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Beyond this station the road reaches the frontier which divides Russian Turkestan from the Pamir plateau and the vast territory of the Kara-Khirghizes. This part of Central Asia is continually being troubled by Plutonian disturbances beneath its surface.
An English envoy arrived in Cabul, and negotiations were entered into, which we contrived to spin out sufficiently to gain time for the erection of small forts in the Pamirs. Finally an arrangement was arrived at in London to the effect that the Pench should be the boundary between Russia and Afghanistan in the Pamir territory.
If you lay your left hand on a map of Tibet so that the part nearest the wrist touches the Pamir, the flat of the hand covers the region of central Tibet, where there is no drainage to the ocean, but where the country falls instead into a number of isolated lake basins.
During the preceding reigns Panchow had made the power of China felt in regions far west of that realm, bringing several small kingdoms and many tribes under subjection, conquering the city of Kashgar, and extending the western borders of China as far into the interior of Asia as the great upland region of the Pamir.
The major is, nevertheless, anxious to see the country for himself, and although it is not yet six o'clock in the morning, we are both out on the gangway, glasses in hand, maps under our eyes. The Pamir, or Bam-i-Douniah, is commonly called the "Roof of the World." From it radiate the mighty chains of the Thian Shan, of the Kuen Lun, of the Kara Korum, of the Himalaya, of the Hindoo Koosh.
In many places are clumps of birches and junipers, which are the principal trees of the Pamir, and on the undulating plains grow tamarisks and sedges and mugwort, and a sort of reed very abundant by the sides of the saline pools, and a dwarf labiate called "terskenne" by the Kirghizes. The major mentioned certain animals which constitute a somewhat varied fauna on the heights of the Pamir.
"No," replied Ruthine, "I leave the ship here." The small man glanced from the face of one to the other with something sly and uneasy in his eyes. Jem Agar had altered since he saw him last in the little tent far up on the slopes of the Pamir. He was older and graver. There was also a wisdom in his eyes that steadfast wise look that comes to eyes which have looked too often on death.
Since then the political state of Central Asia has been entirely changed, and Turkestan is merely a province of Asiatic Russia, extending to the frontiers of the Chinese Empire. And already Chinese Turkestan is very visibly submitting to the Muscovite influence which the vertiginous heights of the Pamir plateau have not been able to check in its civilizing march.
"That is comforting, Major Noltitz. And as to the section between the frontier and Pekin?" "That is another matter," replied the major. "Over the Pamir plateau, up to Kachgar, the road is carefully guarded; but beyond that, the Grand Transasiatic is under Chinese control, and I have not much confidence in that." "Are the stations very far from each other?" I asked. "Very far, sometimes."
Some panthers approached our bivouac to answer the barking of Pamir, but dared not attack us. I had left Srinagar at the head of eleven carriers, four of whom had to carry so many boxes of wine, four others bore my travelling effects; one my weapons, another various utensils, and finally a last, who went errands or on reconnaissance.
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