have gone out to preach the very letter of the Koran
the letter of rigid practice among the Faithful, and of rigid hate against the Infidel. Until the day of the railway, the European's presence in any one of Bokhara's eighty mosques (somehow fabled to be three hundred and sixty-five) was ever a probable cause of riot.
But all this has been changed by the Russians. One is now as safe in the Emir's territory as in Moscow. His army, which we saw manoeuvring handsomely under its native officers, has been organised by Russian advice and is tamely uniformed and armed in European fashion. Because he feels irritated by the watchful supervision of the Muscovite; because he is saddened by the vain show of emasculated power, which is now all that remains of a former omnipotence; because he is a lazy lover of luxurious ease—for one or all of such surmised reasons, the Emir has left the rather tawdry palace just outside the city's walls, and now dwells in retirement some thirty or forty miles away, returning only on state occasions or when some unusual occurrence draws him to his capital. We were told that such visits were not relished by his subjects, over whom the vestige of his power may yet be tyrannically exercised in many petty matters.
One must not, however, take too literally the point of view adopted by European administrators, or their native sycophants, in a subjugated Asiatic state. Practices that seem the sheerest abuse of power, even to the Russian, may yet be not disliked in these communities, whose traditions and whose present sentiments we but dimly apprehend. Nor
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