10 ACROSS A CONTINENT. 



dominion. But here you have but a single, long, 

 isolated arm stretching from the confines of Europe 

 into the very heart of an ancient continent. Far more 

 even than the plains of Asiatic Turkey or the plateaux 

 of Iran, the vast solitudes of Turkomania or the steppes 

 of Turkestan seem to you a world apart. As you are 

 borne rapidly along you might, indeed, be travelling on 

 some witch's broomstick in a fairy tale. Merve, Queen 

 of the World ; Bokhara, the Noble ; Samarkand, the 

 capital of Timur, pass before you in quick succession, 

 overwhelming you with the magnitude of their asso- 

 ciations. You gaze upon their sights and marvel at 

 the strange stories which they tell, and you mix with 

 their peoples for a while, and then pass on. And when 

 you have passed on and they are no longer before you, 

 you look back upon them as upon the figures of a 

 dream. You may have mixed with them and talked 

 with them, but you are not of them ; their world is not 

 your world, nor yours theirs. 



I remember strolling through the bazaar of a town in 

 the heart of Turkestan, loitering among the shops and 

 talking to their occupants. I thought after all that 

 they seemed very ordinary people, and not so very 

 different from myself The same night I was present 

 at a mosque, and before I left I knew that I was wrong. 

 It was no pretentious building, — a plain structure en- 

 closed on three sides by severely simple walls, and 

 open on the fourth to the night. No objection was 

 made to our presence — two Russian gentlemen and 

 myself: we were, in fact, to all intents and purposes, 

 ignored. When a sufficient number had arrived — they 

 were members of a peculiar sect of dervishes — prayers 

 were first intoned, the ends of their white turbans, 

 emblem of the shroud, hanging down, and then a score 

 or more knelt in a circle on the floor. The scene which 



