THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



259 



Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massa- 

 chusetts, and do their best to keep it from 

 drying up into a salt pile ; but they are 

 slowly losing the battle. 



The first point of interest along the 

 railway is the Akhal Oasis, which can 

 easily be distinguished in spring, but re- 

 sembles the desert in late fall and winter. 

 It is the largest oasis in Turkestan, 160 

 miles long and 10 miles wide. Here 

 dwell the Tekke Turkomans — huge, fine- 

 looking men, who wear sheepskin hats a 

 foot high. The Turkomans owe as much 

 of their charm to their fantastic head- 

 gear as does a stage beauty. When they 

 remove them and reveal the shaved heads 

 and gaudy embroidered skull caps be- 

 neath, they seem commonplace ; yet there 

 are many of the older men whose majesty 

 of bearing is not a matter of costume 

 alone. Their red cotton khalats give them 

 a princely stateliness which the trousered 

 and booted Russian with his shirt flopping 

 lacks. 



America's love for rugs changes an 

 oriental people 



If some one asserted that the American 

 love for Oriental rugs had changed the 

 marriage customs of a nomadic people, 

 had brought forth on this globe a com- 

 paratively homely race of human beings, 

 and had built up a complex system of 

 morals in the heart of Asia, it would seem 

 like a sensational story. 



Yet that statement seems well founded, 

 and love for beauty in America has re- 

 acted on the facial features of a princely 

 race in Turkestan with deplorable result. 

 Truly it is a small world when an artistic 

 recluse in a New York studio fathers a 

 homely son in a distant desert. Yet the 

 rising generation of Turkomans are dis- 

 tinctly homelier than their princely sires. 

 And the conquest of their domain by 

 Russia does not entirely explain it. 



The Tekkintzi rug, more commonly 

 known by the less distinctive name of 

 Bokhara, is the loveliest product of the 

 desert loom. Its charm lies not in in- 

 tricacy of design, manifold detail, or sym- 

 bolic meaning. It is not a picture in wool. 

 Brilliancy of coloring it does not have. 

 But in richness of tone the Tekkintzi wins 

 its rightful place as queen of rugs. 



Its symphony of soft and sober color 

 has its major and minor chords. From 

 one direction it is dark and quiet and 

 soft. But as the light strikes down into 

 its velvety nap, it shines with a light over- 

 tone and reveals a sheen like that of silk, 

 such as can come only from years of con- 

 tact with the flexible, high-arched feet of 

 the desert mother or the heel-less boots 

 of her master. 



Years of care in selecting the long- 

 fibered, spotless wool, in dyeing it in reds 

 from Bokhara, blues from Afghanistan, 

 or blacks from Merv, with a touch of 

 orange or yellow now and then, and in 

 weaving it beneath the hot sun of the 

 dry desert, give the Tekkintzi a character 

 which more hurried methods cannot give. 

 It reveals no trace of foreign accent, for 

 its language of lasting beauty is bred in 

 the blood. 



When one sees how well the erect 

 Turkoman, with his stalking camel or his 

 loping horse, fits the desert vastness he 

 wonders why the Russians were able to 

 humble him as they did. God gave him 

 life and boundless pastures for his flocks, 

 and while he sat in solemn council or 

 rode the boundless plain, with a wob- 

 ble-kneed colt at the heels of his light- 

 foot mare, his wife wove rugs and found 

 in them expression for the artistic in her 

 nature and its desire to make itself known. 



Then came the Russian glacier, creep- 

 ing down toward India, and the fearless 

 nomad was cruelly beaten in his own field 

 by the well-armed fighters of an agri- 

 cultural race. The locomotive came to 

 shriek derision at his train of stalking 

 camels, and a band of shining steel cut its 

 burning way across his trackless desert. 



Then the trade in rugs, which had be- 

 gun as a matter of art and individual 

 choice, became a commercial transaction. 

 As the pastures became smaller, irrigated 

 plots made it possible for the nomad to 

 become agriculturalist, and the dweller 

 of the yurteh began to buy with the prod- 

 uct of his wife's labor the frames for his 

 felt hut, instead of making them himself 

 from the reeds of the marshes. The old 

 roaming life was gone and mud huts, 

 plain and square, began to grow up from 

 the desert plain, usually centering about 

 a homely station building. Not flocks 

 but rugs became the source of income. 



