"Right you are, Mourad my boy; so let's have a mouthful of bread and meat, and then look about us."

The Tartar's eyes glisten hungrily, and he produces the battered havresack with significant alacrity. With the one clasp-knife which we possess in common, we hack our black bread and cold mutton in true barbaric fashion-wash down the "Gothic carving" with a huge draught of cold tea (the efficacy of which I first learned on the top of Mont Blanc) and, in the words of an American friend of mine, "are ready for anything from piracy to pumice-stone."

But although we eat like men who are under the open sky day and night, it must be owned that the situation itself is not particularly appetising. Meat running short-no chance of fresh supplies for days to come-a temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit-constant delays -250 miles of desert still lying between us and the Syr-Daria-and, above all, the chance of reaching Khiva before the final assault reduced to a minimum. As yet, indeed, we are not in Turkestan at all. Five stations away, the little post-house of Terekli looks down upon the wilderness of cracked, parched clay, and dried watercourses, and drifting sands, which forms the boundary of the famous province; and, at our present rate of travelling, it will be a good day's journey to reach it.

But the Desert is a good school for learning patience; and men who have lived for weeks face to face with thirst, hunger, fever, bruises, vermin, and ophthalmia, have little room for minor grievances. Mourad and I

look at each other over the half-empty havresack, and laugh aloud.

"Never mind, master! we shall get to the end somehow or other. After all, we can hardly expect to get along here as if we were on the Nikolaievski railway.” *

"Hardly, my lad; but anyhow, we may just as well have a bath while we're waiting. Just see if you can find a stream or a pond anywhere about-with all that grass yonder, there ought to be water."

Off goes Mourad at the word, with unaffected zeal; for your Asiatic, as a rule, bathes more (and washes less) than any man under heaven. And, in truth, we are both much in need of it. Barely six hours have passed since I swam across the Irgiz and back, yet one may already strike a match upon any part of me; and honest Mourad's yellow face looks like a peppered omelette. Desert travelling is certainly no sinecure, and a thing hard to conceive till one has actually tried it. In cool, breezy England, men picture it to themselves vaguely as a long, hot, rather thirsty ride. The reality is widely different. The heat of a furnace during the day, the damp of a Lincolnshire fen at night; an atmosphere filled with hot prickly dust, choking your pores and making you tingle from head to foot; a quivering haze of intense heat along the horizon; lips cracked and bleeding, eyes that ache with a dull, unceasing pain, a furred leathery tongue that seems too large for your mouth; a torturing thirst, which no amount of drink can satisfy; a feverish un

* The Moscow-St. Petersburg line, named after the late Czar.

refreshing sleep; a constant irritation, worse than the sharpest agony; a lassitude which makes you feel as if life itself were not worth the trouble of defendingsuch are the realities of desert life!

Under such auspices I naturally rejoice at the reappearance, about half-an-hour later, of my trusty henchman, dripping from his recent plunge, and looking, if not absolutely clean, at least considerably less dirty than before.

"All right, master; there's not much water, but quite enough for a bath. Just follow those two cows yonder, and they'll bring you right to it."

And, so speaking, the true believer stretches himself under a patch of shade about the breadth of a handkerchief, and goes to sleep as only an Asiatic can.

Rather a novel sensation, bathing in a desert pool with cattle for one's bathmen; but it would be well if these were my only attendants. I have gone barely fifty yards when a sound like the striking-up of a church-organ warns me that the bush-flies are astir. At every stride fresh swarms spring up, stimulated by the unexpected wind-fall of a tolerably tender European skin; and to a distant observer, if there were one, I speedily present the spectacle of an infuriated lunatic. Once under the water, I shall be safe from them; but how about undressing? Why are not one's clothes made all in one piece, like those of the circus dancers? I make a frantic attempt at "peeling" as I run, in unconscious imitation of Jacob Grimm's farrier, who shod a horse at full gallop without stopping him, and

two minutes later I am over head and ears in the cool, refreshing, delightful water, sending through all my veins a thrill of life and vigour which I have almost forgotten.

What a strange sensation it is, that of being in perfect comfort for the time being after intense hardship, with the full consciousness that you must move some time, and that as soon as you do the hardship will recommence afresh. The courier drinking in the warm post-house after a ride through blinding snow; the sailor turning into his hammock from the "middle watch" off the Horn; the climber on the summit of Mont Blanc or the Brazilian "Sugar-loaf;" the schoolboy romping out his short half-holiday; the Roman slave revelling in the brief and boisterous "liberty of December "-what a tug for them all to return to their old conditions from the enjoyable Present! And so, too, with me. Plunged in this glorious bath of Nature's making-cool, and clean, and buoyant, after the hot, dusty lassitude of the desert-for the moment I am perfectly happy, but then-!

When I get back to my waggon there are still no horses; and I must perforce open negotiations with the Kirghiz, who, sure of their prey, are patiently squatted at the tent-door, "biding their time." I take a huge draught from the bowl of sour milk in the centre, and, squatting myself on the general "felt," touch hands with the whole circle.

"Any one here got a horse?"

Most of the party look as if they had never heard of

such a creature; but the old chief, with a cunning twinkle in his small, deep-set eye, ventures to think that he "has one somewhere."

"Double pay if I get three within a quarter of an hour." A bombshell could hardly be more effective. Three men instantly rush off in search of the beasts, three more in quest of harness; while the patriarch, with the air of a man who knows how to be civil even to an inferior, hands me the bowl again, bidding me drink and be welcome. I speedily make friends with every one of the gaunt brown scarecrows, and am just starting a furious game of romps with the chief's son and heir, a bullet-headed five-year-old, with black beady eyes, and a mouth like the opening of a letter-box, when up come horses, harness, and driver all in the lump, and ten minutes later the whole encampment is a mere shadow on the horizon.

Afternoon brings us to Uralsk, anather little islet of human life in the great sea of desolation. Along the brow of a steep ridge overhanging the Irgiz a few scores of log-shanties cluster like limpets, crowned by a little toy fortress that would just fit into Belgrave Square, over the low mud breastwork of which one might march without changing step, with little risk from the two guns which are defended by it. Altogether, an unpretending, insignificant little place enough; yet it is just these tiny atoms of armed colonisation which have carried the banners of Russia from the Ural to the Thian-Shan. All the steppe forts which I have seen throughout the length and breadth of Central Asia