Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  Gruesome sights were not confined to the fate of prisoners. One day he saw some magnificent silk robes being embroidered and on inquiry found they were being awarded to those who had brought home the heads of enemies severed in battle – the more the heads the grander the robe. The next day he saw the warriors returning to claim their awards; they were emptying sacks full of severed heads – as if they had been sacks of potatoes – at the feet of the vizier in the public square and receiving a receipt which they would later cash in for the appropriate robe. This was no city for squeamish sightseers.

  But that was not the reason which persuaded Vambery it was time to move on. The pilgrims had been in the khanate for a month; great kindness had been shown to them; they had been laden with gifts (most of which Vambery rejected as became a true dervish); but now the weather was becoming ever hotter and they feared that if they delayed longer the further journey across desert and steppe to Bokhara would become unendurable. His Khivan friend tried so hard to persuade him not to go on and put himself at the mercy of the Emir of Bokhara, that Vambery had moments of wondering whether that friend had penetrated his disguise and realized just how great a risk he would be taking. But, having given a final blessing to the Khan of Khiva, he decided to go forward as planned. The pilgrims, owing to the generosity of the Khivans, were now better mounted than before: Vambery had the promised donkey to ride, and a camel to carry his frugal luggage. So many people came to see them off, and to follow them for the first mile or so requesting final benedictions, that Vambery’s donkey eventually could stand no more of it and took off across the steppe at a crisp gallop, braying as it went.

  It took them two days to cross the Oxus river, partly because the river was swollen and their ferry frequently was grounded on the sands, obliging some of the pilgrims to carry their own donkeys on their shoulders; and partly because the camels had to cross separately the following day. On the far bank of the Oxus, the countryside was relatively fertile: women offered the pilgrims drinks from their gourds; there were markets where Vambery even found other dervishes – though most of these were comatose through excessive opium consumption.

  He waxes lyrical about the Oxus river ‘rolling with a dull sound’ by moonlight.2 Although they felt safe here, the caravan leader was nervous about the approaches to Bokhara (six or eight days’ ride away) since the emir was known to be on campaign with his army, and at such times the Tekke Turkomans (the most feared tribe) felt free to ambush caravans on their approach to the city. They were therefore very relieved when five horsemen, who galloped up to them at full speed during their midnight march, turned out to be Khivan merchants who had come from Bokhara and reported that the routes were now quite safe.

  The feeling of security was short-lived. On the banks of the Oxus they came across two half-naked men who had been robbed of everything they had by an unusually large – 150-strong – band of Tekke Turkomans, and who urged them to fly or conceal themselves because ‘in spite of you all being pilgrims, they will leave you behind in the desert without beasts or food’. The warning was enough to persuade the caravan leader – who had twice previously been waylaid and narrowly escaped with his life – to order an about turn. After a brief rest, and refilling of water skins, he then led the caravan off directly into the desert: the going would be harder but they were more likely to avoid the Tekke. A number of the pilgrims were so frightened of another desert crossing (it was now July, the hottest month) that they accepted a lift on a skiff returning down the river. Only fourteen of the original party remained with the caravan leader, among them Vambery, who decided in his own words, ‘my life, indeed, is threatened everywhere – is everywhere on danger; forward, then, forward! Better to perish by the fury of the elements than by the racks of tyrants!’. With the dreaded Emir of Bokhara ahead of him, he could hardly have been sure he would avoid the latter fate.

  There was good reason to dread the desert crossing that now ensued. First two of the camels died, obliging more of the party to walk. Then two of the pilgrims became so exhausted that they had to be strapped onto the backs of other camels, being unable to ride or sit and calling out continually and unavailingly for water. One of them died on the fourth day, his tongue having turned black from thirst. Every man was now intent on his own survival, and slept with his arm around his water bottle. Vambery commented: ‘It is a horrible sight to see the father hide his store of water from the son, and brother from brother; each drop is life, and when men feel the torture of thirst, there is not, as in other dangers of life, any spirit of self-sacrifice, or any feeling of generosity’. He noticed that his own tongue was beginning to turn black, and drank off at a single draught half his remaining meagre horde of water. He was at the end of his tether, but nature had a further unpleasant surprise in store for them. It was the camels that first sensed that the dust wave that could be seen approaching them was in fact a full-blown sand storm; they lay down and tried to bury their heads in the sand; the pilgrims then entrenched themselves beside the camels; when the storm broke over them, it felt to Vambery as if ‘the first particles that touched me seemed to burn like a rain of flakes of fire’. He reckoned that if they had encountered the sand storm when they were even six miles deeper into the desert, they would all have perished.

  As it was, they managed to stagger out of the desert and Vambery, who was too weak to dismount without assistance, was laid on the ground with ‘a fearful fire seeming to burn my entrails’. He passed out, and when he regained consciousness found that he was in a mud hut surrounded by people with long beards who turned out to be Persian slaves from Bokhara acting as shepherds on the fringe of the desert. The shepherds had been given only the meanest supply of bread and water, to ensure that they did not try to run away, but they generously shared what they had with the pilgrims.

  When they reached a village on the outskirts of Bokhara they were told to wait until the customs officials came out to examine and note down all their possessions. As so often before, the official in question looked suspiciously at Vambery and – when his dervish status was confirmed by his companions – gave ‘a shake of the head full of meaning’. From here the track into the capital was through gardens and lush cultivated fields and soon they could see the minarets, domes and towers of Bokhara. It was an exciting moment for the pilgrims: this was the city which in Islamic legend (as Moorcroft had noted forty years earlier) instead of basking in the light reflected down from heaven, itself threw light up to heaven. No wonder it was known as ‘Bokhara Sherif’ – Bokhara the Noble.

  The pilgrims managed to reject the suggestion that they should stay in the customs house, where they would have been subjected to further inspections, and managed to secure accommodation in the Moslem college, which Vambery described as ‘the chief nest of Islamite fanaticism’. Here he was treated with deference and given a spacious cell to himself, as became a dervish holy man. But he was quick to realize the nature of his accommodation was a somewhat two-edged asset. On the one hand, it was an address which in itself confirmed his status; on the other hand he was surrounded by clerics who would be quick to observe any deviation from the accepted practices and doctrines of Islam, and who would probably want to engage him in endless debate. This was made the more dangerous in his case by the fact that, not only was Bokhara a most perilous place for all strangers especially Europeans (as the experience of Stoddart and Conolly had confirmed), but it was also a place where ‘the Government has carried the system of espionage to just as high a pitch of perfection as the population has attained pre-eminence in every kind of profligacy and wickedness’. There would be plenty of cunning people trying to catch him out and to gain credit by reporting him to the barbaric authorities.

  One of his first expeditions out of the college was to the bazaar. Here he was concerned to find a large number of goods of Russian manufacture – including samovars in the tea bazaar – providing evidence of increasing commercial penetration from the north. But he was also proud and pleased to see objects l
abelled as ‘made in Birmingham’ or ‘made in Manchester’, though he had to be careful not to so far forget himself as to show any give-away signs of pleasure or special interest in this. The bazaar was crowded with people from every corner of the khanates and emirates of Central Asia, as well as with Jews, Indians and Afghans. Most of the clothes in the bazaar were of local manufacture, and in bright colours and lively fashions. Vambery concluded that for the Tartar ‘Bokhara is his Paris or London’.

  But word of the customs officer’s suspicions had reached the grand vizier (who in the absence of the emir was in charge) and Vambery was subjected to endless efforts to entrap him, usually by inviting him to talk about Europe to see if he revealed any insider knowledge of its languages and mode of living. Eventually he told these provocateurs that ‘I quitted Constantinople to get away from these Europeans’ and that he did not want to spoil his time in Bokhara the Noble by talking about these matters. Having drawn a blank in this direction, the grand vizier summoned him to a levee, which turned out to be ‘a sort of examination, in which my incognito had to stand a running fire’. As on previous occasions, Vambery met the challenge by taking the initiative: he turned the interrogation onto his interrogators, asking them all sorts of esoteric theological questions. A lively debate ensued and he managed to ‘get safely through this ordeal’.

  After this he was left to lead a relatively quiet life in Bokhara for the remainder of his three-week stay. Although now feeling less at risk himself, he was nonetheless depressed by the extent to which all the inhabitants stood in continual dread of being reported for some misdemeanour: even – he recorded – when a husband and wife were alone together they would not dare mention the emir’s name without adding ‘may he live 120 years’! As a holy city, it failed to come up to expectations: the water and almost everything about the sacred capital seemed dirty, despite a local saying that cleanliness is derived from religion (the Islamic equivalent of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’). Also, the citizens were far less generous to pilgrims than the inhabitants of Khiva: he had to sell his donkey, and left much poorer than he had arrived. But he was certainly lucky that the sadistic former emir (the murderer of Conolly) had been succeeded by a gentler tyrant, whose quirky vindictiveness was usually directed against the powerful rather than the weak, hence he was known as ‘the slayer of elephants and the protector of mice’. Vambery would hardly have qualified as a mouse however, had he been detected in his monstrous deceptions.

  However intrigued Vambery might have been by Bokhara and its markets, his fellow pilgrims were anxious to press on to Samarkand. Their numbers were now reduced to two cart loads of people, and were going to diminish still further as his companions reached their homes. He found these primitive carts even more uncomfortable than camels; the passengers shook around until ‘our heads were continually cannoning each other like balls on a billiard table’. Progress was slow as the driver – who came from Khokand – was unfamiliar with the route and frequently lost his way. But now they were travelling through cultivated land rather than desert and he noticed that every village market, however small, had its Russian samovar – dispensing tea and reminding the inhabitants of the culture of their powerful northern neighbour. Indeed, the samovars were the central point of much political discussion – an activity frowned upon in Bokhara but acceptable here.

  Vambery, who had been disappointed in the decrepit appearance of Bokhara, was enchanted by his first distant views of Samarkand, which he thought was larger and more impressive than Tehran. Although on entering the famous caravan destination, ‘the focus of the whole globe’, he found it again rather shabby, he nonetheless spent most of his eight days there visiting all the celebrated sights, including the tomb of Tamerlane, and describes them all in detail in his book. He also witnessed the return of the triumphant emir (who ruled over Samarkand as well as Bokhara) from his military campaign; he thought that his retinue looked more like the chorus in an opera than a troop of Tartar warriors.

  The day after his return, the emir declared he wanted to see hadji Rashid (Vambery) in a private audience. ‘This was a blow, because we all now suspected that something was going wrong.’ He spent a nervous hour being kept waiting, and then was ushered into the royal presence. The emir remarked that he had heard that Vambery had come to see the tombs of the saints of Turkestan, and remarked ‘Strange! And thou hast then no other motive in coming hither from so distant a land?’ Vambery said that was the case; he had no other business in life than being a world pilgrim. But the emir was still sceptical, and said, ‘What, thou, with thy lame foot, a world pilgrim! That is really astonishing.’ Vambery cleverly replied that the same lameness had applied to the emir’s illustrious ancestor – Tamerlane the Great – and it had not prevented the latter from becoming a world conqueror. The answer flattered and amused the emir, who dismissed him with a present. It had been an uncomfortable audience, and he was advised by his friends ‘to quit Samarkand at all speed and gain as rapidly as possible the further bank of the Oxus’.

  The moment had now come for him to decide whether he was going to press on further eastwards into China and possibly even into Tibet, or return via Herat (on the Afghan-Persian border) to Tehran. His friends all advised him against going further east: he would be leaving the realms of Islam and entering countries where his role as a dervish and Moslem holy man granted no prestige or protection. After much heart-searching, he decided enough was enough: he was only thirty-one, and ‘what had not happened may still occur; better, perhaps, now, that I should return’. But parting from his companions was a sad event; two of the other pilgrims in particular had been kind to him throughout and supportive in all his difficult moments; he knew he would never see them again and felt bad about leaving them still under a complete illusion about his real personality and provenance. At his last sight of them, they were still standing ‘with their hands raised to heaven, imploring Allah’s blessing upon my far journey’.

  Accompanied now by a smaller band of other pilgrims, his way ran through Karshi and Kerki, two Turkoman settlements still within the domain of the Emir of Bokhara, and he stopped in the former place long enough to buy a supply of cheap hunting knives, needles and glass beads – all of which he was assured he would be able to trade for more vital commodities such as bread on the next stage of his travels. He felt he cut a strange figure: a pilgrim loaded with wares like a travelling shop. When they again reached the swollen river Oxus, which – with a rare childhood recollection of Hungary – Vambery decided was twice as wide here as the Danube between Buda and Pest, they persuaded a ferryman to take them on the three-hour crossing without charging them. But the far bank, where he had hoped he would be safer than on Bokharan soil, held an unpleasant surprise.

  They had no sooner landed than an official representing the local governor arrested him on suspicion of being a runaway Persian slave and confiscated all his possessions. Vambery made his usual scene and produced a passport which had the seal of the sultan of Turkey (a document which had got him out of more than one scrape before) demanding that it should be shown immediately to the governor himself. The combination of documentation and bluster did the trick, and he was sent on his way with apologies and a small bribe to persuade him to keep quiet about the incident.

  At Kerki he had to wait several days for the chance of joining up with a much larger caravan – some 400 camels, 200 donkeys and a few horses – which was made up of a mixture of freed slaves and genuine pilgrims. While waiting, Vambery occupied himself by noting in detail the defensive potential of the town (doubtless already having in mind the paper he would write about the Russian threat to India from this direction). Once underway with the caravan, he was subjected to listening to endless horrendous stories told to him by the ex-slaves: stories about the 15,000 Tekke Turkomans who were continually prowling over the steppes and deserts to capture more human hostages, and about the devastation caused to family life for those required to try to raise the ransoms demanded. At anoth
er settlement they passed through, an officious vizier demanded such an extortionate tax on the caravan that their leader protested violently and a fight might have ensued had not the local khan intervened and sent them on their way. The caravan, now doubled in size, felt that only their numbers protected them from robbery by brigands or unscrupulous officials.

  At another staging post – the settlement of Maymene – renowned for its horse markets, Vambery again found time to study the defences in depth, making notes of the height and thickness of walls and towers. Here it was not he who was arrested for being a runaway slave, but several other members of the caravan who claimed to be from Turkey and needed Vambery’s corroboration to confirm their status. It transpired these ‘fellow pilgrims’ had been captured by the Russians while fighting in the Caucasus, and transported like common criminals to Siberia where they had been employed felling trees in the forests round Tobolsk. Years had elapsed before they learnt to speak any Russian, but when they did they set about chatting up their guards and even managed to reach a degree of familiarity with them which allowed of vodka-drinking parties. One night when the guards had drunk a bit too much, the prisoners felled them with their axes and appropriated their weapons.

  They then escaped and, living on grass and roots and whatever they could find or steal, managed to reach Central Asia and join up with the caravan, hoping eventually to get back to Turkey. Vambery vouched for them – although he thought them criminals – and they were released. The incident probably went some way to strengthening his anti-Russian sentiments.