Difficulties of the railway direct their journey. The nightes for the more parte be brighter than the dayes, wherfore in the daye time the countrey is wild and unpassible, when they can neither finde any tracte nor waye to go in, nor marke or signe wherby to passe, the starres beying hidden by the miste. If the same winde chaunce to come durying the time that men be passying, it overwhelmeth them with sande. Not less accurate, and perhaps even more realistic, is the narrative of the illustrious Spanish Hidalgo Don Ruy de Clavijo, who, crossing the Oxus sands on December 10, 1404, on his homeward journey from a mission to the Court of Timur at Samarkand, wrote as follows: On the banks there were great plains of sand, and the sand was moved from one part to another by the wind, and was thrown up in mounds. In this sandy waste there are great valleys and hills, and the wind blew the sand away from one hill to another, for it was very light; and on the ground, where the wind had blown away the sand, the marks of waves were left; and men could not keep their eyes on this sand when the sun was shining.' This was the most difficult section of the line to build, there being next to no natural vegetation to aid in fixing the sands, and the displacement when gales blew being tremendous. I have mentioned that the Russians are now in some places beginning to plant the saraoul. This is a slight atonement for the foolish economy which led them, on their first arrival, almost to exterminate it in several districts for the sake of fuel. Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour at Samarkand, A.D. 1403. Translated by Clements R. Markham for the Hakluyt Society, 1859. A relic of this mistaken policy in the shape of big stacks of gnarled roots and boughs may still be seen at several of the stations, which in this region are little more than rude shanties built of a few planks and half-buried in the sand. I expect that if General Annenkoff begins to expend his credit in this horrible waste, the major part will be swallowed up before he emerges on the other side. At last, after a whole day of this desolation, we again come to cultivated land separated by a line The Oxus that might have been drawn by a rule from the Kara Kum. Passing at a slight distance the town and fort of Tcharjui, where Bokharan territory begins, and which is commanded by a Beg or native Governor, the railway traverses six miles of orchard and garden and brings us at length to the source and giver of this great bounty, the Amu Daria or Oxus itself. There in the moonlight gleamed before us the broad bosom of the mighty river that from the glaciers of the Pamir rolls its 1,500 miles of current down to Width and the Aral Sea. In my ears were continually ringing the beautiful words of Matthew Arnold, who alone of English poets has made the great Central Asian river the theme of his muse, and has realised its extraordinary and mysterious personality. Just as when upon its sandy marge the hero Rustum bewailed his dead son, so now before our eyes the majestic river floated on Out of the mist and hum of that low land Into the frosty twilight, and there moved Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste The Gihon of Eden, that encompasseth the whole land of Ethiopia,' the Vak-shu of Sanskrit literature, the Oxus of the Greeks, the Amu Daria, or River-Sea, of the Tartars-no river, not even the Nile, can claim a nobler tradition, or a more illustrious history. Descending from the hidden Roof of the world,' its waters tell of forgotten peoples and whisper secrets of unknown lands. They are believed to have rocked the cradle of our race. Long the legendary watermark between Iran and Turan, they have worn a channel deep into the fate of humanity. World-wide conquerors, an Alexander and a Tamerlane, slaked their horses' thirst in the Oxus stream; Eastern poets drank inspiration from its fountains; Arab geographers boasted of it as superior in volume, in depth, and in breadth to all the rivers of the earth.' The bed of the Amu Daria-i.e. the depression of channel which is covered in time of high water--is here between appearance 1 Genesis ii. 13. |