Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  Before long, Vambery and his travelling companions were impatient to move on. One of the most unpleasant aspects of their life as guests of the Turkomans was having to witness their cruelty towards their Persian slaves, many of them young lads who had been captured at sea or on land and were being held – shackled day and night – in the hope of raising a ransom for their release. Those who were too poor to command a ransom were sold off in the slave markets of Khiva for whatever they could fetch. Vambery was torn between trying to help and comfort them, and his fears that by doing so he might draw attention to himself as acting out of character.

  The pilgrim group set about negotiating the hire of camels, one between two pilgrims being the most they could afford. Vambery himself, who had sewn money into his ragged clothing and who had received donations from the Turkomans, could have afforded to hire his own camel, but he was strongly advised not to, as the covetousness of the nomadic tribes ‘was sure to be excited by the slightest sign of affluence [. . .] a suspicion of wealth might convert the best friend into a foe’.

  Vambery had two special reasons for wanting to depart so swiftly. He feared that as the weather got hotter the rain water still to be found in the desert would become scarcer. But more urgently, he once again feared that suspicion was growing about his dervish character: some of the Turkomans were already speculating that he was ‘an envoy of the Sultan [. . .] who was bringing a thousand muskets with him and was engaging in a plot against Russia and Persia’. He reckoned that the discovery of his disguise ‘might have involved a cruel, perhaps a life-long captivity’.

  So it was very welcome news when they found that the Khan of Khiva, whose capital was to be their next destination, had sent a specially trusted and experienced caravan leader to collect two buffaloes from Astrabad and bring them back to Khiva. Buffalo milk had been recommended by his physician to the khan for his health, and now his caravan with the buffaloes was passing near by and they could join it for the next leg of their desert journey. For the first stage of their march towards the rendezvous with the caravan, Vambery was allocated a horse to ride rather than a camel. But a disaster nearly ensued; riding through tall rushes, they stumbled on a wild boar’s lair and as his horse shied Vambery was thrown to the ground in the path of a charge by the mother of the young boars; he was only saved by one of the Turkomans riding between them with his lance and forcing the mother boar to retreat. It had been an unexpectedly narrow escape and he was congratulated on his luck by his fellow pilgrims because, as they reminded him, ‘death by a wound from a wild boar would send even the most pious Moslem into [. . .] a hundred years’ burning in purgatorial fire’ to cleanse away the uncleanness of the porcine wound.

  Meeting up with the large caravan from Khiva was not quite as straightforward as they had hoped. Several days were spent at Etrek, another Turkoman settlement which was renowned as a holding station for Persian slaves. All the repulsion which Vambery had felt earlier at the treatment of these captives was multiplied by witnessing the even harsher conditions here. One Persian girl, who had managed to change her status from that of a slave to that of a wife, was particularly harsh in her dealings with her compatriots in an effort to demonstrate how strong were her loyalties to her new Turkoman husband. When eventually they left Etrek they had to cross the river of that name, which was in flood, and spent much time trying to find the shallowest crossing point; the cargo on the camels got soaked and at one point Vambery thought he was going to have to swim for his life.

  The good news was that having crossed the river ‘the anxiously-awaited caravan came in sight’, recognizable by having in its van three buffaloes (two cows and a bull) to supply milk to cure the Khan of Khiva. (It seemed that buffalo milk was a favoured remedy for impotence.) Vambery attached much importance to making a good impression on the caravan leader, who would not only be their protector in the desert but would also open the way to a welcome in Khiva. He was therefore very disconcerted when he learnt that one of their party – an opium-addicted Afghan-born merchant who had recently attached himself to them – had denounced him as a European to the caravan leader and suggested that the rigours of the Khan of Khiva’s torturers would reveal him for what he was.

  This Afghan had some skill in spotting European features, because he had been brought up in Kandahar during the British occupation and had seen many Englishmen; he had also been compelled to leave Kandahar after committing various crimes, so he had no love for the British. He had more than once approached Vambery threatening to expose him if he were not bought off. For the moment, his malicious remarks were countered by the loyal protestations of his fellow pilgrims, but the Afghan could well prove a fatal enemy when they reached Khiva.

  Some nights later, Vambery found himself drinking tea alongside the same Afghan, who was in an advanced state of drugged delusion; he found himself sorely tempted to slip one of the strychnine tablets he had been given before setting out (as a means of suicide if he ever found himself facing torture and death) into the Afghan’s bowl of tea, and thus rid himself of his blackmailer and persecutor. But the combination of the beauty of the heavens and his own Christian conscience prevailed, and he let the tempting opportunity pass.

  Meanwhile the caravan leader was busy urging his pilgrims to fill their water skins to the full and prepare themselves in every way for the impending desert crossing. When they finally set off, they numbered forty men, of whom twenty-six were unarmed pilgrims and most of the rest heavily armed Turkomans. Between them they had some eighty camels. They struck out on a direct line northwards, the shortest – but driest – route to Khiva. By day, they took their direction from the sun; by night, from the Pole star. The camels were roped together in single file and led by a man on foot. Progress was mostly at night, to avoid the heat of the day, and was slow because of the pace of the buffaloes. One of the cow buffaloes was heavily pregnant and later gave birth to a calf which did not live long in the arduous conditions of a desert crossing. Everyone was worried about the scarcity of water.

  For Vambery, however, there were additional worries. He saw the caravan leader in deep conversation with the leading pilgrims, and when he tried to find out what was going on, he was told that the caravan leader ‘was making many objections to my joining him on the journey to Khiva’. Chief among these objections was the fact that he looked suspicious (the Afghan’s slanders had clearly not been forgotten) and that the Khan of Khiva was paranoid about visitors mapping the routes into his domains. The Khan had recently found two visitors gathering such information about the caravan tracks and had not only executed those who had passed information to them, but had also threatened to execute the caravan leader himself for bringing these spies into the khanate in his entourage. No wonder the caravan leader was nervous. He was considering dumping Vambery where they were, and letting him try to find his own way back.

  The caravan leader was eventually persuaded that Vambery could stay with the party, provided – his friends said – he was prepared to be ‘searched to see if thou hast any drawings or wooden pens (lead pencils), as the Frenghis [Europeans] generally have; and second that thou promise to take away with thee no secret notes respecting the hills and routes’. Otherwise he would be abandoned where he was. Vambery made a considerable scene about all this, declaring that when they reached Khiva they would learn how holy a man he was and what an affront such suspicions were. He appears to have got away with it. But it must have been an anxious moment for him, as he not only had money but other things concealed in his ragged clothes; in particular, he had some spare paper for writing notes leafed into his copy of the Koran which he always carried on a cord round his neck. The whole incident meant that he felt he could not now ask any questions as to the names of different places and landmarks; this was frustrating because ‘however immense the desert, the nomads inhabiting the various oases have affixed a specific designation to every place, every hill and every valley, so that if exactly informed I might have marked each place on the map of
Central Asia’. This had, after all, been one of his objectives in coming on the trip. Despite the inhibitions, he resorted to cunning methods – not disclosed in his book – of recording as much as he could. In fact, he was doing exactly what the Khan most wanted to prevent.

  Meanwhile Vambery made himself as useful as possible. One night, while he was catching a brief few hours’ sleep in his pannier basket on his camel, he was rudely woken by cries from those around him that they had lost their way – the clouds had covered the stars – and could he use his compass to put them on the right track again, which he did. When they had to dismount and walk on foot, sometimes for four hours at a stretch with his bad leg, he noticed that the caravan leader now sought out his company and went out of his way to be friendly, as if to make up for his former hostility and suspicion. The leader’s nephew, who was also part of the caravan, did the same; he had not seen his young wife since the previous year (presumably because he had been travelling so much) and was anxious about her welfare and faithfulness; so he asked Vambery, whose character as a dervish he never doubted, ‘to search in my Koran for a prognostic regarding his family’. Vambery was a bit taken aback by this request but recorded that he ‘made the usual hocus focus, shut my eyes, and fortunately opened the book at a place where women were spoken of’. He then went on to extrapolate an encouraging meaning from the passage, and the nephew thanked him and ‘I was delighted to find that I had won his friendship’. Vambery was pushing his luck and living dangerously by this sort of blasphemous play acting.

  The caravan leader kept his own counsel about which route he would take for the next stage across the desert until the very last minute, because of fears that if any word leaked out from the caravan to some passing shepherd it would increase their chance of being ambushed. The pilgrims were warned not to speak loudly at night in case they gave their position away. No fires were lit at their stopping points. The pilgrims were urged to pray to Allah for safety, and that ‘in the hour of danger we should not behave like women’. From time to time weapons were distributed, including to Vambery, who was pleased to find he was ‘regarded as one having most heart [for a fight]’. At one moment he and the caravan leader thought they were indeed going to have a fight on their hands; they were exploring a cave when a wild figure clad only in a gazelle skin sprang out at them with a threatening lance in his hands; he turned out to be a half-mad refugee from a local vendetta, who had been haunting a desert well for years and trying to avoid any contact with other nomads who had a grievance against him.

  Water was running out – and what dirty water they had was turning to mud with the jolting of the camels – so the leader chose the shortest route. Many of the party were suffering from acute dehydration. Some, including the leader, were thought to have concealed water with them, but no one dared mention their suspicions since ‘any design upon a water-skin would be considered as a design upon the life of its owner’. Sometimes the camel chain broke in the dark of night time and individual animals got left behind; in those cases, a man would go back to look for the missing beast, and keep in touch with his companions by continually calling out to them; this worked well, unless the wind changed, and then there was a real risk of losing a man as well as a camel. On one occasion, the leader uncharacteristically fell asleep during a night march, and the camels walked into a salt morass, covered with a thick white crust in which their feet became entrapped. When the riders sprang down from their camels, they too became stuck. The leader – by now awake – shouted to everyone to remain where they were and, after three anxious hours, the dawn light enabled them to retrace their steps to firm ground. ‘Had we only advanced a little further’, Vambery concluded, ‘a part or perhaps the whole caravan might have been swallowed up’. At one point the caravan leader insisted that they all dismounted and walked the final stage towards a desert shrine where they were expected to bellow out passages from the Koran; Vambery, with his lameness and his parched throat, found this particularly galling. But the leader’s popularity was restored when, quite unexpectedly at a moment of maximum thirst and weariness, he revealed he had indeed been carrying a concealed supply of water – and shared it out among the pilgrims.

  After several weeks of struggling through sand, suffering from thirst and the constant fear of attack, they reached the edge of the desert and the frontiers of the khanate of Khiva. Rain, freshwater pools and an escort of cavalry (at first mistaken for marauders) were a reward for their perseverance. While other pilgrims tried to smarten themselves up for their arrival, Vambery declined all offers of clean clothes and rejoiced in contemplating his face ‘covered with a thick crust of dirt and sand’. He reckoned that the poorer and more dishevelled he looked, the likelier he was to avoid unwelcome attention. His excitement at seeing the minarets, fine meadows and lofty poplars of the capital was only mitigated by his apprehensions about his false role being detected: ‘my nerves were all strung to the highest point’. The khan’s reputation for ‘at once making slaves of all strangers of doubtful character’ was well known. As he passed through the welcoming crowds – such a large party of pilgrims had not arrived here for many years – he was mentally rehearsing ways ‘to get the better of the watchful, and superstitious tyrant’.

  His worst fears were quickly realized. No sooner had the khan’s chamberlain (who acted as customs officer) addressed the normal questions to the leader of the caravan, than the malicious Afghan pressed forward and called out aloud ‘We have brought to Khiva three interesting quadrupeds and a no less interesting biped!’. The quadrupeds were, of course, the buffaloes; the biped – alas – was Vambery. All eyes immediately turned on him, and he heard whispers of ‘spy’, ‘Westerner’ and ‘Russian’. The chamberlain ordered him to remain and addressed him in an exceedingly unpleasant way. But, once again, a combination of the support of his fellow pilgrims and his own ingenuity rescued him from his predicament. He had taken the trouble to refresh his memory about an eminent Khivan citizen who had been resident in Constantinople when he had been there; he now tracked down this former acquaintance to the Islamic college where he lived, and established his credentials with him as a Turkish dervish with whom – he claimed – he had common friends. He knew he had got away with it when the next day a messenger arrived from the khan, bringing a present and saying that the ruler had heard about hadji Rashid’s arrival at his capital and was anxious to receive a blessing from such a pious visitor. Meanwhile the Afghan had been reviled for his regrettable outburst and unfounded accusations.

  The prospect of a private audience with the khan was nonetheless a daunting one. He was accompanied to the palace by his former acquaintance who gave him some briefing about how to behave in the royal presence. He found the khan seated on a dais with his left arm supported on a velvet cushion and his right hand holding a golden sceptre. After giving a blessing to the khan, he retired a few paces and the official part of the ceremony was over. The khan then started to ask him questions. What was the object of his journey? How had he found the desert crossing, and the Turkomans? How long would he stay? Had he adequate funds? In reply to this last question, Vambery asserted, ‘we Dervishes do not trouble ourselves with such trifles’; and he added a wish that the khan should live for a hundred and twenty years. He found that his answers seemed to give satisfaction, because the khan ordered that he should be given twenty ducats and a stout donkey. Vambery declined the ducats, saying that ‘for a Dervish it was a sin to keep money’, but then went on to specify that his donkey should please be a white one as that was what ‘the holy commandment prescribed for pilgrimages’. (His self-confidence knew no limits!)

  He returned to his lodgings through waving crowds and, only when he was at last safely in the privacy of his cell, did he feel he could congratulate himself on the fact that ‘the Khan, who in appearance was so fearfully dissolute, and who presents in every feature of his countenance the real picture of an enervated, imbecile and savage tyrant, had behaved in a manner so unexceptionable’. He felt
that he could now, with the khan’s approval, visit whatever part of the territory he wished. And now that he was seen to be basking in the khan’s favour, the inhabitants of Khiva vied with each other to entertain him in their houses; he was continually being confronted with large and disgusting meals of rice swimming in the fat of sheep’s tails, and if he did not do justice to the meal, his hosts would speculate that it was extraordinary that someone ‘so well versed in books, should have acquired only a half acquaintance with the requisites of polite breeding!’. Almost equally exhausting were the continual questions put to him by passers by, whenever he ventured out of his convent cell. Since they knew he came from Constantinople, many of the questions related to the Ottoman sultan. Was it true, for instance, that the sultan had all his meals forwarded to him from Mecca? And were they miraculously flown from Mecca to Constantinople in a few seconds of time? Vambery wryly thought to himself how very different in reality the sultan’s worldly existence was from the divine vision imagined by his questioners: little did they know ‘how much Chateau Lafitte and Margot garnished the sovereign’s table’ at the Porte.

  Worse than any of these embarrassments however were the scenes that he was obliged to witness as he went around the capital. On one occasion he saw a party of captives – allegedly brigands who had attacked a caravan – being divided into those young enough to be worth selling in the slave markets, and those too old for any useful purpose. The latter had their eyes gouged out, the executioner wiping the blade of his knife on their beards. Since the khan was anxious to establish a reputation as a defender of Islamic law, a man who ‘cast a look upon a thickly veiled lady’ would be hanged, while the unfortunate lady who had attracted his attention would be buried in the ground up to her breasts, and then stoned to death. Such penalties usually followed a brief verdict of ‘take him away’ by the khan, who had been sitting in judgement. Vambery was uncomfortably aware that had his own performance at his audience been less convincing, he would doubtless have been subjected to the same verdict.