ot worth a moment's thought.

In the operation of this road petroleum waste is used as fuel, the
refining works at Baku yielding an inexhaustible supply. The carriages
are of mixed classes, some being two stories in height, each story of
different class. There are very few first-class carriages on the road.
As for the stations, some of them are miles from the road, that of
Bokhara being ten miles away. This method was adopted to avoid exciting
the prejudices of the Asiatics, who at first were not in favor of the
road, regarding it as a device of Shaitan, the spirit of evil. Yet the
"fire-cart," as they call it, is proving very convenient, and they have
no objection to let this fiery Satan haul their grain and cotton to
market and carry themselves across the waterless plains. The camel is
being thrown out of business by this shrill-voiced prince of evil. The
road is being extended over the oases, and will in the end bring all
Turkestan under its control.

It almost takes away one's breath to think of railway stations and
time-tables in connection with the old-time abiding-place of the
terrible Tartar, and of the iron horse careering across the empire of
barbarism, rushing into the metropolis of superstition, and waking with
the scream of the steam whistle the silent centuries of the Orient.
Nothing of greater promise than this planting of the railroad in Central
Asia has been performed of recent years. The son of the desert is to be
civilized despite himself, and to be taught the arts and ideas of the
West by the irresistible logic of steel and steam.

But this enterprise is a minor one compared with that which Russia has
recently completed, that of a railway extending across the whole width
of Siberia, being, with its branches, more than five thousand miles
long--much the longest railway in the world. Work on this was begun in
1890, and it is now completed to Vladivostok, the chief Russian port on
the Pacific, a traveller being able to ride from St. Petersburg to the
shores of the Pacific Ocean without change of cars. A branch of this
road runs southward through Manchuria to Port Arthur, but as a result of
the war with Japan this has been transferred to China, Manchuria being
wrested from the controlling grasp of Russia. It is a single-track road,
but it is proposed to double-track it throughout its entire length, thus
greatly increasing its availability as a channel of transport alike in
war and peace.

All this is