VIII ON THE ROAD (continued 2)

Night in an inn or post-house or under the resplendent Asian stars! Hot day toiling over empty moors and across half-empty deserts, staying in shady Russian villages, going up the yards of the farmhouses with my pot in hand asking for milk, drinking about a pint of milk, and filling my two bottles so that I might have something better than water with which to quench my thirst when I was out on the road again; talking to the farmers; riding behind the reckless Kirghiz and his three horses; and then night again and its problems and charms!

Seventeen versts beyond Pishpek is Constantinovka, and seventy-one versts, Kurdai. Russian settlement is rather sparse until Kazanskaya Bogoroditsa and Linbovinskaya are reached, and these are in the urban district of Verney, the capital of the colony. There is an enormous amount of room for human beings here and, when the railway comes along and puts stations every twenty miles or so from European Russia, all the way, to Kuldja in China.

After the Cossack village of Linbovinskaya, with its shops and bazaar, comes the approach to Verney, and the high road is worn into many tracks and is broad and deep in dust. Along these come many equipages and picnic carts with pleasure parties of Russians, and for the first time since leaving Tashkent there was a suggestion of the life of a large provincial town. But, after all, Verney was only a larger Pishpek.