CHAPTER XIV
CENTRAL ASIA, 1898
In 1898 I planned an expedition to a part of Central Asia which has been visited by only very few Englishmen, though to a big-game hunter or a naturalist the Altai Mountains are one of the most attractive places I know of.
Though Mr. St. George Littledale, had gone there to hunt the Great Wild Sheep, and Major Cumberland has written an account of his sport there, I was the first English naturalist who had been in the Altai. My stay there was far too short to make extensive collections, but I was never more successful or enjoyed a journey better. My companion, Mr. W.A.L. Fletcher, one of the most distinguished oarsmen that Oxford has ever produced, was anxious, if possible, to reach the home of Prjevalsky’s wild horse, which had then only been obtained by the Russian naturalist Grum Grshimailo; and as he had accompanied his uncle, Mr. St. George Littledale, on his great journey almost to the gate of Lhasa, he was keen to explore and survey new country, and to shoot big game on the journey.
It was important to have a really competent interpreter who could speak not only Russian but some of the native languages, and, on the advice of M. Semenoff, the President of the Russian Geographical Society, I engaged M. Berezowsky, who was a naturalist and had accompanied Potamin in an expedition to Kansu and Mongolia. I did not know at the time that Berezowsky was a half-breed, his mother, as I learnt afterwards, being a Buriat; he was personally a very good companion, honest, sober, and speaking very fair French, but he was slow, dilatory, and, like many Russians, bad to start in the morning.
As we had a considerable amount of baggage, including a tent, saddles, surveying instruments, and collecting outfit, Fletcher went out by sea to Riga, where he had the usual trouble, delay and expense, in getting our things through the Customs. I went round by Petrograd, where I picked up Berezowsky, arranged with the Bank for a credit on the Govern¬ ment Treasury at Barnaul—there being no bank or house of business in the province which could finance me—and met Fletcher at Moscow on May 19th. From here we sent our heavy baggage on in charge of a travel¬ ling servant, Joseph Abbas by name, who had accompanied Prince Demidoff to the Altai Mountains, and who, I believe, was an Armenian, though he called himself Persian; a very clever fellow, and a good linguist, but not the man for a journey entailing hard travelling, and as greedy to make money at our expense as most of his race.
We took the route by Nishni Novgorod and the Volga, spending two days on a very good and comfortable steamer on our way to Samara, where the weather became quite warm and summerlike. At Samara, which is a large, very dirty and dusty place with more Tartars than Russians, we got into the train; and on the next day entered the foothills
of the Ural mountains, covered with an almost unbroken forest of elm,
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