Bokharan

women

zealots, but a city of merchants. It contains a peaceful, industrious, artisan population utterly unfitted for war, and as wanting in martial instinct as in capacity. The hostility to strangers, and particularly to Christians, sometimes degenerating into the grossest fanaticism, upon which earlier travellers have enlarged, has either disappeared from closer contact with civilisation, or is prudently disguised. I attribute it rather to the former cause, and to the temperate conduct of the Russians in their dealings with the natives; because not even when I wandered about alone, and there was no motive for deception, did I observe the smallest indication of antagonism or repugnance. Many a face expressed that blank and haughty curiosity which the meanest Oriental can so easily assume; but I met with no rudeness or interference. On the contrary, the demeanour of the people was friendly, and no one when interrogated declined to answer a question. An acquaintance of the previous day would salute you as you passed by placing his hand on his breast and stroking his beard. I never quite knew what to do on these occasions. For not having a beard to stroke, I feared it might be thought undignified or contrary to etiquette to finger the empty air.

I have frequently been asked since my return-it is the question which an Englishman always seems to ask first-what the women of Bokhara were like? I am utterly unable to say. I never saw the features. of one between the ages of ten and fifty. The little girls ran about, unveiled, in loose silk frocks, and

wore their hair in long plaits escaping from a tiny skull-cap. Similarly the old hags were allowed to exhibit their innocuous charms, on the ground, I suppose, that they could excite no dangerous emotions. But the bulk of the female population were veiled in a manner that defied and even repelled scrutiny. For not only were the features concealed behind a heavy black horsehair veil, falling from the top of the head to the bosom, but their figures were loosely wrapped up in big blue cotton dressing-gowns, the sleeves of which are not used but are pinned together over the shoulders at the back and hang down to the ground, where from under this shapeless mass of drapery appear a pair of feet encased in big leather boots. After this I should be more or less than human if I were to speak enthusiastically of the Bokharan ladies. Not even the generous though fanciful interpretation of Moore, who sang of

that deep blue melancholy dress

Bokhara's maidens wear in mindfulness

Of friends or kindred, dead, or far away,

could reconcile me to so utter an abnegation of feminine duty.

buildings

tice

From the people I pass to the city. In a place Religious so arrogant of its spiritual reputation, it is not sur- and prac prising that religious edifices should abound. Their number has, however, been greatly exaggerated. A devout Sunnite of Bokhara boasts that he can worship Allah in a different mosque on each day of the year. But this number must probably be halved. Similarly

the alleged total of one hundred and sixty medresses, or religious colleges, is about double the actual figure. Both mosque and medresse are, with scarce an exception, in a state of great dilapidation and decay; the beautiful enamelled tiles, bearing in blue and white characters texts from the Koran, having fallen or been stripped from the lofty pishtaks or

façades, and the interiors being in a state of great squalor. In a panorama of the city are conspicuous three domes covered with azure tiles. One of these belongs to the great mosque Musjid Baliand, or Kalian, variously reported to have been built or restored by Timur, where the Jumma, or Friday service, is held, attended by the Amir, and in the presence,

theoretically, of the entire population. The mosque consists of a vast open court surrounded by a double and sometimes a triple colonnade. Here it was that in 1219 Jenghiz Khan, riding into the mosque, and, being told that it was the House of God, dismounted, ascended the pulpit, and flinging the Koran on to the ground, cried out: The hay is cut; give your horses fodder'-a permission which his savage horde quickly interpreted as authority for a wholesale massacre. The two other domes surmount the largest medresse of Miri Arab, standing opposite, said to contain one hundred and fourteen cells, and to have attached to it two hundred and thirty mullahs, and exhibiting in its structural detail the best decorative work in Bokhara. These buildings are typical of the religious life and even of the faith of the people, which, in the degradation of morals so conspicuous in the East of this century, and partly owing to contact with a civilisation whose politic avoidance of proselytism or persecution has encouraged indifference, have become a hollow form, veiling hypocrisy and corruption. The fanaticism of the dervishes or kalendars, as they are called in the Arabian Nights,' of whom there used to be many orders in Bokhara, living in tekkehs or convents, and who stirred a dangerous bigotry by their wild movements and appeals, has subsided or taken the form of a mendicancy which, if unattractive, does not threaten a breach of the peace. Religious toleration, inculcated on the one side, has developed on the other with an astonishing rapidity.

N

The Great
Minaret

Between the Musjid Baliand and the Miri Arab rises the tapering shaft of the Minari Kalian, or Great Minaret, whence criminals are thrown headlong, and which no European had hitherto been allowed to ascend. I have since heard that in the early part of the present year this rule was for the first time in history relaxed. The tower, which we had already seen from the railway, and which reminded me somewhat of the celebrated Kutub Minar, near Delhi, is nearly two hundred feet high, and is built of concentric rows of bricks stamped with decorative patterns, and converging towards the summit, where is an open gallery, on the roof of which reposes an enormous stork's nest. Some natives sitting at the base informed me that the keys were not forthcoming, but that on Fridays the doors flew mysteriously open. Their refusal to allow Christians to mount to the top has always been attributed to the fear that from that height sacrilegious eyes, looking down upon the flat roofs of the town, might probe a little too deeply the secrets of female existence. I succeeded in obtaining a very fair panorama of the city by climbing to one of the highest points of the numerous cemeteries scattered throughout the place.1 From there was spread out around me a wilderness of flat clay roofs, above whose level surface towered the Ark or citadel, built on a lofty mound, the Great Minaret, the ruined pishtaks of medresses, and the turquoise domes.

1 Khanikoff says there are thirteen inside the city walls. Burnes, by an extraordinary oversight, appears to have overlooked them; and yet they are a very noticeable feature.