less plains and hills of Central Asia in
a Russian cart, whose whole progress is a series of jolts that might
dislocate the spine of a megatherium, flinging one at every turn against
the corner of a box, or the broad shoulders of the Tartar driver. The
correct way of preparing for a journey in this primitive region is to
half fill your cart with hay, lay your baggage upon it as a kind of
pavement, and cover the whole with a straw mattress, upon which you
recline, walled in with rolled-up wrappers to keep you from being
absolutely battered to bits against the sides of the vehicle. You then
provide yourself with a hatchet and a coil of rope, as an antidote to
the inevitable coming off of a wheel two or three times a day during the
whole journey, and thus fore-armed, you are, as the Russians
significantly say, "ready to _chance it_."

After a night of such travel as this, with all its attendant bumps,
bruises, and overturns, among the hills on the frontier of Bokhara, my
English comrade and I find ourselves nearing the once famous city of
Samarcand, and getting forward much more easily now that the plain is
fairly reached at last. But what we gain in comfort we lose in
picturesqueness. For several miles our course lies through the wet, miry
level of the rice fields, and we leave them only to emerge upon a wide
waste of bare gravel, amid which the once formidable current of the
"gold-giving Zer-Affshan" has shrunk to a single narrow channel, the
only fine feature of the landscape being the dark purple ridge beyond,
upon which, in June, 1868, was fought the battle that decided the fate
of Bokhara.

But commonplace as it looks, every foot of this region is historic
ground. Here stood the centre of a mighty empire, drawing to itself all
the pomp and splendor of the East, in days when marsh frogs were
croaking upon the site of St. Petersburg, and Indians lighting their
camp fires upon that of New York. The very earth seems still shaking
with the march of ancient conquerors, and one would hardly wonder to see
Alexander's Macedonians coming with measured tramp over the boundless
level, or low-browed Attila, with the light of a grim gladness in his
deep-set eyes, waving on five hundred thousand horsemen with the sweep
of his enchanted sabre. But mingled with these memories comes the
thought of one who surpassed them both--a little, swarthy, keen-eyed,
limping man, known to history as Timour the Tartar, who crushed into one
great