Soviet Turkistan, Khoresm

As an engineer under a two-year contract with the Soviet Government, I had the opportunity to travel through this entire area and to study several proposed irrigation projects. The survey party of which I was a member included, besides Russian engineers, two other Americans, Arthur P. Davis, from 1914 to 1923 Director of the United States Reclamation Service, and V. V. Tchikoff, of Russian birth. It was our purpose to investigate possibilities of reclaiming great tracts of rich, but spasmodically watered, country.

We began the journey at Tashkent, went southwest to Chardzhui, on the Amu Darya; followed the river by boat to Khoresm, far to the northwest; made our survey of Khoresm, and finally took ship across the Aral Sea to Aralskoe More, whence we returned overland to Tashkent.

The start was made on a sunny afternoon in the middle of August. Our private car was in the center of a combination freight and passenger train on a siding at the Tashkent railway station, and we put our personal luggage aboard under the curious gaze of native Uzbeks and Russian loiterers. Two compartments in the car had been filled with food and cooking utensils, for it was a poor country we were to travel through and there would be little food for us to buy.

Having said good-bye to our families at home, because there had been no room in the one available automobile to bring them to the station with us, Mr. Davis and I were surprised, upon looking from our car windows, to see our wives on the station platform waving wildly toward us. They had come to see us off in an izvoshchik, one of those queer little cabs with a single seat, too wide for one person and too narrow for two .

The train was due to start, but for some unknown reason it was delayed, as usual. During a two-hour wait we examined the car. It was a "soft-seat" coach, with places for 20 people in two-person and four-person compartments. Since there were only ten of us, all but two could have lower berths. The car apparently had been thoroughly cleaned, and the spotless canvas covers on the berths led us to hope-vainly, we learned later-that the usual small inhabitants of beds in oriental countries were absent.

Mr. Davis had the first compartment, I the second. Then followed Mr. Tchikoff; Mr. Kainarsky, our interpreter; two young Russian engineers, only slightly past 30 years of age, who were in responsible charge of the million-acre irrigation projects that we were to investigate; two other Russian engineers; Sieb, the young Uzbek cook; and a purchasing agent. The last named was necessary because of the red tape and scarcity of food and materials, which occasioned great difficulty in buying supplies in the Soviet Union.

Each person carried a lunch basket filled with such delicacies as he chose to round out his menu and to serve as real sustenance in case of failure of the culinary department, which could not always operate en route.

There were no electric lights in the car, and not long after the candles were lighted we turned in, to awaken early the next morning, as the train was entering the pass…"