set out on their campaign against the
Tekke Turcomans. Three hundred miles inland is the famous fortress of
Geoke Tepe, where disaster overtook the Russians, and where, in a
subsequent campaign, occurred that massacre of women and children which
caused the Western world to wonder anew at the barbarism of the Russian
soldiery.

Still steaming north, our little craft ploughs her way toward
Krasnovodsk, an important military station on the eastern coast.

At night the surface of the sea becomes smooth and glassy, the sun sets,
rotund and red, in a haze suggestive of Indian summer in the West. The
cabins are small and stuffy, so I sleep up on the hurricane-deck,
wrapping a Persian sheepskin overcoat about me. An awning covers this
deck completely, but this does not prevent everything beneath getting
drenched with dew. Never did I see such a fall of dew. It streams off the
big awning like a shower of rain, and soaks through it and drips, drips
on to my recumbent form and everything on the hurricane-deck.

Early in the morning we moor our ship to the dock at Krasnovodsk, and
load and unload merchandise till noon. Here is where railway material for
the Transcaspian railway to Merv is landed, the terminus being at
Michaelovich, near by. We go ashore for a couple of hours and look about.
The inmates of a military convalescent hospital are passing from the
doctor's office to their barracks. They are wearing long dressing-gowns
of gray stuff, with hoods that make them look wonderfully like a lot of
monks arrayed in cowls. A company of infantry are target-practising at
the foot of rocky buttes just outside the town. Not a tree nor a green
thing is visible in the place nor on all the hills around--nothing but the
blue waters of the Caspian and the dull prospect of rude rock buildings
and gray hills.

Except for the sea, and the raggedness and abject servility of the poor
class of people, one might imagine Krasnovodsk some Far Western fort.
Scarcely a female is seen on the streets, soldiers are everywhere, and in
the commercial quarter every other place is a vodka-shop. We visit one of
these and find men in red shirts and cowhide boots playing billiards and
drinking, others drinking and playing cards. Rough and sturdy men they
look--frontiersmen; but there is no spirit, no independence, in
their expression; they look like curs that have been chastised and
bullied until the spirit is completely broken. This peculiar humbled and
re