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From Meshed it is only a few days' journey through a mountainous tract to the frontier between Persia and Russian Asia. There lie Transcaspia, Samarcand, Bukhara, Turkestan, and the Kirghiz Steppe. This road would take us out of our way to India, but while we halt at Tebbes I can tell you something about the country it passes through.
We have been expecting her all day." "What is the cause of this sudden tenderness? They have not seen each other for ten years. Does he expect her husband, too? His son-in-law, the pedagogue?" contemptuously asked the general's wife. "No! How could he come? He could not leave his service. And his son, too, Peter Iurevitch, he cannot come at once. He is on duty, in Transcaspia. It is a long way."
Central Asia was conquered by Russia forty-five years ago, Transcaspia thirty years ago. Transcaspia is inhabited by Turkomans, a powerful and warlike people, who in former times used to make raids into northern Persia, carrying off men and women, whom they sold as slaves in the markets of Bukhara and Samarcand. General Skobeleff put a check to their domination when he invaded the country in 1880.
“That, of course, is problematical,” we answered, with the embarrassment men of our age might feel at being instigated to talk politics with a prime minister. “What we do know, for certain, is that Russia is now, with her Transcaspian railroad, within about forty miles of Meshed, the capital of Persia’s richest province of Khorasan; that she now has a well-engineered and, for a great portion of the way, a macadamized road to that city across the Kopet Dagh mountains from Askabad, the capital of Russian Transcaspia; and that half that road the Persians were rather forcibly invited to construct.”
South-west of Tashkent is the district of Samarcand, with a capital of the same name. South-west of Samarcand again, on the north of the Amu-darya, stretches a country called Bukhara, ruled by an Emir, a prince under the supremacy of Russia. Close to the Caspian Sea, on the east, there is a large area of country called Transcaspia.
We have been expecting her all day." "What is the cause of this sudden tenderness? They have not seen each other for ten years. Does he expect her husband, too? His son-in-law, the pedagogue?" contemptuously asked the general's wife. "No! How could he come? He could not leave his service. And his son, too, Peter Iurevitch, he cannot come at once. He is on duty, in Transcaspia. It is a long way."
They are playing for the richest stakes in the history of the world: for the control of the Bosphorus and the Bagdad Railway for whoever controls them controls the trade routes to India, Persia, and the vast, untouched regions of Transcaspia; the commercial domination of Western Asia, and the overlordship of that city which stands at the crossroads of the Eastern World and its political capital of Islam.
Across the desert a train of the Transcaspian railway was gliding smoothly along toward the city. A hearty welcome back to civilized life was given us the next evening by General Kuropatkine himself, the Governor-General of Transcaspia.
The delay on the part of the Russian authorities in granting us permission to enter Transcaspia had postponed at least a month our arrival in Tashkend, and now, owing to the early advent of the rainy season, the roads leading north were almost impassable even for the native carts.
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