for the surroundings of Kizil Arvat are calculated to drive a European to despair. The town stands in a dreary plain two miles from the mountains, which supply an abundance of water. Nothing would be easier than to produce vegetation of surpassing beauty, for the desert soil needs but irrigation to furnish everything that could delight the eye. The People’s Park only serves to make the aspect of the town more forbidding; and the ugly square boxes serving as married quarters are entirely destitute of a garden. The place is said to be healthy, in spite of a summer heat rising to 110 degrees; but another tale is told by the crowd which are attracted by the band of the 2nd Railway Battalion, stationed here. The adults are generally ill-favoured and stunted, and the repulsive sores on their faces are evidence of bad water and insufficient nutrition. The working population is Russian, with the exception of a few Turkomans, who are admitted as apprentices, and exhibit a mechanical bias which ought to be more encouraged. Wages and working hours would hardly be approved of by the pampered British artisan. Foremen draw a salary of £110 to £130 annually, but the rank and file are paid on the piece-work system. A carpenter of average industry can earn 5s. 6d.; a fitter, 4s. 4d. per diem. The hours of work are from 6 p.m. till noon, with a break at 7.30 for breakfast; and again from 1.30 till 7 p.m.--an eleven hours’ day. Geok Teppe, the scene of the crowning mercy of 1881, is the next halting-place. In this dry atmosphere the vestiges of the Tekkes’ last refuge enables the traveller to conjure up the fearful scenes enacted there eighteen years ago. A hundred yards north of the railway stretches a long earthen rampart 12 or 15 feet high, broken near its south-east angle and on the eastern face by huge gaps, through which the infuriated Russian soldiers pressed on the memorable 24th of January 1881. The interior of the rude fortress is still scored with funnel-shaped holes, and strewn with fragments of iron left by the exploding shells. The whole scene comes vividly before him who ascends Dangil Teppe, a mound at the north-west corner whence the Turkomans plied their only gun during the siege.[678] He seems to see beneath, the dense mass of dark felt kibitkas lit up by the explosion of missiles charged with petroleum. His ears are stunned by the shrieks of the agonised women and children who seek shelter in vain from these messengers of death, the hoarse cries of the combatants locked in a death-struggle, the roar of musketry and the clash of steel. While he is fain to admit that civilisation has gained by the issue of the tremendous struggle, the Englishman bares his head in honour of the brave men who bled for freedom here. The Russian lines can still be distinguished to the east of the crumbling ramparts; and, as if to point Gray’s sad moral, “the paths of glory lead but to the grave,” three graveyards alone remain where the pulse of war once