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The maiden said, "Good mother, I will tell nobody, but show me that bright world." So the old woman took the girl out of the iron house. But when she saw the bright world, the girl tottered and fainted; and the eye of God fell upon her, and she conceived. The shower of gold in the Greek story, and the eye of God in the Kirghiz legend, probably stand for sunlight and the sun.
A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and wearing a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap. A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghiz mount with an enormous tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a blue French overcoat. Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse.
Late in the afternoon we emerged upon the plain, but no post-road or station-house was in sight, as we expected; nothing but a few Kirghiz kibitkas among the straggling rocks, like the tents of the Egyptian Arabs among the fallen stones of the pyramids. Toward these we now directed our course, and, in view of a rapidly approaching storm, asked to purchase a night’s lodging.
Several of the more intelligent peasants with whom I spoke advised me strongly to visit Alexandrof-Hai, a village situated on the borders of the Kirghiz Steppe. This prediction was fulfilled in a somewhat unexpected way.
But even without this powerful element of success in regard to the Tartar rebellion, circumstances were not the less very serious; for it was to be feared that a large part of the Kirghiz population would join the rebels. The Kirghiz are divided into three hordes, the greater, the lesser, and the middle, and number nearly four hundred thousand "tents," or two million souls.
Only our good-hearted Russian host was up to put an extra morsel in our provision-bag, for, as he said, we could get no food until we reached the Kirghiz aouls on the high plateau of the Talki pass, by which we were to cut across over unbeaten paths to the regular so-called imperial highway, running from Suidun.
Our speed was not slow, and frequently the poor fellow would have to resort to the whip, or shout, “Slowly, gentlemen, my horse is tired; the town is not far away, it is not necessary to hurry so.” The fact is that in all our experience we found no horse of even the famed Kirghiz or Turkoman breed that could travel with the same ease and rapidity as ourselves even over the most ordinary road.
From the Chu valley, dotted here and there with Kirghiz tent villages and their grazing flocks and herds, we pushed our wheels up the broken path, which wound like a mythical stairway far up into the low-hanging clouds. We trudged up one of the steepest ascents we have ever made with a wheel. The scenery was grand, but lonely.
M. Kostenko mentions that the details are taken from an article by M. Garder in the Voyenni Sbornik for 1875. He says that among the Inner Kirghiz Horde, races for prizes were instituted by the Minister of State Domains, beginning with the year 1851. On October 4 of the same year a circular course measuring four miles was made, and the horses ran five times round it.
The Asiatic dominions comprise the following great subdivisions: Caucasia, under a separate governor-general; the Transcaspian region, which is under the governor-general of Caucasus; the Kirghiz Steppes; Turkestan under separate governors-general, Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia; and the Amur region, which last comprises also the Pacific coast region and Kamchatka.
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