territory, and give the means of overawing Persia and Afghanistān; and so it was treated as a military work and placed under the governor of Transcaspia, who was himself subordinate to the Minister of War. But trains had hardly begun to run ere merchants and passengers flocked to the station; goods accumulated in masses which defied the slender means of transport. In 1893, 185,000 tons of merchandise and material were carried; and in 1897 the volume dealt with aggregated 249,000.[648] Trade left its old channels and poured into that which gave merchants steamer communication with the great consuming centres and the seaboard. Tea, which cheers the nomad as well as his civilised brother, no longer enters Central Asia through Afghanistān. It is transhipped at Bombay into steamers which convey it to Batum. Thence it crosses the Caucasus by rail and the Caspian by steamer, and finds the terminus of the Central Asian Railway at Krasnovodsk. This trade is of very recent growth. In 1893 none travelled by rail; in 1897 no less than 6,192,000 pounds. The commerce with Russia has been equally affected. The wool and cotton worked up in Moscow factories no longer reaches them by camel caravan; while the manufactured beet-sugar and drugs so largely in demand in the Khānates travel by the new route. That the railway should have profoundly modified the whole course of Central Asian commerce is a natural outcome of the line selected by the Tsar’s advisers. It follows the principal channel whence the silks, sugars, and stuffs of India and China poured into Europe during the ages illumined by Greek culture, and moulded by the governing instincts of Rome. Balkh in Northern Afghanistān was a rendezvous for caravans from the south and east. Thence the goods find water-way to the Oxus, and so, by its ancient course, to the Balkan Bay on the Caspian. The precious wares were carried in small vessels across that sea to the embouchure of the Cyrus, now the Kura, 90 miles south of the modern town of Baku. Here they were transhipped into canoes and dragged up stream to the foot of the Suran Pass. At this point the light vessels were carried, with their contents, 40 miles over the mountain to the river Kvirilla, a confluent of the Phasis,[649] now called the Riom, which discharges into the Black Sea near the fever-haunted port of Poti. A glance at the map will reveal the identity of this ancient highway of trade with that followed by the railway systems of the Caucasus and the regions beyond the Caspian.[650] The revolution has been recognised by the Russian authorities, and the Central Asian railways have now lost their exclusively military character, and have passed under the direction of the Minister of Ways and Communications. They will eventually have a central administration at Tashkent, and be managed by the governor-general at Turkestān.[651] The unlooked-for success which has attended the opening of the trunk line has given a great impetus to extensions.