the head for their slain enemies, and Mr.
Vámbéry tells how, when he went to the khan's
treasurer for the sum granted for his daily board,
he found him sorting robes of honour, silken
coats of staring colour with large flowers
worked on them in gold, as four-headed,
twelve-headed, twenty-headed, and forty-headed, coats.
Next morning the traveller from Europe saw in
the chief square of Khiva what the coats had
been sorted for. About a hundred horsemen,
covered with dust, rode in from the camp.
Each brought at least one prisoner, and among
the prisoners were children and women bound
to the tail of the horse or the pommel of the
saddle. The prisoners were brought in as
presents to the khan, and then each soldier, as he
came before the accountant, opened his sack,
and, seizing it by the lower corners, as if he
were emptying potatoes, rolled out of it the
bearded or beardless heads with which he was
to be accredited. As he reckoned them, the
accountant with his foot kicked them
together until he had a large heap of several
hundreds.

After nearly a month's residence at Khiva,
the Hungarian dervish and his faithful comrades
the hadjis departed richer than they came. For
their blessings, and "breaths," and charms,
they had been paid with honour and a multitude
of gifts.

So, on they went to Bokhara, and having
crossed the broad stream of the Oxus in a
ferry-boat, travelled up its eastern bank: the
Oxus on their right hand, the desert on their
left. They were journeying towards a point
from which there is a comparatively short and
easy crossing of the great sandy desert between
Bokhara and Khiva. But where the horseman
can live, plundering bands supply the want of
other peril, and, although the shorter desert
route had been chosen after learning that the
way was clear, two suppliants for bread met
the pilgrims by the way, and told how they and
others had been stopped by a band of a hundred
and fifty horsemen. Hereupon, the faces of the
asses and the dromedaries were turned back,
and with hot speed the way was retraced to
the point from which the greater desert track
commenced—a track over sands so inhospitable
and fatal to those over whom they are blown by
the wind Tebbad, that no robber dares make
them his haunt.

Having laid in a stock of the sweet Oxus
water— which is said to be, after deposit of the
grit it bears with it, more delicious than even
that of the Nile— the pilgrims plunged, with as
little rest as might be, into the desert known as
the Life Destroyer. It was July, and that
desert route is considered to be safe only in
winter, after heavy falls of snow. The first
station bears the name of Adamkyrylgan, the
Place where Men Perish ; and little heaps of the
bleached bones of men and beasts were piled
up here and there on the wayside by previous
travellers, to mark the track. That central
Asiatic wilderness is a great sea of sand,
sometimes rolled into high waves, and sometimes
rippled like the surface of a lake; not a bird
flies overhead; there is no worm or beetle under
foot. The Oxus water disappeared by evaporation
faster than any calculation had supposed.
Of the camels, wearied by the speed of the
retreat before the desert was plunged into, two
died, and still there must be all haste made,
for if the Tebbad swept over them while they
were in the deep roll of the sands, the whole
caravan would be overwhelmed, and all would
perish. Two men died of thirst, the cry for
"water" the one only incessant sound from
their lips; while every man clung to the drops
in his own water-skin as to the drops of his
own life. Each slept with his water-skin in his
embrace. The father hid away his store of
water from the son, the brother from his brother.
When at last they came near the Khalata
mountains, and the sand lay thinner upon the hard
subsoil, a cloud of dust was seen approaching;
the camels, uttering a loud cry, fell on their
knees and pressed their heads on the ground,
with their laces turned from the blast; the
pilgrims buried themselves within the shelter
formed by the bodies of the camels; and the
first sand-shower of the hot Tebbad fell like
flakes of fire upon their bodies. The wind
rushed by, with a dull clattering sound, leaving
them all covered with sand two inches thick.
Had it come over them when they were six
miles deeper in the desert, all would have
perished. The passage of this desert was the
worst suffering endured by the young
Hungarian, who found himself at the end of it
half dead in the hut of some kindly Persian
slaves.

At last they were on cultivated land again,
near Bokhara the Noble, which accounts itself
the capital of Central Asia, and the Rome of
Islam. Of the three officials who came out to
meet the caravan, one was impressed, as usual,
by the European cast of Mr. Vámbéry's tell-tale
face, tanned as it was; and in Bokhara, too, he
had active suspicions to contend with. But again
he played his part so well as a great mollah,
that he soon found himself in the midst of
undoubting faith and honour. The emir was not
then in Bokhara, and the suspicious lord in
office, after surrounding the suspected man with
spies who sought to entrap him into showing
fellow-feeling with the Frenghis, at last, in the
shape of an invitation to a pilow, brought him
into a picked circle of Bokhariot ulemas, who
were quietly to subject his pretensions to strict
scrutiny. When he had got safe through that
ordeal, the government was satisfied, and he was
free to go his own way about the mysterious
city in which Stoddart and Conolly found only
their martyrdom. Questions of any kind upon
political events, Mr. Vámbéry, in his character
of dervish, might not ask; but he could freely
use his eyes and ears in the wonderful town
where men go about in the streets with four-
thonged whips to drive people into the mosques,
and, examining passers-by and even greybeards
on the principles of Islamism, send them to
school for eight days or a fortnight if they find