where to put down his wooden fork.

He has to place the coarse gunpowder in the pan, then strike fire with the flint to ignite the tinder, and proceeds to tap upon the powder for at least five minutes. The rusty gun bursts, the fork tumbles down, and where the ball has gone to God only knows.

Besides this dissimilarity in arms, we have to consider the utter want of union, which disabled the natives of Central Asia from a vigorous defence of an invading power. Bokhara may well be taken for the leading state in Central Asia; but her influence over the neighbouring khanates was never of such an extent as to rally the Khivans, the Khokandians, and Turkomans around her flag, nor was the Emir himself sufficiently penetrated by the necessity of such assistance. He was proud, haughty, and over selfconfident. His conceitedness vied with his stupidity, and when I met him in Samarkand he asked me, amongst other things, whether the Sultan of Turkey could boast of an army as formidable as his own, an army with which he might have conquered China if he were disposed to do so. As to his subjects, I noticed that they had not even the slightest foreboding of the approaching Russian danger, and when alluding to such an eventuality I generally got for an answer: "Hadji, do not speak about it; the soil of Samarkand and Bokhara is so full of the remains of

departed saints and pious Mohammedans that infidels will die as soon as they set foot upon it." Ludicrous, childish remarks, which certainly were forgotten when the armies of Bokhara, Khokand, and Khiva were defeated; and, strange to say, these very boasting, overweening men were the first to submit to Russian rule, and to look upon the new state of things as a matter long ago decreed by the will of Almighty God.

To sum up briefly, Bokhara, Khiva, and Khokand fell one after the other. Russia reached the left bank of the Oxus; she obtained what she had been long coveting. She now could have rounded off her possessions from Siberia to the very heart of Asia; for in reaching the Oxus, this old natural frontier between Iranians and Turanians, she then might have been satisfied with having brought nearly the whole of the Tartar race under her sway; the great work of civilisation which she wrote upon her banners could have been quietly begun. But the politicians at St. Petersburg had objects quite different in view. Humanitarian purposes are only the clever bait invented to catch the credulous statesmen of Europe. Russia cherished other far-reaching schemes, in the furtherance of which she crossed frontiers many a thousand years old, and, disregarding any eventual complications, merrily rushed into her adventures on the left bank of the Oxus.

CHAPTER III.

THE MATERIAL AND MORAL VICTORY AT GEOK-TEPE.

THE Russian move on the left bank of the Oxus might have been viewed from the very beginning as the unmistakable sign of her ulterior designs against India. In conquering the three khanates of Turkestan, we are disposed to conclude that Russian politicians made a failure of it, and that they only subsequently found out that the route leading from Orenburg towards the Oxus was a very difficult highway for an army intending to march from the interior of the mother country towards the Suleiman range. Judging from the attempt to build a railway from Orenburg to Tashkend, which afterwards failed, in spite of the exertions of M. Lesseps, who promised the world to run a train from Calais to Calcutta, 7,500 miles long, in nine days, we may assume that the Russians had really over-rated the possession of the khanates, and found out that Central Asia, which has ever since charged the exchequer with a deficit varying of from eight to

ten millions of roubles annually, will never pay, and will always remain a barren acquisition to the State. Well, as far as this burden is concerned, we will not deny the fact that the expenses of a European administration, be it even a Russian one, will never be defrayed by the income. It will always prove an expensive colony-a luxurious acquisition; but Russia had nevertheless to submit to this sacrifice in the interests of her ulterior schemes. She was compelled to secure in her rear a safe position, whilst she had the intention of moving on the main line from the south-west towards the south-east-I mean from southern Russia across the Caucasus, the Caspian, and along the northern border of Persia to the goal of her desire. This was the route originally conceived for the Russian march against India; and the endurance, astuteness, and cleverness with which this line of communication was begun and continued, are really unrivalled in the history of conquering nations.

Our space is too limited to dwell here at length upon the details of this plan, carried on for nearly two centuries. We shall speak rather of that portion which relates to the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, and state that Russian aggression dates as far back as 1825, when the afterwards famous Muravieff started on his mission to Khiva from Krasnovodsk, in order to explore the desert and to bring home information

about this little or scarcely known tract of country. Immediately after him followed in 1835 Karelin, who investigated the shore from the Gurgan river as far as Krasnovodsk, and since that time scarcely a year has elapsed without some Russian officers, under the guise of the famous Russian scientific expeditions, visiting this shore to continue the explorations. The result of it was that whilst the rest of Europe remained in utter ignorance about the people and the country on the eastern shore of the Caspian, Russia was pretty well informed as to the geographical position of that country, as well as to the mutual relations of the Turkoman inhabitants. The picture drawn by Galkin may well be defective, but it is the first reliable report, and I do not exaggerate when I state that since the occupation of Ashurada Russians were by no means strangers amongst the Yomuts and Goklans. Having duly reconnoitered the country, the proper move against the Turkomans began only after the subjugation of the three khanates, and particularly after the horrible massacre of the Turkomans subject to Khiva in 1873. The bloody affair of Kizil-Takir, in which nearly 10,000 Turkoman Yomuts lost their lives, Ichilled the blood of their brethren on the south of the Balkans. The Russian position at Tchekishlar was easily secured, and in fact no serious fight took place during the whole time that the Russians had