediately north of the town of Khiva. Following a north-west course, and then a due west one, it reaches Sarykamish in longitude 57; but of this channel we possess less authentic information than of the others. It is believed, however, that its further course has been choked up, and that the furrow in the soil is not perceptible much beyond the vicinity of Khiva itself. The term Oghus is applied by German writers to the Uzboi, which is generally accepted as the main channel from Sarykamish to the Caspian, whichever may have been the principal link between that lake and the river itself. The Kunyadarya-lik (the old little river) leaves the Oxus at a point fifteen miles lower down the river than the Doudon, and runs in a direct north-westerly course to the city of Kunya Urgendj, and it then passes under the base of the Tchink into the Sarykamish lake. This branch has generally been considered the main channel, and the term Uzboi has been extended so as to embrace that channel known as the Kunya-darya-lik. Major Wood expresses the opinion that the Uzboi was more probably "the channel of that other river into which the southerly overflow from Lake Aral finally resolved itself, and which is mentioned by Masudi in the tenth century;" but here we take it as the principal channel of the Oxus, because it is in all probability by means of it alone that the course of that river can be effectually diverted.

Whether the Kunya-darya-lik or the Doudon was the main course of the Oxus in olden days matters little at present; and the only practical problem that

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