On that day, as Vambéry has told us, a new era opened for Central Asia. “The countries and cities once absolutely closed to the Western man are now opened before him. There where a European could not make a single step without danger of death, he now comes and goes as freely as he pleases, for a Christian army holds the land. At Tashkend, Khojend, and at Samarcand there are clubs, _cafés_, and churches. Tashkend has its Russian newspaper, and with the plaintive chant of the Muezzin is mingled the tinkling bell of the Greek Church, more terrible to the ear of the true believer than the thunder of cannonades. In the streets of Bokhara, where, but a few years ago, the author of these lines heard only Mussulman hymns, the Russian priest, the Russian soldier, and the Russian merchant are now walking together with the pride of the conqueror. A hospital and a storehouse occupy the once splendid palace where Tamerlane used to command; the palace to which all the princes of the East came to do homage, to which the monarchs of Spain and the Indies sent an embassy to beg for the friendship of the great conqueror, and where the Turanians, humble and devout, knelt, to strike with their foreheads the green stone which forms the sacred pedestal of the throne of Timour. By the victory of the Russian eagles in Central Asia, Islam has received a most terrible wound. For the whole thousand years and more during which it has struggled with Christianity it has never been hit so full in the breast. In our time Western civilization acts vigorously on Mussulman Asia from Byzantium to India, and even Mecca and Medina have not escaped its influence. Central Asia alone had remained the sanctuary of Mahomedanism. The evil there had not been changed, and it was not Mecca but Bokhara which passed for the intellectual centre of Islam. The ascetic, the member of a religious order, the theologian, sighed for this sacred city, and the most zealous Mussulmans of the Ottoman Empire, of Egypt, of Fez, and of Morocco, came to cherish their fanaticism in its schools and in its mosques. Samarcand is incontestably the Maracanda of the Greeks, the capital of the ancient Sogdiana. It was the queen city of the basin of the Oxus. It lost its preponderance for a time, but recovered it, and under Tamerlane reached the height of its splendour. The Mahomedans had a thousand poetic expressions in praise of its wealth, its abundance of water, its innumerable canals fed from mountain torrents, and running in all directions through the plain.”