uld have been of little use to him: like a
true child of nature he always knew the cardinal points by the sun or
the stars. Some years later I had the satisfaction of learning that the
map had reached its destination safely, through no less a personage
than Count Tolstoy. One evening at the home of a friend in Moscow I
was presented to the great novelist, and as soon as he heard my name he
said: "Oh! I know you already, and I know your friend Mehemet Zian. When
I passed a night this summer in his aoul he showed me a map with your
signature on the margin, and taught me how to calculate the distance to
Bokhara!"

If Mehemet knew little of foreign countries he was thoroughly well
acquainted with his own, and repaid me most liberally for my elementary
lessons in geography. With him I visited the neighbouring aouls. In all
of them he had numerous acquaintances, and everywhere we were received
with the greatest hospitality, except on one occasion when we paid a
visit of ceremony to a famous robber who was the terror of the whole
neighbourhood. Certainly he was one of the most brutalised specimens of
humanity I have ever encountered. He made no attempt to be amiable,
and I felt inclined to leave his tent at once; but I saw that my friend
wanted to conciliate him, so I restrained my feelings and eventually
established tolerably good relations with him. As a rule I avoided
festivities, partly because I knew that my hosts were mostly poor and
would not accept payment for the slaughtered sheep, and partly because
I had reason to apprehend that they would express to me their esteem
and affection more Bashkirico; but in kumyss-drinking, the ordinary
occupation of these people when they have nothing to do, I had to
indulge to a most inordinate extent. On these expeditions Abdullah
generally accompanied us, and rendered valuable service as interpreter
and troubadour. Mehemet could express himself in Russian, but his
vocabulary failed him as soon as the conversation ran above very
ordinary topics; Abdullah, on the contrary, was a first-rate
interpreter, and under the influence of his musical pipe and lively
talkativeness new acquaintances became sociable and communicative. Poor
Abdullah! He was a kind of universal genius; but his faded, tattered
khalat showed only too plainly that in Bashkiria, as in more civilised
countries, universal genius and the artistic temperament lead to poverty
rather than to wealth.

I have no intention of