Persia, and lived in the Oasis for five months. At first the people treated him coldly, but he gradually won their confidence and convinced them of his friendliness. They made him one of their elders, and appointed him to a place on the Governing Council; he has told the story of his residence among these strange people in an interesting volume entitled 'The Merv Oasis.'
"One of the most remarkable journeys ever made on the Turcoman steppes," said the gentleman in conclusion, "was accomplished by another newspaper correspondent, an American named MacGahan, during the campaign against Khiva in 1873. Without an escort, and accompanied only by a servant and two guides, he started from Fort Peroffsky, on the Jaxartes or Syr Darya River, near the Aral Sea, to overtake General Kaufmann's army, that had gone to the attack of Khiva. Its exact whereabouts were unknown; he had eight or ten days of desert travel before him, and if he had fallen into the hands of the Turcomans or Kirghese who roam over the desert, his fate would have been certain death.
"The Russians at Fort Peroffsky refused to allow him to start, as they considered it impossible for him to make the journey, and he was obliged to slip out of the place in the night. He had several narrow escapes, but managed to get through all right and join General Kaufmann's column just as the fighting before Khiva began. The officers told him the chances of his getting across the desert with his life were not more than one in a hundred. He remained with our army till the end of the Khivan campaign, and every officer who knew him felt that he had lost a personal friend when the news of MacGahan's death came a few years later. The story of his adventures is told in his book—'Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva.'
"In 1875 a similar journey was made by Captain Burnaby, an English officer of the Guards. He has given an admirable account of his experience in a book entitled, 'A Ride to Khiva.'"
"Conversation such as this," writes Fred in his journal, "beguiled the tediousness of the ride over the flat and desolate region through which the railway passes. At the few oases where we stopped, we saw little villages of Turcomans, but they were so much alike that the descriptions you have already read will answer for them all. At Kizil Arvat we found an oasis containing altogether half a dozen square miles of tillable land, on which were several Turcoman villages, and a Russian town of perhaps a thousand inhabitants.
"We call the town Russian from the flag that waves over it, rather than from the nationality of those who live in it. They are Russians,
