Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  This might have lasted indefinitely, when I saw something which caused me to get off the lorry hurriedly and disappear into some trees at the side of the road where I was joined by my N.K.V.D. man.

  A car was coming down the road from the station, containing my other N.K.V.D. man and a uniformed officer of State Security. Meanwhile the lorry, having got rid of most of its passengers, had started once again on its way. It was quickly overtaken by the police car and stopped a hundred yards further on. The driver was made to get out and was cross-questioned and finally every bale of cotton was gone through. Meanwhile the first N.K.V.D. man, crouching beside me in the bushes, remained, inexplicably, where he was without giving any sign of life. As I watched the progress of the search from my hiding-place, I decided that the interest which the local authorities were showing in my movements was far from reassuring. I consoled myself, however, with the thought that the zeal which they were now displaying might peter out, as so many things do peter out in Central Asia.

  Having completed his search of the lorry and allowed the somewhat bewildered driver to proceed on his way, the officer of State Security now climbed back into his car and drove off, leaving his plain-clothes colleague from the capital standing in the middle of the road. From the bushes, I watched his departure with feelings of unmixed relief. I had by this time decided that my only hope of reaching Bokhara was to walk there and wondered why I had not thought of this before. My ideas about distance were vague, but I had an idea that the Emir’s little train was supposed to take about an hour, so that it could not be very far. The road taken by the lorry was the only one in sight, so I came out of the bushes and started off along it, while my escort fell in behind at a discreet distance, wondering, I imagine, what was coming next.

  Apart from the railway station, N.K.V.D. Headquarters, one or two cotton mills and a distressing structure of uncertain use combining all the worst features of both European and Oriental architecture, Kagan has little claim to be called a town, and we were soon in the open country. On either side of the road flowering fields of cotton stretched as far as the eye could reach, intersected by irrigation ditches. From time to time I passed clusters of two or three native farmsteads amid poplars and other trees. Through an occasional open gate, set in high mud walls, I caught sight of a courtyard, with, in the living-quarters on the far side, an open door and a fire burning in the living-room. Uzbek houses have changed very little since the days of Tamerlane.

  From time to time the road branched and I was left in some doubt whether to go to the left or the right. The sun was setting and the prospect of spending the night wandering about Uzbekistan looking for Bokhara in an entirely wrong direction did not appeal to me. On the whole I allowed myself to be guided by the endless caravans of two-humped Bactrian dromedaries, which, I imagined, were, like myself, making for the city of Bokhara. The peculiarly sweet tone of their bells sounded reassuring in the gathering darkness. Behind me my followers in their neat Moscow-made blue suits and bright yellow shoes padded along disconsolately in the acrid-smelling, ankle-deep dust.

  I walked for what seemed a very long time. It was by now quite dark and there was still no sign of Bokhara. I had come to feel less well-disposed towards the dromedaries. With their vast bales of merchandise they took up the whole road entangling me in their head ropes, breathing menacingly down my neck and occasionally lumbering up against me and pushing me into the ditch.

  I was beginning to wonder if I had not after all taken the wrong road, and, if so, where it would lead me, when I noticed that the sky in the direction in which I was walking seemed slightly more luminous than elsewhere. It might, or it might not, be the reflected lights of a city. Soon the farmsteads along the road and in the fields became more numerous and the road took me between high mud walls enclosing orchards of apricot trees. It was very unlike the Soviet Union.

  Then all at once the road took a turn, and topping a slight rise I found myself looking down on the broad white walls and watch towers of Bokhara spread out before me in the light of the rising moon.

  Chapter X

  Bokhara the Noble

  IMMEDIATELY in front of me stood one of the city gates, its great arch set in a massive fortified tower which rose high above the lofty crenellated walls. Following a string of dromedaries I passed through it into the city.

  I possessed a fair knowledge of the writings of most of the European travellers who visited Bokhara during the past century and this made easier the task of identifying the principal buildings. Entering the city from the south east, I followed the fairly straight street leading to the bazaars and centre of the town which has for centuries been followed by travellers and caravans from India, Persia and Afghanistan.

  It was along this street that there passed in 1845, to the consternation of the population who had assembled in their thousands to witness his arrival, the Reverend Joseph Wolff, D.D., ‘garbed’, by his own account, in ‘full canonicals’, clergyman’s gown, doctor’s hood and shovel hat, and carrying a bible under his arm. By origin a Bavarian Jew, the son of a Rabbi, by vocation (after a brief but spirited passage with the Pope) a Church of England clergyman, the Eccentric Missionary, as he was known to his contemporaries, had set out at an advanced age to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly, two British officers who had been sent sometime previously by Her Majesty’s Government on a mission to the Court of the Emir Nasrullah, with the ultimate aim of making Bokhara a British dominion before it became a Russian one.

  Dr. Wolff ascertained the fate of the envoys soon enough. After months of what was in fact imprisonment they had been consigned to the well, twenty-one feet deep, where the Emir kept his specially bred vermin and reptiles. When, two months later, ‘masses of their flesh having been gnawed off their bones’, they had finally refused to turn Mussulman, they had been beheaded outside the Citadel. This had happened many months before Wolff’s arrival. He himself attributed the failure of the mission to the action of the Prime Minister, ‘that bloodhound Abdul Samut Khan, in whose character, it seems to me the Foreign Office has been deceived’.

  Soon the question of his own religious proclivities was raised. The Chief Executioner was sent, a little pointedly, by Abdul Samut Khan to ask him whether he was prepared to embrace Islam. To this inquiry he replied ‘Decidedly not!’ and sat down to write a farewell letter to his wife, the Lady Georgiana,1 with whom he had kept up an animated correspondence throughout his journey.

  But his life, as it turned out, was saved by the strangeness of his appearance and behaviour. On his being brought before the Emir, still clad in full canonicals and with his bible still under his arm, that potentate, of whom he writes vividly, ‘His Majesty has the whole appearance of a bon vivant’, was seized with a fit of uncontrollable laughter, which redoubled when the Eccentric Missionary prostrated himself thirty times, stroked his beard thirty times and cried ‘Allah Akbar’ thirty times, instead of the usual three. For, though not prepared to become a Mohammedan, Dr. Wolff was ready to go to considerable lengths in order to keep out of the vermin pit. The interview was thus a distinct success and culminated with the appearance of a ‘musical band of Hindoos from Lahore’ who gave a spirited rendering of ‘God Save the Queen’. After further adventures, which included his temptation by means of an unveiled woman specially sent for this purpose by the Prime Minister, Dr. Wolff was eventually suffered to leave Bokhara, greatly to the surprise of the population, who were not accustomed to such clemency and hailed the Emir’s astonishing decision as a sign from heaven.

  Following in the steps of the Eccentric Missionary, I reached the centre of the town. Seen thus, Bokhara seemed an enchanted city, with its pinnacles and domes and crumbling ramparts white and dazzling in the pale light of the moon. High above them all rose the Tower of Death, the oldest and most magnificent of the minarets. Built seven hundred years ago by the Karakhanides, who ruled in Bokhara before the Mongol invasion and the advent of Genghis Khan, it vies in purity of line and be
auty of ornament with the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance. For centuries before 1870, and again in the troubled years between 1917 and 1920, men were cast down to their death from the delicately ornamented gallery which crowns it. Today a great Red Flag flaps from its summit.

  Before me gaped one of the cavernous tunnels of the covered bazaar. There I bought from a plump Uzbek merchant sitting cross-legged at the entrance of his dimly lighted shop a flat round loaf of sour-tasting black bread, some fruit and a bottle of sweet red wine, and, repairing to the garden of a nearby mosque, sat down under a bush to rest and eat. Under the central arch of the old mosque the present rulers of Bokhara had erected a gleaming new white marble monument to Lenin and Stalin, lavishly draped with red bunting.

  As I took a pull at my bottle of wine, I became aware of someone hovering uncertainly near me, and a quavering voice said, ‘Please leave some for me.’ Then a very frail, very tattered old Russian, with long white drooping moustaches emerged ghostlike from the shadows and stood waiting expectantly. I gave him the wine. Tilting back his head, he raised the bottle to his mouth. There was a sound of gurgling, and he put it down empty. Then, with a mumbled word of thanks, he shuffled off into the darkness, leaving me with an odd sense of satisfaction at having thus by chance supplied a much felt need.

  Cheered by this encounter and by my share of the wine, I took another stroll through the empty streets, and then returned to the garden, which I had decided to make my home for as long as I remained in Bokhara.

  An attempt to secure a bed in one of the chai-khanas would have necessitated the production of documents and probably have led to trouble with the local authorities. So long as I did not formally announce my presence, they were not formally obliged to take steps to get rid of me, and my chief concern was accordingly to avoid any kind of incident which would have made it necessary for me to declare my identity. I therefore made myself as comfortable as I could under some shrubs, while my escort reluctantly followed my example a few yards away. They were not, I think, particularly pleased. They had taken a good deal more exercise than they liked; they had been made to look at a great many ancient monuments in which they were not particularly interested and, worst of all, their evening’s work had added nothing to their knowledge of British intrigues in Soviet Central Asia.

  Wrapped in my greatcoat I passed the remainder of the night undisturbed. After midnight few of the inhabitants venture out, and there was no noise save in the distance the snarling and barking of the thousands of dogs which stray about the streets, the melancholy whistling of the night-watchmen and the flapping of the great Red Flag on the Tower of Death.

  Next day I resumed my wanderings through the town. My escort had now been reinforced by an Uzbek colleague, an amiable native of Bokhara, with whom I soon made friends and who showed me my way about, told me in broken Russian where I could buy the local products and even helped me to identify some of the buildings. He was a simple soul, clearly delighted at coming into contact with a genuine foreigner, especially one so full of admiration for his native city.

  In many ways Bokhara resembles Samarkand or the old city of Tashkent. There are the same intricate labyrinth of narrow lanes between high windowless mud walls, the same jostling, brightly clad crowds in the streets, pushed aside here and there to make way for strings of donkeys or camels, the same chai-khanas crowded with clients sitting on piles of carpets, drinking tea, talking, telling each other stories, or selling each other whatever comes to hand.

  But, while in Tashkent and Samarkand East and West lie side by side and often intermingle in the most disconcerting way, Bokhara has remained, and, I think, cannot but remain, so long as it survives at all, wholly Eastern.

  With the capture in 1868 of Samarkand and the upper reaches of the Zaravshan by the Russians, who thus gained control of his water supply, the Emir of Bokhara was obliged to accept the suzerainty of the Tsar and Russian control of his relations with the outside world; but inside his own dominions he maintained his own army and enjoyed absolute power of life and death over his unfortunate subjects. The Russian population was limited to a few officials and merchants, while the Emir excluded other Europeans from his domains with a jealousy which has been emulated by his Bolshevik successors. Bokhara thus remained a centre of Mohammedan civilization, a holy city with a hundred mosques, three hundred places of learning, and the richest bazaar in Central Asia. It was not until 1920, three years after the downfall of his imperial suzerain, that the last Emir, after vainly invoking the help of both the Turks and the British, fled headlong across the Oxus to Afghanistan, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope of thus retarding the advance of the pursuing Red Army, who, however, were not to be distracted from their purpose by such stratagems. A leading part was played in these events by the same Faisullah Khojayev, whom I had seen condemned to death in Moscow six months earlier.

  In Bokhara the process of Sovietization can have been neither rapid nor easy. The population were accustomed to being oppressed and tortured by the Emirs, but they were not accustomed to interference with their age-old customs and their religion. There were the mullahs to be reckoned with, who possessed great influence over the population, and there were the capitalist class, the Begs, the merchants, both large and small, and the landowners.

  The problem which faced the Bolsheviks in the domains of the former Emir, and particularly in such a stronghold of Moslem culture as the city of Bokhara itself, was as hard as any with which they were confronted in Central Asia. The solution adopted was perhaps the only one possible. The capital of the Emirs could not be converted into a Soviet town unless it was to be razed to the ground and built up afresh. And so it was left to decay. In contrast to that of most provincial towns in the Soviet Union, which in many cases has increased tenfold, the population of Bokhara has fallen steadily until now it is less than half what it was thirty years ago. With the exception of a highly incongruous Pedagogic Institute which has made a somewhat half-hearted appearance within its walls, the dying city of Bokhara has remained purely Eastern. The only changes are those which have been wrought by neglect, decay and demolition.

  The city is still surrounded by its high crenellated walls with their eleven gates and one hundred and eighty-one watch towers, believed by some to be a thousand years old. Immediately inside the walls on the outskirts of the city lie what must once have been the gardens and houses of the rich. Outwardly little has changed, and the high walls, pierced by no windows, make it impossible to tell by whom they are now occupied.

  In the centre of the town, clustering round the Tower of Death stand the principal mosques: the Kalyan, or Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome), formerly the place of worship of the Emir, and the vast Mir Arab which lies beyond the Tower of Death and formerly possessed the largest madresseh in Central Asia. Neither is of great architectural beauty, though the dome from which the Kok Gumbaz gains its name, with its tiles of the brilliant blue only found in Turkestan, provides pleasant relief from the dust-coloured buildings which surround it. Both were built in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

  Like those in Tashkent and Samarkand, the mosques and madressehs of Bokhara are constructed of mud bricks of different shades of pale red and brown. The design is nearly always the same: in the centre of the façade, the central arch or pishtak, reaching the whole height of the building, with, on either side, a double row of smaller arches. In the madressehs the central arch forms the entrance to one or more courtyards surrounded by cloisters and rows of cells. Most of the mosques in Bokhara have lost the coloured tiles which formerly adorned their façades and which to a large extent still survive in Samarkand; but the madressehs of Ulug Beg and Abdul Azis, which stand facing each other not far away from the Tower of Death have retained that much of their former splendour, their façades being still decorated with their original intricate arabesques. The Ulug Beg madresseh, like the madresseh of the same name in Samarkand, was built by Ulug Beg, the grandson of T
amerlane and famous astronomer, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Bokhara abounds with smaller mosques and madressehs. Of the former a very few are still in use, but for the most part they stand abandoned or have been turned to other uses. Everywhere heaps of masonry and rubble testify to the process of demolition, which is robbing the city of its splendours.

  Round the Tower of Death and the principal mosques lies the bazaar quarter. Formerly the covered bazaars stretched for miles throughout the centre of the town. Now little is left of what was once the richest bazaar in Central Asia save the Char-su or clusters of domes at the points where two or more bazaar streets intersect. A few shops and stalls still survive, but individual enterprise, though possibly it survives in Central Asia to a greater extent than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, has been all but stamped out, and even the brightly striped khalats are now produced by collectivized seamstresses working under the auspices of some State combine or trust. Only the fruit and vegetable bazaars have retained something of their former magnificence with their splendid heaps of grapes and melons.

  Not far from the Kalyan and Mir Arab mosques, on the north-west side of the town, rises the grim thousand-year-old Ark or Citadel of the Emirs, where Stoddart and Conolly and innumerable other prisoners met such singularly unpleasant ends. Constructed on an artificial mound, its lofty walls and crumbling fortifications cover an enormous amount of ground. The entrance gate, with its twin turrets, now bears, in Russian and Uzbek, the inscription, ‘Town Soviet’. In front of it stretches a large open space, formerly the Registan, or main square of the city, but now bereft of any signs of life. Shakh Rud, a canal linked with the Zaravshan and constituting the city’s only water supply, still flows through Bokhara, but many of the khaus, or tanks, which were formerly filled by it, seem to have been abolished, no doubt in an attempt to check the ravages of the Sartian Sickness or Bokhara Boil so prevalent in Uzbekistan and largely due to the particular foulness of the water.