PEOPLING THE DESERT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3254, 26 July 1916, Page 63

PEOPLING THE DESERT.

RUSSIA'S GREAT WORK IN CENTRAL ASIA.

With the courage of the innocent, Mr Stephen Graham set out on a journey of 2000 miles, much of it to be done on foot and all in a strange country; with the naivette of a child and the delicate imagery all his own that distinguishes his writing, bo has given us the record "Through Russian Central Asia" (Cassell; 16s net) of this super tour. Let me be not misunderstood, it is the virgin or child mind that sees no incongruity in mixing the sacred with the material, and so we get from Mr Graham such illuminating sentences as this from outside Queen Tamara's castle.. "' Here the real world seems to jut out through the green turf and flower-carpeted earth into the light of day, striking us awfully, like the apparition of God the Father coming up out of the bowers of Eden." A child would not talk of anything striking it awfully or of an apparition, but would see nothing inappropriate in introducing God or heaven into a simile. I In a walk out to Kazbek Mountain—the mountain where the ancients believed Prometheus was bound as a punishment for stealing fire from heaven, there is the imagery that makes description live, touches of which, referring to things animate and inanimate, are scattered through the volume like pearls of wisdom' and discernment. It was winter, and the leaking rocks of summer had grown old with " wisps of grey hair hanging down—■ yard long icicles and thick tangles of ice." and beside the running river the granite boulders " held threads of ice and ice pearls—the earrings of the rocks." It was here the wanderlust seized our author and set him off again on his travels through

dirty, foul-smelling Baku, across Caspia Sea. and then- into Asia, via Krasnovdsf one of the hottest, most desert, and. misei

able places in the world. Then the rail across the desert, with its empty stations, where the train stops anything from 12 to 30 minutes, so that it takes 23 hours to traverse 390 miles. At Askhabad everyone had roses—the glorious roses of Persia. With a bunch of red and white roses Mr Graham scrambled back into the train and went to sleep. But Persia is not all roses; when he woke he was passing through Karakum, a waterless waste, and so on to Bokhara." The most.wonderful city of Moham- ' medan Asia, a place that might have been produced for you by enchantment —that reminds you of Aladdin's palace as it must have appeared in the desert to which the magician transported it. Within toothed walls—a grey Kremlin eight miles round —live 150,000 Mohammedans entirely after their own hearts, without any appreciable interference from without, in narrow streets, in covered alleys, with endless shops, behind screening walls! The roads are narrow and cobbled, and wind in all directions, with manifold alleys and lanes, with squares where stand handsome mosque?, with portals and stairways leading down to the cool and treeshaded, but "stagnant, little reservoirs that hold the city's water. Along the roadway various' equipages come prancing—muddy proletkas, unhandy-looking', eggshaped carts, with, clumsy wooden wheels Bft high and projecting axles ; gilt and* crimson-covered carts made of cane and straw, the shape of a huge egg that has , had both ends sliced off.

And much else descriptive that makes one sigh with, impotence and say, " What a city to visit!" Mohammedan and Russ. — Mr Graham is very fair in his appreciation of Mohammedans, of whom there are many more millions than there are Christiana. "If the peoples of the world could bo seen as part of a great design of cmbroidery on the garment of God, it would probably be seen that Mohammedanism at the present moment is part of the beauty of the pattern and the amazing labyrinthine scheme. It is not a rent, not a disfigurement.'' It is God's will, and the fatalists submit. Russia has spread over the whole land. It was ■.iot always so. Tmiour brought back thousands of Russian slaves, and the great and cruel Tamarlane laid the lash on Riissian shoulders among others. Xow Central Asian Mohammedans have lest their warlike qualities, ami are meek subjects of the Czar, rhe conquest of the country goes on by rail and colonisation, the old people no longer have a- soul of their own. It is sunk in Lethe. Wanderers.— Our Empire was built up by wanderers, but the wanderlust of the Russians is "greater than that of the Briton. We expand via the ocean, the Russian by land. After the last railhead is past he w'ill trek with his family hundreds of miles till he comes to a village set out by the military authorities, where sites have already been bought by the peasants' advance agent. It was from Tashkent that Mr Graham set out on foot over the hundreds of miles leading to China, and here lie met the only Englishman ho saw on his travels—a German Jew named Kellerman, who yearned for " a nice house in Kentish Town, all fog and wet in the streets, a nice fire, pull :he blinds down, and read the Daily Telegraph." Much pleasanter were the unkempt and dirty peasants who gave him ''bed and- breakfast" in the wilds for 2d ! For many nights the earth was his bed and the 'stars his canopy. Not the least valuable portion of the volume are the two appendices—cue on " Russia and India and the Prospects of Anglo-Russian Friendship." the other on "' The Russian Empire and the British Empire." Both are important contribu tions to modern politics. The growing friendship of Russ and Briton owes a very great deal to Mr Stephen Graham.