The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

  Makaryevna was dying; but Przhevalsky could not put back the day of his departure. He gave her a copy of his newly-published book and inscribed it to ‘my dearly beloved nanny’. The last month at Sloboda, a sunny, hot July, took away Przhevalsky’s urge to shoot; he sat down and wrote ‘Instructions to the Manager of the Village of Sloboda.’ They are long, detailed lists of major and minor works to be done on the estate, but they are not without their telling points:

  I entrust the management of the household and the cattle to Makaryevna; all the rest to you. I ask you to act by mutual agreement in cases of joint arrangements …

  Hunting and fishing in my possessions is absolutely forbidden for anyone, no matter who; only angling is allowed. In the newly acquired part of Lake Sapsho even angling is forbidden, as is boating anywhere on Lake Sapsho, with the exception of the Sloboda school-teachers …

  Outsiders, no matter who, are not permitted to stay in my house even for a day …

  The priest and the clergy are not permitted to graze cattle in my paddocks.

  In all dealings with the peasants no currying of favour is allowed; always sacrifice money interest to the advantage of authority; but always act justly and honestly …

  In autumn bind all fruit trees with straw.

  Every two months send a detailed report of incomings and outgoings to Yevgeni Mikhaylovich [Przhevalsky’s brother]; once a year go to Moscow for directions on more serious business questions …

  Makaryevna’s salary is to be paid from 1 January 1888 … at 5 roubles a month. In addition … issue Makaryevna every year a pension of 25 roubles …

  Avoid cutting our woods, rather buy timber anywhere else if needed.

  Keep a strict watch that peasants do not soak hemp anywhere in my waters.

  … I ask you to write to me nothing but the truth while I am away, keeping back none of the misadventures that may befall Sloboda …

  5/17 August 1888 dawned. Peasants and neighbours milled around the house to take their leave of Przhevalsky. He slipped away into the garden, spent a little time in his ‘hut’, and then went back to say goodbye to Makaryevna who was too distraught to say more than, ‘For the last time!’ as they tearfully embraced. There was an equally emotional scene as Przhevalsky said goodbye to Denisov and then kissed the men and children who stood outside. Next he took a red pencil and wrote on a wooden pillar of the porch, ‘5 August 1888. Goodbye, Sloboda. N. Przhevalsky’, and made Kozlov, Roborovsky, Teleshov and Nefedov sign their names below.

  Distressed and irritable, he made his way to his unsprung carriage, which was harnessed to a troika of horses. He picked at the overhanging branch of an oak, tore off two acorns as a talisman and put them in his knapsack. The expeditionaries then moved off. As they drove away, Przhevalsky became angry when his companions talked of what they would do when they returned; he reminded them that their lives would be hanging by a thread many times in the two years ahead.

  First of all Przhevalsky had to take his men to Petersburg; he was to present a copy of his recent book to the Tsar. The Tsar, Przhevalsky said, ‘saw me off as if I were a relative.’ His next parting was from his foster son, Kostya Voyevodsky. He ‘burst into tears like a woman’ at the farewell. He entrusted Kostya’s education and maintenance to his friend Feldman, who was to buy Kostya a rifle if he passed his 1889 examinations, give him his pocket money and ‘in case of idleness or, worse, failing his exams, to thrash and thrash again.’ Przhevalsky’s lodging on Stolyarnaya Street, reports Dubrovin, his friend, colleague and future biographer, looked more like a barn, the rooms piled high with equipment for some twenty-seven men over two years. The first chapter of Przhevalsky’s From Kyakhta to the Sources of the Yellow River described ‘How to Travel in Central Asia’; the lodgings were a demonstration. There was a medical cabinet with quinine, opium solution, castor oil, flowers of sulphur (also useful for making explosive bullets), carbolic, ipecacuanha, American toothache drops, gutta-percha and medicinal tar. There were ‘beads for the natives’—picture postcards of actresses, kaleidoscopes and so on, and there was an armoury. As in his first journey, so in his fifth over Central Asia, Przhevalsky held that the best guides were money, rifles and whips.

  On 18/30 August the baggage and men were ready to move to Moscow on the first stage of the journey. The departure was meant to be secret, but crowds were waiting at the station. Przhevalsky’s friends ringed him like a bodyguard and they fought their way to the train. As it moved off, he shouted out to the ornithologist Pleske, ‘If I don’t come back, I hand the work on the birds to you.’ A day or two after his arrival in Moscow he received a telegram from Denisov. Makaryevna was dead. Przhevalsky telegraphed back; he wanted Makaryevna buried in the best plot in the churchyard. But, he wrote next day, ‘instead of the copious priest’s memorial service, just give the poor peasants (but only the very poorest) a hundred roubles in remembrance. I enclose the money. Put a wooden fence round Makaryevna’s grave and erect a wooden cross. Next year plant flowers on the grave. When I come I’ll make a wall. Or perhaps I’ll be lying next to her myself some time … Set aside for me the cup and saucer Makaryevna drank tea from.’

  He did not want to depress his spirits further by going to her funeral. A day or two later, taking leave of his brothers, he left by train for Nizhni Novgorod (Gorky) and the next day transferred his men (he had taken on three more grenadiers in Moscow) to a Volga steamer, the Field-Marshal Suvorov. It took them 1,300 miles, travelling at fifteen knots, down the Volga to Astrakhan. Even in the first-class section Przhevalsky could not get away from passengers. It was hot and he was tense.

  At Astrakhan the expedition boarded another steamer which took them to the mouth of the Volga where the Grand Duke Konstantin was waiting to take them over the Caspian Sea to Baku. Przhevalsky and Kozlov were stricken with sea-sickness for two days. From Baku they took the boat across the Caspian to Turkmenia, at Uzun Ada. It was September, but baking hot. In the evening they left by train over the newly built Transcaspian railway—the first railway in Central Asia, stretching nearly 1,000 miles to Samarkand and about to be extended to Tashkent. Przhevalsky was particularly interested in it, his half-brother Nikolay Tolpygo was one of the construction engineers. The railway enabled Russia to bring armies by boat and train from Moscow to the borders of Afghanistan in a matter of days, whereas the British needed weeks to move from their capital to the periphery of their empire. Przhevalsky’s last diary records: ‘As though in a fairytale you bowl along in your carriage over sand dunes or desolate shingle plains … A bridge spans the Amu Darya [Oxus] which, though it creaks and sways as the carriages go over it, still takes the train safely from Turkmenia to the realm of Bukhara [an Emirate under Russian “protection”] …’ Sand-dunes blew over the track; men were constantly sweeping away the sand or trying to consolidate it by tipping clay.

  Przhevalsky stayed four days in Samarkand as Nikolay Tolpygo’s guest. They feasted on fruit and went to see Tamerlane’s tomb. From Samarkand it took just two days in a mail coach for the men, and a week on carts for the baggage to reach Tashkent, the “capital” of Russian Central Asia, already a fine European city opposite the Uzbek quarter. Nikolay Tolpygo came with them, but as he had only five days’ leave he soon had to say goodbye. He was puzzled by Przhevalsky’s insistence on adieu, not goodbye. In Tashkent Przhevalsky had seven battalions of infantry drawn up for his inspection. He picked out forty likely lads for the expedition and then cut the number down to ten. One of the soldiers chosen, Menukhov, thought it an unnerving experience. There was no saluting, Przhevalsky seemed to ‘stare right through you’. There were only four questions: ‘Surname? Do you smoke? Do you drink spirits? Marksmanship?’ If the answers to the last three questions were ‘no, no’ and ‘first-class’, Przhevalsky would then say, ‘Put his name down, Roborovsky.’

  Four days’ journey brought Przhevalsky and his party of now eighteen men to Pishpek (Frunze). Here they camped outside the town in felt gers. There were enough men; more w
ere to join the expedition at Karakol from Transbaykalia. But Przhevalsky found the Kirghiz unwilling to show him their best animals. It took three days to find thirty-eight ‘good’ animals and one ‘excellent’. Przhevalsky took Roborovsky and two grenadiers north to Verny (Alma Ata) to buy more camels and choose some Cossacks. Verny was still rumbling and jolting after a recent earthquake. Przhevalsky camped in the governor’s garden while negotiations went on for the purchase of Chinese silver. He was very annoyed that the money had not yet come through from Petersburg. All he could buy was twenty-eight pounds of silver, nearly a ton of sugar, seven hundredweight of tea, some rope, apples and pears, all of which he sent straight to Karakol.

  The nearer the expedition came to its proper departure, the more melancholy Przhevalsky grew. He complained to Roborovsky that if he did survive it, he would have to face the unhappiness of a settled life without challenge or strength. Old age and corpulence depressed him. He said he wanted to die during the expedition in the arms of his men, ‘his family’.

  Eliminating all Cossacks who were married, who drank, who had lived in towns or worked for a wage, Przhevalsky filled his vacancies. He still needed eighty camels. The Kirghiz were ordered to present their camels at all the post stations between Verny and Pishpek. Of 500 camels lined up, only seven passed muster. Przhevalsky had learnt all he could from his Mongol guides and drivers; he was an exacting connoisseur of camels—as well he might be in view of the demands he made on them.

  The day after his return to Pishpek, Przhevalsky felt an urge to shoot. Near Pishpek flows the River Chu, through reedy marshes full of game and, in those days, tigers. That afternoon he took his gun ‘Lyan’, Roborovsky and one of the Tashkent soldiers, Menukhov, to carry the game. They rode twelve miles out of Pishpek and shot until dusk. Przhevalsky noted with wry satisfaction in his diary next day: ‘In the evening and morning I killed fifteen, Roborovsky one.’ It was unseasonably hot; feeling unusually sensitive, Przhevalsky found it oppressive. The evening’s snooting made him thirsty. Menukhov heard him ask Roborovsky, ‘You’ve got a bowl, let me have a drink from the stream.’ Roborovsky warned him not to; Przhevalsky took no notice and drank. The River Chu was an undrained river; the previous winter Kirghiz nomads had camped here and had been decimated by typhoid, as Przhevalsky must have known.

  Przhevalsky rode back to camp and, the next afternoon, to Pishpek, feeling not quite right. His last diary entry runs: ‘My itch has started up again thanks to the heat and being thrown about in a tarantas (unsprung wagon). I have twenty-three soldiers and Cossacks in my platoon; I need only two more.’ He spent the evening normally; he drank two bottles of his special cordial, made of sweetened tea and pumpkin squash.

  Three days’ ride took the expedition on to Karakol on the southern snores of the bleak but sheltered Issyk-Kul’. Przhevalsky was acting strangely. He told Roborovsky he envied him his health. He could not settle on any quarters, but rejected one building after another as too damp, too dark or too small. He moved out of town and sent Roborovsky and Teleshov to look for a camp site near the mountains. They found a gorge with a stream of fresh water flowing into the lake. Przhevalsky supervised the erection of the four gers and helped set up the kitchen.

  No sooner was he in his ger than he complained of illness; he would not let anyone call a doctor. Rain set in and turned to snow. Przhevalsky half reclined on a felt groundsheet, taking his own temperature and pulse. He asked a visiting staff-captain if there was typhoid about. On the morning of 16/28 October he was feverish and tired; but he struggled out of the ger to see, sitting on the hillside opposite him, a black vulture. He fetched his Lancaster Express and shot it dead. A Kirghiz picked up the body and brought it to him. Przhevalsky stretched out the bird’s wings, studied them and went back to the ger.

  At last he agreed to see a doctor. He felt thirsty, his legs and neck ached, and he was vomiting. He heartbeats became irregular, his skin was jaundiced. It was cold, but Przhevalsky refused to have a fire; the bright flames and the suffocating smoke in the ger were intolerable. He lay there drinking cold tea and pumpkin squash.

  The doctor cajoled Przhevalsky into agreeing to move to the hospital. A ward of the Karakol military hospital was hastily cleared out and whitewashed. The gers were set up in the hospital yard and the camels tethered outside.

  By now Przhevalsky was bleeding from the nose, short of breath and all but delirious. He recovered in hospital long enough to take chicken soup and wine, even to eat a cutlet. He composed a telegram demanding more camels. Then the disease took the upper hand. At midnight the doctor massaged him with spirits of camphor. Przhevalsky began to lapse into unconsciousness. In intervals of lucidity he started to give orders. He was not, he said, afraid of death; merely in a hurry. He was anxious to be buried in his expedition clothes in a simple coffin on the shores of Issyk-Kul’ just above the waterline. Roborovsky was to photograph him with his Lancaster in the coffin and he would then inherit the gun; Kozlov was bequeathed the Purdy shotgun. Sloboda was to go to his brother Vladimir or, if he refused to accept it, to their brother Yevgeni and his daughter. The doctor persuaded Przhevalsky that he would not die yet and he fell silent again.

  The next night he lay semi-conscious, his head covered by his right hand, as if crying. He spoke, asking Menukhov to turn him over. Menukhov called Roborovsky and Kozlov to help. Suddenly Przhevalsky stood bolt upright, looked about and said, ‘Well, now I’ll lie down.’ A minute later he was dead.

  The Cossacks would not let outsiders in. They laid him out themselves. They searched the shores of the lake until they found a steep bank by the water. They dug for two days through the hard ground. The military command made a wooden coffin and an iron outer coffin. The ladies of Karakol wove a wreath of artificial flowers; the soldiers made a garland of fir boughs.

  Roborovsky telegraphed the authorities for instructions. A week later permission to bury Przhevalsky arrived. Half the population of Karakol and many Kirghiz followed the gun-carriage the seven miles to the graveside, which overlooked the blue, ice-free waters of Issyk-Kul’ and was dominated by the eternal snows of the Tien Shan.

  Russia’s two greatest explorers died in 1888: Miklukho-Maklay, the gentle artist and anthropologist, obscurely in a workhouse; and Przhevalsky, the ruthless conquistador and misanthropic scientist, at the zenith of his fame, as he wished, in the arms of his men. The telegraph took the news to the press of the world. Przhevalsky was mourned by the Russian court, the army, by scientists and hero-worshippers all over the world, and, above all, by his Warsaw and Smolensk friends. He was too adamant a chauvinist for educated opinion in Russia, let alone Europe, to love him; but the pathos of his passing caught men’s imagination. Though Przhevalsky was dead, what he had begun was too dynamic to stop. The expedition, Petersburg decided, must go on. They made economies in men and camels. Captain Pevtsov, a highly-respected explorer of Mongolia and Turkestan, a skilled surveyor and geodesist, was sent for and put in charge. Finally, the authorities removed southern Tibet from the programme and, not antagonizing Chinese or British, instructed Pevtsov to explore only the northern approaches to Tibet.

  Pevtsov led Roborovsky, Kozlov and the expedition in 1889 through Yarkand and the oases south of the Takla Makan. They systematically explored the steep valleys leading up to the plateau. The Cossacks could not get used to this gentle leader. Menukhov was convinced that if Przhevalsky had been with them they would have reached Lhasa. In the event, the only excitement was the discovery of a tiger, which Teleshov wounded and another Cossack killed.

  This was Pevtsov’s last expedition; Przhevalsky’s disciples were to go on to greater things. In 1892 the Imperial Geographical Society prepared a two-pronged approach to Tibet. While Potanin travelled from Peking and got as far as Pa-t’ang on the Yangtse Kiang, the border between Cham do and Szechwan, Roborovsky, with Kozlov second-in-command, left Karakol, where they had a requiem mass sung beside Przhevalsky’s grave, to penetrate deep into the Tien Shan and cross the dreade
d Kum Tag desert east of Lob Nor. Both expeditions were tragic. In 1893 Potanin’s wife died not far from Chung-king. In January 1895, after climbing too many high passes, his heart and brain starved of oxygen, Roborovsky was struck down with paralysis. His expedition had achieved much: Roborovsky was the first European to reach the Great Yuldus; he discovered the Lükchun depression, a hole in the Central Asian plateau which went down to 154 feet below sea level; he and Kozlov mapped over 100,000 square miles, often splitting into wide-ranging reconnaissance parties; Roborovsky revealed the Turfan inscriptions which were to open up the closed book of ancient Turkestan’s history. Now, crying with distress at his own uselessness, often unconscious, Roborovsky was half carried, half dragged to Russia by two strong grenadiers. He was awarded the Konstantin Medal and managed to write an account of his travels, but he was doomed to live another fifteen years, more and more a vegetable, nursed by his already afflicted family until he died in 1910. Long before he died he handed to Kozlov the gun, ‘Lyan’, that Przhevalsky had left him. Alone of Przhevalsky’s followers, Kozlov was to carry on the exploits of his leader and, at least in part, realized the dream which Przhevalsky seven times failed to bring about—of seeing Lhasa and the Dalai Lama.

  Przhevalsky’s fame was undiminished in Russia. In 1893 Aleksander III declared that Karakol should be named Przhevalsk. (In 1921 Lenin deferred to Kirghiz national feeling and changed it back to Karakol; in 1939 Stalin, who had a vivid appreciation of his Tsarist imperial heritage, renamed it Przhevalsk to celebrate the centenary of the explorer’s birth.) Przhevalsky’s friend Bilderling was commissioned to design a monument over the grave. In 1893 it was erected—a bronze eagle on a great stone plinth looking at the mountains, with a simple bas-relief copied from the Geographical Society’s gold medal of Przhevalsky.