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Crossing a fertile region where poplars like distaffs rise gracefully erect, skirting fields bristling with vines, running by gardens where fruit trees abound, our train stops at the new town. As is inevitable since the Russian conquest, there are two towns side by side at Tachkend as at Samarkand, as at Bokhara, as at Merv.
Not that her grandfather was a misanthrope, but his interests were bound up so thoroughly in Egyptian research that his friends were, for the most part, elderly savants with kindred tastes. The wreck, of the Bokhara, too, with Irene's father and mother among its passengers, had helped to cut him off from the social world.
There was once, in the city of Bokhara, a water-carrier, who used to carry water to the house of a goldsmith and had done this thirty years. Now that goldsmith had a wife of exceeding beauty and loveliness, brilliancy and perfect grace; and she was withal renowned for piety, chastity and modesty. One day the water- carrier came, as of custom, and poured the water into the cisterns.
Great, deep, red-leather chairs stood everywhere invitingly, the floor was spread with a magnificent specimen of Royal Bokhara, the rich recesses of the noble walls were lined with books in rare editions, a heavily carved table of dull black wood from some foreign land sprawled in the center of the room and held a great bronze lamp of curious pattern, bearing a ruby light.
He had no eye for the tramps, laden with grain from Odessa, coming down from the Black Sea; for the vessels of ancient shape and build, such as the Argonauts might have sailed in when questing for the Golden Fleece; for the graceful caiques rowed by boatmen in zouaves of crimson and gold, in the sterns of which the flower of Circassian beauty in gossamer veils reclined on divans and carpets from the most famous looms of Persia and Bokhara.
The Venetian merchants set out, and were a whole year crossing the immense extent of country lying between Bokhara and the northern limits of China. Kublaï-Khan was much pleased to receive these strangers from the distant West.
Mandu was at first an essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the throne from Hushang's effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara. But its greatness was short-lived. Mahmud's son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field.
There are the graves of the Russian soldiers who died in the attack in 1868, near the ancient palace of the Emir of Bokhara. From this point, by a straight narrow road, our arba reached the Righistan square, which, as my pamphlet says, "must not be confounded with the square of the same name at Bokhara."
But as destiny had provided, long years before the actual event, a means for the accomplishment of his happiness, I have ever rested content in the belief that all was well with him that all is well with him even yet perhaps with him and his beloved in the valley of far-away Bokhara." "I should like to find that hollow column," muttered the Afghan.
Then merchants come from Bokhara to buy the tea, and to carry it home, where it is so much liked. This land is not a desert. Yet there are but few trees, and because there is so little shade, the rivulets are soon dried up. Yet it might be a fruitful land, if the inhabitants would plant and sow.
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