At Tchislikar we are met by a lighter with several Turcoman passengers.  The sea is pretty rough, and the united efforts of several boatmen are required to hoist aboard each long-gowned Turcoman, each woman and child.  They are Turcoman traders going to Baku and Tiflis with bales of the famous kibitka hangings and carpets.  Tchislikar is the port whence a few years ago the Russian expedition set out on their campaign against the Tekke Turcomans.  Three hundred miles inland is the famous fortress of Geoke Tepe, where disaster overtook the Russians, and where, in a subsequent campaign, occurred that massacre of women and children which caused the Western world to wonder anew at the barbarism of the Russian soldiery.

Still steaming north, our little craft ploughs her way toward Krasnovodsk, an important military station on the eastern coast.

At night the surface of the sea becomes smooth and glassy, the sun sets, rotund and red, in a haze suggestive of Indian summer in the West.  The cabins are small and stuffy, so I sleep up on the hurricane-deck, wrapping a Persian sheepskin overcoat about me.  An awning covers this deck completely, but this does not prevent everything beneath getting drenched with dew.  Never did I see such a fall of dew.  It streams off the big awning like a shower of rain, and soaks through it and drips, drips on to my recumbent form and everything on the hurricane-deck.

Early in the morning we moor our ship to the dock at Krasnovodsk, and load and unload merchandise till noon.  Here is where railway material for the Transcaspian railway to Merv is landed, the terminus being at Michaelovich, near by.  We go ashore for a couple of hours and look about.  The inmates of a military convalescent hospital are passing from the doctor’s office to their barracks.  They are wearing long dressing-gowns of gray stuff, with hoods that make them look wonderfully like a lot of monks arrayed in cowls.  A company of infantry are target-practising at the foot of rocky buttes just outside the town.  Not a tree nor a green thing is visible in the place nor on all the hills around—­nothing but the blue waters of the Caspian and the dull prospect of rude rock buildings and gray hills.

Except for the sea, and the raggedness and abject servility of the poor class of people, one might imagine Krasnovodsk some Far Western fort.  Scarcely a female is seen on the streets, soldiers are everywhere, and in the commercial quarter every other place is a vodka-shop.  We visit one of these and find men in red shirts and cowhide boots playing billiards and drinking, others drinking and playing cards.  Rough and sturdy men they look—­frontiersmen; but there is no spirit, no independence, in their expression; they look like curs that have been chastised and bullied until the spirit is completely broken.  This peculiar humbled and resigned expression is observable on the faces of the common people from one end of Russia to the other.  It is quite extraordinary