The successful issue of this enterprise led, in 1895, to the appointment of a mixed commission to demarcate the spheres of English and Russian influence on the Pamirs. The boundaries of the three Asiatic empires meet in those stupendous hills, but their difficulty of access had hitherto precluded any attempt to lay them down authoritatively. The English representatives, under the direction of Sir M. G. Gerard, K.C.S.I., left India on the 30th June; and, a month later, they met their Russian colleagues on the shore of Lake Victoria, a wild mountain tarn which gives birth to the Oxus. No time was lost in tracing the boundary prescribed in an agreement entered into between the two Powers. Starting from the eastern side of the lake, it follows the crest of the Sarikol range until the Chinese frontier is reached. “From the sixth mile,” wrote Sir T. Holdich, K.C.I.E., the chief survey officer, “a rugged and inaccessible spur of the Sarikol range carried the boundary into regions of perpetual ice and snow to its junction with the main range. Here, amidst a solitary wilderness, 20,000 feet above sea-level, absolutely inaccessible to man, and within the ken of no living creature except the Pamir eagles, the three great empires actually meet. No more fitting tri-junction could possibly have been found.” The cordiality which marked the relations between the subjects of Queen and Tsar was even more marked than on the earlier occasion. On their arrival at the scene of action the travel-worn Britons were hospitably received in the Russian camp, and a feeling of good-fellowship was then and there engendered which never afterwards grew cold. The scanty leisure left the commissioners by their duty of traversing ninety miles of the most difficult country in the world was devoted to races and shooting-matches. The Kirghiz of the Russian escort astonished our countrymen by their prowess at ulak, a struggle on horseback for a goat, similar to the Bokhāran game of baigha. The Cossacks, too, displayed their wondrous equestrian skill. August 3rd, the name-day of the Dowager-Empress of Russia, was the occasion of an outdoor service, and the sweet plaintive melody of the anthems of the Greek Church never sounded so impressively as it did on those remote mountain heights.[639] Every lover of his country will re-echo the hope expressed by the Russian commissioner at a farewell banquet given to his colleagues on 11th September 1895, that “the agreement just concluded would be the beginning of more cordial relations between the two countries, and of a better understanding of their national aims and desires.” CHAPTER VI THE CENTRAL ASIAN RAILWAYS