IV
The Triumphal Entry
Tomsk, founded in 1604, nearly in the heart of the Siberian provinces, is one of the most important towns in Asiatic Russia. Tobolsk, situated above the sixtieth parallel; Irkutsk, built beyond the hundredth meridian—have seen Tomsk increase at their expense.
And yet Tomsk, as has been said, is not the capital of this important province. It is at Omsk that the Governor-General of the province and the official world reside. But Tomsk is the most considerable town of that territory, bounded by the Altai mountains, a range which extends to the Chinese frontier of the Khalkhas country. Down the slopes of these mountains to the valley of the Tom, platina, gold, silver, copper, and auriferous-lead succeed each other. The country being rich, the town is so likewise, for it is in the center of fruitful mines. In the luxury of its houses, its arrangements, and its equipages, it might rival the greatest European capitals. It is a city of millionaires, enriched by the spade and pickax, and though it has not the honor of being the residence of the Czar’s representative, it can boast of including in the first rank of its notables the chief of the merchants of the town, the principal grantees of the imperial government’s mines.
Formerly Tomsk was thought to be at the end of the world. It was a long journey for those who wished to go there. Now it is a mere walk where the road is not trampled over by the feet of invaders. Soon, even a railway will be constructed which will unite it with Perm, by crossing the Urals.
Is Tomsk a pretty town? It must be confessed that travelers are not agreed on this point.
Madame de Bourboulon, who stopped there a few days during her journey from Shanghai to Moscow, calls it an unpicturesque locality. According to her, it is but an insignificant town, with old houses of stone and brick, narrow streets—differing much from those which are usually found in great Siberian cities—dirty quarters, crowded chiefly with Tartars, and in which are swarms of quiet drunkards, “whose drunkenness even is apathetic as with all the nations of the North.”
The traveler Henry Russel-Killough is positive in his admiration of Tomsk. Is this because he saw in midwinter, under its snowy mantle, the town which Madame de Bourboulon only visited during the summer? It is possible, and confirms the opinion that certain cold countries can only be appreciated in the cold season, as certain hot countries in the hot season.
However this may be, Mr. Russel-Killough says positively that Tomsk is not only the prettiest town in Siberia, but is one of the prettiest town in the world; its houses adorned with columns and peristyles, its wooden side-paths, its wide and regular streets, and its fifteen magnificent churches reelected in the waters of the Tom, larger than any river in France.
The truth is something between these two opinions. Tomsk, which contains twenty-five thousand inhabitants, is picturesquely built on a long hill, the slope of which is somewhat steep.
But even the prettiest town in the world would become ugly when occupied by invaders.
Who would wish to admire it then? Defended by a few battalions of foot Cossacks, who resided permanently there, it had not been able to resist the attack of the Emir’s columns. A part of the population, of Tartar origin, had given a friendly reception to these hordes—Tartars, like themselves—and, for the time, Tomsk seemed to be no more Siberian than if it had been transported into the middle of the Khanates of Kokand or Bukhara.
At Tomsk the Emir was to receive his victorious troops. A festival, with songs and dances, followed by some noisy orgies, was to be given in their honor.
The place chosen with Asiatic taste for this ceremony was a wide plateau situated on a part of the hill overlooking, at some hundred feet distance, the course of the Tom. The long perspective of elegant mansions and churches with their green cupolas, the windings of the river, the whole scene bathed in warm mists, appeared as it were in a frame formed by groups of pines and gigantic cedars.
To the left of the plateau, a brilliant scene representing a palace of strange architecture—no doubt some specimen of the Bukharan monuments, half Moorish, half Tartar—had been temporarily erected on wide terraces. Above the palace and the minarets with which it bristled, among the high branches of the trees which shaded the plateau, tame storks, brought from Bukhara with the Tartar army, flew about in thousands.
The terraces had been reserved for the Emir’s court, the Khans his allies, the great dignitaries of the Khanates, and the harems of each of these Turkenstan sovereigns.
Of these sultanas, who are for the most part merely slaves bought in the markets of Transcaucasia and Persia, some had their faces uncovered, and others wore a veil which concealed their features. All were dressed with great magnificence. Handsome pelisses with short sleeves allowed the bare arms to be seen, loaded with bracelets connected by chains of precious stones, and the little hands, the fingernails being tinted with the juice of the henna. Some of these pelisses were made of silk, fine as a spider’s web; others of a flexible aladja, which is a narrow-striped texture of cotton; and at the least movement they made that rustle so agreeable in the ears of an Oriental. Under this first garment were brocaded petticoats, covering the silken trousers, which were fastened a little above neat boots, well shaped and embroidered with pearls. Some of the women whose features were not concealed by veils might have been admired for their long plaited hair, escaping from beneath their various colored turbans, their splendid eyes, their magnificent teeth, their dazzling complexions, heightened by the blackness of the eyebrows, connected by a slight line, and the eyelashes touched with a little black-lead.
At the foot of the terraces, gay with standards and pennons, watched the Emir’s own guards, armed with curved sabres, daggers in their belts, and lances six feet long in their hands. A few of these Tartars carried white sticks, others enormous halberds ornamented with tufts of gold and silver thread.
All around over this vast plateau, as far as the steep slopes, the bases of which were washed by the Tom, was massed a crowd composed of all the native elements of Central Asia. Uzbeks were there, with their tall caps of black sheepskin, their red beards, their gray eyes, and their arkalouk, a sort of tunic cut in the Tartar fashion. There thronged Turkomans, dressed in the national costume—wide trousers of a bright color, with vest and mantle woven of camel’s-hair; red caps, conical or wide; high boots of Russian leather; and sabre knife hung at the waist by a thong. There, near their masters, appeared the Turkoman women, their hair lengthened by cords of goats’-hair; the chemisette open under the djouba, striped with blue, purple, and green; the logs laced with colored bands, crossing each other to the leathern clog. There, too—as if all the Russian-Chinese frontier had risen at the Emir’s voice—might be seen Manchus, faces shaven, matted hair, long robes, sash confining the silken skirt at the waist, and oval caps of crimson satin, with black border and red fringe; and with them splendid specimens of the women of Manchuria, wearing coquettish headdresses of artificial flowers, kept in their places by gold pins and butterflies lightly laid on their black hair. Lastly, Mongols, Bukharans, Persians, and Turkenstan-Chinese completed the crowd invited to the Tartar festival.
Siberians along were wanting in this reception of the invaders. Those who had not been able to fly were confined to their houses, in dread of the pillage which Feofar-Khan would perhaps order to worthily terminate this triumphal ceremony.
At four o’clock the Emir made his entry into the square, greeted by a flourish of trumpets, the rolling sound of the big drums, salvos of artillery and musketry.
Feofar mounted his favorite horse, which carried on its head an aigrette of diamonds. The Emir still wore his uniform.
He was accompanied by a numerous staff, and beside him walked the Khans of Kokand and Kunduz and the grand dignitaries of the Khanates.
At the same moment appeared on the terrace the chief of Feofar’s wives, the queen, if this title may be given to the sultana of the states of Bukhara. But, queen or slave, this woman of Persian origin was wonderfully beautiful. Contrary to the Muhammadan custom, and no doubt by some caprice of the Emir, she had her face uncovered. Her hair, divided into four plaits, fell over her dazzling white shoulders, scarcely concealed by a veil of silk worked in gold, which fell from the back of a cap studded with gems of the highest value. Under her blue-silk petticoat, striped with a darker shade, fell the zirdjameh of silken gauze, and above the sash lay the pirahn of the same texture, sloping gracefully to the neck. But from the head to the little feet, encased in Persian slippers, such was the profusion of jewels—gold beads strung on silver threads, chaplets of turquoises, firouzehs from the celebrated mines of Alborz, necklaces of carnelians, agates, emeralds, opals, and sapphires—that her dress seemed to be literally made of precious stones. The thousands of diamonds which sparkled on her neck, arms, hands, at her waist, and at her feet might have been valued at almost countless millions of rubles.
The Emir and the Khans dismounted, as did the dignitaries who escorted them. All entered a magnificent tent erected on the center of the first terrace. Before the tent, as usual, the Koran was laid on the sacred table.
Feofar’s lieutenant did not make them wait, and before five o’clock the trumpets announced his arrival.
Ivan Ogareff—the Scarred Cheek, as he was already nicknamed—wearing the uniform of a Tartar officer, dismounted before the Emir’s tent. He was accompanied by a party of soldiers from the camp at Zabediero, who ranged up at the sides of the square, in the middle of which a place for the sports was reserved. A large scar could be distinctly seen cut obliquely across the traitor’s face.
Ogareff presented his principal officers to the Emir, who, without departing from the coldness which composed the main part of his dignity, received them in a way which satisfied them that they stood well in the good graces of their chief.
At least so thought Harry Blount and Alcide Jolivet, the two inseparables, now associated together in the chase after news. After leaving Zabediero, they had proceeded rapidly to Tomsk. The plan they had agreed upon was to leave the Tartars as soon as possible, and to join a Russian regiment, and, if they could, to go with them to Irkutsk. All that they had seen of the invasion, its burnings, its pillages, its murders, had perfectly sickened them, and they longed to be among the ranks of the Siberian army.
However, Jolivet had told his companion that he could not leave Tomsk without making a sketch of the triumphal entry of the Tartar troops, if it was only to satisfy his cousin’s curiosity, so Harry Blount had agreed to stay a few hours; but the same evening they both intended to take the road to Irkutsk, and being well mounted hoped to distance the Emir’s scouts.
Alcide and Blount mingled therefore in the crowd, so as to lose no detail of a festival which ought to supply them with a hundred good lines for an article. They admired the magnificence of Feofar-Khan, his wives, his officers, his guards, and all the Eastern pomp, of which the ceremonies of Europe can give not the least idea. But they turned away with disgust when Ivan Ogareff presented himself before the Emir, and waited with some impatience for the amusements to begin.
“You see, my dear Blount,” said Alcide, “we have come too soon, like honest citizens who like to get their money’s worth. All this is before the curtain rises, it would have been better to arrive only for the ballet.”
“What ballet?” asked Blount.
“The compulsory ballet, to be sure. But see, the curtain is going to rise.”
Alcide Jolivet spoke as if he had been at the Opera, and taking his glass from its case, he prepared, with the air of a connoisseur, “to examine the first act of Feofar’s company.”
But a painful ceremony was to precede the sports. In fact, the triumph of the vanquisher could not be complete without the public humiliation of the vanquished. This was why several hundreds of prisoners were brought under the soldiers’ whips. They were destined to march past Feofar-Khan and his allies before being crammed with their companions into the prisons in the town.
In the first ranks of these prisoners figured Michael Strogoff. As Ogareff had ordered, he was specially guarded by a file of soldiers. His mother and Nadia were there also.
The old Siberian, although energetic enough when her own safety was in question, was frightfully pale. She expected some terrible scene. It was not without reason that her son had been brought before the Emir. She therefore trembled for him. Ivan Ogareff was not a man to forgive having been struck in public by the knout, and his vengeance would be merciless. Some frightful punishment familiar to the barbarians of Central Asia would, no doubt, be inflicted on Michael. Ogareff had protected him against the soldiers because he well knew what would happen by reserving him for the justice of the Emir.
The mother and son had not been able to speak together since the terrible scene in the camp at Zabediero. They had been pitilessly kept apart—a bitter aggravation of their misery, for it would have been some consolation to have been together during these days of captivity. Marfa longed to ask her son’s pardon for the harm she had unintentionally done him, for she reproached herself with not having commanded her maternal feelings. If she had restrained herself in that post-house at Omsk, when she found herself face to face with him, Michael would have passed unrecognized, and all these misfortunes would have been avoided.
Michael, on his side, thought that if his mother was there, if Ogareff had brought her with him, it was to make her suffer with the sight of his own punishment, or perhaps some frightful death was reserved for her also.
As to Nadia, she only asked herself how she could save them both, how come to the aid of son and mother. As yet she could only wonder, but she felt instinctively that she must above everything avoid drawing attention upon herself, that she must conceal herself, make herself insignificant. Perhaps she might at least gnaw through the meshes which imprisoned the lion. At any rate if any opportunity was given her she would seize upon it, and sacrifice herself, if need be, for the son of Marfa Strogoff.
In the meantime the greater part of the prisoners were passing before the Emir, and as they passed each was obliged to prostrate himself, with his forehead in the dust, in token of servitude. Slavery begins by humiliation. When the unfortunate people were too slow in bending, the rough guards threw them violently to the ground.
Alcide Jolivet and his companion could not witness such a sight without feeling indignant.
“It is cowardly—let us go,” said Alcide.
“No,” answered Blount; “we must see it all.”
“See it all!—ah!” cried Alcide, suddenly, grasping his companion’s arm.
“What is the matter with you?” asked the latter.
“Look, Blount; it is she!”
“What she?”
“The sister of our traveling companion—alone, and a prisoner! We must save her.”
“Calm yourself,” replied Blount coolly. “Any interference on our part in behalf of the young girl would be worse than useless.”
Alcide Jolivet, who had been about to rush forward, stopped, and Nadia—who had not perceived them, her features being half hidden by her hair—passed in her turn before the Emir without attracting his attention.
However, after Nadia came Marfa Strogoff; and as she did not throw herself quickly in the dust, the guards brutally pushed her.
She fell.
Her son struggled so violently that the soldiers who were guarding him could scarcely hold him back.
But the old woman rose, and they were about to drag her on, when Ogareff interposed, saying—
“Let that woman stay!”
As to Nadia, she happily regained the crowd of prisoners. Ivan Ogareff had taken no notice of her.
Michael was then led before the Emir, and there he remained standing, without casting down his eyes.
“Your forehead to the ground!” cried Ogareff.
“No!” answered Michael.
Two soldiers endeavored to make him bend, but they were themselves laid on the ground by a buffet from the young man’s fist.
Ogareff approached Michael.
“You shall die!” he said.
“I can die,” answered Michael fiercely; “but your traitor’s face, Ivan, will not the less carry forever the infamous brand of the knout.”
At this reply Ivan Ogareff became perfectly livid.
“Who is this prisoner?” asked the Emir, in a tone of voice terrible from its very calmness.
“A Russian spy,” answered Ogareff.
In asserting that Michael was a spy he knew that the sentence pronounced against him would be terrible.
Michael had stepped up to Ogareff.
The soldiers stopped him.
The Emir made a sign at which all the crowd bent low their heads. Then he pointed with his hand to the Koran, which was brought him. He opened the sacred book and placed his finger on one of its pages.
It was chance, or rather, according to the ideas of these Orientals, God Himself who was about to decide the fate of Michael Strogoff. The people of Central Asia give the name of fal to this practice. After having interpreted the sense of the verse touched by the judge’s finger, they apply the sentence whatever it may be.
The Emir had let his finger rest on the page of the Koran. The chief of the Ulemas then approached, and read in a loud voice a verse which ended with these words, “And he will no more see the things of this earth.”
“Russian spy!” exclaimed Feofar-Kahn in a voice trembling with fury, “you have come to see what is going on in the Tartar camp. Then look while you may.”