Published
Arminius Vambery, Travels in Central Asia (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2003)
INTRODUCTION
One morning in the spring of 1863, in a dusty caravanserai in the city of Tehran, a certain Hadji Reshid—ostensibly a dervish from Rum (Turkey) who was journeying eastwards in search of enlightenment—joined a caravan of pilgrims returning from Mecca; and furnished with only a pilgrim’s staff, a beggar’s bowl, a few rags of clothing and a small bag of silver coin, set off across the hungry wastes of Central Asia to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarqand.
This was no mean undertaking, even for those accustomed to the harshness and privations of Central Asian travel; for a lame dervish from Rum, fresh from the relative comforts of the Sultan’s realm, it might have been seen as little short of lunacy.
For such a journey, though it followed established caravan routes, entailed crossing great tracts of awful, waterless desert: a howling wilderness where rain fell only a few times a year, salt flats sucked straggling merchants to their doom, and sandstorms of unimaginable ferocity buried whole caravans, man, beast and bail, in their tracks. The nature of the terrain is best expressed by the local name for one area they would come to cross: Djan Batirdigan, meaning ‘life destroyer.’
As if this weren’t enough, there was the very real danger of being captured by the dreaded ‘man-stealing Turkomans’—whose lightning raids, or alamans, were the fear of the settled population deep into Khurasan—and being carried off to the slave markets of Bukhara. Though all caravans sought safety in numbers, such safety remained only relative, and was far from guaranteed.
For Hadji Reshid’s companions—pious men of little wealth and few possessions, most of who were from Yarkhand, Aksu and Khokand in Chinese Tartary—these dangers were acute enough. For the lame dervish from Rum, they held another, even more hazardous dimension. Not only was Hadji Reshid no dervish at all, he was not from Stambul (Istanbul) as he claimed, nor was he even a Muslim. He was, in fact, a Hungarian-born linguist whose research into the eastern Turkic languages (and insatiable inclination towards travel) had led him to adopt such an audacious disguise. His prodigious talent for languages, and long residence in Stambul—where he had gained entry into all levels of Turkish society, and which had turned him ‘into a Turk, nay, into an Effendi’—allowed him to adopt a double layer of disguise so convincing that it withstood living at intimate close quarters with his fellow travellers for months on end, and did not even falter under the scrutiny of Khans and Emirs. The discovery of any of these facts in Central Asia would, it need hardly be said, have ensured for the lame dervish from Rum a singularly unpleasant death.
Central Asia—always inaccessible to a degree, stranded amid a dizzying array of waterless deserts, towering mountains and boundless steppe, yet traversed by trade routes for millennia—had gained an evil reputation of late. The terrible fate of Stoddart and Conolly—their long and bitter confinement, and subsequent execution, at the hands of the infamous Nasrullah, Emir of Bukhara; the disastrous course of the First Afghan War; the countless Russian soldiers dragged off into slavery by the Turkomans; the present conflict between Dost Mohammad Khan and his son-in-law and former vassal centred around Herat; the Crimean War and a low ebb in Anglo-Russian relations—had ensured that hardly any European had ventured there since the Spanish ambassador, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, had visited Timur’s court in 1404. Central Asia, and it’s legendary cities of Bukhara, Khiva and Samarqand—mystified and immortalised by poets and play-writes from Marlowe to Moore, and from Flecker to Marco Polo—was still more or less terra incognita in the 1860s....
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