kand..

Khiva, Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Kashgar, Lanchow -rough uncut jewels strung on that long, thin, golden thread which drew the wealth of India and the silks and porcelain of far-off Cathay to Europe, from times remotely B.C. till the day when Vasco da Gama sailed round Africa and opened the sea-route to the East. Each package packed small, to sling on a camel, and each indescribably valuable. No bulk. Months on long months of careful travelling and handling, and then the markets of Byzantium and the West. The overland route of Serindia.

The cities strung along that route waxed fat and golden: by the trade in which they shared; by the transport which they supplied, the lean beasts

VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. MCCCLI.

vans, the beasts fat from the lush grazing of the oases supplied in their place; medicaments for trail-worn man and beast; and the vast army of cooks, vintners, and panders who ministered to men fresh from the desert, and who give even modern Bokhara a name all its own; a reputation which, in ancient times, must have made even the Cities of the Plain look to their laurels.

Nobody knows how the safeguarding of that route was managed. It is a marvel not that the trade was as constant as it was valuable, but that the caravans ever got through in safety. For, from the Caspian to the point where the last Chinese outposts clung to the extension of the Great Wall, the whole route lay past the lands of the Mongol Tartars.

X

Now the first record there is of the Tartars is from Alexander the Great. He, of Macedon, inherited Philip's ambition for a hegemony of the Greek peoples, and a counterattack on the hereditary enemy, Persia. He crossed the Hellespont, and in three historic battles and a long advance lasting four years, smashed Darius, and, with him, Nineveh, Babylon, and the whole Empire of Persia.

He strode over the ruins of Persia into the north-east. Herát, the gateway-fortress of the eastern valleys, he took in his stride. Crossing the Hindu Kush, he made one fat mouthful of Samarkand, Bokhara, and their deadweight of riches. Beyond them lay the desert, and the incalculable fluid tribes of stunted warriors which peopled it. He crossed the Jaxartes, and launched out into the wilderness. The historians say little of what happened; his own chroniclers are silent, and the whole episode is very obscure, but presently he returned, licking his wounds. Pensive.

Whatever it was that happened was shortly forgotten in his matchless conquest of the obstacles which lay between him and the plains of India. But it takes little imagination to see the Macedonian phalanx lumbering slowly through the sand, stung and exasperated by clouds of mounted archers who appeared and disappeared at will, and whose very real numbers must have seemed multi

plied tenfold by their ubiquity. Undoubtedly they were too much for him. They chased him out of their country, hardly knowing, and little caring, who it was that they were chasing.

Thereafter, silence.

Though this vast people lay like a stormcloud on the horizons of civilisation, it was only in sections that there arose and streamed over the world Attila and his Huns, who swept Europe; the hordes of Jenghiz Khan, who swamped both China and Russia simultaneously; Ogdai, the worst of the lot, whose whirlwind path was one long orgy of senseless slaughter; Mangu; Kublai Khan, he of the stately pleasure dome; Timur Leng of the distorted leg, whose crooked limb seems to have twisted his mind into strange shapes. Never at any one time was the nation united as one, or on the move together. The Lord be praised. For one may picture such a mounted horde, stretching from horizon to horizon, innumerable; brown; silent and hurrying along at a steady six miles an hour; rustling, like a carpet of bees; irresistible; terrifying and merciless.

No, they never got on the move together; and, again, the Lord be praised; for, had it been otherwise, you and I (had we, indeed, ever been born) should now be short of stature, massive of limb and slant of eye, our skin dingy in spite of many baths. For the Tartars would have swamped the earth.

The danger is past, nor can it ever come again. Wars are now a matter of machinery, of economics and complicated organisation. Wars are won in the air, under the sea, in chemists' shops, any way but by floods of irresistible humanity, however grim and ruthless. Picture such a horde; picture yourself suddenly viewing it across the plain; "lummy, what a gift!"-and reach for the machine-gun.

In the five hundred years from 1360 to 1860 there is no doubt that the thing was both possible and terrible.

I say 1360, because in that year the first Ming Emperor of China had managed to drive the Tartar race out of China, and to roll its eastern section back, for good, on to its centre, thereby consolidating the nation. Furthermore, by then a certain dawning national consciousness had begun to overspread the Turanian peoples. The splendours of the countries conquered in raid and invasion had not been without their effect, and the Tartars had begun to be wealthy. Light come, light go, as it might be with any pirates, by land or by sea, some of it stuck; and the consolidation of the race began to take shape through its fixed possessions.

Had there been one man, one genius, to inspire the tribes, the movement might have gone more quickly, and with it the danger to the world would have grown. There might have

been a widespread prophecy of the reincarnation of Jenghiz Khan and his Golden Horde. The movement might have hinged round some great city saved from the wreck. Luckily, the idea fell into the hands of the Sháman wizards, they who practised the black magic and the devil - propitiation which formed the Tartar religion. But the Shámans, as sombre and obscure as the blind and unimaginative race itself, failed to produce an ideal which would breathe life into the movement.

Now Shamanism is a dark thing: an introspective wizardry devoid of emotion or constructive appeal. It deals largely in mesmerism and the black arts, in signs and talismans, and in the multiplicity and universality of devildom, needing propitiation by the wizard. The talisman idea looms largely in it; and all that the Sháman wizards could produce as an ideal by which to breathe life into the racial solidarity which they sought to foster was a vague talk of a Sign to come. With this idea they barely kept alive the conception, which made little headway through the centuries. Had it ever blazed forth, certainly in the later period, it would have become a flaming anxiety to Mongolia's two near neighbours, Russia and India, and after them to the whole world.

The Turks, that race akin to the Tartars, seem to have known of it in the sixteenth century, and even to have

impending conquests in India, subjugated and compacted into the province of Bactria. The Greek colonies were firmly established there for two hundred years, till the Tartars made an end of them; and during that time the arts and culture of Greece held full grip on the land. Alexander's was a name with which to conjure, and persists as an influence to this day in all parts of Upper India. The magic of this name kept alive and inviolate the numerous military settlements which marked Alexander's onward path, and which, after his death, persisted as islands in the midst of the sea of a hostile population for centuries. Judged by the sheer geographical reach of his personality, the man must have been a marvel.

Herát, as valueless in loot as Bokhara and Samarkand were valuable, is one of those strategic points to be found up and down the world, with a history of mixed fighting running back into the dim beginnings of all warfare, which will still be nursing its latest wounds when Gabriel blows the Last Trump. Alexander's name overlies it still, though it has suffered siege, storm, and destructions innumerable since his day; and traces of the Greek occupation in pottery, coins, and carved stone are constantly being excavated. So that when Alexander Burnes told his tale of the Dást-iSikándar of Herát and stated his belief that round it hung some occult significance of great

political value to his masters, the masters smiled; admitting, indeed, its probable existence in a land full of Alexandrine relics, but refusing to recommend it as a serious subject to their Foreign Department; and when, six years later, John Company sent troops to Herát to help to stave off a Persian invasion, and those troops had the run of Herát for over a year, the matter wasn't even mentioned to their commander as a subject to be reported on (if, indeed, it existed at all), and he came away without having heard of it.

But next year, in 1839, one of that venturesome band of Indian native explorers and secret service agents who are perpetually roaming the outer marches of our Indian Empire, and who, even in those days, were known in our Foreign Department at Simla by initials or numbers lest long-armed vengeance should pursue them, settled for a while in Herát, where he got the job of bodyservant to the Afghan commander of the Fort garrison. His report, as recorded on his return a year later, is a mass of important detail, every line of which bears witness not only to his persistent enterprise but also to a memory unsurpassed since Marco Polo, since, as was customary, he kept no written notes. But one thing which he risked his life to bring away was a clear pen-and-ink drawing of the Dást-i-Sikándar and the sarcophagus shaped stone box,