Under the fast-falling darkness (for in these latitudes night comes on like the fall of a curtain) the great plain looks vaster and drearier than ever; and, before this sudden sense of the mighty desolation encompassing us, the presence of these many hundred men is blotted out as if it had never been. The fortress and its garrison, the town, the bazaar, the war-steamers in the riverall seem but a little speck of human life in the boundless sea of desolation; and it is a kind of relief to find myself back in my quarters once more, with my little tea-urn steaming on the table, and my Tartar servant standing obediently beside it.

CHAPTER XIX.

A CIRCULATING LIBRARY IN CENTRAL ASIA.

"AND you've really been five weeks in this horrid place?" says Captain P, as we sit over our evening tea and black bread, "They may well say that the Anglo-Saxon breed can bear anything. If I had been in your place, I should have simply gone stark mad."

And in truth my present "surroundings" are not particularly enticing. A little cluster of mud hovels, one storey high, flanking broad dusty ditches, called by courtesy "streets;" a small, dirty, cell-like room, with uneven brick floor and whitewashed walls, upon which the squelched carcasses of countless mosquitoes hang as trophies of my "Arabian Nights' Entertainments; boots with three holes apiece, and a coat that would have fallen to shreds long ago, but for the mud which plasters it; a temperature of 100 in the shade, and all around, as far as the eye can reach, an unpeopled desert ; such is the situation.

"Oh, I've seen much queerer places than this in Arabia and Brazil," answer I, with a would-be stoical air; "and as for going mad, what with walking about, and writing my journal, and taking sketches, and exploring the steppes, and talking with the soldiers, and swimming across the Syr-Daria, I've had plenty to do."

"And have you really swum across the Syr-Daria?" "Yes, and back again. What of it?"

'Why, only that you're lucky to be alive to talk about it, that's all. But, to be sure, you've had one passetemps that I forgot—the library."

"What library? I didn't even know there was one." The captain opens his eyes to their fullest extent. "Five weeks here, and never heard of the library! Well, you do astonish me.”

"So it appears. But, if there is one, where's it to be found? A Central Asiatic circulating library must be something worth seeing."

Well, I don't know that I can give you the route exactly. You see, I always send my servant for the books; but you have only to ask the first man you meet everybody knows it."

I thank my informant, not without some secret misgivings, having remarked, in the course of a long and varied experience, that the hardest places in the world to find are those which "everybody knows." However, as a strong-minded friend of mine used to be always saying, "when a thing has got to be done, done it must be;" so, the very same evening, I despatch my Tartar servant in quest of this mysterious place, with instructions not to come back till he has found it. Two hours later, honest Mourad returns, and, mopping the heat from his lean, swarthy, brigand-like face, reports himself as follows:

Master, they told me at first that it was in the fortress, and it wasn't; and then they told me that it

was near the post-house, and it wasn't; and then they told me it was close to our lodging here, and it wasn't; and then they told me it was beside the police office,— and there, praise be to Allah, it was!"

"And did you see the librarian ?

"I would have seen him, master, only he wasn't there!"

"Well, that certainly might be a hindrance," remark I, sarcastically. "And what did you do, then?"

"I went to his house, master-but he wasn't there either!"

"Hm-that's pleasant; first hunt the library, and then hunt the librarian. I see how it is-I must just go myself."

Early next morning I make good my words, but with as little success as my henchman. The same afternoon, the invisible librarian returns the compliment by coming in search of me, just as I have gone off for my afternoon swim in the Syr-Daria. And so, for two whole days, this game of hide and seek goes on with unabated vigour.

"I went to Taffy's house, Taffy wasn't at home,

Taffy came to my house, and found that I was gone."

At length, on the third day, I begin to tire of the sport, and despatch Mourad once more, with orders to “find the man and bring him here, if he takes all day to it." Off goes the obedient Mussulman accordingly, returning in about three quarters of an hour with the glad tidings that the librarian is "coming directly." And,

sure enough, directly (ie., an hour and a half later), there comes a hesitating tap at my door, and in sidles a tall, stalwart fellow with a bluff sunburned face-evidently a retired soldier, limping slightly from a wound received in some forgotten skirmish with the Turkomans, but still upright and active enough to make many a younger man envious.

Our conference is brief and business-like enough.
66 Are you
the librarian ?"

"Yes, your honour."

"Come along!"

Short as the distance is between my quarters and the library, a tithe of it would suffice to show the most unobservant stranger into what an utterly new region he has penetrated. At every turn, we are met by some object never seen in Europe, and one glimpse of which in a London thoroughfare would suffice to draw a larger audience than either "School" or "Richelieu." Lean, dark, wiry Cossack soldiers, in white foragecaps and linen tunics; mud-hovels thatched with reeds, and surrounded by every imaginable kind of filth; huge plate-armoured lizards darting in and out of the crevices in the clay walls; bare-footed women with scarlet kerchiefs knotted around their broad, flat, copper-coloured faces; and a motley population of lumpy Bashkirs, hook-nosed Kirghiz, high-cheeked Khivans, bun-faced Kalmucks, stately Bokhariotes, low-browed Russians, and bullet-headed Tartars. On this side, a passing camel, with slouched neck and long, noiseless stride, glancing slyly at us from beneath his