THE PRISON OF BOKHARA. 185 



hard ground and a yelling mob at the end of it ! That 

 is what criminals in the Bokhara of old had to look 

 forward to ; for they were taken to the summit, bound, 

 and precipitated from one of the apertures which look 

 out over the market-place beneath. I was not so 

 fortunate as to observe, as did Mr Henry Norman, the 

 depression in the ground at the foot of the tower, 

 caused by the fall of generations of victims, but I 

 shuddered as I stood and gazed up all the same. 



But there is another building which, could it speak, 

 would tell tales which might well wring tears from a 

 stone, and that building is the zindan or state prison. 

 Built on the top of a low mound, surrounded by 

 crumbhng brick walls, with low unpretentious wooden 

 doors, it presents no imposing appearance, but the 

 scene which confronts you within is not good to see. 

 The jailer was corpulent and altogether evil-looking, 

 and an unpleasant smile stole over his vicious physiog- 

 nomy as he invited me to come in. Perhaps he was 

 thinking of the excruciating torture which the accursed 

 infidel had gone through in Bokhara in the past ; but 

 the smile w^hich such recollections conjured up served 

 only to illuminate the peculiar villainy which shone 

 from what Sheridan would no doubt have described as 

 " an unforgiving eye and a damned disinheriting coun- 

 tenance ! " 



The scene which presents itself at the present day is 

 enough to make one's flesh creep at the thought of 

 what was in the past. After passing through a sort of 

 guard-room and across an open yard, I came upon two 

 cells, one opening out of the other. Both were small, 

 absolutely bare, filthily dirty, and sepulchrally gloomy— 

 for light, it would appear, is not considered a necessary 

 element in the existence of the criminal of Bokhara. 

 But it was the inmates that afforded the crowning 



