The first part of the journey was all too familiar, by sled back along the Arrow of Arabat, over the bridge at Yenitchi, and then east along that dreary winter coast to Taganrog, where the snow was already beginning to melt in the foul little streets, and the locals still appeared to be recovering from the excesses of the great winter fair at Rostov. Russians, in my experience, are part-drunk most of the time, but if there’s a sober soul between the Black Sea and the Caspian for weeks after the Rostov kermesse he must be a Baptist hermit; Taganrog was littered with returned revellers. Rostov I don’t much remember, or the famous river Don, but after that we took to telegues, and since the great Ignatieff was riding at the front of our little convoy of six vehicles, we made good speed. Too good for Flashy, bumping along uncomfortably on the straw in one of the middle wagons; my chains were beginning to be damned uncomfortable, and every jolt of those infernal telegues bruised my wrists and ankles. You may think fetters are no more than an inconvenience, but when every move you make means lifting a few pounds of steel, which chafes your flesh and jars your bones, and means you can never lie without their biting into you, they become a real torture. I pleaded to have them removed, if only for an hour or two, and got a kick in my half-mended rib for my pains.
Cossacks, of course, never wash (although they brush their coats daily with immense care) and I wasn’t allowed to either, so by the time we were rolling east into the half-frozen steppe beyond Rostov I was filthy, bearded, tangled, and itchy beyond belief, stinking with the garlic of their awful food, and only praying that I wouldn’t contract some foul disease from my noisome companions – for they even slept either side of me, with their nagaikas knotted into my chains. It ain’t like a honeymoon at Baden, I can tell you.
There were four hundred miles of that interminable plain, getting worse as it went on; it took us about five days, as near as I remember, with the telegues going like blazes, and new horses at every post-house. The only good thing was that as we went the weather grew slightly warmer until, when we were entering the great salt flats of the Astrakhan, the snow vanished altogether, and you could even travel without your tulup.
Astrakhan city itself is a hell-hole. The land all about is as flat as the Wash country, and the town itself lies so low they have a great dyke all round to prevent the Volga washing it into the Caspian, or t’other way round. As you might expect, it’s a plague spot; you can smell the pestilence in the air, and before we passed through the dyke Ignatieff ordered everyone to soak his face and hands with vinegar, as though that would do any good. Still, it was the nearest I came to making toilet the whole way.
Mark you, there was one good thing about Astrakhan: the women. Once you get over towards the Caspian the people are more slender and Asiatic than your native Russian, and some of those dark girls, with their big eyes and long straight noses and pouting lips had even me, in my unkempt misery, sitting up and dusting off my beard. But of course I never got near them; it was into the kremlin for Flash and his heavenly twins, and two nights in a steaming cell before they put us aboard a steamer for the trip across the Caspian.
It’s a queer sea, that one, for it isn’t above twenty feet deep, and consequently the boats are of shallow draught, and bucket about like canoes. I spewed most of the way, but the Cossacks, who’d never sailed before, were in a fearful way, vomiting and praying by turns. They never let go of me, though, and I realized with a growing sense of alarm that if these two watch-dogs were kept on me all the way to Kabul, I’d stand little chance of giving them the slip. Their terror of Ignatieff was if anything even greater than mine, and in the worst of the boat’s heaving one of them was always clutching my ankle chains, even if he was rolling about the deck retching at the same time.
It was four days of misery before we began to steam through clusters of ugly, sandy little islands towards the port of Tishkandi, which was our destination. I’m told it isn’t there any longer, and this is another strange thing about the Caspian – its coastline changes continually, almost like the Mississippi shores. One year there are islands, and next they have become hills on a peninsula, while a few miles away a huge stretch of coast will have changed into a lagoon.
Tishkandi’s disappearance can have been no loss to anyone; it was a dirty collection of huts with a pier, and beyond it the ground climbed slowly through marshy salt flats to two hundred miles of arid, empty desert. You could call it steppe, I suppose, but it’s dry, rocky heart-breaking country, fit only for camels and lizards.
“Ust-Yurt,” says one of the officers, as he looked at it, and the very name sent my heart into my boots.
It’s dangerous country, too. There was a squadron of lancers waiting for us when we landed, to guard us against the wild desert tribes, for this was beyond the Russian frontiers, in land where they were still just probing at the savage folk who chopped up their caravans and raided their outposts whenever they had the chance. When we made camp at night it was your proper little laager, with sangars at each corner, and sentries posted, and half a dozen lancers out riding herd. All very business-like, and not what I’d have expected from Ruskis, really. But this was their hard school, as I was to learn, like our North-west Frontier, where you either soldiered well or not at all.
It was five days through the desert, not too uncomfortable while we were moving, but freezing hellish at night, and the dromedaries with their native drivers must have covered the ground at a fair pace, forty miles a day or thereabouts. Once or twice we saw horsemen in the distance, on the low rocky barchans, and I heard for the first time names like “Kazak” and “Turka”, but they kept a safe distance. On the last day, though, we saw more of them, much closer, and quite peaceable, for these were people of the Aral coast, and the Russians had them fairly well in order on that side of the sea. When I saw them near I had a strange sense of recognition – those swarthy faces, with here and there a hooked nose and a straggling moustache, the dirty puggarees swathed round the heads, and the open belted robes, took me back to Northern India and the Afghan hills. I found myself stealing a look at my Cossacks and the lancers, and even at Ignatieff riding with the other officers at the head of our caravan, and thinking to myself – these ain’t your folk, my lads, but they’re mighty close to some I used to know. It’s a strange thing, to come through hundreds of miles of wilderness, from a foreign land and moving in the wrong direction, and suddenly find yourself sniffing the air and thinking, “home”. If you’re British, and have soldiered in India, you’ll understand what I mean.
Late that afternoon we came through more salty flats to a long coastline of rollers sweeping in from a sea so blue that I found myself muttering through my beard “Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?,” it seemed so much like the ocean that old Arnold’s Greeks had seen after their great march. And suddenly I could close my eyes and hear his voice droning away on a summer afternoon at Rugby, and smell the cut grass coming in through the open windows, and hear the fags at cricket outside, and from that I found myself dreaming of the smell of hay in the fields beyond Renfrew, and Elspeth’s body warm and yielding, and the birds calling at dusk along the river, and the pony champing at the grass, and it was such a sweet, torturing longing that I groaned aloud, and when I opened my eyes the tears came, and there was a hideous Russian voice clacking “Aralskoe More!”,b and bright Asian sunlight, and the chains galling my wrist and ankle-bones, and foreign flat faces all round, and I realized that my earlier thoughts of home had been an illusion, and this was alien, frightening land.
There was a big military camp on the shore, and a handy little steamer lying off, and while the rest of us waited Ignatieff was received with honours by a group of senior officers – and he only a captain, too. Of course, I’d realized before this that he was a big noise, but the way they danced attendance on him you’d have thought he was the Tsar’s cousin. (Maybe he was, for all I know.)
They put us aboard the steamer that evening, and I was so tuckered out by the journey that I just slept where I l
ay down. And in the morning there was a coast ahead, with a great new wooden pier, and a huge river flowing down between low banks to the sea. As far as I could see the coast was covered with tents, and there was another steamer, and half a dozen big wooden transports, and one great warship, all riding at anchor between the pier and the river mouth. There were bugles sounding on the distant shore, and swarms of people everywhere, among the tents, on the pier, and on the ships, and a great hum of noise in the midst of which a military band was playing a rousing march; this is the army, I thought, or most of it, this is their Afghan expedition.
I asked one of the Russian sailors what the river might be, and he said: “Syr Daria” and then pointing to a great wooden stockaded fort on the rising land above the river, he added: “Fort Raim.”35 And then one of the Cossacks pushed him away, cursing, and told me to hold my tongue.
They landed us in lighters, and there was another delegation of smart uniforms to greet Ignatieff, and an orderly holding a horse for him, and all around tremendous bustle of unloading and ferrying from the ships, and gangs of orientals at work, with Russian non-coms bawling at them and swinging whips, and gear being stowed in the newly-built wooden sheds along the shore. I watched gun limbers being swung down from a derrick, and cursing, half-naked gangs hauling them away; the whole pier was piled with crates and bundles, and for all the world it looked like the levee at New Orleans, except that this was a temporary town of huts and tents and lean-to’s. But there were just as many people, sweating and working in orderly chaos, and you could feel the excitement in the air.
Ignatieff came trotting down to where I was sitting between my Cossacks, and at a word they hauled me up and we set off at his heels through the confusion, up the long, gradual slope to the fort. It was farther off than I’d expected, about a mile, so that it stood well back from the camp, which was all spread out like a sand-table down the shore-line. As we neared the fort he stopped, and his orderly was pointing at the distant picket lines and identifying the various regiments – New Russian Dragoons, Romiantzoff’s Grenadiers, Astrakhan Carabiniers, and Aral Hussars, I remember. Ignatieff saw me surveying the camp, and came over. He hadn’t spoken to me since we left Arabat.
“You may look,” says he, in that chilling murmur of his, “and reflect on what you see. The next Englishman to catch sight of them will be your sentry on the walls of Peshawar. And while you are observing, look yonder also, and see the fate of all who oppose the majesty of the Tsar.”
I looked where he pointed, up the hill towards the fort, and my stomach turned over. To one side of the gateway was a series of wooden gallows, and from each one hung a human figure – although some of them were hard to recognize as human. A few hung by their arms, some by their ankles, one or two lucky ones by their necks. Some were wasted and blackened by exposure; at least one was still alive and stirring feebly. An awful carrion reek drifted down on the clear spring air.
“Unteachables,” says Ignatieff. “Bandit scum and rebels of the Syr Daria who have been unreceptive to our sacred Russian imperial mission. Perhaps, when we have lined their river with sufficient of these examples, they will learn. It is the only way to impress recalcitrants. Do you not agree?”
He wheeled his horse, and we trailed up after him towards the fort. It was bigger, far bigger, than I’d expected, a good two hundred yards square, with timber ramparts twenty feet high, and at one end they were already replacing the timber with rough stone. The Russian eagle ensign was fluttering over the roofed gatehouse, there were grenadiers drawn up and saluting as Ignatieff cantered through, and I trudged in, clanking, to find myself on a vast parade, with good wooden barracks around the walls, troops drilling in the dusty square, and a row of two-storey administrative buildings down one side. It was a very proper fort, something like those of the American frontier in the ’seventies; there were even some small cottages which I guessed were officers’ quarters.
Ignatieff was getting his usual welcome from a tubby chap who appeared to be the commandant; I wasn’t interested in what they said, but I gathered the commandant was greatly excited, and was babbling some great news.
“Not both of them?” I heard Ignatieff say, and the other clapped his hands in great glee and said, yes, both, a fine treat for General Perovski and General Khruleff when they arrived.
“They will make a pretty pair of gallows, then,” says Ignatieff. “You are to be congratulated, sir. Nothing could be a better omen for our march through Syr Daria.”
“Ah, ha, excellent!” cries the tubby chap, rubbing his hands. “And that will not be long, eh? All is in train here, as you see, and the equipment arrives daily. But come, my dear Count, and refresh yourself.”
They went off, leaving me feeling sick and hang-dog between my guards; the sight of those tortured bodies outside the stockade had brought back to me the full horror of my own situation. And I felt no better when there came presently a big, brute-faced sergeant of grenadiers, a coiled nagaika in his fist, to tell my Cossacks they could fall out, as he was taking me under his wing.
“Our necks depend on this fellow,” says one of the Cossacks doubtfully, and the sergeant sneered, and scowled at me.
“My neck depends on what I’ve got in the cells already,” growls he. “This offal is no more precious than my two birds. Be at peace; he shall join them in my most salubrious cell, from which even the lizards cannot escape. March him along!”
They escorted me to a corner on the landward side of the fort, down an alley between the wooden buildings, and to a short flight of stone steps leading down to an iron-shod door. The sergeant hauled back the massive bolts, thrust back the creaking door, and then reached up, grabbing me by my wrist-chains.
“In, tut!” he snarled, and yanked me headlong down into the cell. The door slammed, the bolts ground to, and I heard him guffawing brutally as their footsteps died away.
I lay there trembling on the dirty floor, just about done with fatigue and fear. At least it was dim and cool in here. And then I heard someone speaking in the cell, and raised my head; at first I could make nothing out in the faint light that came from a single window high in one wall, and then I started with astonishment, for suspended flat in the air in the middle of the cell, spread-eagled as though in flight, was the figure of a man. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I drew in a shuddering breath, for now I could see that he was cruelly hung between four chains, one to each limb from the top corners of the room. More astonishing still, beneath his racked body, which hung about three feet from the floor, was crouched another figure, supporting the hanging man on his back, presumably to take the appalling strain of the chains from his wrists and ankles. It was the crouching man who was speaking, and to my surprise, his words were in Persian.
“It is a gift from God, brother,” says he, speaking with difficulty. “A rather dirty gift, but human – if there is such a thing as a human Russian. At least, he is a prisoner, and if I speak politely to him I may persuade him to take my place for a while, and bear your intolerable body. I am too old for this, and you are heavier than Abu Hassan, the breaker of wind.”
The hanging man, whose head was away from me, tried to lift it to look. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse with pain, but what he said was, unbelievably, a joke.
“Let him … approach … then … and I pray … to God … that he has … fewer fleas … than you … Also … you are … a most … uncomfortable … support … God help … the … woman … who shares … your bed.”
“Here is thanks,” says the crouching man, panting under the weight. “I bear him as though I were the Djinn of the Seven Peaks, and he rails at me. You, nasrani,”c he addressed me: “If you understand God’s language, come and help me to support this ingrate, this sinner. And when you are tired, we shall sit in comfort against the wall, and gloat over him. Or I may squat on his chest, to teach him gratitude. Come, Ruski, are we not all God’s creatures?”
And even as he said it, his voice quavered, he staggered under
the burden above him, and slumped forward unconscious on the floor.
* * *
a See Flashman.
b “Aral Sea!”
c Christian.
Chapter 7
The hanging man gave a sudden cry of anguish as his body took the full stretch of the chains; he hung there moaning and panting until, without really thinking, I scrambled forward and came up beneath him, bearing his trunk across my stooped back. His face was hanging backward beside my own, working with pain.
“God … thank you!” he gasped at last. “My limbs are on fire! But not for long – not for long – if God is kind.” His voice came in a tortured whisper. “Who are you – a Ruski?”
“No,” says I, “an Englishman, a prisoner of the Russians.”
“You speak … our tongue … in God’s name?”
“Yes,” says I, “Hold still, curse you, or you’ll slip!”
He groaned again: he was a devilish weight. And then: “Providence … works strangely,” says he. “An angliski … here. Well, take heart, stranger … you may be … more fortunate … than you know.”
I couldn’t see that, not by any stretch, stuck in a lousy cell with some Asiatic nigger breaking my back. Indeed, I was regretting the impulse which had made me bear him up – who was he to me, after all, that I shouldn’t let him dangle? But when you’re in adversity it don’t pay to antagonize your companions, at least until you know what’s what, so I stayed unwillingly where I was, puffing and straining.
“Who … are you?” says he.
“Flashman. Colonel, British Army.”
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 245