These were the Tien Shan: the Mountains of Heaven. At their foot lay Alma Ata, beyond them Chinese Turkestan.
Chapter VI
Cities of the Plain
ALL day we trundled across the desert towards those distant peaks. Then, suddenly in the early afternoon, we found ourselves once again amid cultivation: apple orchards, the trees heavily laden with fruit; golden fields of Indian corn ripening in the sun; plantations of melons; rows of tall poplars growing by the side of canals and irrigation ditches. After the desert the foliage seemed lusciously, exuberantly green. We were nearing Alma Ata. Already we could see the white houses of the town. Beyond it the tree-covered foothills of the Tien Shan rose steeply towards the snow-covered peaks behind them.
I was in Central Asia.
Alma Ata lies ten miles from the railway. After an interminable wait, followed by a sharp mêlée, I succeeded in securing myself a place in a lorry that was going there. Next to me was a grubby but cheerful individual, with a snub nose, a mouthful of irregular, broken teeth and a shock of tangled hair, who told me that he had just completed five years in a penal settlement. Life there, he said, had not been so bad, though to this day he did not know why he had been sent there. Perhaps it was because he was a Pole. But now, although he had never applied for them, he had been given Soviet papers, so things would perhaps be easier for him. Before being deported he had been a barber by profession; now he hoped to make a living by picking apples. He seemed a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, ready to take things as he found them.
After a fierce jolting down long dusty roads lined with poplars, we passed through a colony of dilapidated Kazakh yurts on the outskirts and almost immediately found ourselves in the centre of the town.
Alma Ata must be one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union. In character it is purely Russian, being one of the first Russian settlements in Central Asia. From its foundation in 1854 until the Revolution it bore the name of Vierny. In Kazakh its new name means ‘Father of Apples’, an appellation which it fully merits, for the apples grown there are the finest in size and flavour that I have ever eaten. The central part of the town consists of wide avenues of poplars at right angles to one another. The houses, whether of wood or of stone, are painted white and are for the most part in a good state of preservation. In addition to the ornate pre-revolutionary buildings, a large number of austere ultra-modern constructions have been erected which include a very large block of government buildings, a telegraph, telephone and wireless building, a fine cinema, various scientific and other institutes, shops and several blocks of flats. Other buildings were nearing completion. A tramway system was being installed and many of the streets were asphalted. The shops seemed well stocked, especially the food shops. In the centre of the town there was a large open bazaar to which the Kazakhs from the neighbouring collective farms rode in to sell their wares. The population, which to judge by the crowds in the streets was roughly half Kazakh and half Russian, seemed comparatively contented, and those with whom I spoke showed themselves intensely proud of the town they lived in. I gained an impression of prosperity and progress.
Alma Ata, until a few years ago a smaller town than Semipalatinsk, owes its development almost entirely to the Turksib Railway which has linked it up with the rest of the Soviet Union. Before the Revolution the population was approximately 30,000; in 1929, before the railway reached it, it was 50,000 and now seven years after the construction of the Turksib, it had reached the figure of 230,000.
The population of Kazakhstan of which it is the capital and, which in 1936 became a Union Republic, is only about eight millions, but in area it is approximately equivalent to England, France and Germany put together. Its economic importance is principally agricultural and in the immediate neighbourhood of Alma Ata the country seemed remarkably fertile, producing Indian corn, cotton, wheat and rice and sugar beet besides the apples for which it is famous and other kinds of fruit. It is also the most important cattle-breeding area in the Soviet Union.
On arrival at Alma Ata I immediately set out in search of somewhere to live. I was attracted by what I had seen of the town and its immediate surroundings and I was also determined to see something of the Ala Tau, the portion of the Tien Shan range which lies immediately to the south. From what I knew of Soviet methods it would be several days before I even found out what means existed of getting up into the mountains.
I had ascertained on arriving that there were two hotels, both of recent construction. One was known as the Ogpu Hotel because of its proximity to N.K.V.D. Headquarters and the other, which formed part of the central block of Government buildings, was called the Dom Sovietov or House of the Soviets. At both I was told on applying for accommodation that they were completely full, the management of the Dom Sovietov adding that even if they had had room they would not have given it to me as they only catered for Government and Party officials travelling on official business.
Emboldened by my experience at Sverdlovsk I decided that the time had come to invoke the help of the N.K.V.D. At N.K.V.D. Headquarters I was told that the competent officer was out but would be back in two hours, and on returning two hours later, I found no one except an apparently half-witted Kazakh sentry from whom I gathered that Headquarters had shut down for the night. My own N.K.V.D. escort had no suggestions to offer and seemed in some doubt as to where they were going to spend the night themselves. The immediate outlook was scarcely promising, but before resigning myself to the prospect of a night on the streets, I decided to go back to the Dom Sovietov, which had seemed to me in every way preferable to the ordinary hotel, and see whether I could not by sheer persistence make the management relent. I accordingly deposited my luggage in the front hall and fought my way through the crowd surrounding the booking desk. An hour later, although the management showed no signs of weakening as far as sleeping accommodation was concerned, I had succeeded in securing permission to have supper in the hotel dining-room, a success of which I hastened to take advantage.
I had expected the filthy oilcloth-covered tables, the rude attendants and the greasy, stodgy food with which I had grown familiar at Sverdlovsk and elsewhere. Instead, I found a pleasant room, obsequious waiters and waitresses, and good food. After eating a meal of bortsch, roast duck with apples, and pancakes, which cost me only ten roubles, and drinking several glasses of vodka I felt a great deal happier and more determined than ever not to be turned out of this preserve of the privileged classes.
But the tired, solitary, middle-aged woman who had been left in charge of the booking desk stuck to her guns and an hour or two later, in spite of every kind of threat, taunt and appeal, I had still made no progress and was preparing to spend the night on a bench in the local Park of Rest and Culture, when, suddenly, as is the way in the Soviet Union, her opposition collapsed and she told me that, if I would promise to go away next day, I might have a bed in the Lenin Corner which had been turned into a temporary dormitory. I was issued with the necessary propusk or pass and a few minutes later I was installed in a fairly clean bed immediately under the outstretched arm of a life-sized statue of Lenin and opposite an equally imposing bust of Stalin. The fifteen other beds in the room were occupied by snoring Kazakh or Russian minor officials, all of whom woke and protested loudly when I tried to open the window.
Next morning, having been told that the impending arrival of 70 visiting members of the Communist Youth Association made my continued presence in the hotel impossible, I returned to the attack with the N.K.V.D. This time I was received almost immediately by the Commanding Officer, who was clearly unaccustomed to foreigners and seemed at a loss to know what to do with me. In the end he turned for advice to his lady secretary who told him with an air of authority, which under any other system would have been surprising, that he was to have nothing to do with me at all. I was accordingly turned politely away from N.K.V.D. Headquarters and advised to try the Dipagentstvo or Diplomatic Agency.
This, I felt quite convinced, did no
t really exist. In any case my experience of Mr. Stark in Tiflis made me feel certain that even if there really was a Diplomatic Agent in Alma Ata he would be worse than useless. But I was mistaken.
After a prolonged search I at last found the Diplomatic Agency which, in the absence of the Agent, who I gathered was an official of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, was in charge of a most amiable and zealous young Kazakh who assured me that he was delighted to see me as he felt that my arrival justified his existence. In spite of the fact that he was employed in a Diplomatic Agency, I was the first foreigner with whom he personally had ever come into contact. After a brief struggle in which he was completely victorious, he brought the Dom Sovietov into line and a good single room was put at my disposal for as long as I liked. Moreover, on learning of my desire to visit the Tien Shan he provided me with a recommendation to the Society of Proletarian Tourists.
When I applied next day to the offices of that organization I was told that a car and a guide had now been found but that there was no petrol to be had as every drop was required for bringing in the harvest. I accordingly decided to make an excursion on my own. After loitering for some time round the motor-lorry base in the centre of the town I succeeded in obtaining a place on a lorry going to Talgar, a large village in the hills some forty miles to the south-east of Alma Ata.
On reaching Talgar I set out on foot into the hills followed by one of the two local N.K.V.D. men who had relieved their colleagues from Novosibirsk soon after my arrival. After we had gone some distance I allowed my new escort, to whom I had not yet spoken, to catch up with me and remarked on the beauty of the scenery. He agreed and, taking advantage of the opening, inquired whether I proposed to go on walking all day without anything to eat. I suggested that we might pick some apples off the trees. He replied that if I wanted apples and some hot food too we could stop at a peasant’s cottage, as he was a Talgar man himself and the peasants were all old friends of his. I agreed and we turned into the next cottage we came to.
The cottage, which was surrounded by three or four acres of ground, including an apple orchard, a plot of Indian corn, a plot of melons and a plot of sunflowers, contained one large room where the occupants slept and ate, a kitchen and a space under the eaves for drying fruit and vegetables. It was built of mud bricks and whitewashed inside and out. Sitting in the sun outside it we found a very old Russian peasant woman and her two grandchildren aged four and five. They seemed delighted to see visitors and the grandmother immediately started to prepare a meal while I played in the garden with the puppy, the children and the N.K.V.D. man. Later we were joined by the children’s mother, a fine healthy-looking peasant woman, and their elder sister aged nine who arrived with the bread, and finally by their father who had been into the bazaar with his horse and cart to sell his Indian corn crop.
The meal to which we now sat down after the family had duly crossed themselves in front of the numerous ikons which were hanging in a corner of the extremely clean and quite well-furnished living-room, was a good one. There was no meat; but a large bowl of pancakes with sour milk into which we all dipped, eggs, tea and magnificent apples and melons which the children were sent out to pick. After we had finished, we discussed, as always happens on such occasions in the Soviet Union, our respective modes of life. My hosts told me that they worked on the neighbouring collective farm. In addition to what they earned there, they were able to sell on their own account the produce of their plot of ground which they had bought twelve years before. They also kept pigs and hens. They said that all the peasants in the district had been collectivized but that life there was pleasant and prosperity fairly general. This was certainly borne out by the appearance of most of the peasants I saw near Talgar and Alma Ata.
After refusing an urgent invitation to spend the night, my escort and I set out for Talgar at dusk having failed to induce our hosts to accept any reward in return for their hospitality. Before leaving I was called on to hear the little girl’s reading and geography lessons. She seemed to possess a fair knowledge of both subjects and to my relief I found that her reader contained ordinary fairy stories and practically no propaganda. At Talgar we boarded a lorry full of highly Sovietized Kazakh girl students returning to Alma Ata after spending the free day in their villages. They, too, seemed pleased with life and squeaked and giggled shrilly as we jolted along.
Early next morning I again visited the Tourist Base only to find that there was still no petrol. I had by now decided that this was probably a case of deliberate obstruction rather than mere disorganization, but as a last resource I suggested that an attempt should be made to obtain me some official petrol from the Alma Ata Town Soviet, a body with whom I had as yet had no dealings. To my intense surprise the reply came back in a few minutes that the necessary quantity of petrol had been put at my disposal by the Town Soviet and that one of the more active members of that body would himself accompany me on my expedition. An hour or two later I drove out of Alma Ata in an extremely dilapidated open Ford car, accompanied by a decorous young Soviet official in a neat blue suit and a ferocious-looking one-eyed Kazakh guide in a sheepskin. My N.K.V.D. escort were left gaping outside the Dom Sovietov.
First we climbed by a road in a very early stage of construction, south-eastwards through the foothills of the Ala Tau as far as the village of Issik. At frequent intervals gangs working on the road made it necessary for us to make considerable detours through the scrub. At Issik, a mountain village which much resembled Talgar, we turned southwards up a more or less non-existent mountain track, passing on the way a native aul with its mud huts clinging insecurely to the almost perpendicular mountain side. The corn cobs were spread out to dry on the roofs as being the only available flat space. The sides of the valley through which we were climbing were thick with wild apple trees and rose bushes. Finally we arrived at the point where the track ceased to exist and, leaving the car in charge of a Kazakh lumberman whose solitary yurt happened to be nearby, set out on foot for the lake, climbing up the rocky bed of a mountain stream.
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 rea
lizing 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.
Eastern Approaches Page 8