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About noon the land is reported to the eastward, a low, yellowish land, with no rocky margin, but a few sandhills in the neighborhood of Krasnovodsk. In an hour we are in sight of Uzun Ada, and twenty-seven minutes afterward we set foot in Asia.
At five o'clock in the morning the train stops at the capital of the Khanate of Bokhara, eleven hundred and seven versts from Uzun Ada. The Khanates of Bokhara and Samarkand used to form Sogdiana, a Persian satrapy inhabited by the Tadjiks and afterwards by the Usbegs, who invaded the country at the close of the fifteenth century.
This nowhere distinctly appears; but we may easily understand incidentally, and from the history of the period, that the Venetian republic endeavoured to stir up enemies to the Turkish empire in the east, being unable to resist its power, now exerted against them in the Morea and the Greek islands; and we may even surmise that Uzun- Hassan was subsidized by the Venetians to make war upon the Turks.
The Kizil Uzun is on the right of the watershed of the mountains of Kurdistan, and falls into the Caspian Sea. The Khabur above referred to flows through Mesopotamia, not through Media. Rabbi Pethachia, who travelled through Armenia within twenty years after Benjamin, speaks of four mountain peaks, between which the Ark became fixed and from which it could not get free. See also Marco Polo, Bk.
If he does not despise a glass of vodka, opportunity offered, he may have a good deal to say to me; for ten years he has been on the Transcaspian between Uzun Ada and the Pamirs, and during the last month he has been all along the line to Pekin. I call him No. 7 in my notebook, and I hope he will give me information enough.
On the 26th of October we separated, as the Persian went to Uzun- Hassan at Tauris, and I took the road for the dominions of Sivanse, in which Shamaki stands; but by means of the Persian ambassador I procurred a molah, or Mahometan priest, to guide me on the road to Shamaki.
And when this vast basin has dried up through evaporation, why should not a railroad be run across its sandy bed, so that trains can run through without transhipment at Baku and Uzun Ada? While we are waiting for the realization of this desideratum, it is necessary to take the steamboat, and that I am preparing to do in company with many others.
I told them that if he had defrauded the Transasiatic Company it was thanks to this fraud that he was able to get on to the train at Uzun Ada. And if he had not been in the train we should all have been engulfed in the abyss of the Tjon valley. And I enlarged on the facts which I alone knew.
All this rich country is watered by the Mourgab the White Water or its tributaries, and pheasants swarm like crows on the plains of Normandy. At one o'clock in the afternoon the train stopped at Merv Station, over five hundred miles from Uzun Ada. The town has been often destroyed and rebuilt. The wars of Turkestan have not spared it.
There is only one line which will be longer when it is finished, and that is the Grand Transsiberian, from the Urals to Vladivostock, which will measure six thousand five hundred kilometres. Between Tiflis and Pekin our journey will not last more than thirteen days, from Uzun Ada it will only last eleven. The train will only stop at the smaller stations to take in fuel and water.
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