Its chief value lies in the means it gives for the transport of troops and munitions of war, for the river is navigable up to the Afghan frontier, 700 miles from its mouth. The Amū Daryā, however, cannot be made to serve the needs of commerce, for the channel is constantly shifting, sand-banks are thrown up and disappear in a few hours, and the navigating officers are in the hands of native pilots, who divine obstructions by observing the colour of the water. We have already described the great viaduct which spans the Amū Daryā near Charjūy. It is admittedly but a make-shift, and will soon be replaced by a girder bridge. The traveller glances uneasily at the current swirling round the slender piers, and feels inwardly relieved when his train has crept safely to the opposite bank. On either side of the line there now stretches a dead level of parched-up loam, broken here and there by hillocks covered with the outlines of some ancient citadel. There are many of these Central Asian Pompeiis, deserted owing to the failure of the water-supply, or overwhelmed by the ever-encroaching sand. Mosques, market-places, and palaces stand as they did centuries back, but the narrow streets show no signs of human life. But the desert yields again to cultivation, and the train speeds through fields of cotton and millet, overshadowed by splendid trees. The fair domains irrigated from the river Zarafshān have been reached, and its centre, Bokhārā the Noble, comes into view. A canon of Russian policy ordains that the European quarters shall be placed at a considerable distance from the great cities. Thus the effect of sudden waves of fanaticism, which are always to be feared in Mohammedan countries, is lessened, and time is given to organise defence. The railway station is eight miles by road from the capital, and is the centre of a Russian town called New Bokhārā. Its broad thoroughfares are destitute of trees and flowers, for nothing will grow in this ill-chosen site. Among many mean buildings of the bungalow type are some with architectural pretensions--a handsome residency, built by M. P. Lessar during his term of office as representative at the Bokhāran Court, a palace in a hybrid Byzantine style lately erected for the Amīr, the new buildings of the Imperial Bank, and the offices of the 3rd Railway Battalion. The Russian quarter already numbers 6000 inhabitants, and is daily growing in importance at the expense of its older rival. The highway leading to the latter passes through a country which is evidently much subdivided, and cultivated with extreme care. The fertile belt is watered by distributories from the Zarafshān,[688] which passes Samarkand and pours a flood of wealth into Bokhārā’s lap. These canals are popularly attributed to Alexander the Great and Tīmūr, heroic figures which serve as a spur to the imagination of poets and professional story-tellers throughout Central Asia. They are, in point of fact, the inevitable result of the natural conditions