Eastern Approaches (9 page)

The sun was setting and from where we were at five or six thousand feet above sea level there was a magnificent view over the steppe stretching away for three thousand miles to the Arctic Ocean. By the time we reached our destination night had fallen and we got our first view of the waters of Lake Issik by the brilliant starlight of Central Asia. We slept in a one-roomed wooden hut on the shore of the lake, sharing it with an old man and a young girl of fifteen or sixteen who slept together in the only bed, while the guide and I spent the night on the floor.

In the morning we woke to find ourselves in what might have been a typical Alpine valley, and after a bathe in the icy waters of the lake, I set out to explore the surrounding hills. But the lateness of the season
made any further progress out of the question. And so, having extracted from the guide a promise that if I returned next summer he would take me a six-day journey on horseback over the mountains to Frunze and show me lakes full of flamingoes and other even more exotic birds, I made my way back to Alma Ata.

Next morning I left Alma Ata for Samarkand. The critical stage of my journey had begun. If I were not stopped now, nothing could prevent me from achieving my objective.

My departure from Alma Ata was unobtrusive; so unobtrusive that, when I had boarded the train and settled into a densely crowded ‘hard’ carriage, I found that I had left my escort behind. This, I felt, was just as well. I was doubtful about Alma Ata, but Samarkand I knew was in a forbidden zone and in the circumstances the presence of two representatives of the N.K.V.D. could only have been embarrassing.

My plan was to travel from Alma Ata to Tashkent, to stop there for as short a time as possible and then go straight on to Samarkand.

For most of the 500 miles from Alma Ata to Tashkent the snowcapped mountains of Kirghizia remain in sight to the south. As you travel westwards and southwards, signs of Russian, though not necessarily of Soviet, influence become far less numerous and one has no difficulty in realizing that one is in a part of Asia which, until its conquest by the Tsar’s armies some seventy or eighty years ago, had only been visited by half a dozen Europeans. In the villages through which we passed and which I generally had time to explore quite thoroughly before the incredibly slow train started off again, nothing seemed to have changed since the time when the country was ruled over by the Emir of Bokhara. Agricultural methods are primitive and camels and donkeys are still the most common means of transport, while not infrequently one encounters one of the local notables advancing down the poplar-lined village street mounted on a bull. The men wore turbans and brightly coloured striped robes (
khalats
) and most of the women still had heavy black horsehair veils.

On the next bunk to mine lay an Uzbek girl of sixteen or seventeen. A loose-fitting striped
khalat
partly masked her young body and she wore the same soft black riding-boots as the men. On her head was the usual little round black cap embroidered in white, from under
which her sleek black hair fell in two long plaits. She wore no veil and from where I lay in the shadows I was free to study her features. They reminded me of a face on a Chinese scroll. She had the high cheekbones, short upturned nose and almond eyes of the Mongol, but her features were finely formed and the delicate oval of her face showed a trace of some other ancestry, Persian perhaps, or Circassian. Her skin was scarcely darker than my own, its pale, golden hue clear and unblemished. Most of the day she lay stretched out asleep with her head pillowed on her arm. Once she woke and climbed down from the carriage with the rest of the passengers at a station. When she came back she brought a fine yellow melon and, cutting a slice from it, handed it to me. The firm crisp flesh was snow white and as sweet as honey.

I had decided to stop in Tashkent only on my way back from Samarkand but a missed connection now gave me several hours there. It was nearly midnight when I started out to explore. In the old town the dimly lighted
chai-khanas
(tea-houses) opening on the street were still filled with squatting Uzbeks and from all sides the flat native drums throbbed rhythmically in the warm Eastern-smelling darkness. Two or three hours before dawn I returned to the station and boarded the Samarkand train without having been asked my business by anyone.

The last stretch was the worst. There was no room anywhere on the train and for hours I squatted, swaying dangerously, on the little iron platform between two coaches. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder whether it was worth it, the train stopped at a little wayside station and I saw the name in black letters on a white ground: ‘
SAMARQAND
’. A truck, picked up outside the station, took me at break-neck speed through the long tree-lined avenues of the Russian cantonments and deposited me, without further ado, in the middle of the old town. I had arrived.

Before me, in the early morning sunlight, lay a paved square, the Registan, open on one side to the street and enclosed on the other three by the lofty arched façades of three ancient
madrassehs
or Moslem colleges. At each corner of the square a slim minaret points skywards. The buildings are of crumbling sun-baked bricks, decorated with
glazed tiles of deep blue and vivid turquoise that sparkle in the sun. Each
madrasseh
is built round a central courtyard surrounded by cloisters. Into these open the cells once occupied by Moslem scholars and now inhabited by various local inhabitants. On the northern side of the square is the Tillah Kari or Golden Mosque Madrasseh, called after the great mosque which forms part of it. On the western side stands the smaller and more beautiful Madrasseh of Ulug Beg, Tamerlane’s grandson, who built it in 1417; opposite it, the Shir Dar. Across the top of the central arch sprawls the form of the great golden lion which gives it its name: Shir Dar — Lion bearing. On either side of the façade rise splendidly proportioned twin domes. After passing through the central arch and exploring the cloisters beyond, I climbed by a narrow twisting stairway to the top of the Shir Dar and from there looked down on the sun-baked Registan and beyond it on the fabled city of Samarkand, on the blue domes and the minarets, the flat-roofed mud houses, and the green tree-tops. It was a moment to which I had long looked forward.

Then, leaving the sunlight of the Registan, I plunged into the semi-darkness of a covered bazaar, where Uzbek merchants offered their goods for sale. From these, as I passed, I received tempting offers for my greatcoat and even for my trousers. Presently, I came to an open air
chai-khana
, or tea-house, where scores of turbaned and bearded worthies squatted on raised wooden platforms strewn with fine carpets, gossiping and sipping bowls of green tea.

Here I sat for a time drinking tea like the rest of them, and then, walking on through the outskirts of the town, came suddenly upon the splendid ruins of the Bibi Khanum mosque, built as the chief ornament of his capital by Tamerlane a year or two before his death in 1405 and named after one of his wives, a Chinese princess. Its great blue dome is shattered, some say by Russian shell fire when the town was captured in 1868, but one immense crumbling arch still remains, poised perilously above the surrounding buildings. From it one can still picture the noble proportions of the original structure.

According to a legend, the Persian architect who built the mosque fell in love with the princess and imprinted on her cheek a kiss so passionate that it left a burn. Tamerlane, seeing this, sent his men to
kill his wife’s lover. But the Persian fled before them to the top of the highest minaret and then, as his pursuers were about to seize him, sprouted wings and, soaring high above Samarkand, flew back to his native town of Meshed.

Near the Bibi Khanum two or three incongruous modern buildings in the Soviet style have already made their appearance and will no doubt be followed by others. Passing by these and along the main street out in the country I came to a dusty hillside, littered with graves and gravestones all crumbling into decay. Down it ran a walled stairway with, on either side, a row of small mosques of the most exquisite beauty. In these lie buried the friends and contemporaries of Tamerlane. From some, the blue tiles have disappeared completely, leaving a rough crumbling surface of pale sun-baked clay sprouting here and there with tufts of grass. At the top of the stairway stands a larger mosque, the tomb of Kassim Ibn Abbas, a Mohammedan soldier-saint, who, it is said, is only sleeping and will one day rise again sword in hand to perform great exploits. After him the mosque, for centuries a place of pilgrimage, is called Shah Zinda — The Living King. Climbing over the wall, I wandered in and out of the mosques until I was eventually turned away by an angry Uzbek woman ably seconded by an idiot boy. Sightseeing, it seemed, was not encouraged in Samarkand.

Beyond the Shah Zinda stretches the dusty expanse of the Afro Siab, the former site of the ancient city of Maracanda, founded by Alexander the Great. Now it is a desolate undulating plain, sprinkled with crumbling ruins.

At the far end of the old town stands the blue-ribbed dome of the Gur Emir, where the great conqueror Tamerlane himself lies buried. In front of the great entrance arch an old man had set up his bed under a mulberry tree. Rousing him, I induced him to open the gate for me. Inside, the walls are wainscoted with alabaster and adorned with jasper. Tamerlane’s tombstone is of polished greenish-black nephrite, carved with Arabic lettering. His body lies in a vault below.

Though the Gur Emir was empty many of the smaller mosques scattered about the old town were in use, and the mullahs seemed still to command the respect of the population. In character the old town
had remained practically unchanged by the Russian invasion of 1868. Few Russians were to be seen in the streets. The Uzbeks wore their national dress, long striped quilted coats and turbans or embroidered skull-caps, while many of the women were still enveloped in their traditional thick black horsehair veils, entirely covering and hiding the face and most of the body. The houses were built in the native style of sun-baked mud bricks with flat roofs. There were few windows in the outside walls, though some of the larger houses had balconies. Through open gateways I caught glimpses of courtyards and gardens, and here and there I came on square ponds surrounded by trees. The shops of the merchants were open to the street and their owners sat cross-legged in them manufacturing their goods on the threshold. In the open bazaars great heaps of fruit were offered for sale: melons, apples, apricots and grapes. Life seemed easy and the inhabitants seem to spend most of their time talking and drinking tea out of shallow bowls in the innumerable
chai-khanas
.

But it is only a question of time before all there remains of a bygone civilization is swept away. Chancing to look into the courtyard of a house in the old town, I was not surprised to see some twenty little Uzbek girls of three or four years old being marched briskly up and down in fours and made to sing hymns to the glorious Leader of the People.

Tashkent, the centre of the Soviet cotton industry, is, with its population of half a million or more, a vast city in comparison with Samarkand. It also has a tremendous reputation for wickedness. Returning on the train from Samarkand I was taken aside by the ticket-collector, a comfortable motherly middle-aged female, and solemnly warned against the dangers and temptations to which I was about to be exposed. She could see, she said, that I was young and inexperienced and not accustomed to life in great cities.

After a trying night in a crowded hard carriage, I was glad to find a bench in a garden near the station on which to go to sleep. But I had scarcely closed my eyes when I awoke to find my neighbours on each side shaking me and asking me in agitated tones whether I realized that I had fallen asleep. On my replying that that was what I was trying to
do, they seemed profoundly shocked and explained that if you were foolish enough to go to sleep out of doors in a city like Tashkent anything might happen to you. And so, I set out unreposed to explore this latter-day Babylon.

The old town, which is intersected by a network of tortuous narrow streets running between the high walls of the flat-roofed mud-built native houses, has no monuments which can be compared with those of Samarkand. Life, as usual in the East, centres round the teeming bazaar in the centre of which is a vast open space, ankle deep in mud and filled with a seething crowd of Uzbeks packed shoulder to shoulder, each engaged in trying to sell something to his neighbour. The goods offered for sale range from embroidered skull-caps and Bokhara carpets to second-hand trousers and broken-down sewing machines. Once again I received many tempting offers for my overcoat and indeed for everything I had on, although my clothes, which I had slept in for several nights running, were not looking their best. Clearly, wearing apparel had a scarcity value in Tashkent.

The streets leading into this arena are lined with shops, all of which overflow into the street, and are filled with a jostling, shouting crowd, continually being pushed apart to make way for strings of camels or donkeys, or for
arbas
, the high-wheeled native carts.

In Tashkent as in Samarkand the national dress and customs had been largely retained, and many women still went veiled. But while in Samarkand life had seemed a leisurely affair, in Tashkent it was full of noise and strife. A queue had only to form outside a bread-shop for a free fight to begin which generally ended in the shop being taken by storm and in any member of the Militia (a force for the most part recruited locally and treated with scant respect), who was unwise enough to intervene, being left seated in the mud, trying to collect his wits.

This same violence, which, after the stolid patience of Russian crowds, I found rather refreshing, is encountered in acute form on the Tashkent trams, which can be boarded only after a hand-to-hand fight. Fists, teeth and feet are used freely. Once one is on board, however, the trams, which run to every point of the new town and for considerable distances out into the country, provide a most convenient means of seeing Tashkent.