It is satisfactory to recollect, looking back upon the whole scene, that I did not quote the Fifth Æneid with reference to it. The temptation was undoubtedly strong, for a dead country is the fittest place to parade a dead education; but, in my opinion, it is a mistake for a man who has been buried alive to be constantly flourishing the shreds of his winding-sheet.

When I return from my stroll two hours later, I find both the gardeners and the architects working away as indefatigably as ever, and am disposed to marvel at the endurance which can stand such prolonged toil in the glare of an Asiatic sun-little dreaming that I am myself destined to go through severer labour a few days hence, under a yet more intense heat. How this came about, will be seen in the next chapter.

H

CHAPTER XII.

A "STEPPE MARCH."

I HAD gone to bed rather late, after a long evening with my friend the acting Governor, who was as full as ever of the Khiva Expedition, and its recent passage of the Oxus within thirty miles of the Khan's capital. Over his evening refection of tea and lemon-juice, he triumphantly prophesies the speedy fall of the city, the occupation of the Khanate by Russian troops, and the export of the Khan and his ministers to Russia as prisoners of war.

"You might do better for him than that," suggest I; "send him to the Zoological Gardens at Moscow, and exhibit him at a rouble a-head, till the expenses of the war are paid off."

The old soldier gives a grim chuckle. "Well, he ought to be at home there he'd hardly meet a greater brute than himself. He's given us more trouble than he's worth, the rascal! A thousand miles of desertlittle water, and that little bad-carry your own forage and your own provisions-thermometer 145-sand knee-deep, and as hot as fire-and the wind blowing it over you in mountains at every turn-why, there hasn't been such a campaign since Alexander Makedonski.”

"So M. Vambéry seems to think," answer I, “and certainly, few armies have done so much with so little loss."

"I should think so! Only three deaths in one whole column, and only one in another! You see now what Russian soldiers are made of no other army could have done it!"

"Well, I don't know about that," object I, feeling my sensitive nationality writhe under this uncompromising stroke of "Podsnappery." "It strikes me that the English in India, and the French in Algeria, and the Turks during the Yemen insurrection, and the Americans in their last Indian campaign, did quite as much."

The veteran arrests his tumbler half way to his lips, and surveys me over its brim with a look such as Aristotle may have given to a pupil who had ventured to contradict him.

"Look here!" says he, in a tone of quiet scorn; "this is the height of summer, and yonder's the steppe; you just try a march of twelve or fifteen miles across it in the heat of the day, and see how you feel!"

It is a singular and somewhat objectionable law of nature, that whenever a man has formed a particularly praiseworthy resolution, he is instantly assailed by the strongest possible temptation to break it. After escaping a broken neck in the Caucasus, a sunstroke in the Kara-Koum desert, and a death by drowning in the Syr-Daria, I have at length made up my mind to avoid all unnecessary risks, and to behave like a conscientious special correspondent, who knows that dead men write

no letters as well as tell no tales. And here, on the very heels of this laudable determination, comes this perverse old fellow with a challenge which no man of Anglo-Saxon blood-be he Englishman or Yankee— could hear without accepting it. It is needless to say that I yield. My very dreams are haunted by a phantasmagoria of burning sand hills, stretching one beyond the other in endless perspective, amid which a crowd of ghastly figures are struggling, stumbling, and falling to rise no more; and before the sun has begun to peer into the waggon in which I am sleeping on the straw, I wake up and begin to look about me.

My first feeling on waking is a vague sense of some important duty to be performed, without exactly knowing what; but in another moment the whole thing is clear before me. Fifteen miles across the steppe in the heat of the day, without breaking down. Let us have a look at the map.

"The next bend of the Syr-Daria, where the post road joins it, seems to be about eight miles off—sixteen there and back. I think that ought to satisfy our friend the Governor!"

It must be owned, however, that my equipment is hardly equal to the occasion. My last surviving pair of boots are not merely too big for me, but grievously torn into the bargain, and rasp my feet at every step; while my light linen forage-cap, with its "puggree" of white gauze, though well enough under the sun of Orenburg or the Volga, is a weak fence against the sevenfold furnace of Turkestan.

"I'm in for it this time," muse I, "but it can't be helped. After all, I've made the circuit of Jerusalem outside the walls, in June, within the fifty-four minutes, and marched twenty miles up-hill, in South America, within the four hours. This thing can hardly be much worse, anyhow!"

The hottest part of the day in these latitudes being from II A.M. to 3 P.M., I conscientiously wait till noon, in order to fulfil the Governor's considerate stipulation. respecting the heat of the day. As soon as my watch points to twelve (for the only clock within reach is usually either six hours slow or five fast, and strikes three when it means eleven), I take a final draught of cold tea, look carefully to the laces of my "double soles," draw my belt two holes tighter, and start off.

I had intended to keep up a fair "quick march" step and no more quite sufficient on an Asiatic prairie, and beneath an Asiatic sun. But old habit is not so easily vanquished; and at the very first stride, I find myself swinging away at my old regulation pace of five miles an hour. The mud hovels and bare dusty streets of the little village, the Kirghiz tents on its outskirts, the tiny windmills that look northward into the desert, melt away one by one; and I come out at length upon the genuine steppe-a dismal waste of cracked, sun-parched clay, with a thin lacquer of prickly herbage (the camel's favourite provender) every here and there.

I have crossed many deserts in my time, both in Asia, Africa, and America; but anything which can compare with the overwhelming desolation of the Turkestan