The Railroad In Turkestan

On the 24th of January, 1881, Edward O'Donovan, a daring traveller who

had journeyed far through the wastes and wilds of Turkestan, found

himself on a mountain summit not far removed from the northern boundary

of Persia, from which his startled eyes beheld a spectacle of fearful

import. Below him the desert stretched in a broad level far away to the

distant horizon. Near the foot of the range rose a great fortress,

wit in which at that moment a frightful struggle was taking place.

Bringing his field-glass to bear upon the scene, the traveller saw a

host of terror-stricken fugitives streaming across the plain, and hot

upon their steps a throng of merciless pursuers, who slaughtered them in

multitudes as they fled. Even from where he stood the white face of the

desert seemed changing to a crimson hue.



What the astounded traveller beheld was the death-struggle of the desert

Turkomans, the hand of retribution smiting those savage brigands who for

centuries had carried death and misery wherever they rode. These were

the Tekke Turkomans, the tribes who haunted the Persian frontier, and

whose annual raids swept hundreds of captives from that peaceful land to

spend the remainder of their days in the most woful form of slavery. For

a month previous General Skobeleff, the most daring and merciless of

the Russian leaders, had besieged them in their great fort of Geop Tepe,

an earthwork nearly three miles in circuit, and containing within its

ample walls a desert nation, more than forty thousand in all, men,

women, and children.



On that day, fatal to the Turkoman power, Skobeleff had taken the fort

by storm, dealing death wherever he moved, until not a man was left

alive within its walls except some hundreds of fettered Persian slaves.

Through its gateways a trembling multitude had fled, and upon these

miserable fugitives the Russian had let loose his soldiers, horse, foot,

and artillery, with the savage order to hunt them to the death and give

no quarter.



Only too well was the brutal order obeyed. Not men alone, but women and

children as well, fell victims to the sword, and only when night put an

end to the pursuit did that terrible massacre cease. By that time eight

thousand persons, of both sexes and all ages, lay stretched in death

upon the plain. Within the fort thousands more had fallen, the women and

children here being spared. Skobeleff's report said that twenty thousand

in all had been slain.



Such was the frightful scene which lay before O'Donovan's eyes when he

reached the mountain top, on his way to the Russian camp, a spectacle of

horrible carnage which only a man of the most savage instincts could

have ordered. "Bloody Eyes" the Turkomans named Skobeleff, and the title

fairly indicated his ruthless lust for blood. It was his theory of war

to strike hard when he struck at all, and to make each battle a lesson

that would not soon be forgotten. The Turkoman nomads have been taught

their lesson well. They have given no trouble since that day of

slaughter and revenge.



Such was one of the weapons with which the Russians conquered the

desert,--the sword. It was succeeded by another,--the iron rail. It is

now some twenty years since the idea of a railroad from the Caspian Sea

eastward was first advanced. In 1880 a narrow-gauge road was begun to

aid Skobeleff, but that daring and impetuous chief had made his march

and finished his work before the rails had crept far on their way. Soon

it was determined to change the narrow-gauge for a broad-gauge road, and

General Annenkoff, a skilful engineer, was placed in charge in 1885,

with orders to push it forward with all speed.



It was a new and bold project which the Russians had in view. Never

before had a railroad been built across so bleak a plain, a treeless and

waterless expanse, stretching for hundreds of miles in a dead level,

over which the winds drove at will the shifting sands, constantly

threatening to bury any work which man ventured to lay upon the desert's

broad breast. West of Bokhara and south of Khiva stretched the great

desert of Kara-Kum, touching the Caspian Sea on the west, the Amu-Daria

River on the east, the home of the wandering Turkomans, the born foes of

the settled races, but from whom all thought of disputing the Russian

rule had for the time been driven by Skobeleff's death-dealing blade.



The total length of the road thus ordered to be built--extending from

the shores of the Caspian Sea, the outpost of European Russia, to the

far-away city of Samarcand, the ancient capital of Timur the Tartar, and

the very stronghold of Asiatic barbarism--was little short of a thousand

miles, of which several hundred were bleak and barren desert. Two

immense steppes, waterless, and scorching hot in summer, lay on the

route, while it traversed the oases of Kizil-Arvat, Merv, Charjui, and

Bokhara. In the northern section of the last lay the famous city of

Samarcand, the eastern terminus of the road. The western terminus was at

Usun-ada, on the Caspian, and opposite the petroleum region of Baku,

perhaps the richest oil-yielding district in the world.



General Annenkoff had special difficulties to overcome in the building

of this road, of a kind never met with by railroad engineers before.

Chief among these were the lack of water and the instability of the

roadway, the wind at times manifesting an awkward disposition to blow

out the foundation from under the ties, at other times to bury the whole

road under acres of flying sand.



These difficulties were got rid of in various ways. Fresh water, made by

boiling the salt water of the Caspian and condensing the steam, was

carried in vats or tuns over the road to the working parties. At a later

date water was conveyed in pipes from the mountains to fill cisterns at

the stations, whence it was carried in canals or underground conduits

along the line, every well and spring on the route being utilized.



To overcome the shifting of the sand, near the Caspian it was

thoroughly soaked with salt water, and at other places was covered with

a layer of clay. But there are long distances where no such means could

be employed, at least two hundred miles of utter wilderness, where the

surface resembles a billowy sea, the sand being raised in loose hillocks

and swept from the troughs between, flying in such clouds before every

wind that an incessant battle with nature is necessary to keep the road

from burial. To prevent this, tamarisk, wild oats, and desert shrubs are

planted along the line, and in particular that strange plant of the

wilderness, the saxaoul, whose branches are scraggly and scant, but

whose sturdy roots sink deep into the sand, seeking moisture in the

depths. Fascines of the branches of this plant were laid along the track

and covered with sand, and in places palisades were built, of which only

the tops are now visible.



Yet despite all these efforts the sands creep insidiously on, and in

certain localities workmen have to be kept employed, shovelling it back

as it comes, and fighting without cessation against the forces of the

desert and the winds. In the building of the road, and in this battling

with the sands, Turkomans have been largely employed, having given up

brigandage for honest labor, in which they have proved the most

efficient of the various workmen engaged upon the road.



Aside from the peculiar difficulties above outlined, the Transcaspian

Railway was remarkably favored by nature. For nearly the whole distance

the country is as flat as a billiard-table, and the road so straight

that at times it runs for twenty or thirty miles without the shadow of a

curve. In the entire distance there is not a tunnel, and only some small

cuttings have been made through hills of sand. Of bridges, other than

mere culverts, there are but three in the whole length of the road, the

only large one being that over the Amu-Daria. This is a hastily built,

rickety affair of timber, put up only as a make-shift, and at the mercy

of the stream if a serious rise should take place.



The whole road, indeed, was hastily made, with a single track, the rails

simply spiked down, and the work done at the rate of from a mile to a

mile and a half a day. Before the Bokharans fairly realized what was

afoot, the iron horse was careering over their level plains, and the

shrill scream of the locomotive whistle was startling the saints in

their graves.



Over such a road no great speed can be attained. Thirty miles an hour is

the maximum, and from ten to twenty miles the average speed, while the

stops at stations are exasperatingly long to travellers from the

impatient West. To the Asiatics they are of no concern, time being with

them not 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 of the deepest significance. The railroad in Asia has come

to stay; and with its coming the barbarism of the past is nearing its

end. The sleeping giant of Orientalism is stirring uneasily in its bed,

its drowsy senses stirred by the shrill alarum of the locomotive

whistle. New ideas and new habits must follow in the track of the iron

horse. The West is forcing itself into the East, with all its restless

activity. In the time to come this whole broad continent is destined to

be covered with railroads as with a vast spider-web; new industries will

be established, machinery introduced, and the great region of the

steppes, famous in the past only as the starting-point of conquering

migrations, must in the end become an active centre of industry, the

home of peace and prosperity, a new-found abiding-place of civilization

and human progress.