2 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



a Bicycle," I quote, writing of my impressions of 

 Baku : 



" Everywhere, everywhere, hovers the shadow of the 

 police. One seems to breathe dark suspicion and mis- 

 trust in the very air. The people in the civil walks of 

 life all look like whipped curs. They wear the expres- 

 sion of people brooding over some deep sorrow. The 

 crape of dead liberty seems to hang on every door-knob. 

 Nobody seems capable of smiling ; one would think 

 the shadow of some great calamity is hanging gloomily 

 over the city. Nihilism and discontent run riot in the 

 cities of the Caucasus ; government spies and secret 

 police are everywhere, and the people on the streets 

 betray their knowledge of the fact by talking little, and 

 always in guarded tones." 



Such was the impression made on the author by his 

 first visit to Russian soil. Was this impression in any 

 degree the result of disgust at having been humbugged 

 by the Russian Minister, at Teheran, about permission 

 to ride through Merve, Samarkand, and Tashkend ? 

 That gentleman had promised me, with Oriental polite- 

 ness of tongue, that " all obstacles should be removed 

 from my road through Turkestan." With the inno- 

 cence of one whose experience of Russian officialdom 

 was yet of the future, I had believed that the tongue 

 of a Russian diplomat, like the tongue of any other 

 person, was given him to express his thoughts and in- 

 tentions, and not to conceal them; and so, on the 

 strength of the promise, I rode three hundred miles 

 across the Persian deserts, there to find that orders 

 had been telegraphed to stop me at the frontier. 



Commenting on this, a reviewer of my book in the 



