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It burns with a yellowish flame which golden tinge you have no doubt noticed in these famous flames of yours with the production of carbonic acid and water. In the neighbourhood of oil wells in America, and also in the Caucasus, if my memory doesn't fail me, the gas escapes from the earth, and in some districts particularly in Baku it has actually been burning for years as sacred fires.
One can scarcely realize that only fifty years ago a tumble-down Persian settlement stood on the spot now occupied by broad, well-paved, gas-lit streets, handsome stone buildings, warehouses, and shops. Baku has, like Tiflis, a mixed population.
But perhaps it may inflame his imagination if I tell him that Baku is the town of the Guebres, the city of the Parsees, the metropolis of the fire-worshippers. Encircled by a triple girdle of black battlemented walls, the town is built near Cape Apcheron, on the extreme spur of the Caucasian range. But am I in Persia or in Russia?
One could scarcely discern, through the driving mist, the long low shore and white line of breakers that marked the entrance to Enzelli. To land was out of the question. No boat would live in such a sea. "I will lay-to till this evening," said Captain Z "If it does not then abate, I fear you must make up your mind to return to Baku, and try again another day." A pleasant prospect indeed!
The business of refining is generally in the hands of others than the producers; but some of the larger firms notably the Rothschilds, Nobel Brothers, and Taghioff are both producers and refiners. This means of course, the employment of very, much larger capital. There is a great dash of the gambling element in the oil-well business at Baku.
They are quite charming people, and their little flat was open to us all the time we were at Baku. The place itself is wind-blown and fly-blown and brown, but the harbour is very pretty, with its crowds of shipping, painted with red hulls, which make a nice bit of colour in the general drab of the hills and the town.
The Caspian is filled with various kinds of fish, and while bathing one might reasonably have the impression that he was swimming in an aquarium. In fact, this place is an ideal one for an Izaak Walton. On the islands beyond the peninsula, projecting out from the Baku section, petroleum gas has flamed for centuries, lighting the heavens at night with a lurid glare that is visible far out at sea.
He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels.
The allied conception of the land route from the West and America to Bagdad and India is by Mont Cenis, Trieste, Serbia and Constantinople, as their North European line to India is through Russia by Baku. And that brings us to Constantinople.
At Tchislikar we are met by a lighter with several Turcoman passengers. The sea is pretty rough, and the united efforts of several boatmen are required to hoist aboard each long-gowned Turcoman, each woman and child. They are Turcoman traders going to Baku and Tiflis with bales of the famous kibitka hangings and carpets.
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