THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



265 



demand for rugs, like the demand for 

 wives, brought its own unhappy sequel. 



the: rug-weaving art finally 

 commercialized 



The supply of fine old rugs was insuffi- 



| cient and new ones had to be made more 

 quickly. Women who had not learned 

 the complex processes of manufacture 

 began to produce rugs for the brisk mar- 



I ket. Persian, Sartian, and Kirghize 

 women began to set up frames and turn 

 out a product that showed their lack of 



I artistic taste. Aniline dyes became com- 

 mon, and coal-tar yielded colors so hide- 

 ous that artificial aging methods had to 

 be resorted to. The market in a depre- 

 ciated product began to decline. 



The young men not only could not af- 



I ford a Turkoman wife ; even the Sart 

 and Kirghize women became a burden 

 rather than a source of income. The 

 Turkoman, whose religion is lax and 

 whose ideas of social intercourse are the 

 same, became the first nominal Moham- 

 medan to forsake polygamy for indis- 

 criminate prostitution ; and in Bairam 

 Ali today there exist great buildings de- 

 voted to this shame produced by the com- 

 mercialization of art. 



Nineteen seventeen was a bad year in 

 Turkestan. The Russian Government 

 had encouraged the growing of cotton for 

 its Moscow factories instead of food, and 

 with the disorganization of the railways 

 by Bolshevik troubles and the long 

 drought, both in the Afghan Mountains 

 and in Turkestan, food became scarce 

 and dear. Hunger forced priceless rugs 

 into the market, and when I visited the 

 rug market at Merv there were thousands 

 of specimens, where the autumn before 

 there had been dozens. 



Many of them are the best quality that 



! has been seen for a decade. When the 

 well-to-do American secures one of these 

 art treasures from the cradle of civiliza- 

 tion, he has a product whose value in- 

 creases with every year, unless he mars 

 with heeled shoes an art study in wool 

 which was not intended for such use. 



But it is a small world nowadays, and 

 back of many a rug that will find its way 

 to America after the war is a desert 

 woman robbed of her mate by the skill of 

 her hands and the avarice of her parents ; 



a homely little son of a handsome father 

 and a bought woman from another race; 

 and a great brick brothel in Old Merv, 

 rising beside the ruins of ancient cities 

 that reach back to the time of the Per- 

 sians, the Uzbegs, the Mongols, the 

 Arabs, the Nestorians, and the Seleucidse, 

 and beyond into the remote ages before 

 the Zoroastrian Books of Wisdom told 

 of the haven that prehistoric man sought 

 mid the shifting desert sands and found 

 in the great oasis of Merv. 



THE CHARM OE BOKHARA 



Farther east lies the romantic mud 

 flower-pot of Bokhara, which might be 

 any desert city inclosed in crumbling 

 walls and composed of mud houses which 

 have almost no windows on the streets. 

 A good rain would wash it away, and if 

 left to the ravages of time this ancient 

 city would soon sink to the level of the 

 dust from which it was constructed. But 

 Bokhara, like many another ancient city, 

 does not owe its permanence to brick, 

 marble, or reinforced concrete, and it will 

 probably survive for a few more centu- 

 ries, patching up here and rebuilding 

 there, never completely old and never 

 wholly new. 



There are some charming spots in 

 Bokhara, but it is a city lacking in archi- 

 tectural interest. There is a very roman- 

 tic tower from whose top, 200 feet above 

 the courtyard of the mosque of which it 

 is the minaret, criminals used to be hurled 

 headlong to their death. This high min- 

 aret, which has all the grace and charm 

 of a monolithic smokestack, is almost the 

 only break in the skyline. But the people 

 of Bokhara are absorbingly interesting 

 and their principal charm is their dress. 



A solemn old Bokhara mullah wears as 

 his flowing robe a garment whose colors 

 would have made Joseph in his famous 

 polychrome coat appear to be practicing 

 camouflage in a dust bin. An American 

 darky chooses just such colors for his 

 necktie and then hides it under his vest 

 to keep the city from calling out the fire 

 department. 



Six colors in a single Bokhara male 

 costume is considered a monochrome, and 

 the rainbow is a colorless aggregation of 

 dull tints compared with what is consid- 

 ered sober apparel for a Bokhara Tatar. 



