200 ACROSS THE STEPPES OF TURKESTAN. 



one that he has reached a capital and centre of 

 administration.^ 



Adjoining the modern town is the old Tashkent of 

 100,000 inhabitants, close to which rise the earthern 

 ramparts of the old fort stormed and captured by 

 General Tchernaieff in 1865 — the ardent general hav- 

 ing carefully omitted to read the despatch from Tsar 

 Alexander 11. forbidding him to attack the city until 

 after he had captured it ! — and now occupied by Russian 

 soldiers ; but, unlike Bokhara or Samarkand, it can 

 boast of no historic buildings or mosques and madres- 

 sahs of special note, so that, as I have said, it is of the 

 chief town of a Russian province that one thinks when 

 mention is made of Tashkent. For similar reasons there 

 is little to be found there of any great interest for the 

 traveller ; and after the best part of a week spent at 

 the chief numera — the very moderate substitute for a 

 hotel which is to be found in the chief Russian towns 

 in Asia — owing to unavoidable delay in obtaining the 

 conveyances necessary for my further journey, I was 

 glad enough to take my leave of the capital and to 

 start on my journey once more. I should, however, be 

 guilty of gross ingratitude were I to fail to acknow- 

 ledge before leaving the kindness and hospitality of 

 the Russian officials whose acquaintance I was fortun- 

 ate enough to make. Should these lines ever chance to 

 meet the eye of the gentleman to whose genial company 

 are due my pleasantest recollections of Tashkent, may 

 he read in them the sincere, though wholly inade- 

 quate, expression of gratitude of a wanderer in a 

 strange land. 



For the present, unless you wish to return the way 



1 It may be of interest to the advocates of afforestation to leam that 

 since the Eussian occupation, when trees— poplars and Turkestan elms — 

 were largely planted, the rainfall has increased by 250 per cent. 



