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Updated: June 28, 2025
All this has ceased since the Russian occupation of Merv; the cruel slave trade has been stamped out....
And I've a commission from the Buggin's Literary Syndicate, of Chicago, to 'write up India. I shall take a hack at Egypt on my way home, and perhaps ride over to Persia, then get into Merv and Tashkend, and come back by Astrakhan into 'darkest' Russia, and return home. I shall also write some spicy letters to the Chicago Howler and the New York Whorl.
The southern part of this region now forms the Transcaspian province, divided into six districts, Fort Alexandrovski, Krasnovodsk, Askhabad, Karibent, Merv, Pendjeh, governed by Muscovite colonels or lieutenant-colonels. As may be imagined, it hardly takes an hour to see Uzun Ada, the name of which means Long Island.
But the greatest danger to India lies on the north-western border, where Russia has been making rapid progress. The conquest of Merv by the Russians brought their dominion close to that of our allies, the Afghans, and it became necessary to establish a fixed boundary between them.
One month you find English politics turning on the Oasis of Merv and the next on the hinterland of Albania; or a member rises in the Commons with a little bit of paper in his hand and desires to ask the foreign secretary if he is aware that the Ahkoond of Swat is dead. The foreign secretary states that the government have no information other than that the Ahkoond was dead a month ago.
Not only the friendly state of Afghanistan, but on its northwestern border the neutral territory of Merv, hitherto an independent province, and inhabited by warlike tribes of Turcomans difficult to reach through their deserts and likely to harass a Russian advance to Herat to an embarrassing extent.
This was the idea. From Tiflis to Baku, and across the Caspian to Ouzoun Áda, the western terminus of the Trans-Caspian Railway. Thence by rail to Merv and Bokhára, and from the latter city direct to India, viâ Balkh and Cábul, Afghanistán. A more interesting journey can scarcely be conceived, but Fate and the Russian Government decreed that it was not to be.
O'Donovan son of Dr. John O'Donovan, the distinguished Irish scholar and archaeologist was in the service of the London Daily News. That dashing campaigner as his famous book, The Merv Oasis, shows him to have been perished with Hicks Pasha's Army in the Sudan in November, 1883.
It has produced endless friction and has strained the resources of two great Empires; but the allegation of Russian perfidy in the Merv affair may be left to those who look at facts solely from the insular standpoint.
This was the tract of fertile land upon the Murg-ab, or ancient Margus river, which is known among moderns as the district of Merv. The Murg-ab is a stream flowing from the range of the Paropamisus, in a direction which is a little east of north; it debouches from the mountains in about lat. 36° 25', and thence makes its way through the desert.
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