Meyer: Collecting in Turkestan 



163 



THE PARADISE APPLE AT HOME. 



This bushy apple {Mains paradisiaca), apparently a native of the Caucasus, is now widely 

 grown all over the world as a grafting stock for dwarfing apples. Mr. Meyer believes it 

 has still a useful future before it as a factor in producing a strain of bush apples suited 

 especially to regions where the summer temperatures are too high for ordinary apples. 

 Photograph made at Geok-Tapa, Caucasus, Russia, April 11, 1910. (Figure 7.) 



and investigate this matter myself and 

 find out who was responsible for this 

 mishap. Well, he was kind enough to 

 allow this and as I promised him I would 

 not escape, I didn't even get any guard 

 sent with me. 



And so we left that village of Peki on 

 Tuesday, July 12, 1910, went for the 

 whole day along an extremely bad road 

 where often the path went simply over 

 sticks and poles, put slantingly in the 

 rocks and covered over with brush and 

 dirt. We wound along the roaring 

 Zarafshan river, sometimes level with 

 the water, then again several hundred 

 feet above it. Tales of accidents had 

 made us apprehensive of the great dan- 

 gers of this road, but, thank Heaven, 



nothing occurred save that the baggage 

 looked less respectable in the evening 

 than it had done at the outset. We had 

 to employ three porters at the most dan- 

 gerous points to carry the more valuable 

 baggage, for it was too unsafe to allow 

 it to remain on the packhorses' backs, 

 especially my satchel, in which all pass- 

 ports and valuable papers are stored. 

 If, for instance, my letter of credit, 

 together with the passports, had gotten 

 down in the deep, I could almost as 

 well have shot myself, the more so as 

 1,000 roubles in paper money was also 

 among its contents. It is my policy to 

 have all my valuable belongings in only 

 one receptacle, which has to be strong, 

 not to be too heavy to be carried easily 



