On the road

The blog is about Central Asia but it at times diverts from the topic to take a closer look at those who travelled through the region and wrote about it. What were their motives, what pushed them to continue their journeys? Military missions, curiosity or – in the post-revolution period - ideological persuasion? How did they understand their role and explained it to those whom they had met on the road?

‘Once you have become the companion of the road, it calls you and calls you again. Even in winter, when you have to walk briskly all day, and there is no sitting on any bank of earth or fallen tree to write a fragment or rest, and when there is no sleeping out, but only the prospect of freezing at some wretched coffee-house or inn, the road still lies outside the door of your house full of charm and mystery’ (Through Russian Central Asia, p.1)

This is what Stephen Graham would say to our first question. This undoubtedly convincing argument comes from his Through Russian Central Asia, a thick volume containing, except for the record of his journey undertaken in the summer before the World War I, some well-preserved photographs and a map indicating: railways, post roads and camel routes stretching between the Caspian Sea and the Chinese Empire (quite uncommonly, the scales are in both miles and Russian versts).

How did Stephen Graham attempt to explain his travels to those he met during his journeys. He gives us an account of a conversation held on the road from Tashkent to Chimkent with two Russian soldiers: ‘One of the soldiers was inclined to talk, the other not. Suddenly the silent one asked: 

“What are you doing here – making plans?” 

“No,” I said apprehensively; “I’m just walking along through the country to see what it is like. Afterwards I write about it.” 

“For a library, so to speak?” 

“That’s it.”

The record of Graham’s journey had been published in The Times but the author wished to postpone issuing the book:
‘to some quitter moment beyond the war. But the days go on, and we are getting accustomed to live in a state of war; war has almost become a normal condition of existence.’
The book was eventually published in 1916.

On the road, some hundred years later, Kyrgyzstan, Batken province