the Syr Daria or Jaxartes, and, after the conquest of Khiva and practical absorption of Bokhara in 1873, of the Amu Daria or Oxus, would provide the requisite channels of connection; and a great deal was heard of the future Aral flotilla. But the difficulties arising from the river navigation, which have not to this day been successfully surmounted, speedily threw these schemes into the background, and the plan of a Central Asian Railway began to take definite shape. In 1873 a Russian official was entrusted with the duty of preparing a report on the feasibility of constructing a line from Orenburg to Tashkent; and early in the same year, M. Cotard, who had been one of the engineers employed upon the Suez Canal, meeting M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose hands were for the moment empty, at Constantinople, suggested to him this fresh field of conquest.

M. de Lesseps was nothing loth. He at once put pen to paper, and in a letter dated May 1, 1873, to General Ignatieff, then Russian Ambassador at Constantinople (followed later on by one to the Emperor Alexander II.), he unfolded the details of his scheme, which was no less than the recommendation of a through railway from Calais to Calcutta, a distance of 7,500 miles-the portion from Orenburg to Samarkand to be laid by Russia, and from Samarkand to Peshawur by England. General Ignatieff replied with ready enthusiasm, welcoming the idea because of its commercial and political importance, and not least because it would show to the world the

Scheme of

M. Ferdi

and de

Lesseps

Attitude of

England

essentially pacific and civilising character of Russian influence in those regions.' He further declared his 'intimate conviction that this grandiose enterprise, though it might appear at first sight both risky and chimerical, was yet destined to be realised in a future more or less near.' The indefatigable M. de Lesseps then went to Paris, where a small society was formed to undertake the preliminary topographical surveys. These were to be submitted to a committee of experts, who were to report upon the technical feasibility of the enterprise, and on its future commercial and fiscal advantages. Definite local surveys were next to be made, backed by a financial company; and, finally, the work of construction was to commence, and to last for six years.

Meanwhile, however, the consent of another high contracting party was required; and M. de Lesseps had in the interim opened communications with Lord Granville. In England the project was not received with much alacrity; and when certain of the French engineers, who had been despatched to India to reconnoitre the ground, arrived upon the Afghan frontier, permission was refused to them to advance beyond, on account of the difficulties in which England might thereby be involved with those turbulent regions. After their return to Europe, the project languished; and before long M. de Lesseps, scenting a more favourable spoil in another hemisphere, withdrew his attention and his patronage to the Panama Canal. Since then the idea, in its original shape, has not again been heard of.

Trans

Railway

For some time afterwards the design of a Central Idea of a Asian Railway slumbered. But the commencement caspian of the series of Russian campaigns against the Turkomans in 1877, and the gradual shifting of the centre of political gravity in Central Asia from Turkestan to Transcaspia brought about its revival in another shape, and has since ended in its realisation, not, however, by a line over the steppes from the North, but by one from the Caspian and the West. It was in 1879, while General Lomakin was prosecuting his series of ill-adventured expeditions against the Akhal Tekkes that mention was first made of a Transcaspian Railway (his successor, General Tergukasoff laying stress upon the idea in a report upon the unsuccessful campaign of that year, and upon the proper means by which to subjugate the Akhal Oasis); and in 1880, after Skobeleff had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, in order to retrieve the Russian laurels, that the work was actually taken in hand.

of the plan

leff

At that time it was supposed that the subjugation Adoption of the Turkoman steppes would entail a much more by Skobearduous task than subsequently proved to be the case, the disastrous defeat of Lomakin at the Tekke fort of Denghil Tepe, more commonly known as Geok Tepe, in September 1879, having profoundly discouraged the Russians. Skobeleff was accordingly given carte blanche in his selection both of the manner and means of operation. He was commissioned to conquer and to annex; but was allowed to do both after his own fashion. Now the main difficulty in the preceding campaign had arisen

from the scarcity and loss of transport animals. During the expedition of 1879, 8,377 camels had perished out of a total of 12,273 employed; and at the end of Skobeleff's own campaign, a year and a half later, only 350 remained out of a total of 12,596.1 To meet this initial drawback, it was suggested to Skobeleff that he should employ a light railroad. While his base still remained at Tchikishliar, near the mouth of the Atrek River, on the Caspian, a service of traction engines was projected by General Petrusevitch, and subsequently a tramway to the edge of the Akhal Oasis. But Skobeleff having almost immediately resolved to shift his main base northwards to Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku, a new set of proposals saw the light. A genuine railroad was now spoken of. A proposal made by an American contractor named Berry, who offered to construct a line from the Caspian to Kizil Arvat, a distance of 145 miles, at his own expense, with material brought from some disused railroad in the States, and upon completion, either to hand it over to the Government, or to continue its working with an annual state guarantee of 132,000l., was refused; and General Annenkoff, formerly military attaché at Paris, and at that time. Comptroller of the Transport Department of the Russian Army, who had been entrusted in 1877 with the transport arrangements in the Turkish war, and had had considerable experience of military railways since, was invited by the Commander-in-Chief to his

1 Vide The War in Turkomania. By General N. I. Grodekoff. Chaps. ii. and xi.

aid. He recommended the use of 100 miles of steel rails that had been purchased for use in the Balkan peninsula in 1878, in the event of the collapse of the Congress at Berlin, and had been lying idly stored ever since in European Russia. These were at once

transhipped to Michaelovsk, a point on the coast considerably to the south of Krasnovodsk which was selected by Annenkoff as the starting point of the line; but even so, no decision was yet arrived at as to a permanent broad-gauge line, orders having been given