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He had culled his first laurels at Khiva and Khokand, and now came to the shores of the Caspian to carry forward the standards which he hoped one day to plant on the walls of Delhi. His disclaimer of any such intention to Mr. At once the operations felt the influence of his active, cheery, and commanding personality.
Along the banks of these streams the soil is fertile, and where irrigation is employed the crops are abundant. In the vicinity of Khiva, at Kermineh on the Bokhara river, at Samarcand, at Balkh and in a few other places, the vegetation is even luxuriant; gardens, meadows, orchards, and cornfields fringe the river-bank; and the natives see in such favored spots resemblances of Paradise!
In 1846 the Great Kirghiz Horde acknowledged its subjection to Russia on the farther side of the Balkash, while at the same time a fort was constructed on the lower Yaxartes. In 1847 the encroachments of Russia in Central Asia had brought her upon the borders of the important khanates of Khiva and Khokand, and, like some huge boa-constrictor, she prepared to swallow them.
The Czar's emissaries therefore had easy work in fomenting the strifes that constantly arose in Bokhara, Khiva, and Tashkend, with the result that in 1864 the last-named was easily acquired by Russia.
He meditated strange enterprises, and proposed that Keane should support his project of sending a force toward Bokhara to give check to a Russian column which Pottinger at Herat had heard was assembling at Orenburg, with Khiva for its objective.
Equally obvious was his aim in insisting that "the interests of the Afghan and English Governments are identical," and that "the border of Afghanistan is in truth the border of India." These were ingenious ways of working his intrenchments up to the hitherto inaccessible citadel of Indian border policy. The news of the Russian advance on Khiva lent strength to his argument.
The hardy mountaineers of Afghanistan, Bokhara, Khiva, and Tibet were then, as at present, far different from the generality of Asiatics in warlike spirit and endurance.
In 1868 Russia seized Samarcand, and established over the khanate of Bokhara a similar supervision to that in Khiva. As the distinguished Russian already quoted remarks: "The programme of the political existence of Bokhara as a separate sovereignty was accorded to her by us in the shape of two treaties, in 1868 and 1873, which defined her subordinate relation to Russia.
The wagon and the oxen we left in the immediate charge of Goza and Tom, our driver and leader, both trustworthy boys, requesting a worthy Scotch missionary who lived in this distant place to keep an eye on them. Then, accompanied by Umbopa, Khiva, Ventvögel, and half a dozen bearers whom we hired on the spot, we started off on foot upon our wild quest.
These make no doubt from the account of Khosroo Murza and of the others who went to Petersburg, that the conquest of India by the route of Khiva and Bokhara is the favourite object of the Russians, and the whole people seem animated by hatred of England. Cabinet dinner chez moi. The Duke did not see the King to-day; the Dukes of Clarence and Cumberland being there, whom he did not wish to see.
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