floors and whitewashed walls, thatched with reeds five or six feet long-the famous reeds of the Aral Sea, which are to the Kirghiz what birch-bark is to the Finn, or reindeer-skin to the Samoiede.

I doubt whether life on the Syr-Daria can ever be particularly pleasant; but in my circumstances it is simply unendurable. While we were crossing the KaraKoum, the romance of this wild life, the sense of going Forward, the accidents, the breakages, the strange hospitality of the nomads, the savage novelty of our surroundings, the underground huts of the Kirghiz, starting up like rabbit-burrows from the very earth-the daily fever of unquenchable thirst, broken at times by the sudden delight of plunging your burning face into a huge bowl of frothing milk-even the attendant dirt, and raggedness, and bruises-all these things had a sustained excitement about them which kept up my strength. But this is all over now; and there remains only a creeping depression, growing worse with every hour-a sense of failure and of restriction, the two things most intolerable to an Englishman; and in addition to this, a mingled feeling of utter lassitude, and constant, cureless irritation. Marching, swimming, eating, sleeping-the oppression of the climate is over all. You sit still, and are beset by ants and mosquitoes; you walk about, and get roasted alive. You care nothing for food, but drink, and drink, and drink, only to be thirsty the next moment. You plunge again and again into the river, and dress wet as you are, in the vain hope of keeping cool. You try to read, to write,

to think-but everything seems a toil, and the feeling of doing nothing is an oppression in itself. Vermin by night, scorching by day-dirt, and rags, and mosquitoes, both by day and by night-the perpetual risk of fever or ophthalmia, and the ever-present torment of an allbut-achieved enterprise now become impossible. And all this while, Europe and civilisation seem so far off, that I am haunted by a dismal, nightmare feeling of never being able to get back to them, but living on in this dreary round for ever and ever.

I am just consoling myself with a seventh tumbler of tea (the national addition of lemon-juice is not to be thought of in this wilderness, where lemons, when they can be got at all, are 2s. 6d. a piece) when a waggon pulls up before the door, and an officer leaps out. At the first glance, the face seems familiar to me; but it is that of a man whom I should as soon have expected to meet on the top of the Matterhorn as here.

"Can it be really he?" soliloquise I; "if so, this is the queerest adventure I've had yet. However, it's easy enough to find out. Onesimus!"*

"What do you please to want?" answers the ostler, looking in.

"Who's that officer who came in just now?" "Adjutant M-, from Orenburg-going to Tash

kent."

To start from my seat, to rush out of the room

* The names of the peasants being mostly taken from their saintly mythology, are often very sonorous. I have met a Theodosius who could not write his own name, and a Nicephorus whose only clothing was a tattered sheepskin.

A

(nearly squelching Onesimus en route), to bolt along the corridor, and knock at the farthest door, is, as the sensation novelists say, "the work of a moment." cheery voice bids me "come in," and I find myself facing a nondescript machine very much like the skeleton of a starved sofa, on which lies a slim, smooth-faced, but well-bronzed young man, in light linen tunic and white trousers, who regards me with a puzzled look. And well he may; for with a beard like a pasha, and a face bearing the visé of every climate from Syria to Brazil, I am by far the less recognisable of the two. Our last meeting was six years ago, at a children's party in the house of the Minister of War at St Petersburg; and here, in the heart of an Asiatic desert, with the Khivan war looming in the background, do we meet again.

"I see you don't remember me," begin I; "but perhaps you may recollect meeting a man of the name of Ker at St Petersburg, in the spring of 1867."

"To be sure!" cries my friend, seizing me cordially by the hand. "So it's you, is it? Did you get across Siberia to Pekin, after all?"

"No, that must wait for another time; I've just come back from South America, and I'm bound for Khiva now-though just at present I don't look very like getting there."

'Khiva, eh? Why, that's just where I'm going— only I've got to go round by Tashkent first. But come, pour yourself out a glass of tea; and you'll find a biscuit or two in that bag yonder."

And forthwith I begin to add a few more tumblers to the seven which I have already taken. The amount of liquid which one can consume with impunity in these regions bears much the same proportion to the solids, as Falstaff's sack to his "halfpennyworth of bread." During the five days which it took me to cross the Kara-Koum, I lived entirely on one big loaf; but, per contra, I drank on an average eighteen tumblers of tea per diem, and a jar or two of milk into the bargain.

"I heard at Tiflis that you had started," says Mfilling his own glass; "but I never dreamed of catching you up. The authorities have done me a service without knowing it."

"And me too; but what on earth were you doing at Tiflis?"

"Why, you see, after I came back from Tchikishliar"

"Tchikishliar! were you with Markozoff's column, then ?"

"Yes-all the time it was out."

Here is a windfall! As yet I know nothing of the fate of this detachment, save the ominous fact of its having returned without reaching even the Khivan frontier; and here, suddenly, as if dropped from the clouds, is a man who has stood the ordeal himself.

"By Jove, I envy you! You must have seen something worth telling."

"I have, indeed. Fill your glass, and I'll tell you all about it."

"One question before you begin," interrupt I. "You

marched along the ancient bed of the Oxus, and must have had a good look at it; do you really think it possible to turn the river into the Caspian again, as some of your engineers propose?"

'Not by that channel; it would only lose itself in the sands."

"You say that channel; is there another, then?"

This

"Indeed there is, and a much likelier one. You can see it here for yourself;" and he produces a splendid military map, the very sight of which makes my mouth water. "This is the map we carried with us on the march. It'll show you everything you want to know. Here, you see, is the lake of Sari-Kamish, south-west of the southern extremity of the Aral Sea. channel running east connects it with the Oxus, which fills it at every overflow; and another channel, running almost due south from the lake, strikes the ancient bed of the river, along which we marched. Around these two channels the soil is firmer and less sandy, and some of our engineers think it might be done that way. The best authorities, however, pooh-pooh the whole affair, saying that the river, shrunk as it is, cannot muster a volume of water sufficient to reach the Caspian; and for my own part, I quite agree with them."

Here my extempore Xenophon pauses for a moment to wash down, with a careless draught of tea, the most important enterprise in Asia, and then returns like a giant refreshed to the narrative of his own personal adventures.

"We left Tchikishliar (you see it down yonder, close