Description
Once, long ago, we spoke of Samarcand. Afterwards I began thinking what pleasure it would give me to tell you more about my life in Turkistan. The idea haunted me, so I jotted down some of the pictures which arose before me whenever I recalled that Paradise on Earth; and little by little the following pages were written. Of course, I realize that I had no business to misbehave in that way. I knew that my English is far too clumsy, quite powerless, in fact, to describe the subtle and varied charm of Central Asia; and that these unpretending sketches are therefore sorely deficient in those merits which they ought to have possessed if they were to deal at all adequately with their subject. Excuse a foreigner. In using for my medium a language I had better have left alone, I merely thought of yon and of amusing you. I aimed at making a film pass before your eyes, and I hoped that you would not be chilled by my enthusiasm for a country which you, of all humans, would love if you knew it. But is it still the same? It is many veers new since I saw the places I describe, and in that time the immutable East has proved its mutability. The so-called Communists from Moscow have created in Samarcand an important propaganda-school for spreading revolution in Asia, and the beautiful old mosques are used, I hear, for expounding to gaping audiences the gospel of Marx. In what Monstrously modernized Persian or Turki dialect it is done, I shudder In think. and what may he the appearance of ogpu agents under the tiles and marbles of Timur‘s archwavs, I cannot imagine; Providence has spared me these sights. The Ameer of Bokhara {the son of the one l knew} is an exile, and I have no information as to what has happened and what is happening in his country. Nevertheless, l have preserved the present tense in most of these sketches. I could not help it, and I do not feel that I can alter it. My hope is that same, at least, of the beauty and originality of Russian Central Asia may, even in the hands of super-experts in destruction, not yet have been destroyed.