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Updated: June 10, 2025
Heraclius showed them extraordinary attention; he put his own diadem on the head of the barbarian prince, and distributed gold, jewels, and silk to his officers; and, on the other hand, he obtained from them an immediate succour of 40,000 horse, and the promise of an irruption of their brethren into Persia from the far East, from the quarter of the Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of the passages by which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South.
You may travel from Calais to Vendome, to Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme, to the Gironde, and you are on chalk the whole way. It stretches through Central Europe, and is seen in North Africa. From the Crimea it reaches into Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the sea of Aral in Central Asia.
With what lies north of the Oxus we can have very little to say or to do; therefore it matters the less that in reality we know very little about it. The Oxus is not a fordable river. At Khoja Saleh, which is the furthest point supposed to have been reached by the Aral flotilla, it is about half a mile wide, with a slow current. At Charjui it is about the same width, only rapid and deep.
We rush through an endless succession of tunnels, and on emerging from each are surprised by a new view of the mountainous shore. Baikal, or the "Rich Lake," is the third inland sea of Asia, only the Caspian and the Sea of Aral being larger. Its height above sea-level is 1560 feet; the water is light-green in colour, sweet, and crystal clear, and abounds in fish, among them five species of salmon.
And this is why the path southwards to the east of the Aral was, in matter of fact, the path of civilization, and that by the Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia, with many fortunes, under many masters, for many hundred years, before they came round to the region to which their Turcoman brethren attained so easily, but with so little eventual advantage.
The tiger, which is entirely absent from Mesopotamia, and unknown upon the plateau of Iran, abounds in the low tract between the Elburz and the Caspian, in the flat region about the Sea of Aral, and in the Indus valley. The elephant was, perhaps, anciently an inhabitant of Upper Egypt, where the island of Elephantine remained an evidence of the fact.
After being kept out of the town for a time they were allowed to return, and when they went back to their houses they found that they had been pillaged and stripped of every thing that the soldiers could carry away. There was another large and important town named Kojend. It was situated two or three hundred miles to the northward of Samarcand, on the River Sir, which flows into Aral Lake.
Those of the shallower northern half of the Caspian are similarly affected by the Volga and the Ural, while, in the shallow bays of the southern division, they become extremely saline in consequence of the intense evaporation. The Aral Sea, though supplied by the Jaxartes and the Oxus, has brackish water.
Now with this last passage into Europe we are not here concerned, for the Turks have never introduced themselves to Europe by means of it; but with those two southward passages which are Asiatic, viz., that to the east of the Aral, and that to the west of the Caspian.
The Sea of Aral, or Eagles, is situated about 100 miles east of the Caspian, and is nearly 200 miles in length and 70 in breadth; it is surrounded with sandy deserts, and has been little explored; its waters are not so salt as the Caspian, but there are many small saline lakes in its vicinity.
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