r's mouth,
but which is still 150 versts from the roadstead or anchorage,
called the Nine Feet Station; the spot on the Caspian where sea
navigation really begins.

At Tsaritzin we might have fancied ourselves in some brand-new
town in one of the remote backwoods of America. It was nothing of
a place before the railway reached it. No one can foretell what
it may become before the locomotive travels past it. For under
present circumstances all the postal service, the light goods and
time-saving passenger traffic from all parts of Russia to Astrakhan,
the Caspian and the Trans-Caspian region, or _vice versa_, must
pass between the Tsaritzin pier on the Volga and the platforms
of the Tsaritzin railway station.

We did not see much of the upstart town, for the horrible clouds
of thick, dung-impregnated dust would not allow us to keep our
eyes open. But we perceived that almost every trace of what was
once little better than a second rate fortress and a village was
obliterated; the old inhabitants were nowhere, and a bustling set
of new settlers were sharing the broad area among themselves, taking
as much of it as suited their immediate wants, and extending it to
the utmost limits of their sanguine expectations; drawing lines
of streets at great distances, tracing the sides of broad squares
and crescents, and laying the foundations of what would rise in
time into shops and houses, hotels, bazaars, theatres and churches.

Tzaritzin when we saw it was merely the embryo of a city. Those
that may visit it a score of years hence will tell us what they
find it.

Two more nights and a day down the sluggish waters of the main
channel of the Volga landed us on the tenth day after our departure
from Nijni-Novgorod, at Astrakhan, where we stayed a whole week.

From Tsaritzin to Astrakhan the Volga flows through the Steppe,
the great Asiatic grass desert extending from the Caucasus to the
frontier of China. The wild tenants of this wilderness, the various
tribes of Tartars, once the terror of East and West, were like a vast
ocean of human beings swayed to and fro by nomadic and predatory
instincts, which for centuries threatened to overwhelm and efface
every vestige of the world's civilization.

The Russians who were first invested and overpowered by the flood,
were able by the valour and more by the craft of their princes,
first to stem the tide, then to force it back, and in the end to
rear such bulwarks as might for ever baf